DR. COOK'S RECORD

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 125, 23 November 1923, Page 6

DR. COOK'S RECORD

Company-promotion is sometimes a fine disguise for the swindler. A man who has a gift that way can rise high; and he can fail. And, as the American proverb has it, " the bigger he is, the harder he falls." Dr. P. A. Cook, who once flashed upon the world like a meteor from the hidden realm of polar ice, has been sentenced to go to gaol for fourteen years for fraudulent promotion of oil companies, along with a group of fellow swindlers. Cook would be worth no more mention than the other conspirators if it were not that, fourteen years ago, he worked a bigger swindle still. He'had gone to the Arctic in 1907 with the avowed' intention of reaching the North Pole; and, in the absence of any news, it was presumed that he had perished. In the following year Lieutenant Peary (who died in 1920), with whom Cook had some years previously visited the Arctic regions, set out on another expedition, and on 6th April, 1909, he succeeded in reaching the Pole. But before his success was reported Cook had returned, and " got in first." He declared that he had left his white companions, and, accompanied only by some Eskimos, had reached the Pole on 21st April, 1908 ; and he brought back a photograph of the spot, by which unsatisfactory evidence, some people professed to be convinced. The ease with which such a claim could be mad,e, and the absence of reliable confirmation, however, soon undermined the confidence with which his claims were at first accepted; and Cook, after a brief reign as one of the heroes of the Arctic, suddenly declined into dishonourable oblivion. But his feat showed that he had the makings of a grand deceiver; and his present fate has merely set the seal of the law upon his character.