Frederick Albert Cook (June 10, 1865 – August 5, 1940) was an American explorer, physician and ethnographer, who is most known for allegedly being the first to reach the North Pole on April 21, 1908.

Other members, including Belmore Browne, whom Cook had left on the lower mountain, immediately but privately expressed doubt.

[11] In late 1909, Ed Barrill, Cook's sole companion during the 1906 climb, signed an affidavit saying that they had not reached the summit.

His 1909 affidavit included a map correctly locating what came to be called Fake Peak, featured in Cook's "summit" photo, and showing that he and Cook had turned back at the "Gateway" (north end of the Great Gorge), 12 horizontal bee-line miles from Denali and 3 miles (4.8 km) below its top.

[14] A 1910 expedition by the Mazama Club reported that Cook's map departed abruptly from the landscape at a point when the summit was still 10 miles (16 km) distant.

[15] Cook's descriptions of the summit ridge are variously claimed to bear no resemblance to the mountain[16] and to have been verified by many subsequent climbers.

His claim to have reached the summit is not supported by his photos' vistas, his two sketch maps' markers, and peak-numberings for points attained.

[20] Similarly, neither his recorded compass bearings, barometer readings, route-map, nor camp trash support his claim of reaching the summit.

Cook claimed that he reached the pole on April 21, 1908, after traveling north from Axel Heiberg Island, taking with him only two Inuit men, Ahpellah and Etukishook.

Living off local game, his party was forced to push south to Jones Sound, spending the open water season and part of the winter on Devon Island.

Cook never produced detailed original navigational records to substantiate his claim to have reached the North Pole.

He had left them with Harry Whitney, an American hunter who had traveled to Greenland with Peary the previous year due to the lack of manpower for a second sledge-journey 700 miles (1,100 km) south to Upernavik.

On December 21, 1909, a commission at the University of Copenhagen, after having examined evidence submitted by Cook, ruled that his records did not contain proof that the explorer reached the Pole.

The Peary expedition's people (primarily Matthew Henson, who had a working knowledge of Inuit, and George Borup, who did not) claimed that Ahwelah and Etukishook told them they had traveled only a few days from land.

A map allegedly was drawn by Ahwelaw and Etukishook that correctly located and accurately depicted then-unknown Meighen Island, which strongly suggests that they visited it as they claimed.

He left unmistakable evidence of his presence at the South Pole, whereas any ice on which Cook might or might not have camped would have drifted many miles in the year between the competing claims.

While Peary's North Pole claim was widely accepted for most of the 20th century, it has since been discredited by a variety of reviewers, including the National Geographic Society, which long supported him.

Researching the complicated story of the conflicting claims, the writer Robert Bryce began to assess how the men's personalities and goals were in contrast, and evaluated them against the period of the Gilded Age.

Bryce writes that Cook "genuinely loved and hungered for the real meat of exploration—mapping new routes and shorelines, learning and adapting to the survival techniques of the Eskimos, advancing his own knowledge—and that of the world—for its own sake.

There was tremendous pressure on each man to be the first to reach the Pole, in order to gain financial support for continued expeditions.

Also tried was his head advertising copywriter, S. E. J. Cox, who had been previously convicted of mail fraud in connection with his own oil company promotions.

[33] Cook was pardoned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, ten years after his release and shortly before his death of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5.