The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  “Lieutenant Peary would have been badly hurt, or worse, if not for Mr. Stead,” Henson said, looking nervously around as if he was unsure if anyone besides the principals had seen what happened. Someone had, but it was not the two crewmen who manned the rowboat, for they looked as mystified and surprised as everyone else. It was Marie Peary, who was still solemnly watching from the deck of the Windward. There was no sign of Mrs. Peary.

  “Is either one of you hurt?” said Dr. Cook.

  Peary, still clenching his arm, shook his head.

  “Are you all right, Devlin?” Captain Bartlett said. He had never called me by my first name before.

  “I think I sprained my hand,” I said.

  “I will see to Mr. Stead’s hand,” said Dr. Cook.

  “All right, then,” Captain Bartlett said. “Lieutenant Peary is greatly in your debt, Mr. Stead. I’m sure that someday, when he is feeling more like himself, he will thank you for helping him.”

  The agitation of Peary’s eyes resumed as suddenly as it had stopped. Stay home, boy. Stay home, or someday you will wind up like your fool of a father. It had sounded as much like a threat as a warning or a prediction.

  Dr. Cook led me away from Peary, at whom I looked over my shoulder. Peary, without crossing one foot over the other, taking tiny steps, turned around, with Henson beside him, even closer than before, and the two of them made their way towards the rowboat.

  Peary and I might just have fought a duel in which both of us had been slightly wounded and were now being attended to by our seconds.

  In spite of what had happened, in spite of my arm, I could not resist watching Peary’s return to his tent. In the boat, he sat as before, now with his back to us, ramrod straight.

  On the beach, he fell forward once but caught himself with his hands before he hit the ground. Shoulders now hunched, as if he were calling on his last reserves of strength, Peary continued towards his tent with Henson all but facing him. He walked without even a token effort to lift his feet from the ground, shuffling through the rubble in his moccasins. Dr. Cook shook his head as Peary, while Henson held the flap, bent over as though bowing deeply to someone inside the tent. Henson pulled the flap closed before I could see if Peary fell.

  Dr. Cook took me below on the Erik, where he examined my hand and arm, palpating them gently with his fingers, noting when I winced.

  “The main bones on both sides of your hand are fractured,” he said. “Your wrist, too, but not badly. I won’t know for certain until we get back home.”

  He went about fashioning a sling and an ice pack, which he hoped would reduce the swelling. He taped the pack, which had a kind of pouch to hold the ice, to the back of my hand.

  “You won’t be climbing the mast on the way home,” he said. “No more ice piloting for you. At least not on this expedition.”

  “Thanks for helping me,” I said.

  “I would have intervened sooner if I’d been watching. It’s an old trick, what he did with your hand—one with which I’m sure he knew you were not acquainted. If you hold a person’s hand the right way, he can’t squeeze back.”

  “I was surprised at how strong he was.”

  “He is strong. But it has more to do with where you grip the hand than with how hard you squeeze it. A boy who knew what he was doing could have brought Peary to his knees.”

  “I hope what you did doesn’t get you into trouble.”

  “It won’t. Henson kept us all out of trouble, though I’m sure that it was only Peary he was thinking of. If Peary survives, he will either hold to Henson’s version of what happened or, more likely, pretend that nothing did.”

  “Marie saw what happened,” I said.

  “I know,” Dr. Cook said. “But I doubt that she understood much except that her father was in danger for a while.”

  “She might have seen you strike Peary’s arm.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she saw or what she tells her mother. Henson’s story will hold up.”

  “Did you hear what Peary said to me?” I said.

  Dr. Cook shook his head. I told him, repeated it word for word as I was certain I would be able to do forty years from now. Your mother was buried in the clothes she was wearing when they found her, buried dripping wet in a graveyard in St. John’s.

  Dr. Cook turned away from me and sat on the edge of his bed. “Only a fevered mind,” he said, but his voice trailed off.

  “He said my father was buried in the ice,” I said. “Surely he knows you are my father. He told Francis Stead you were.”

  “He strongly suspects it, of course,” said Dr. Cook. “But I have never talked to him about it.”

  He rose suddenly, put his arms around me and hugged me to him as much as my injured arm would allow. I hugged him back with my left arm. When he stepped back from me, his eyes were glazed with tears. “You are your mother’s son,” he said. “But also mine.”

  Later that day, Mrs. Peary and Marie paid a long visit to Peary’s tent, taking with them some presents that they told him not to open until Christmas. It was clear, when they returned to the Windward, that Marie had been crying. Aside from her red and swollen eyes, however, she wore the same look of grim composure as her mother.

  At night, in my bunk, I wondered what I was to make of Peary’s words, his particular choice of words. Your mother was buried in the clothes she was wearing when they found her, buried dripping wet in a graveyard in St. John’s. Surely he had no idea what my mother wore when she was buried.

  “You acted quite heroically, you know,” said Dr. Cook. “He may never admit it, not even to himself, but he owes you his life.”

  “It seems like a strange way to end my first expedition.” I said.

  “All expeditions have strange endings,” Dr. Cook said, “because they all end with a return to civilization. You’ll see what I mean. The world we are returning to will never again seem to you as it did before we left.”

  We stopped talking when we heard Marie crying on the Windward. We heard the murmur of Mrs. Peary’s voice, more subdued than usual, as if not even to comfort Marie could she put aside her own preoccupations.

  I fell into a dream-filled sleep, the throbbing of my hand incorporated into every dream. I shook hands with a succession of firm-gripped men—among them Peary, Uncle Edward, Francis Stead, Dr. Cook—all of whom wished me good luck as if they believed that no amount of luck could save me. The dream moved on. I was looking over the side of a rowboat at a dead man who was floating just beneath the surface, his clothing buoyed up by the water, his coat pulled halfway around his head, which was tilted back as though he had spent his last moments peering up through the water at the sky. Then I was holding onto my mother, who was submerged and whose face, as I looked down at it, was peacefully composed. Before I could pull her out or was forced to let her go, the dream moved on again. Next, I was standing face to face with Francis Stead, who suddenly tried to throw me overboard. We struggled, and it was Francis Stead who went over. A second later, he confronted me again and this time I went over, but I woke up before I hit the water.

  When I woke up for good, I was more tired than if I had not slept at all.

  Dr. Cook made his last rounds of the tupiks on the hill, bidding the Eskimos goodbye, giving them as much medicine as he could spare.

  He told me that Peary and Henson would soon be going northwest with a number of Eskimos to Peary’s winter quarters. Charlie Percy, the steward of the Windward and the closest thing to a medical officer among the crew, would go with them. Dr. Dedrick was, as stubbornly and pointlessly as Peary, staying on in Greenland until next summer, but he planned to keep his distance from them.

  From the winter quarters, once the snow pack was right for sledding, they would set out for the polar seas and then across the seas to the pole. That, at least, was the plan. Dr. Cook said that if Peary left his winter quarters, he would be dead within a week. Men were going to risk their lives, he said, to indulge this delusion of Peary’s that he was
still strong enough to reach the pole. Henson, Percy and the Eskimos were going with him so that in his last days, when death was certain, when even he was forced to admit that he had failed, he would not be alone.

  All hands were on the decks of both ships just after noon. As the crews raised the gangplank and unmoored from each other the Erik and the Windward, I looked at the beach, on which there was nothing now but Peary’s tent and Henson’s smaller one, nothing in the prospect to indicate what century this was or that any white man had ever set foot here. There were no crew members, or any of their tools and equipment; no rowboat pulled up on the sand; no coloured clothing spread out on the rocks to dry. The flags of America, Canada, Denmark and Newfoundland had been removed. How improbable it seemed that along that beach, little Marie Peary had walked with her mother, apeing the way she twirled her parasol, and that I had, one warm day, sat against a flat rock in the sunlight, reading the books assigned to me by Dr. Cook.

  When Charlie Percy climbed into the boat to go ashore, Marie Peary said, “Take care of my father, Charlie.” Percy, a tall, shy young man from Brooklyn who had instantly accepted when Henson invited him to stay behind, assured her that he would.

  In my hand, I felt not only pain but the ghost of Peary’s grip. How strange it would be if I could still feel it when I heard that he was dead.

  As the two ships separated and the Windward, powered by its diesel engine, led the way towards the narrows, Captain Blakeney blew the Erik’s, whistle three times in farewell. Captain Bartlett blew the whistle of the Windward three times in response. The Eskimos had congregated on the beach to watch us leave. They waved and shouted. Among them was Charlie Percy, but there was no sign of Peary or Matthew Henson.

  Jo and Marie stayed below deck as we bade the Eskimos goodbye.

  “What really happened, Mr. Stead?” a young man named Clarence Wyckoff asked one day as we were sailing home. He grinned as if to say, We all know it was not like Dr. Cook and Henson said. I knew Wyckoff and his father were members of the Peary Arctic Club.

  “Lieutenant Peary fainted,” I said, “just after we shook hands. He went over the side and I caught him. That’s all. Just like Henson said.”

  “It will wind up in the papers, you know,” he said. “I’ll make sure of that. So will Herbert Bridgman. You saved Peary’s life. There will be reporters waiting for us when we dock. There always are.”

  My first thought was that Aunt Daphne would soon know where I had gone.

  BOOK FOUR

  • CHAPTER TWENTY •

  “YOU NEED NOT TALK TO THE REPORTERS,” DR. COOK TOLD ME IN the cabin. “In fact, Bridgman would be quite upset if you did. The two of us will meet with Bridgman and give him Henson’s version of what happened. It is always like this in the aftermath of expeditions. Things that up north seemed very clear become so mixed up in New York that in the end no one knows who did what.”

  In New York, by the time Dr. Cook and I met with Bridgman, there had been stories about me in the papers—not prominent ones, but sidebars to the stories that recounted the rescue by Dr. Cook of Jo and Marie Peary; the ones that gave the present location of the expedition and a gilded view of its chances of success. I was said to have saved an “ailing” Peary from near-certain death, in the process suffering a “severely fractured arm.”

  The testimony of crew members and passengers was quoted at length. They spoke as if they had seen with their own eyes everything that happened. They said I had screamed with pain while holding onto Peary with my broken arm.

  “The stories are Bridgman’s doing,” Dr. Cook said. “He wants to draw attention away from the failure of the expedition and Peary’s physical state, not to mention his feud with Dr. Dedrick.”

  He assured me that it would be pointless to try to convince the press that they were exaggerating what had happened.

  Other pieces followed, providing yet more fanciful details. When it became common knowledge that Francis Stead had once served with Peary, and I had supposedly joined the expedition so I could set eyes on my father’s final resting place, the story gained extra prominence. It was no longer a sidebar.

  This, Dr. Cook said, was the “special slant” that the papers had been looking for.

  I was interviewed by several reporters, one of whom described me as “humble, self-effacing and taciturn.”

  “One can see,” he wrote, “from his unflappable manner how he was able to maintain his composure and provide assistance to Lieutenant Peary under what, for one so young, had to have been the most difficult of circumstances.”

  I played down my supposed heroism to a point just short of denying that I had done anything for Peary, but the reporters would not have it. In every photograph of me that appeared in the papers, my arm in its sling was conspicuously visible. I told the reporters that it was only my hand that was broken, but they kept referring to my “badly broken arm.”

  “Why don’t you simply take the credit you deserve?” said Dr. Cook. “There is no doubt that you saved his life.”

  “I suppose it’s because of what he said to me,” I said. “And because he told Francis Stead that you were my father. I would rather that people not dwell on my having saved someone who would do such things. Besides, I could not have saved him without your help and Henson’s.”

  “It would do no harm if you simply give the papers what they want, which is the story, in your words, of what you did. Has it occurred to you that we might use all this to our advantage? It seems that Bridgman and the members of the Peary Arctic Club do not blame me for returning from Greenland without Peary. But all that may change if Peary dies.”

  I relented. I was, as The New York Times put it, “finally forthcoming.” I described in detail to one of the Times’ reporters everything that happened after Peary fainted.

  A short sketch of my life was included with the story. Born and raised in Newfoundland. Son of Francis Stead, who was now referred to as “a former colleague of Lieutenant Peary’s, a medical officer who was tragically lost on the North Greenland expedition.” Came without prospects to Manhattan, where, by sheer coincidence, he met up with Dr. Cook, member of the Peary Arctic Club, leader of the rescue expedition and likewise a former colleague of Peary and Francis Stead’s on the North Greenland expedition. “It started out for Mr. Stead as a pilgrimage to the bleak northern land where his father disappeared. In 1892, when Devlin Stead was just twelve, his father went to Greenland with Lieutenant Peary and Dr. Cook. Tragically, he did not return. To join those two great explorers, Peary and Cook, to walk where his father had walked, has been for Mr. Stead a life-long dream. Who could have known how that dream would end? That the young man whose father lost his life in Greenland so long ago would wind up saving the life of the great explorer under whom his father served.”

  It seemed that every day some new embellishment appeared: the long line of men shaking Peary’s hand and wishing him good luck on the eve of their departure from Etah; Peary “chatting” with each of them despite being so exhausted; Peary collapsing as he and I were talking, with me catching him as he went over the rail, shouting through gritted teeth for help, refusing to drop a man who weighed so much more than I did.

  The papers did nothing more than hint obliquely at Francis Stead’s abandonment of his wife and child and the circumstances of his death. They made no reference to my mother’s death except to say that she had died when I was six. Almost nothing was said of Aunt Daphne and Uncle Edward, who were referred to only as “the aunt and uncle by whom Mr. Stead was raised,” which somehow made it sound as if they had had many children of their own, as if I had grown up in a household so swarming with their offspring that I had more or less been left to raise myself, thereby developing the hardihood and quick-thinking resourcefulness that in Greenland had so well served me and Lieutenant Peary.

  “Wherever Mr. Stead is,” The Times story read, “Dr. Cook is sure to be close by, attending to his protégé. Those who know them say that they were like this from t
he start, that there was a familiar, collegial air between them that made their just having met seem inconceivable. Dr. Cook explains this by saying that he was so close to Mr. Stead’s father that when, by chance, he met his son, he felt as though they had been friendly associates for years. What father would not regard with envy the closeness of these two, would not wish from his son the same measure of dutiful obedience as that accorded Dr. Cook by Mr. Stead?”

  • CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE •

  Dear Aunt Daphne:

  As you will have read by now in the St. John’s papers of my involvement in the rescue expedition that was sent to Greenland in search of Lieutenant Peary and his family, the time seems right for a full disclosure of my whereabouts and plans.

  Up to the point of my strange and chance encounter with Lieutenant Peary, I was really little more than a guest of the leader of the expedition, Dr. Frederick Cook, whose personal assistant I have been since shortly after arriving in New York.

  As you know, both Lieutenant Peary and Dr. Cook were members of the North Greenland expedition of 1892, from which my father disappeared. Lieutenant Peary was its commander, Dr. Cook my father’s fellow medical officer.

  Dr. Cook and his wife, Marie, have been kind enough to put me up in the unoccupied wing of their house in a part of Brooklyn known as Bushwick. I am very well provided for, wanting for nothing except your own dear company, which I have greatly missed these many months.

  I realize that, what with all that happened to my father and mother, the idea of my taking part in polar expeditions and associating with a polar explorer with a view to becoming one myself must be very troublesome to you. I can think of no way of putting your mind completely at rest on this score, since you are as well-acquainted as I am with the perils of exploration. I have chosen my vocation not because it was my father’s, not to redeem his reputation or to complete what he began. I am drawn to Dr. Cook not because he knew my father or because he took part in my father’s last expedition. That Dr. Cook is, to some degree, my inspiration I happily admit, but not even he could have inspired me to become an explorer were I not predisposed by nature to become one.