The Navigator of New York (32 page)

Mrs. Peary, Dr. Cook told me, had cut her hair short to minimize the chance of catching lice. Marie, however, had protested so at the prospect of having hers cut that Mrs. Peary had relented. Mrs. Peary was determined to keep her child’s hair free of lice, as if that hair, being the last thing left untainted by their stay at Etah, was symbolic to her of the world to which they would soon return.

Once a day, Marie would appear on the deck of the
Windward
with her mother, holding her hand, blinking at the brightness of the sunlight and the water. If Mrs. Peary, in this setting, looked incongruous, the little girl was not far short of an apparition. She wore a frilly white hat tied in a bow beneath her chin, had long, well-tended ringlets of red hair that rested on her shoulders. She had variously coloured knee-length coats but always wore white gloves and carried an unfurled sunshade with which she prodded at things on the beach.

When they were rowed ashore for their daily walk, Marie would look down the beach at the tent, but she never complained when Mrs. Peary turned her the other way. Her mother must have explained her father’s long confinement in the tent in some way that satisfied Marie, though I could not imagine what it was.

In her black stockings and buttoned boots, she made her way along the beach beside the caped, parasol-toting Mrs. Peary. Sometimes the Eskimos, clad in light pelts and furs and moccasins, all with the same shoulder-length tangled mass of black hair, would come down from their tupiks on the hill and follow in a train behind the Pearys, chattering and laughing, some of the women bearing babies on their backs. Among those who would follow behind them, every bit as unselfconscious as the others, was Peary’s Eskimo wife, Allakasingwah, with her son, himself an exotic, papoosed on her back. Allakasingwah, with the boy on proud display in her papoose, seemed to me, and I suspected to Dr. Cook, like some sort of native parallel of him and me. “I can assure you,” he said, “that when they go back to America,
neither of the Pearys will speak of Allakasingwah and her son. The list of things that members of the Peary Arctic Club have had named after them by Peary will never include an illegitimate half-Eskimo.”

Jo Peary was resigned to their presence and paid them no special attention. As Mrs. Peary knew a little of the Eskimos’ language and they knew a little of hers, they were able to communicate. Mrs. Peary smiled but stayed close by when the Eskimo children gathered round Marie to gaze at her hair and the frills of her hat. If they made to touch her, Mrs. Peary would rap their hands with her parasol, at which they would laugh.

Unlike those of white adults, Marie’s face was close enough in height to theirs that they could scrutinize it. They peered closely at her pale complexion as if they believed that behind it, masked by it, was a face just like theirs. Marie submitted to their curiosity with the same mixture of obliviousness and patience with which a good-tempered pet will submit to the ministrations of strangers. It was as if Miss and Mrs. Peary had been acquired by the Eskimos for the purpose of extended observation.

How much of all this, I wondered, will Marie remember years from now? How much of it does she understand? She had been here more than a year now, had wintered here on board the
Windward
while it was dark for months on end. What a task it must have been for Mrs. Peary just to keep her occupied, to structure her days, to prevent her from becoming bored and despondent. And to disguise her own anxiety so that her daughter did not catch it, did not suspect what a predicament they were in. What a winter they must have had, pent up in the ship throughout four months of night, confined to their smokey, lantern-lit room, scarcely able to hear each other speak above the screeching of the wind, the creaking of the masts.

Yet here she was, the little girl, looking not too much the worse for wear, thinner than she would have been if she was home, though not so thin as Mrs. Peary, who no doubt had gone without food sometimes or got by on less than usual so Marie would not be hungry. Compared with me, young Marie was a seasoned expeditionary.

Sometimes, while Marie was in the care of Matthew Henson, Mrs. Peary would walk about the village on the hill with Dr. Cook and me. Her hands beneath her cloak, head slightly inclined, she nodded as he gestured here and there. He might have been the local governor, she a monarch paying a brief visit to the most far-flung region of her kingdom, observing, surveying the most primitive of her subjects while Dr. Cook spoke of the possibilities for betterment and progress.

Dr. Cook introduced me to Mrs. Peary as the son of Dr. Stead. She had spent as much time with Dr. Stead as with Dr. Cook on the North Greenland expedition, at the same close quarters, with nothing between him and her but that symbolic makeshift curtain. But all she did was nod politely at me as if she was hearing the name of Francis Stead for the first time. I think she was so wearied with her husband’s quest, so worn down by her thirteen months at Etah, that she could no longer even pretend an interest in anything but going home. The presence of someone to whom all this was new and exciting, whose sojourn in Etah had just begun, she seemed to find almost unbearable. She would let nothing divert her from her one sustaining thought—that soon she and her daughter, and hopefully her husband, would be leaving, and none of them would ever set eyes on what she called “this wretched place” again.

I occasionally accompanied Dr. Cook when he made his rounds of the tupiks. There were about two dozen of them arranged in a cluster—haphazardly, it seemed to me, though there may have been a pattern that I could not discern. The village was a constant frenzy of activity. The Eskimos worked as though the sky had cleared in the midst of a storm that had lasted for years and would soon return some night while they were sleeping. The men scoured animal pelts, some with knives for which they had traded furs, others with sharp-edged stones through which they had painstakingly carved grips like those of saws. The women sewed the pelts together with large needles carved from walrus tusks, threading them with rawhide as thick as the laces of my boots.

As he did with the residents of Brooklyn and Manhattan, Dr. Cook observed the Eskimos in a manner that somehow combined detachment and sympathy, moving about among them slowly, as if a sudden movement or even a brisk manner would scare them off or earn him their mistrust. He spoke quietly to them, inquired of their symptoms, smiling no matter what they replied so as to assure them that their answer boded well for their recovery. They wore sheepish grins, as if their illnesses were forms of misbehaviour, as if they were sorry for putting him to all this trouble.

Many of the crew members of both ships preferred, for various reasons, to spend their nights on shore. They slept in tupiks, luxurious accommodations given that on the ship, they had no quarters and merely bunked down each night wherever they would not be underfoot. On shore, there was space, peacefulness and quiet, fresh air, food and water, and, for those who wanted it, the company of women. Dr. Cook told me that there was no sexual jealousy among the Eskimos. Nor was a pregnancy ever regarded as anything but a cause for celebration.

“I suppose,” he said, “they would be greatly amused to know the truth about us and the lengths to which we go to keep it secret. It mystifies them, this race for what they call the Big Nail. They place no importance whatsoever on its discovery, had never heard of it until they met the first explorers. They will think no more highly of the man who gets there first than they do of any other man. Yet they take care of us while we are in their country, as if they are to blame for its hazards and therefore must protect us from them. They cannot conceive that another race’s capacity for evil might be greater than their own. Some of them will die trying to keep Peary alive if he remains another winter. He knows this, yet insists on staying anyway. Whoever makes it to the pole first will owe a greater debt to the Eskimos than he owes to his captain, his crew and his backers put together.”

Despite extolling the character of the natives, he slept apart from them at night, going back to the ship instead of sharing a tupik with one of the families as they were forever urging us to do. On the
Erik
at night, he would jot down in his notebook his observations of them, add new words to the Eskimo dictionary he was compiling.

One day, as I was walking through the village, I was surrounded by a group of Eskimo women and children. The women were laughing so hard they were clutching their stomachs. Two of them stood on either side of me, took me by the arms and began to pull and push me towards one of the others, a young woman roughly my age. I resisted, my heels ploughing furrows in the dirt as I moved towards my intended. She was laughing, clearly my partner in neither embarrassment nor reluctance. What might be expected of me once we were face to face I had no idea. I began to struggle even harder.

“They are only playing with you,” a voice I recognized as Dr. Cook’s said behind me. At the sound of his voice, they released me and ran away laughing. He clapped me on the back and walked on past me with a briskness meant to minimize my embarrassment.

I thought about the incident later that night as I sat on the deck of the
Erik
with Dr. Cook. I was not sure that they had only been playing with me. I wondered if they had meant me to understand that she would be receptive if, later on, after dark, I sought her out.

From time to time each day, I looked down the beach at the tupik. I was finding it ever more difficult to believe, in spite of hearing him night after night roaring Henson’s name, that Peary was inside it, or indeed that anyone was. Standing on the deck of the
Erik
, I had seen from within the tupik after dark no lights, no lantern, no smoke from a campfire, not even on cold nights when it rained. I had not seen so much as Peary’s shadow, day or night, through the walls of the tent.

Some days, it seemed that the purpose of the rescue mission had been forgotten altogether, that the tent in the shadow of the cliff had been forgotten by all but Dr. Cook and Matthew Henson.

It was as though Peary was quarantined, the rest of us waiting for Dr. Cook to declare him cured and non-contagious so we could take him home.

Dr. Cook went day after day to Peary’s tent—sometimes several
times a day—only to emerge each time in ever-more-obvious frustration, striding away from the tent in long, savage strides.

It began to feel like we were waiting not for Peary to emerge from his tent, but for word that he was dead.

“Peary knows you are here,” said Dr. Cook one night. “Henson told him so that he would not find out some other way. If Peary was in his right mind, your being here would bother him no more than it bothers Mrs. Peary. But you are now in the stew of his delirium like all the rest of us, you whom he has never met. Don’t worry. You are not a primary ingredient as far as I can tell. He mentions Francis Stead more often than he mentions you.”

It occurred to me that I might well leave Etah, go back to New York, without ever having seen Peary, having only heard him at night, roaring out what might have been the only word he knew. It was also possible, even likely, in that case, that I would never in my life see Peary. It seemed absurd that having come all this way, I might leave without even having set eyes on him. I considered walking down the forbidden stretch of beach to poke my head in through the tent just for one brief look at him.

One night on the
Erik
, after Peary had been roaring Henson’s name for an unusually long time, Dr. Cook jumped out of bed and began to pace the cabin. “Where in God’s name is Henson?” he all but hissed at me, whispering to keep from waking Mrs. Peary or Marie, though I was sure that they had already woken up. “Can he not hear Peary calling for him? Does he not realize the effect it must have on Peary’s wife and child?”

At last the shouting stopped, but Dr. Cook could not get back to sleep.

“My motives for leading this rescue mission are not as pure as I have led you to believe,” he said. “It will help my own cause immeasurably if I bring the Pearys safely home.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s only natural to think about such things.”

“The outcome of this expedition will affect my standing in the Peary Arctic Club, and my chances of getting up an expedition of my
own. It weighs on my mind that his wife and child are depending on me to bring him home. But I also wonder what people will think of me if I leave him here and he does not make it through the winter.” He cast a momentary glance in the direction of the
Windward
. Our porthole faced theirs, so both were covered with small curtains.

“When I told her I might eventually have to insist that we leave, with or without him, Mrs. Peary reminded me that I was sent here to save his life. ‘I am trying to save his life,’ I told her, ‘but I was also sent here to bring you and your daughter back.’ She offered to give me written permission to remove him from the tent and put him on the ship against his will. I told her that unless he agrees to go, we must leave him here. The crews of both ships are depending on me to bring this rescue expedition to an end, one way or another, before it is too late in the season to make a run for home. Perhaps they should have sent someone else, someone he would not feel so threatened by. Someone with the courage to defy him.”

“You are right not to force him to go home,” I said. “Mrs. Peary should not have asked you to.”

“I told Peary today that I would not feel I had done my duty to the Peary Arctic Club unless he returned with me. ‘It is, as you say, Doctor,’ he said, ‘the
Peary
Arctic Club. Not, unfortunately for you, the Cook Arctic Club. Not yet, anyway. You must first rescue me before you can succeed me. If you bring me back, you will be their favoured one. Who better to succeed Peary than the man who saved him, the man who did what Peary could not do—brought Peary home.’ “

“You should try to sleep,” I said.

“The Pearys are in a fix, and I wish to help them,” he said. “But so, too, am I in a fix, one that I should have foreseen. I thought that Peary, if he was alive, was awaiting rescue, that the
Windward
was lost or disabled. I know I should not see myself as the victim of this piece, but it seems that whatever I decide, I risk paying a great price. If I order Peary removed from the tent and put on board, he will tell the world that if not for me, he might have made it to the pole. He will be spared the humiliation of being rescued with his wife and little girl. He
could ruin me with the Peary Arctic Club. Some of them would be only too glad to think the best of him and the worst of me. He could have me charged with insubordination, even mutiny. I think he would be quite happy if I forced him to leave. It may be the very thing he has been waiting for all this time. But if I leave him here and he dies, I will be blamed for deserting him and he will be remembered as a hero.”