Alan Gordon Richard Cooke (1933-1989)

Abstract

Alan Cooke, a person well known to all those interested in the history and development of the subarctic and arctic regions, died in Montreal on 11 July 1989, after an illness of several months. After entering Dartmouth College in 1951, he worked with a geological field party in northern Quebec during the summer of 1953 and soon came under the influence of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who with his famous collection of polar books, pamphlets, and letters had just taken up residence at Dartmouth. These two events set Alan firmly upon a long trail of northern studies, which he followed for the remaining four decades of his life as traveller, researcher, writer, consultant, and editor. By the time Alan graduated from Dartmouth he had already compiled a comprehensive bibliography of northern Quebec, which a decade later, with considerable expansion, was published in two volumes as the Bibliography of the Quebec-Labrador Peninsula, co-authored with Fabien Caron. ... [Alan] ... earned a Ph.D. in 1970 with an analysis of the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Chimo operation in the early nineteenth century. During the 1960s and early 1970s he enjoyed a close association with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and for three years edited its journal Polar Record. He also served as a research analyst on the staff for the Arctic Bibliography published by the Arctic Institute of North America. In 1975 he moved back to Montreal to undertake freelance editorial work. ... Alan's career included jobs as assistant librarian and/or curator of manuscripts in two of the world's best polar libraries, the Stefansson Collection at Dartmouth College and the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge. ... his knowledge of the North was not gained merely from the printed page ... [but from first hand experience in such places as McGill's Subarctic Research Station at Schefferville, the Mackenzie Delta, Fort Simpson, and the Noatak River region of Alaska.] ... his most significant and enduring scholarly contribution was the book The Exploration of Northern Canada 500 to 1920; a Chronology (1978), co-authored with Clive Holland. This indispensable annotated compendium of subarctic and arctic expeditions and events has already had a positive influence upon northern scholarship and writing, and there is no reason to think that its value will ever diminish. ...