Peary — who as soon as wrote house in a letter, “Mom, I should have fame” — was self-serving, paranoid and meanspirited. He fathered, and deserted, youngsters with Inuit girls; he obfuscated and minimized the accomplishments of his Black assistant Matthew Henson; he stole treasured meteorites and introduced Inuit individuals from Greenland with the intention to put them on show on the American Museum of Pure Historical past. And when his polar tour failed, he set about inventing, simply as Cook dinner had.
By the point he claimed to have reached the pole in 1909, Cook dinner had proved his value as an explorer. He had begun his polar work alongside Peary in 1891, fastidiously studying concerning the customs and lifeway of the Greenlandic Inuit, which he later used to avoid wasting the lives of most of the crew of the perilous Belgica expedition to the Antarctic (an expedition that included Roald Amundsen, the primary particular person to succeed in the South Pole). He had additionally invented an early type of gentle remedy to stave off ennui through the lengthy polar evening.
Despite the fact that Cook dinner and Peary had been now not on one of the best of phrases, Cook dinner was seemingly content material to share within the glory of the North Pole, nevertheless invented, together with his former chief. However Peary couldn’t abide a shared podium. After his smear marketing campaign left Cook dinner fully disgraced, Cook dinner’s days as an explorer had been over — no person would ever fund considered one of his expeditions once more. So Frederick Cook dinner, our would-be American hero, merely set about one other journey.
In portraits taken round this time, Cook dinner friends out from below a swoop of chestnut hair. You belief me, don’t you? the image asks. In fact I do, you possibly can’t assist desirous to reply. So did the suckers who purchased into Cook dinner’s madcap Texan oil scheme within the Nineteen Twenties, which concerned his shopping for of quite a few failed oil firms and convincing their struggling buyers that handing over but extra money would assist them lastly recoup — although Cook dinner invested all his personal cash into the wells, too. (The dry wells did, in truth, find yourself producing oil a few years later, albeit with new applied sciences unavailable to Cook dinner on the time.) When the scheme collapsed, Cook dinner was despatched to the Leavenworth federal jail to serve out a 14-year sentence for mail fraud. (The sentence was extensively seen as being unduly disproportionate to the crime — punishment not just for his oil schemes but additionally for the more severe crime of getting duped the American individuals.)
Cook dinner merely couldn’t reside as much as the stringent character necessities of the flip of the twentieth century, earlier than flappers and the jazz age and pre-code Hollywood hijinks. His recognition buckled below the newly shaped ethical weapon of mass media dropped at bear on him by Peary — his contemporaries had been comfortable to reward a liar, as long as the liar was a good, well-connected member of the institution.
