Bradley Land was the name
Frederick Cook
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 claime ...
gave to a mass of land which he claimed to have seen between () and () during a 1909 expedition. He described it as two masses of land with a break, a strait, or an indentation between. The land was named for John R. Bradley, who had sponsored Cook's expedition.
Cook published two photographs of the land and described it thus: "The lower coast resembled Heiberg Island, with mountains and high valleys. The upper coast I estimated as being about one thousand feet high, flat, and covered with a thin sheet ice."
It is now known there is no land at that location and Cook's observations were based on either a misidentification of sea ice or an outright fabrication. Cook's Inuit companions reported that the photographs were actually taken near the coast of
Axel Heiberg Island
Axel Heiberg Island ( iu, ᐅᒥᖕᒪᑦ ᓄᓈᑦ, ) is an uninhabited island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. Located in the Arctic Ocean, it is the 32nd largest island in the world and Canada's seventh largest island. According ...
.
See also
*
Crocker Land
The Crocker Land Expedition took place in 1913. Its purpose was to investigate the existence of Crocker Land, a huge island supposedly sighted by the explorer Robert Peary from the top of Cape Colgate in 1906. It is now believed that Peary fraud ...
*
Sannikov Land
Sannikov Land (russian: Земля Санникова) was a phantom island in the Arctic Ocean. Its supposed existence became something of a myth in 19th-century Russia.
History
Yakov Sannikov and Matvei Gedenschtrom claimed to have seen the l ...
References
{{coord, 85, -102, display=title
Phantom Arctic islands
Exploration of the Arctic