Frederick Cook in arctic gear

Frederick Cook on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago

A photo from Cook's 1909 arctic expedition, which he alleged was taken at or near the North Pole

Frederick Albert Cook (June 10, 1865 - 1940) was an American explorer and physician.

Cook was born at Hortonville, New York, on June 10, 1865. His parents were Dr. Theodore A. Koch and Magdalena Koch, nee Long, recent German immigrants to the USA.

He attended Columbia University and subsequently New York University, from which he received his M.D. in 1890. In 1889 he married Libby Forbes, who died in 1890 of childbirth. On his thirty-seventh birthday he married Marie Fidele Hunt; they had one daughter, Helen. In 1923 they were divorced.

Cook was the surgeon on Robert Peary's 1891-92 Arctic expedition, and on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897-99 led by Adrien de Gerlache.

In 1903 Cook led an expedition to Mount McKinley, and claimed to have made the first ascent in 1906 on his second attempt, but this was later proven fraudulent. A photograph purporting to show Cook's companion on the summit was found to have been taken on a smaller mountain 19 miles away, while in 1910 a party from the Mazama Club attempting to retrace Cook's route found that his map departed abruptly from reality while the summit was still 10 miles distant.

Meanwhile, before the Mount McKinley fraud was exposed, Cook had returned to the Arctic in 1907 for what he said was intended to be only a hunting expedition. But then Cook decided to make an attempt to reach the North Pole in the spring of 1908, taking with him only two Inuit men, Ahwelah and Etukishook. Cook claimed to have reached the pole on April 21, 1908 after travelling north from Axel Heiberg Island. Then, living off local game, his party pushed south to winter on Devon Island. From there they traveled north, crossing the Nares Strait to the village of Anoatok on the Greenland side in the spring of 1909.

In the view of polar historians such as Pierre Berton, Cook's story of his trek around the Arctic islands is probably legitimate, but it seems clear that he never went anywhere near the pole. Cook's claim was disputed from the start because he could never produce anything other than his bare word to substantiate his claim. His Inuit companions gave conflicting stories about where they had gone with Cook. It has also been claimed that Cook's party would have died of starvation long before they reached the pole if they had made the attempt carrying only the amount of supplies described by Cook in his account. Much of the campaign to discredit Cook was instigated by supporters of Robert Peary, who claimed to have reached the North Pole himself in April, 1909. In return, Cook's supporters tried to discredit Peary's claims. It was in this atmosphere that Cook's earlier fraud concerning Mount McKinley was exposed. Cook's reputation never recovered, although he spent much of the rest of his life continuing to write defenses of his supposed trip to the pole and attempting to sue writers who claimed that he had faked the trip.

In 1923, Cook was convicted of stock fraud, and was imprisoned until 1930. He was pardoned by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, shortly before his death on August 5.

Cook was a major character in a fiction book, The Navigator of New York, by Wayne Johnston, published in 2003.

References

• Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail
• Robert M. Bryce, Cook & Peary : the polar controversy, resolved (Stackpole Books, 1997)