My Attainment of the Pole: Being the First Record of the Expedition that First Reached the Boreal Center, 1907-1909. With the Final Summary of the Polar Controversy

Second edition. Post 8vo (200 mm); xx, 604 pp. 30 photographic plates and a map. Original red cloth, spine slightly faded. Frederick Albert Cook was an American explorer who claimed to have breached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. This was a year before fellow American Robert Peary claimed the same thing, and both accounts were disputed for several years. His expedition did discover Meighen Island, the only discovery of an island in the American Arctic by a United States expedition. After reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission ruled in December 1909 that he had not in fact reached the pole. This account, first published 1911, has Cook repeating his assertion that he had done so.