The Navigator of New York (49 page)

“Not I,” Bradley said. “Would you like to try for it yourself?”

Dr. Cook said he did not know which surprised him more, hearing himself blurt out the question or receiving Bradley’s instant agreement to back an expedition.

“We’ll fit you for the pole,” Bradley told him, “but we’ll say nothing to anyone about it. We don’t want the papers getting at it. Peary is waiting to go. We don’t want him to get to Etah first and take all the best dogs for himself. And I want to shoot on the way up, so I don’t want to be in a hurry. Look at it this way. If we get to Etah and the
Eskimos are sick or there aren’t enough dogs or something else is wrong, we can say it was just a hunting trip and come back home.”

Dr. Cook said that Bradley wrote him out a cheque on the spot for ten thousand dollars. “This is for the pole,” he said, handing it to Dr. Cook. Then he wrote out another, larger cheque. “And this is for
my
part of the expedition.”

Bradley asked him about Mrs. Cook, and about me.

“I will put off telling them the truth for as long as possible,” Dr. Cook said. “After all, we may not try for the pole, in which case all my wife’s worry will have been unnecessary. It is a harmless lie that may spare her a few months of fretting and Devlin some disappointment.”

“Get there and get back,” Bradley said just as the ship left with its cargo of furs and tusks. Bradley, his hands on Dr. Cook’s shoulders, winked at me.

Bradley’s demeanour made Dr. Cook’s bid for the pole sound like a shady business venture from which, though Dr. Cook would take the risks, Bradley hoped to profit. In this, he was not unlike any backer of a polar expedition. Something about him, however, about the way he kept looking appraisingly at both of us, unsettled me.

“You might make it. Who knows,” Bradley said, laughing, as if he had bought a lottery ticket in aid of some worthwhile but amusing cause.

“How does Dr. Cook plan to make it to the pole without proper equipment or a ship?” Captain Bartlett asked me, having failed, he said, to get a satisfactory answer from Dr. Cook. I told him that I did not know what Dr. Cook’s strategy was.

“Even though your life depends on him?” said Captain Bartlett.

“I’m sure he knows what he is doing,” I said.

“No one starts for the pole from this far south in Greenland,” Captain Bartlett said. “Your ship should take you hundreds of miles north of Etah before it turns back. Dr. Cook will have to sledge all those extra hundreds of miles. It makes no sense. It can’t be done.”

As to whether our base camp was too far south, I could not say,
but I knew that we were not, as was commonly believed among the crew of the
Bradley
, ill-equipped, for Bradley had left us with what Dr. Cook described as everything we would need to make it to the pole and back. When Bradley and the crew went up Smith Sound to the walrus grounds one day, Dr. Cook, Franke and I had unloaded a large amount of equipment and supplies that had been secretly put on board the
Bradley
in Gloucester, including several sledges of Dr. Cook’s design, as well as several compasses, a sextant, a thermometer, a pedometer that measured distance covered on foot, a chronometer, an anemometer for windspeed, an aneroid barometer for air pressure and altitude.

I stood with Franke and Dr. Cook on the beach, watching as first the ship itself and then the
Bradley’s
sails passed from sight.

I had been eager to be rid of the captain and Bradley and the others. But how strange the place seemed once they were gone. How different the beach at Etah seemed in the absence of Peary, without his tent at the far end, near the cliff. I had never seen the harbour at Etah empty of a ship before. There were not even kayaks on the shore, for the Eskimos carried them up to the hill at the end of every day.

It felt as though a ship at anchor was some natural object whose disappearance was a harbinger of winter. Already, though the ship was barely gone, I felt marooned. Before, it had seemed that all that separated me from home was time and space. But now it seemed that nothing led from here to there.

The harbour and the hills were exactly as they had been when we were here before to rescue Peary, exactly as they had been since then, in our absence. This should not have seemed odd, and yet it did. I felt as fixed here as they were. It was a curiously oppressive feeling, especially with what Dr. Cook called the “real” weather already setting in.

I looked at the tupiks and the Eskimos on the hill for reassurance. They were proof that winter in the Arctic was survivable. How unconcerned the Eskimos seemed, preparing in a cheerful frenzy for a winter that they knew would be like all the other winters they had made it through.

But I did not feel reassured. It was the long night that I dreaded most.

The Eskimos were refurbishing underground stone igloos that were decades old, but we would be spending the winter in a Redcliffe House–like dwelling. The box house, we called it.

We used the packing boxes that had carried our supplies to make walls that enclosed a thirteen-by-sixteen-foot space. We used the lids of the boxes for roof shingles and insulated everything with turf. A middle post supported the roof, and around that we built a table.

During the eight days it took to build the house, our supplies lay nearby, covered with the old sails that had been flying from the
Bradley
when Dr. Cook bought her in Gloucester. We installed a small stove, which without almost constant tending would go out.

Dr. Cook said he could think of no reason why, if all went well, we would not be back in Brooklyn by the end of next summer. We would be gone fifteen months at the most, he said, assuring me that we would not hang on pointlessly for years on end like Peary. We would try once, and if we did not reach the pole, we would go back home. And when we were ready, we would try again. There was no point attempting to convalesce up north.

My first night in the box house, I lay awake in my sleeping bag, trying to imagine the coming months. As a child, I had read every account of Arctic travel that I could get my hands on. But almost all were written in a flat, laconic style, as if to vividly depict either beauty or hardship would somehow contravene the explorer’s code.

What the chances of success were of this suddenly hatched plan to try for the pole I had no way of knowing. I had only the vaguest notion of what Dr. Cook meant when he spoke of the “unforeseeably favourable conditions.”

It was our good fortune, he told me, that these “conditions,” really did exist, though it was not, as he had led his wife to believe, because of them that we had stayed behind, which I was glad of, for I could not help thinking that a hunting trip that by sheer fluke had become a polar expedition could only have failed.

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF
S
EPTEMBER, SNOW CAME AND COVERED THE
dories that Bradley had left for us, a half-dozen of them buried upside down on the beach.

The snow set in for good long before the harbour froze. Everything was white but the water, which was grey. The incongruity of it seemed to mesmerize Dr. Cook. He would stand at the water’s edge at dusk, staring at the waves that washed ashore as if there was some implication for him in the sight of the snow-surrounded water that he could not puzzle out.

One morning, when we awoke, the harbour had disappeared. It had frozen and snow had fallen on the ice, so that what the day before had been open water was now a flat white field.

As secondary layers of ice began to form on the harbour, they were pushed up onto the beach, where they were left at low tide, a never-melting, meandering high-water mark of ice that, by the time the harbour was fully frozen, had risen to a kind of seawall, a breakwater that looked like our first line of defence against invasion. The Eskimo women would stand behind this wall at sunset and stare out across the harbour and the larger sound beyond it, as spellbound as Dr. Cook had been by the water, all of them silent and strung out at even intervals along the wall, all with tears streaming down their faces. It was a custom that Dr. Cook had witnessed before but whose meaning he could not discover, so reluctant were any of the Eskimos to talk about it.

We did not have to hunt. We merely traded with the Eskimos for meat and clothing, thereby saving the energy that Dr. Cook predicted we would badly need to get us through the months-long polar night. We traded tobacco, rifles and cartridges, biscuits and soap (with which, for some reason, the Eskimo women washed themselves from the feet up).

In exchange, the Eskimos made coats and stockings from the furs of foxes and hares. From the fur and hide of reindeer that the men had killed, the women made us sleeping bags that they sewed together with sinew, painstakingly working the thread, which they clenched between their teeth and manipulated with both their fingers and their toes. From seal hide, they made us sealskin boots and coils of lashing for the sleds.

Dr. Cook spent much of his time making sledges out of the hickory wood, which came from trees he had cut on his brother’s farm. He made runners for the sleds by first heating and then straightening the staves of barrels. He made seven sledges and lashed them upright to the outside of the box house so they would not be crushed by snow. He made hickory snowshoes, the toes of which he turned up because, he said, this would make for better walking over the ice and snow of the polar seas.

Finally, he made one large sled that would pull the tent he had made in Brooklyn, in which we would shelter whenever it was not possible to build a proper igloo.

Our fuel, during our winter stay in the box house, would be coal. Bradley had left us a heap of hard coal, which was preferable to the soft kind because it did not leave grimy black dust on everything or clog up the stovepipe.

The already short days grew swiftly shorter. Ever since the box house was finished, the Eskimos had been coming down from the hill to visit us for cups of tea. Starting from the middle of the afternoon, they had been coming in groups of two and three. But as winter set in, they came in larger groups and stayed longer, so that their visits overlapped and the box house was often crowded.

The Eskimos, as if, off-puttingly, they dreaded the coming polar
night as much as we did, hated to leave and became morose when told it was time for them to go back to their igloos on the hill.

Eventually, a “day” consisted of an hour-long twilight, the sun barely clearing the almost-flat horizon to the east before it began to set again.

We could not keep our minds from reacting as they normally would to the light conditions, could not help feeling that this was the dusk of a day in which the sun had run its course across the sky and now was setting. We did what people do at dusk: gave in to reflectiveness, to thoughts of the past and what the coming days would bring.

We could not, for a few hours every day, resist regarding the night as a welcome break between the days. And then we would brood on the fact, which always seemed to dawn on us like some disheartening surprise, that there
were
no days, only these recurrent dusks, with long stretches of darkness in between.

It was as if that distant line of light was all that remained of the past, of all things recorded or remembered, as if history and memory were fading and soon nothing would be left of them but darkness. This notion was not unique to me. “The light of other days,” Dr. Cook said once, quoting what he said was the first line of a poem in Palgrave’s treasury of English verse. He said he had first called the ebbing light that on the Redcliffe expedition.

One day the sun failed to clear the horizon, showing all but a fraction of itself, then sinking slowly. As the days went by, less and less of it showed: nine-tenths, three-quarters, a half, a third. It became a great red dome, then was crescent-shaped, then like a sickle, until soon all we saw when we dropped everything and watched was the barest skullcap-like rise of red, after the disappearance of which, on October 25, we had a few weeks of pale, zodiacal light until even that shrunk in from the sides and faded to a faintly luminous, amorphous glow, a faint candle encased in frosted glass, which we still referred to as the sun.

Long after that was gone, we kept a daily vigil for the sun, staring at the place where we had seen it last, waiting as if we believed that it would somehow rise out of season.

What would the Arctic night be like? The question nagged at me more and more as each day the twilight grew shorter. Nothing like Etah had been. That much was clear already.

Dr. Cook noticed my apprehension. “You will do fine, Devlin,” he said. “We will not be cold or hungry. There is only the darkness to contend with. We have our work to do, our books to read, a great adventure after Christmas to look forward to.”

Every day, he spoke some such words of encouragement to me. “You are by nature well suited to the Arctic night,” he said. “You are patient, even-tempered. You are not unused to loneliness.”

Dr. Cook assured me that we would not be cold inside the box house, or even outside it, though it would be some time before I knew from experience that this was true. Peary himself, as he gripped my hand, had assured me that I knew nothing of the Arctic from having spent one summer on a beach in southern Greenland. With a bed on the well-stocked
Erik
to sleep in every night, I had found Etah
easier
than summering on Signal Hill.

I thought of the ice trench—the grave that had been dug by the crew of the
Belgica
for the body of Lieutenant Danco, the only casualty of the South Pole expedition—dug to a depth of six feet, as though the ice, like earth, would stay forever fixed in that one place. It was not the cold that had killed Danco but the darkness.

I had never really tried to imagine myself as a member of a real polar expedition. Ice igloos. Makeshift huts like Redcliffe House, through every crack of which the wind would shriek, the wind that the members of the North Greenland expedition had wound up speaking to, screaming at, begging for mercy. I doubted that I would make it through months of darkness and confinement, that I would ever become what people thought I was, an Arctic explorer.