Hurleyville, NY – Dr. Frederick Cook, the world-renowned Arctic explorer, was born in 1865 into a small family in Hortonville, right here in Sullivan County. His fame came from his discovery of the North Pole, but he was also a physician, an entrepreneur, an ethnographer and an author. One of Dr. Cook’s books in particular, “Return from the Pole,” remains a powerful and beautifully written work that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.
And yet his life was defined by controversy.
In 1909, Dr. Cook’s discovery of the North Pole was maliciously challenged by Robert Peary, another explorer claiming to have reached the Pole first. Peary, who initially befriended Cook, was described by polar historian Fergus Fleming as “undoubtedly the most driven, possibly the most successful and probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration.”
The story of these two men has been widely debated. The Frederick Cook Society was born out of this controversy, and today it is housed in the Sullivan County Museum in Hurleyville. An entire gallery on the second floor of the Museum is dedicated to Dr. Cook’s life and work.
On Sunday, October 20, at 2 p.m., the Cook Society will host a talk by Arctic researcher Douglas Bonoff, who will discuss Dr. Cook’s early travels, the Mt. McKinley climbs, and some of Cook’s contemporaries, notably Matt Henson and Roald Amundsen.
He will also discuss Robert Peary and the Greenland meteorites, stolen from the northern Inuit and now housed in the Museum of Natural History in New York. According to Mr. Bonoff, “Mr. Peary will come in for some praise but also some round condemnation for his theft of the meteorites and general abuse of the northern Inuit – and likewise, the American Museum of Natural History for complicity in acquiring grave artifacts, as well as the Eskimos that Peary brought back to New York, who then promptly died.”
Bonoff has a career that spans five decades of mountaineering across North and South America, including the 1998 first ascent of a 12,000-foot Alaskan spire. He has been studying and researching the polar controversies for much the same length of time.
The Sullivan County Museum is located at 265 Main Street in Hurleyville. Everyone is welcome, and the lecture is free. For more information, call 845-434-8044. For directions, visit the Sullivan County Museum website www.scnyhistory.org.
For more information on Dr. Frederick Cook, visit www.frederickcooksociety.org.