Peary — who once wrote home in a letter, “Mother, I must have fame” — was self-serving, paranoid and meanspirited. He fathered, and abandoned, children with Inuit women; he obfuscated and minimized the accomplishments of his Black assistant Matthew Henson; he stole treasured meteorites and brought Inuit people from Greenland in order to put them on display at the American Museum of Natural History. And when his polar excursion failed, he set about inventing, just as Cook had.
By the time he claimed to have reached the pole in 1909, Cook had proved his worth as an explorer. He had begun his polar work alongside Peary in 1891, carefully learning about the customs and lifeway of the Greenlandic Inuit, which he later used to save the lives of many of the crew of the perilous Belgica expedition to the Antarctic (an expedition that included Roald Amundsen, the first person to reach the South Pole). He had also invented an early form of light therapy to stave off ennui during the long polar night.
Even though Cook and Peary were no longer on the best of terms, Cook was seemingly content to share in the glory of the North Pole, however invented, with his former leader. But Peary couldn’t abide a shared podium. After his smear campaign left Cook completely disgraced, Cook’s days as an explorer were over — nobody would ever fund one of his expeditions again. So Frederick Cook, our would-be American hero, simply set about another adventure.
In portraits taken around this time, Cook peers out from under a swoop of chestnut hair. You trust me, don’t you? the picture asks. Of course I do, you can’t help wanting to reply. So did the suckers who bought into Cook’s madcap Texan oil scheme in the 1920s, which involved his buying of numerous failed oil companies and convincing their struggling investors that handing over yet more money would help them finally recoup — though Cook invested all his own money into the wells, too. (The dry wells did, in fact, end up producing oil many years later, albeit with new technologies unavailable to Cook at the time.) When the scheme collapsed, Cook was sent to the Leavenworth federal prison to serve out a 14-year sentence for mail fraud. (The sentence was widely seen as being unduly disproportionate to the crime — punishment not only for his oil schemes but also for the worse crime of having duped the American people.)
Cook simply could not live up to the stringent character requirements of the turn of the 20th century, before flappers and the jazz age and pre-code Hollywood hijinks. His popularity buckled under the newly formed moral weapon of mass media brought to bear on him by Peary — his contemporaries were happy to reward a liar, so long as the liar was a respectable, well-connected member of the establishment.