COOK'S 'NEW FREEDOM

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 137, 6 December 1930, Page 25

COOK'S 'NEW FREEDOM

One 'day recently, the doors of Leavenworth prison, U.S.A., opened and out stuped a tall, iron-grey man, smiling a little. In his pocket was a railway ticket and ten dollars in cash. He was free under parole and on the understanding that whenever he moved from city to city or town to town ho would tell the police where he was going. This sixty-five-year-old ward of the State was one of the two most talked of men in. the world twenty years ago, celebrated for making a journey of ■which •.men. had dreamed for centuries. His name is Frederick A. Cook. For a while he was hailed as the greatest Arctic explorer of . all time, the man who had actually stood upon the top of the world. Then came Admiral Peary with his claims to explode his feat and brand him a fraud. There are still people who debate to-day which of them reached the Pole—or if

either of them got to the Pole!

[ It was in the heyday of interest in the North Pole that' the two expeditions set out for the Arctic. ■ Peary was a naval officer and a scientist. Cook was a doctor and an adventurer. He had been in both polar seas. He was a likeable fellow, "an honest man and a good American, " as one of the papers called him, and' "in business affairs as innocent as a child," . In Denmark, however, to which country he went from Greenland, and the royal welcome subsided,-flaws in Cook's story of having been first to the Pole became noticeable. Cook was finally discredited. Years later he came to grief in an oil promotion scheme which proved to be fraudulent, and he was sentenced to Leavenworth prison. ■-, The. shortest of his sentences does not expire until 1935, hence the fact that his release from gaol is on parole.