Sculpture honors figure in controversy over who reached North Pole first
Tribute to explorer puts ‘Top of World’ in Forest Lawn
After a century, the argument still rages in scientific circles over who reached the North Pole first — Frederick A. Cook or Robert E. Peary. In all likelihood, it never will be settled.
But don’t tell that to the Frederick A. Cook Society, which has placed a bronze sculpture dedicated to the famed explorer a few yards from Forest Lawn Chapel, where his ashes are kept in an urn festooned with medals and ribbons, including one from the
Frederick A. Cook claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908. king of Belgium.
“Top of the World,” by Buffalo’s Larry Griffis III, is intended to memorialize for all eternity Cook’s contention that he got to the very top of the world in April 1908, a year before Peary staked his claim.
The half-ton bronze monument in the shape of the Northern Hemisphere traces the Cook expedition’s northward journey from the Atlantic Coast past Greenland to the Arctic Sea and the North Pole itself. The sculpture rests on a granite base circled by a brass ring heralding Cook’s discovery.
The recent installation revives a legend “that has remained understated for too long,” said Warren B. Cook of Mahwah, N. J., society president and a grandnephew of the explorer.
That legend was forged in a hostile environment.
“We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice,” Cook wrote in 1908 from what he assumed to be the pole.
At first, his account was widely believed. But after Peary claimed to have reached the pole in April 2009, he and his supporters mounted a campaign to discredit Cook.
It worked. Cook was unable to produce navigational records to back up his story, claiming they were left with other belongings in a small settlement in northern Greenland after his return from the pole.
They never were found, and his reputation never recovered from the smear tactics of Peary, whose own claims later were called into doubt.
“Few men in history . . . have ever been made to suffer so bitterly and so inexpressively as I because of the assertion of my achievement,” Cook wrote in 1938.
A native of Sullivan County, he was a founding member of the New York City-based Explorers Club and was serving as its second president when he undertook the polar expedition.
He came to Western New York late in life to be near his daughters, Helene Vetter of Clarence and Ruth Hamilton of East Aurora, where Roycroft founder Elbert Hubbard had been one of his early supporters.
Cook’s ashes were placed in the Forest Lawn Chapel columbarium after he died at 75 in 1940.
The adventurer’s reputation has rebounded in recent years, helped by scholars from Russia, Norway, Canada and the United States who say he indeed might have found the North Pole. His account was endorsed earlier this year by the Russian Geographical Society.
“I’m a little biased in his favor, sure, but these are people with really good credentials who have no rooting interest” in the Cook versus Peary controversy, said Russ Gibbons of Pittsburgh, executive director of the Cook society. Gibbons wrote his master’s thesis on the explorer in 1954 and joined the society after he became a Buffalo Courier-Express reporter a few years later.
The society, formed to administer a family trust after Cook’s death, has held a number of international conferences to further his legacy. The Forest Lawn monument was commissioned five years ago, Gibbons said.
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