For nearly a year, no one learned the whereabouts of Peary’s discredited rival.  Then Cook resurfaced in London after wanderings in Europe and South America, saying he would soon return to reassert his claim and give “a full answer to everything in my own time.”  Secret meetings with the agent for magazine publisher Benjamin Hampton, resulted in a contract to write a series of articles timed to coincide with Cook’s return to the United States in late 1910.  Hampton hoped by this to recoup his immense losses resulting from his publication of the serialized version of “Peary’s Own Story” that had placed him on the brink of bankruptcy.  
    Hampton hoped to get Cook to tell the inside story of his faked claim to the North Pole, but when Cook still insisted he had been reasonably close to his goal, Hampton took advantage of the terms of Cook’s contract, which stipulated “no editorial guarantees, whatsoever,” and had statements inserted into the first article that implied that Cook’s polar claim was the result of temporary insanity brought on by the incredible hardships he had suffered in the Arctic. Hampton’s Magazine billed the article “Dr. Cook’s Confession,”   but the balance of Cook’s series, in which Cook more or less reasserted his claim, was left untouched.  This inconsistency was taken for insincerity and brought hoots of derision from the press and worse than indifference from the public, thus insuring another costly publishing fiasco for Hampton’s, which drove it into receivership within two years.
    Cook renounced his Hampton's articles as fabrications: “I had made no confession,” he insisted.  “I had made the admission that I was uncertain as to having reached the exact mathematical pole.”
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