Peary — who as soon as wrote home 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 so as 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, rigorously studying in regards to the customs and lifeway of the Greenlandic Inuit, which he later used to save lots of the lives of most of the crew of the perilous Belgica expedition to the Antarctic (an expedition that included Roald Amundsen, the primary individual to achieve the South Pole). He had additionally invented an early form of light therapy to stave off ennui in the course of the lengthy polar evening.
Despite the fact that Cook dinner and Peary have 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, nonetheless invented, together with his former chief. However Peary couldn’t abide a shared podium. After his smear marketing campaign left Cook dinner utterly disgraced, Cook dinner’s days as an explorer have been over — no person would ever fund certainly 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’s 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 Twenties, which concerned his shopping for of quite a few failed oil corporations and convincing their struggling traders 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 actual fact, 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 broadly seen as being unduly disproportionate to the crime — punishment not just for his oil schemes but in addition for the more serious crime of getting duped the American individuals.)
Cook dinner merely couldn’t stay 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 fashioned ethical weapon of mass media delivered to bear on him by Peary — his contemporaries have been joyful to reward a liar, as long as the liar was a decent, well-connected member of the institution.
