CHAPTER VI. 



COOK'S PREPARATION FOR HIS GREAT TASK. 



While Dr. Cook was being thus honored by rulers and mobbed by his 

 admirers, people everywhere were passing through alternating feelings of 

 trust and disbelief. 



History never furnished a keener topic of argument. Nothing in the 

 realm of invention or of discovery could seem more impossible than that a 

 comparatively little known traveler had actually done what men had failed 

 in for so many centuries. As soon as the first news flashed over the wires 

 two camps arose : Those who threw up their hats and hurrahed, and those 

 who said, "I don't believe it. Who is this Cook?" Everybody who had a 

 tongue to talk with joined in the clack of tongues. Scientists gave out weighty 

 reasons for and against. A few preferred to withhold any comment until 

 the explorer could furnish his proofs. Many others broke into the open with 

 statements purporting to show how Cook could or could not have done it. 

 It was even suggested that the doctor might be the victim of mania, and have 

 imagined he reached the pole. Hints were thrown out that Cook had always 

 been a "faker," and that he had carefully prepared for the claim of his dis- 

 covery before he even left America. 



But had Cook always been a "faker?" 



A glance at his career seemed to prove the contrary. 



Frederick A. Cook was born June lo, 1865, and was therefore forty-two 

 years and ten months old when he discovered the pole. He passed his forty- 

 third birthday while struggling back across the ice fields to the nearest place 

 of human habitation; his forty- fourth in a Greenland settlement, awaiting 

 strength to move on again. 



He was of German-American parentage. The family name was origin- 

 ally Koch. Frederick's birthplace was the little town of Callicoon. in Sullivan 

 county, New York state, among the hills of the upper Delaware River. 



When still a youth he sought his fortune in New York City and after 

 working his way through the College of Physicians and Surgeons there he 



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