Queer Eyed

Before dawn in Elsinore, Denmark, where Hamlet saw his father's ghost, a young British newspaper correspondent excitedly climbed aboard a small tugboat. He, Philip Gibbs of the London Daily Chronicle, was late in covering his assignment. Finally he reached the good ship Hans Egede, scrambled up a rope ladder. On deck, newspapermen talked about the North Pole in polyglot tongues. Mr. Gibbs introduced himself to a man with a heavy nose and queer eyes, who said: "Come and have some breakfast."

The queer eyes belonged to Dr. Frederick A. Cook and over the coffee cups, on that morning in 1909, they began his undoing. Mr. Gibbs, convinced that Dr. Cook was a liar and that he had never reached the North Pole, wired the Daily Chronicle seven columns to that ef fect. Meanwhile, Copenhagen received Dr. Cook with cheers and medals, wined and dined him. All the world applauded. But later evidence, including Robert E. Peary's return from the North Pole with news that he had found nothing to show that Dr. Cook had been there, proved that wary Reporter Gibbs was right.

Tactfully, Dr. Cook disappeared for a while. After bobbing up in Europe again, he decided that it would be more profitable to appear on U. S. vaudeville stages. Then he went among the wildmen of Borneo, and later settled in Texas with his eyes on oil. He had a theory: "A consolidation of bankruptcy companies with dry wells would produce a solvent company with flowing wells." The experiment fleeced a few hundred credulous souls out of $4,000,000 and put Dr. Cook in the penitentiary in 1923 for using the U. S. mails to defraud. Since 1925 he has been residing at Leaven worth (Kan.), where he has become an astute needleworker, the editor of th? prison magazine New Era, and an advocate of breeding a race of runts to do the world's work.

Last week, a whimsical headline artist produced the following: "DR. COOK AS NEAR PAROLE AS POLE." The news was that Federal Judge James C. Wilson of Fort Worth, Tex., had granted probationary freedom to Dr. Cook, under a 1925 law which allows Federal judges to liberate prisoners. But, U. S. Attorney General John Garibaldi Sargent, a Vermont country product, announced that he wanted to test this law in the courts. Judge Wilson agreed, recalled his probation order. So, Dr. Cook, who waited for no poles, must wait for the U. S. courts. Whatever happens, he will be eligible for parole in 1930 (his prison term ends in 1937).

Dr. Cook, once a milkman and Brooklyn physician, is now 62 and a pauper. Some people believe that he is mentally, unbalanced. (He still says he thinks he reached the North Pole.) Others say that he is a much maligned man. Edwin Swift Balch of Philadelphia, a distinguished scientist and explorer who died last week, firmly upheld Dr. Cook's integrity. Captain Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, said last week: "He [Cook] is one of the finest men I have ever known. As physician, with the Antarctic expedition of 1897-99, which was frozen in the ice for 13 months, he saved the whole party of 20 men from death. . . ."