The Navigator of New York (50 page)

I thought of the state to which the Arctic had reduced a man as large and strong-minded as Peary. I remembered the colour of his face as he hung from my hand in the gap between the
Windward
and the
Erik
. How presumptuous I had been to think that I could endure what a man like Peary had barely endured.

I tried to resist these thoughts, but they weighed more and more on my mind. There was not much of a purposeful nature to do once the most severe cold set in, though Dr. Cook devised all sorts of outdoor games for us: stone-throwing contests; a version of marbles played with pebbles; three-legged races, in which we competed in pairs with the Eskimos, who found inactivity unbearable.

I told Dr. Cook of Captain Bartlett’s misgivings about starting a polar bid from so far south. A southern start would ensure us fresh supplies of meat through the winter, Dr. Cook said, as well as fresh dogs. It was true that our route would be four hundred miles longer than Peary’s, but it would take us through country where game was plentiful.

I made no attempt to disguise my scepticism.

“Try to imagine how you will feel when you see the sun again,” said Dr. Cook. “You can make yourself feel better simply by pretending to feel better. Remember how hot and bright it was the day we met, the day you stood outside my house for hours in the sun? Remember how good that glass of orange juice I gave you tasted?” I tried what he suggested, but remembering sunlit days only made me pine for them that much more.

There came upon me a reluctance to speak, the urge to hoard up words, as if by speaking I would lose something, as if, like everything else, language was in short supply and I had no intention of sharing my allotment of it with the others.

Dr. Cook devised a strict schedule to which he said Franke and I would have to adhere if we wished to avoid becoming ill. We rose at six, had breakfast at six-thirty, read or wrote until ten, when we had coffee, then went outside to perform exercises, a regimen of calisthenics that Dr. Cook had first prescribed for the ship-bound crew of the
Belgica
expedition. When the sky was cloudy, the darkness was absolute. If not for the lanterns we kept burning on either side of the box-house door, we could not have seen our footprints in the snow.

We had dinner at noon, after which came everyone’s favourite part of the day, when there was no work to do and the Eskimos came
to visit in great numbers. They brought with them drums made from animal skins, which they played while they chanted and danced about the house. Thick smoke from the tallow candles, and from cigars and cigarettes, made the air of the box house almost unbreathable. The Eskimo dancers, women included, stripped to their waists and cavorted about until their torsos gleamed with sweat. Everyone drank tea and ate dried auk’s eggs, of which the Eskimos seemed to have an unending supply. The more loath we became to venture out into the cold, the more eager were the Eskimos to visit us.

There was sometimes a great deal of work done on these afternoons, when, as Dr. Cook put it, the box house became a “factory” for polar equipment and supplies. The Eskimos made pemmican for us with dried walrus meat. They cut it into six-inch strips, and hung it on hooks for three days, during which time all the moisture and the oil dripped from it into pans that littered the floor of the box house. When it was dried, we packed it in tins whose lids we tied in place with wire. Then the Eskimos hung another “crop.” In all, they made fifteen hundred pounds of it. For weeks, it hung on the walls of the box house like some aromatic form of decoration. When the last crop was taken down, the walls and hooks looked so conspicuously bare that we hung on them everything that was not nailed down.

And the Eskimos continued to bring fresh meat, hunting and trapping in the darkness as best they could. We would give them three biscuits for each eider duck they brought us. They hunted hare by moonlight with rifles they borrowed from us, then came back to the box house and gave us half of what they had killed.

Dr. Cook fashioned in the box house a little darkroom in which he developed his photographs, chinking all the cracks in the room with flour paste that when it dried was like cement. The Eskimos would line up to take their turn one by one in the darkroom with Dr. Cook, to see the red light and the magical emergence of the pictures on the submerged squares of paper.
“Noweeo,”
each of them said.
“Noweeo,”
we heard time and time again from inside the room.

They referred to Dr. Cook as Tatsesoah, the big medicine man.
They remembered him from previous expeditions, including the North Greenland expedition. They recalled in far greater detail than he could what had happened on these expeditions, especially the illnesses of which he had cured them, for which they were no less grateful now than they had been fifteen years ago.

Because they regarded the past as almost coterminous with the present, they could not get past the idea that I had come to Greenland in search of my father, Francis Stead. My increasingly morose manner only reinforced this notion, and they were always disappointed to see how little consolation I seemed to derive from their company.

Each day, when we met, they would pantomime a search, looking about them as if they had mislaid some precious object, then sadly shake their heads. They were assuring me that years ago, when Francis Stead went missing, they did everything they could to find him.

I found myself resenting Dr. Cook for having conferred upon Rudolph Franke, a cook who had no experience in Arctic travel and whom he had known but a few weeks, the same honour it had taken me years to earn.

Franke was taller, more robust than I was. As his English was poor and he was by nature taciturn, we hardly ever spoke. He and Dr. Cook spoke German to each other, or rather, Dr. Cook issued orders in his broken German and Franke, mumbling a few words in reply, did what he thought he had been told.

I wondered if it was because he doubted me that Dr. Cook had invited Franke to stay behind. It seemed possible that from the moment we met, he had been disappointed with me but had kept this hidden to spare my feelings. He might merely have been going through the motions of making me an explorer because he did not want to break his promise to me. I felt as if Franke had usurped my place. Perhaps Franke had known about the polar bid before the ship left Gloucester. He was, like Dr. Cook, a German from Brooklyn. Dr. Cook might have known him for quite some time. I could not resist such absurd speculation.

Fighting my darkness-induced doubts, I went for weeks without
speaking to poor Franke, if not for whom, it seemed—for such was my state of mind—Dr. Cook would not have doubted me.

I knew it was not unusual for explorers to send their subordinates back at some early stage of an expedition, beyond which, they believed, they would no longer have need of their assistance. Dr. Cook was perhaps planning to send me back and thereby save my life. I vowed that I would refuse to leave him, refuse to go back unless he went back.

At last, the winter storms that made it impossible for the Eskimos to venture even as far from their igloos as the box house set in. We no longer had visitors, were no longer able to go outside to do our exercises in the darkness.

Lying there in my warm sleeping bag, I felt ridiculously unsuited for a polar expedition, deserving of being left behind. Dr. Cook, I was convinced, had detected in me some fundamental weakness, some crucial flaw, some remnant of the Stead boy, all traces of whom I thought I had shed long ago.

All day and all night long, there was no sound from outside but the roaring of the wind and, occasionally, that of the Eskimo dogs, which, having picked up the scent of the pemmican, came down from the hill, climbed up onto the roof and tried relentlessly to claw their way through the turf, pummelling in silence, as if they believed that if they did not bark we would not notice them. When Dr. Cook threw what meat he thought we could spare outside, they went away for a while. Soon, it was simply to make him throw out some meat that they clawed at the roof, making a few perfunctory scratches at the turf, then jumping down to wait outside the door for their reward.

I felt a constant weariness, a chronic urge to sleep that I saw no reason to resist, it being warm and safe inside my sleeping bag, which I left less and less often, despite the urging of Dr. Cook. Other days, after sleepless nights, I could neither get to sleep nor summon up the will to leave my sleeping bag. I lay in my bunk with my eyes closed, my mind racing as if energy was being diverted to it from my body. Sometimes, with Franke’s help, Dr. Cook would stand me up, so that
the sleeping bag fell about my feet. Then they would walk me around the box house until I was fully awake and Dr. Cook would assign me some task, like planing the runners of the sled he was making or keeping the stove supplied with coal.

But the length of our confinement took its toll on Dr. Cook and Franke as well, and soon they were making only token efforts to keep me from sleeping all the time.

In early December, when there was a lull in the weather, Dr. Cook decided to take a journey in the darkness to test the sledges and snowshoes he had made. He told us he would be back in two weeks. Several days after he left, I fell into a fever from which I did not fully emerge until long after he returned.

I dreamed that I was back in the Dakota; that Dr. Cook had not taken me with him on this expedition; that I was waiting for him to come back from the Arctic, waiting to hear if he was still alive, waiting for a letter from him. I felt as I had years ago, when, because he was on some expedition, it had been months since his last letter and there was no telling when or if the next one would arrive.

I dreamed that he had written to me from Etah just as he had written to Mrs. Cook, explaining why it had been necessary to mislead me. Here I was, once again, being written to by this man with no way to write him back, no way to ask him what the real meaning of his words might be. I had no doubt that when I next heard from him, it would be by letter.

I awoke momentarily from the fever to find Dr. Cook taking my pulse, his hand holding my wrist. “When did you get back?” I said. He smiled at me but either did not speak or said things I could not hear. The next time I came to, I was sitting up. Franke had his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place, while Dr. Cook moved his stethoscope about my bare back.

I returned to lucidity for good on Boxing Day. “The midnight of winter passed two days ago, Devlin,” said Dr. Cook. “The sun is on its way back.”

The worst of the storms had passed. We were able to go outside again. I knew we would leave for the pole in February, which meant that I had a little more than a month to recover from my illness.

I tried so hard to make myself a model expeditionary, performing more than my share of tasks, continuing my calisthenics long after Franke and Dr. Cook had finished theirs, that Dr. Cook warned me I was risking a relapse.

We saw, for a few minutes each morning in the east, a Milky Way–like cloud of light that Dr. Cook said was the first sign of the sun.

“There will not be sufficient food for three of us,” Dr. Cook said. I had been expecting him to say some such thing for weeks. I felt fully recovered from my illness, but I knew that, having seen me reduced to such a state so early in the expedition, Dr. Cook had to have grave doubts about my ability to survive a bid for the pole. At the very best, he had to think I would impede his progress and ensure the failure of the expedition.

He smiled at me—smiled, I thought, as if to say that he knew what a disappointment it would be for me to be left behind, but he hoped I would understand why it was necessary that he and Franke proceed without me, and he believed that I would receive the bad news gracefully, such was my nature. I prepared myself.

“Franke will not be going with us to the pole,” he said.

I threw my arms around him and hugged him and danced about in imitation of the Eskimos.

Dr. Cook told me that he had known from the moment he invited him to stay behind with us at Etah that he would send Rudolph Franke back long before we had reached our goal or turned back ourselves.

“We needed his help to build the box house, and I knew we would be grateful for the company of an extra man, a man from Brooklyn, during the Arctic night. That might sound ruthless, but I told him from the start that at some point I might send him back.”

Dr. Cook told Franke of his decision after the sun returned. They spoke to each other in German, Franke gesticulating at me, clearly
saying that it was unfair of Dr. Cook to send him back and take instead the illness-prone man both of them had been tending to all winter.

After arguing for days with Dr. Cook—who never raised his voice but simply told him that someone needed to stay behind to guard the box house and its contents—Franke finally relented.

W
E LOADED THE ELEVEN SLEDGES, PILING THEM WITH GUNS
, ammunition, pemmican, furs, three alcohol field stoves, spare snowshoes and the tent.

Dr. Cook chose, from the many volunteers, twelve Eskimos to go with us. Only two of them, he said,—and which two, he had not yet decided—would go with us to the pole. The Eskimos who were not chosen offered Dr. Cook some of their dogs. We had 103 of them by the day we left, enough so that we could alternate dogs, letting groups of them take their turn running unharnessed beside the others.

The sun was rising halfway, both preceded and followed by long intervals of twilight, by the time the caravan of sleds and dogs and men left Etah. Those who were staying behind merely raised their hands to us, for the Eskimos, Dr. Cook said, seemed to have no word for goodbye. Franke, though he had politely bade us both goodbye that morning, stayed in the box house. I felt sorry for him, and sorry for the thoughts I had harboured against him throughout the polar night.

We set out with our Eskimo guides across Ellesmere Land. Despite its arduousness, sledge travel was much easier to endure than the monotonous gloom of the Arctic night. For the first time in my life, I had a beard, though as there were no mirrors, I could only feel it with my hands.