My attainment of the pole being the record of the expedition that first reached the boreal center 1907-1909. With the final summary of the polar controversy
New York and London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912. 8vo, pp. xx, 604; frontispiece portrait of Cook, 30 plates, plus other illustrations. and a map in the text; original red cloth stamped in gilt on upper cover and spine; spine a little dull, else very good and sound. This copy with a presentation from Cook on the front free endpaper: "To Miss Mildred Brown, may your future be a continuous aurora without Boreas. Frederick A. Cook." This is the narrative of Cook's supposed journey to the pole which he claims to have reached nearly a year before his rival, Robert E. Peary. Ironically, Cook had been the surgeon on Peary's Arctic expedition of 1891-92. Controversy surrounded this, as well as earlier expeditions of Cook's, and credit for reaching the pole was generally given to Peary, until he, too, was discredited. Credit is now generally given to the Minnesota insurance salesman, Ralph Plaisted (1927-2008) and his three companions, Walt Pederson, Gerry Pitzl and Jean-Luc Bombardier, who were the first to succeed in a surface traverse across the ice in a Ski-Doo snowmobile (a then-novel invention of Canada's Bombardier Company) to the North Pole on 19 April 1968, making the first confirmed surface conquest of the Pole. Arctic Bibliography 3389. Item #61116
Price: $300.00
