The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  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.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR •

  BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, 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.

  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 t
o 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.