'The Enigmatic Dr. Frederick Cook'

My presentation on the Terror Camp panel at the Shackleton Autumn School in Athy on 24 October 2025.

[Detail of photo in the collection of Fabiënne Tetteroo]

Introduction

While I am currently fully engaged in researching 19th-century British Arctic explorers, I became fascinated by American Arctic and Antarctic explorer Dr. Frederick Cook when my Twitter friends began posting about him. Handsome man! What, he lied about his discoveries?! Twice?! He went to prison?! Wanting to read an introduction to Cook that I could finish during my Christmas holiday before I had to get back to writing essays for my MA Naval History, I read Julian Sancton's Madhouse at the end of the earth (2021), about the 1897-99 Belgian Antarctic Expedition on which Cook served as Surgeon. Cook's later reputation as a liar and a fraud is at odds with his behaviour on the Belgica Expedition. An excellent doctor who saved the entire expedition from scurvy and depression. An innovator. A hardworking and reliable man. Cook appears to have been quite the enigma!

But let's begin at the beginning.

Frederick Albert Cook

[Source: Bryce, Cook & Peary, 1997]    

He was born on 10 June 1865 in Sullivan County, New York, USA, a first-generation German-American. His parents, Magdalena Lang and Theodor Koch, both emigrated to America in 1844 and 1855, respectively. Theodor was a Doctor, and finding that the non-Germans of America had difficulty pronouncing his surname, he changed the name from Koch to the literal English translation: Cook.

Tragedy struck the Cook family when Theodor died of pneumonia when Frederick was only 5 years old. Theodor had not left his family with much, and Magdalena struggled to make ends meet. As Frederick would recall in his memoirs, poverty prepared him for the hardships on his later expeditions: 

“For a few years we struggled for a bare subsistence. Sour milk and potatoes with apples and an occasional rabbit or woodchuck linger in my memory of food delicacies. […] Life here must represent the beginning of my schooling for the hardship to follow in wild adventures to the brim of the unknown.” [Bryce, 1997, p. 4]

Together with his siblings, Frederick grew up in the countryside, where his love for exploration was awakened:

“When as a boy I wandered through the north woods from home to school, the thrill of the wilderness fascinated me. The joy thus attained became an urge, a power to generate ambition and new courage to venture further and further into the unknown. To me nature was a never-ending school of delight.” [Cook, Return from the Pole, 1951, p. 13]

[Engraving of photo that appeared in the New York Herald in 1909. Collection Fabiënne Tetteroo]

The Cook family moved to New York in 1878, and after graduating from Grammar School, 16 year old Frederick decided that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. To be able to pay his tuition fees, he set up his own milk delivery company. His brother William joined him, and they named their business Cook Bro’s. In the above photo, you can see Frederick with his mother, sister, and an employee in front of his milk depot. A wagon with Cook Bro’s on it is in the front. In 1887, at age 22, Frederick entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. From 1 AM to 8 AM he drove around delivering milk, then went to school at 10.00, and after he got home at 5.00 he studied until 9 PM when he went to sleep for a few hours.

While this grueling schedule left little time for leisure, Frederick managed to meet his girlfriend Lilly Forbes at a church festival and married her in 1889. Alas, he was not to enjoy this happiness for long, as both Lilly and their newborn child sadly died in June 1890 from birth complications.  This tragedy sent Frederick into a depression, and he sought an escape. He later recalled: “With time to think and plan there developed a longing to get out over the world into the unknown to blaze the trail for a life of useful adventure.” [Bryce, 1997, p. 10]

Early Arctic expeditions (1891-1895)

Accordingly, in 1891 he answered an ad in the newspaper, where one Robert Peary was fitting out an expedition to Greenland, and he was looking for companions. Cook volunteered as Surgeon without pay and after meeting Peary, he got the job. And as we probably all know, Robert Peary would later become Cook’s rival in the race for the North Pole. However, during their 1891-92 expedition, there was nothing but mutual respect and admiration between the two. 

Peary’s wife, Josephine, also joined the expedition and provided a description of the good Doctor in her journal. [Bryce, 1997, p. 54] She found him:

“an exceedingly coarse man with not an idea of gentlemanly behaviour. A former milk man who from his savings studied medicine, although he cannot write a page without misspelling words. How good a physician he is of course I do not know, he was kindness itself during [my husband’s] unfortunate accident & a woman could not have been more gentle. This I appreciate highly & shall never forget but his uncouth manners & unrefined talk grate on me constantly. […] When he has finished eating he rolls back on his chair & rubs his belly, frequently comes to the table in his dirty undershirt & pants, boasts that he only combs his hair on Sunday which not having been cut since he left N.Y. hangs in stringy masses over ears & neck. The other day while he was marking out something on the table cloth with his fingers a louse walked over his hand. Altogether he is a dirty specimen of manhood, but a good worker & a very good-hearted person.”  

After the expedition with Peary, Cook decided to go it alone. He organised a Summer expedition to Greenland with paying guests, most of them University professors and students. From the profit, he hoped to go to Antarctica. The trip was rather disastrous as their ship, the Miranda, a ship that already had a long history of malfunctions and accidents, grounded several times, crashed into an iceberg and ultimately sank off the South East Greenland coast. Nobody died, but this was of course not quite the trip that the guests had hoped for.
However after returning home, Cook told the press that they had had “A delightful trip, replete with adventures. Taken all in all, I have not heard one member of the party that had a complaint to make.” [Bryce, 1997, p. 129] Or maybe he just chose to ignore the complaints...

Failing to organise his own Antarctic expedition, Cook came across an article about a Belgian Antarctic expedition that was to sail soon, led by Adrien de Gerlache. Cook wrote to offer his services, but there were no vacancies. Luckily for Cook, the original Belgian surgeon eventually decided not to go, and the American Doctor was invited to join after all. One of the other expedition members was a certain young Norwegian called Roald Amundsen.  

The expedition was not supposed to overwinter, but they accidentally or on purpose, ended up stuck in pack ice. When the expedition members all got scurvy and became downcast because of the lack of sunlight during the winter, Cook came up with light therapy and together with Amundsen hunted seals and penguins to provide fresh meat. 

Amundsen would later say that the survival and success of the expedition was due to Cook. [Cook, Return from the Pole, p. 213] The two had become very close during the expedition, sharing similar polar dreams. Amundsen biographer Bomann-Larsen says that Amundsen “immediately felt drawn to the handsome, likable American, seven years his senior, who shared his passion for ‘the cold climes’.” [Bomann-Larsen, 2006, p. 24]
In one of his memoir manuscripts entitled Hell is a cold place, Cook described Amundsen as the most interesting man he had ever met, saying that Amundsen “was cold in manner, but alluring and friendly in every act when his profundity could be grasped.” [Bryce, 1997, p. 148] Cook and Amundsen, a match made in polar heaven!

Because I didn’t have a lot of time during my presentation, I had to skip Cook’s alleged false claim of being the first to reach the highest peak of Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska, in 1906. We had to go straight to the second time that Cook made a claim that he couldn’t back up with actual evidence. The North Pole!

After being gone for almost two years and people thinking that he must have died, Cook suddenly emerged from the Arctic in early September 1909, claiming that he had reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908. Then just a few days later, Robert Peary sent word from the Arctic that he had been the first to reach the North Pole on 6 April 1909.
Much debate ensued and ultimately Peary was declared the true discoverer of the North Pole. Cook was branded a liar and a fraud. However, after Peary’s descendants finally lifted the restrictions on his papers in 1984, it was discovered that Peary had also fabricated his attainment of the Pole. [Bryce, 1997, p. 757]

To rehabilitate his reputation and prove his claims, in 1911, Cook wrote and starred in the short film or picture drama, as he called it, ‘The Truth about the North Pole’. At the start of the film, a typed letter by Cook is shown in which he says that “The scenes are natural.” and that “I have consented to appear in the pictures because I believe it will do much to heal the wounds inflicted in my side.” He hoped that the film would make people question whether Dr. Cook has had a fair trial.

After his expedition days were over, Cook got into the oil business in Texas. But after his company fraudulently persuaded people to invest in its unsuccessful business through letters written and signed by Cook, Cook was sentenced to a staggering 14 years and 9 months in prison. Cook claimed that he only ever had altruistic intentions. [Source: a newspaper article that I have to find again and will insert later.]

[Press photo of Cook writing his memoirs in prison. Collection Fabiënne Tetteroo]

Cook was an exemplary prisoner, serving as a physician and learning new skills, such as embroidery. He also started writing his memoirs. In the above photo, we see him in his cell, writing nothing but the truth, I’m sure.

Source: https://amundsen.mia.no/en/rooms/blue-room/

He didn’t want anybody to visit him, but made an exception for Roald Amundsen. When the latter was in America to lecture, he paid his old friend a visit in Leavenworth Prison on 19 January 1926. Cook later sent Amundsen a table runner that he had embroidered himself. Amundsen was very moved by the gift and put it on a table in his house, where it remains to this day. 

When Cook was released from prison in 1930 after serving half of his sentence, he shortly afterwards appeared in a video with audio, of himself reading a speech about his North Pole claims and various prison and social reforms. Even after 21 years, Cook still insisted that he had been to the North Pole. “A million dollars would not be enough to cause me to waver from my claim”, he said. [Freeman, 1961, p. 255] 

It's so incredible to see and hear him speak! Here is a short clip:

View the entire video here.

When it comes to Frederick Cook research, there are a few biographies:
- Return from the Pole (1951). This is basically an autobiography as it is based on Cook’s own manuscripts that were edited by Frederick J. Pohl with help from Cook’s daughter Helene. A great primary source, but of course not very objective.

- The Case for Doctor Cook (1961). By Andrew A. Freeman. Freeman met Cook in 1932
and he says that Cook “left behind a pleasant, but puzzling impression. At first I could not believe that this mild-mannered man was the notorious Dr. Cook.” [p. 9] Freeman decided to tell Cook’s life story and Cook spent six weeks at Freeman’s home helping him gather material. After that they saw each other about two times a year until Cook’s death. Again, this is a great source because the author got his information first-hand from Cook. It is telling that when Freeman requested access to unpublished Peary material for additional information, he received no response from the archives... [p. 259]

- Winner lose all: Dr. Cook and the theft of the North Pole (1973). By Hugh Eames.
- Hero in disgrace: the life of Arctic explorer Frederick A. Cook (1991). By Howard S. Abramson.
Both these authors are rather biased and they are convinced that Cook reached the Pole, so perhaps not the most reliable sources and they don’t really offer new information.

THE Cook biography by Robert M. Bryce, published in 1997. This beast of a book is almost 1000 pages! I must confess that I haven't read the whole thing yet because it is a lot, but Bryce appears to have done a very thorough job analysing loads of hitherto unpublished archival material. He properly cites his sources in the endnotes. Bryce is a librarian, now retired, and he began researching Cook when he wondered why some believed in Cook’s claims. He wanted to see primary sources and tell the story with neutrality, in which I think he has succeeded.

However, the Frederick Cook Society, established in 1974, found numerous flaws in Bryce’s work. On their old website, they say that “The list of Bryce bloopers continues to infinity and it is useless to point them out to him because he has a rationalization for each one.” Moreover when they tried to have discussions with the ‘hysterical librarian’, he resorted to ‘ugly name-calling’. 

In 2013, Bryce published a full and annotated transcription of an incredible document: Cook’s North Pole journal that he had submitted to the University of Copenhagen when they required proof of his achievement. The Danes photographed every single page before handing the original back to Cook. The whereabouts of the original are now unknown. In an article in Polar Record, Bryce says that this copy remained quite forgotten until an inquiry from him caused it to be found in the Royal Astronomical Observatory Library. [‘It proves falsehood absolutely . . . ’ The lost notebook of Dr. Frederick A. Cook. Polar Record 51 (257): 177–190 (2015).]
This is another very valuable addition to Cook research by Bryce. 

Future Research

- Re-evaluating Robert Bryce’s work. During my research on Captain James Fitzjames of the Franklin Expedition, I have found that it is vital to fact-check and not take an author’s word for anything, even if they claim to have consulted primary sources. There are still plenty of mistakes to be made in transcribing and interpreting. Since Bryce is the only one who has done such extensive archival research on Cook, it would be good to evaluate his work and see what kind of interpretations another researcher would have of the same material. 

- Archival research. Cook’s papers are all in America, so the researcher would have to already be there or be able to travel and stay there for a while.
* Library of Congress: Cook’s papers and photographs donated by his granddaughter Janet Vetter in 1989.
* Ohio State University’s Polar Archives: Cook Society records and Helene Vetter’s  [Cook’s daughter] research files.

- Literary analysis of Cook’s published work. Since Cook’s style of writing was very embellished and poetic, his works could be very interesting for literature scholars to analyse.

- Cook as a photographer. He was a prolific photographer and there is one article [Pat Millar, ‘Frederick A. Cook: the role of photography in the making of his polar explorer-hero image’, Polar Record 51 (259): 432–443 (2015)] that analyses his photographs, but more research can be done. 

[1936: Cook at the Geographical Society, Washington.
Press photo, Collection Fabiënne Tetteroo]

In conclusion, I think that Frederick Cook is a great example of the American Dream. He started from nothing and worked very hard to make his dreams come true. I think that he earnestly set out to reach the highest peak of Denali and also to reach the North Pole. But when he found that he could not accomplish it, this was unacceptable to him and he used the power of his imagination to bend the truth. I don’t think he ever had any malicious intent. Cook seemed to function best when he was a subordinate, proving himself to be attentive, diligent, innovative, and a respected colleague.
However, when he was the leader of an expedition, he lost himself in imagination.