Status Updates From Cook and Peary: The Polar C...

DONE. I'M DONE. ONE THOUSAND PAGES OF COOK & PEARY. DONE.

Since this has about a hundred and forty pages of endnotes, I'm almost done!

By using Cook's own journals against him, Bryce is thoroughly destroying Cook's claim to the Pole. I'm convinced.

Author seems convinced—though he won't say for sure—that Cook didn't make it to the top of Mount McKinley. He also brings up some interesting points about why Cook might have thought he could get away with lying. Good critical look at the situation.

A footnote: "However, the transcription [of Cook's Mount McKinley diary] contains a number of errors, many of a nature that severely compromises the value of the transcription. For instance, on page 55 the word 'lake' is twice transcribed as 'fork' which completely destroys the significance of the passage."

Finally, the critical commentary/gossip!

...and now on to the analysis.

Now Cook is dead. Only three hundred pages to go.

In this chapter, I learned that after his presidency, William H. Taft was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The judge at Cook's sentencing: "History gave us Ananias, then we had Machiavelli; the twentieth century produced Frederick A. Cook."

This book is even more unbalanced now that Peary is dead. It's all Cook and his endless legal troubles over oil promotion fraud. It is super boring.

I am not even sure what Cook's failed trip to climb Mount Everest has to do with the North Pole Controversy. All it shows is that travelling through Europe in the middle of WWI is not a great idea.