Frederick Albert Cook (June 10, 1865 – August 5, 1940) was an American explorer and physician, noted for his claim of having reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. This would have been a year before April 6, 1909, the date claimed by Robert Peary.
Cook was born in Brooklyn, in Sullivan County, New York. His parents were Dr. Theodore A. Koch and Magdalena Long, recent German immigrants to the United States.
Cook attended Columbia University, receiving his M.D. in 1890. In 1889 he married Libby Forbes, who died in 1890. On his 37th birthday he married Marie Fidele Hunt; they had one daughter, Helene. In 1923 they were divorced, possibly for financial reasons related to an upcoming fraud trial.
Cook was the surgeon on Robert Peary's 1891–1892 Arctic expedition, and on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899 led by Adrien de Gerlache. He contributed greatly to saving the lives of the crew when their ship (the Belgica) was ice-bound during the winter. A fellow crew-member was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, with whom he established a friendship and life-long relationship of mutual respect. In 1898, during this expedition, Cook visited Tierra del Fuego, where he met Thomas Bridges shortly before his death. As a result of that meeting, Cook brought back the manuscript of Bridges' Yamana dictionary, and several years later acquiesced in the attempted publication of the dictionary as his own work.
Robert Edwin Peary, Sr. (May 6, 1856 – February 20, 1920) was an American explorer who claimed to have led the first expedition, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole. Peary's claim was widely credited for most of the 20th century, though it was criticized even in its own day.
Robert Edwin Peary was born in Cresson, Pennsylvania, in 1856. Peary graduated from Bowdoin College, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1877. He was also a member of the Theta chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon while at Bowdoin, and the flag of DKE was one of the five flags that he took with him to the North Pole. His home in Fryeburg, Maine, still remains in pristine condition as an inn known as the Admiral Peary House.
Peary made several expeditions to the Arctic, exploring Greenland by dog sled in 1886 and 1891 and returning to the island three times in the 1890s, including the Peary Relief Expedition to Greenland of 1892. He twice attempted to cross northwest Greenland over the ice cap, discovering Navy Cliff. American artist F. W. Stokes joined some of these expeditions.
Reinhold Messner (born 17 September 1944) is an Italian mountaineer, adventurer and explorer from the German-speaking autonomous province Alto Adige/Südtirol "whose astonishing feats on Everest and on peaks throughout the world have earned him the status of the greatest climber in history." He is renowned for making the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen and for being the first climber to ascend all fourteen "eight-thousanders" (peaks over 8,000 metres (26,000 ft) above sea level). He is the author of at least 63 books (in German, 1970–2006), many of which have been translated into other languages.
Born in Brixen (Bressanone), Italy, Messner is a native speaker of German and also fluent in Italian. He grew up in Villnöß and spent his early years climbing in the Alps and fell in love with the Dolomites. His father, Josef Messner, was a teacher. He was also very strict and sometimes severe with Reinhold. Josef led Reinhold to his first summit at the age of five. Reinhold had eight brothers and one sister: he later climbed with his brother Günther and made Arctic crossings with his brother Hubert.