Cook
needed wealthy backers
Cook never could get a real arctic expedition together. He had
booked a couple of disastrous tour groups that went to Greenland and
promptly had to be rescued. He was good at promoting, but not at
organizing or leading an expedition. It has been theorized that Cook
had to fake the McKinley climb to raise the kind of money he needed
to stage his brilliant North Pole hoax.
Cook slipped away
When
Fred's phony Mt. McKinley claim was questioned by scientific
societies in New York he needed to get out of town. He slipped away
with millionaire gambler Bradley's yacht after leaving a letter with
the Explorers Club stating that he was going to the North Pole. He
had been buttering up Bradley, as a source of cash, by naming a
mountain peak after him near McKinley. Bradley became Cook's
co-conspirator in the deliberate hoax by which he tried to "steal
the thunder" of Peary's final Polar assault.
Bradley gave Cook $10,000 to buy supplies for
his North Pole scam and took
him as a guide in exchange for his help murdering animal trophies.
Bradley loved big game hunting and at that time there were no laws
or any regulations on arctic species. If one had a yacht, money, and
time they could literally harvest all the polar bear skins and ivory
walrus tusks they wanted. These items were highly prized and very
valuable. A narwhal tusk was worth $1,000. Walrus ivory $90
each. (Note:
gold was $20/oz. back then)
NOTE: When Peary
was headed for the Pole in 1908 he found Cook's stash of $10,000
worth of arctic fox pelts and some ivory in an Eskimo village. Peary took
these items on the grounds that Cook was missing and presumed dead.
Valuable ivory and pelts
Arctic Fox pelts (blue fox
pelts for ladies furs)
Polar bear furs (some bears were 9 feet tall)
Walrus ivory tusks (2 to 3 feet long)
Narwhal ivory tusks (6 feet or more)
Seal skins (hats, gloves, boots)
Fred could speak some Eskimo
language, so he enlisted the "little people", as Fred called them, to skin
the beasts they killed. Fred also helped Bradley accumulate a fortune in
ivory walrus & narwhal tusks from the "boreal pigmies". They traded
trinkets such as handkerchiefs and tin cups for these valuable items. Cook
gloats about this in his book.
Bradley
then dumped Fred at an Eskimo camp and left. The next year Fred "discovered"
new land and made up a story about how he reached the North Pole. In reality,
his Eskimo companions quickly
ratted him out. They knew they had never been more than 12 miles from
land. They said Fred took them south - not north!
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