Frederick Albert Cook (June 10, 1865 – August 5, 1940) was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer who claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. That was nearly a year before Robert Peary, who similarly claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. Both men's accounts have been disputed ever since. His expedition was the first, and the only one with a United States national, to find a previously unknown, to people of European descent, North American Arctic island, Meighen Island. In December 1909, after reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled his claim unproven. In 1911, Cook published a memoir of his expedition that continued his claim. His account of reaching the summit of Denali (Mount McKinley) in Alaska has also been discredited. Biography Cook was born in Hortonville, New York, in Sullivan County. (His birthplace is sometimes listed as Callicoon or Delaware, both also in Sullivan County.) His parents, Theodor and Magdalena Koch, were recent German immigrants who adopted an anglicized version of their surname. He attended local schools before college. After graduating from Columbia University, he studied medicine at what is today NYU's Grossman School of Medicine, receiving his doctorate in 1890. Cook married Libby Forbes in 1889. She died two years later. In 1902, on his 37th birthday, he married Marie Fidele Hunt. They had two daughters together. They divorced in 1923. Early expeditions Cook was the surgeon on Robert Peary's Arctic expedition of 1891–1892, and on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899. He contributed to saving the lives of its crew members when their ship – the – was ice-bound during the winter, as they had not prepared for such an event. It became the first expedition to winter in the Antarctic region. To prevent scurvy, Cook went hunting to keep the crew supplied with fresh meat. In 1897, Cook twice visited Tierra del Fuego, where he met the English missionary Thomas Bridges. They studied the Ona and Yahgan peoples, with whom Bridges had worked for two decades. During this time, Bridges had prepared a manuscript on their language's grammar and a dictionary of more than 30,000 words. Several years later, he tried to publish the dictionary as his own. Summit of Denali In 1903, Cook led an expedition to Denali, during which he circumnavigated the range. He made a second journey in