The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  We somehow managed to walk from Cape Sparbo to Etah, where we arrived in mid-April and found a hunter named Harry Whitney staying in our box house, having been left by Peary, who the previous summer had set out for the pole.

  The box house. Etah. The Eskimos in their tupiks on the hill. How could all this still be here? It was like returning in old age to one’s childhood home to find it just the same as when you left.

  Dr. Cook chatted with Whitney, who spoke disparagingly of Peary, said that Peary had mistreated him and that he had not got his money’s worth on this hunting trip.

  Dr. Cook had kept a record of our journey in a mass of notebooks, which he said contained scientific proof that we had reached the pole. The covers of the notebooks had disintegrated. The ragged and filth-ridden pages were held together with paste and reindeer lashings. There was no question of our waiting with Whitney for Peary and his ship, since Peary would never allow us on board. The nearest shipping port was Upernavik, to which we would have to walk on foot, which would take about four months. Dr. Cook said he was certain that if he travelled this distance on foot with the notebooks, they would fall to pieces.

  “I must leave these notebooks with you, Mr. Whitney,” he said. “May I trust you to bring them back safely with you to New York and leave them with my wife? Otherwise, they will soon be of no use to anyone.”

  Whitney assured Dr. Cook that he would take good care of the notebooks and would say nothing of them to Peary.

  Dr. Cook told me we had to get to Upernavik as quickly as we could, there being no telling when Peary would return from up north or how far he would claim to have gone.

  At Upernavik, we parted with Etukishuk and Ahwelah. They were bewildered at the fuss we made over them, hugging them and trying not to cry. When we were through, they smiled sheepishly, then turned and headed back towards Etah.

  A Danish ship called the Hans Egede took us on board. It was bound for Copenhagen but detoured to Lerwick, the most northern city of Scotland, the capital of the Shetland Islands and the nearest port with a wireless. The Danes told us that going straight to Copenhagen would give Peary a better chance to stake his claim first. They favoured us over Peary, if only because to them would go the honour of transporting us, not only back to civilization, but to their own country, which would be the first to celebrate us and our accomplishment.

  From Lerwick, Dr. Cook telegraphed to the Lecointe Observatory in Brussels the news that we had reached the pole on April 22, 1908. He sent the telegram September 1, 1909. We had spent the past sixteen months making our way back.

  I sent a telegram to Kristine: “I am safe and will soon be home.” I wondered if after all this time, my safety still mattered to her. Dr. Cook sent one telegram to his wife and another, two thousand words in length, to the New York Herald. The latter was a sketchy account of our attainment of the pole that the Herald ran on its front page on September 2.

  “I felt an intense loneliness, despite the presence of Mr. Stead and the Eskimos,” wrote Dr. Cook. “What a cheerless spot to have aroused the ambition of man for so many ages. An endless field of purple snows. No life. No land. Nothing to relieve the monotony of frost. We were the only pulsating creatures in this world of ice.”

  We travelled to Copenhagen.

  What an unlikely way this was for a man to make his first journey to the Old World from the New. I had all but walked to Europe from the pole. To Denmark, by whose tribes those of England were defeated. From whose people those of England were descended. Old Denmark. Old Copenhagen. Dr. Cook, the Eskimos and I had journeyed like a tribe of four against the course of time. We had gone back to the Stone Age at Cape Sparbo. Lived in a cave, hunted animals with weapons that we made from bones.

  As the Hans Egede steamed into the harbour at Copenhagen, I was reminded again of my first sight of Manhattan. The harbour was a brilliant blue, reflecting the sky that had cleared from a storm the night before. It was cluttered with small boats, many of them flying the Stars and Stripes. A chorus of ship’s whistles and sirens went up. Bands we could not see began to play, each blaring forth a different song, the only one I recognized “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”

  Life seemed to have become a series of discoveries set in motion by our having made it to the pole. Cape Sparbo, Upernavik and Copenhagen might all have been unknown to the outside world until we found them, so foreign did everything seem to me. Dr. Cook said it was twenty-seven months since we had set out by train for Gloucester from Manhattan. The number thirty, the idea of a month, meant nothing to me. To measure time in numbers or in distance seemed absurd. I wondered for how long this feeling would last.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN •

  WE MADE PORT AT COPENHAGEN, SUDDENLY AWARE OF WHAT A sight we were. Dr. Cook and I were wearing the ragged skins of seven different kinds of animals. At quayside, the crown prince of Denmark shook our hands and doffed his hat to us. They had cleaned us up some on the ship. The day before, I had had hair down to my shoulders, as had Dr. Cook. I had been filthy for so long that no amount of soap and water could restore my complexion to normal. But no one seemed to mind.

  Thousands of people had come out to get a look at us. No one knew just what sort of tribute was appropriate. Some sang the Danish anthem, some the American. We were introduced to clergymen who seemed as mystified as we were as to why their presence had been called for. By the end of the day, our hands had become so raw from being shaken that to shake them was forbidden, to remind people of which we wore gloves indoors and out.

  How anomalous, how tenuous Copenhagen seemed in comparison with the vast emptiness we had travelled through to get there. It seemed to me that everyone in Copenhagen lived in denial or ignorance of the great darkness that contained them as surely as the sea contains a sunken ship. Buildings, bridges, horse-drawn cabs and motor cars, electric lights—all seemed inconsequential.

  Though much was made of Dr. Cook’s having ushered me ahead of him at the last moment so that I could be the first to reach the pole, it was seen as a purely symbolic gesture. The expedition had been his. As one of the Copenhagen papers put it: “Dr. Cook generously allowed his fledgling protégé to walk the last few feet to the precious spot. So although we say hurray for Mr. Stead, it is Dr. Cook whom we honour as the first man to reach the pole.”

  For a while, Dr. Cook revelled in how eager people would be from then on to take advantage of us, in how much money we had already been offered. From Hampton’s magazine, Dr. Cook accepted an offer of thirty thousand dollars for exclusive story rights, despite the objections of those who assured him he could get ten times that. From Frederic Thompson, the lecture-circuit promoter, $250,000 for 250 lectures. Harper and Brothers would soon make a bid for book rights.

  We spent three weeks in Copenhagen at the Hotel Phoenix, where crowds gathered all night in the rain beneath the windows of our rooms, exhorting us to show ourselves, which we did from time to time to much cheering and applause. We stayed in adjoining suites and took turns going to the windows, going together only once or twice, which brought the loudest cheers from the crowds. “Cook and Stead, Cook and Stead,” they chanted.

  After we were installed in our hotel by government officials, who assured us that all our expenses would be taken care of, my first thought was of food. I all but fainted just reading the room-service menu and would have gorged myself had Dr. Cook not warned me against it, explaining that I would be sick if I ate any amount of anything, so shrunken was my stomach, and especially sick if I ate rich food, to which my body would react as if it were poison.

  Everywhere we walked in Copenhagen, beautiful young women followed us. Once, as we disembarked from a cab, a group of them showered us with flowers, then began to hug and kiss us. They ran after the vehicles in which we travelled through the streets, shouting, “Ve looff you, Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead.”

  At first, we were repulsed by all the luxury after so many months of deprivation (to which we had become so accustomed that we could not get t
o sleep except by stretching out on the floor beside our beds). It took me two weeks to wean myself from the floor and fall asleep atop a mattress.

  We visited Bernstoff Castle, where we had tea with Princess Marie of Denmark and the visiting Princess George of Greece. Both the princesses spoke fluent, if heavily accented, English, as did most of the people in whose houses we were guests.

  How strange it seemed, after two and a half years away from civilization, to return to it and find that everyone’s first language was one I did not understand, as if this were the measure of how long we had been away. The language of the Eskimos had not made me feel as incongruous as the language of the Danes did.

  I was surprised that, although from a distance they looked just like the ones back home, I could not read a word of the newspapers. Everything seemed familiar but skewed, slightly off, as if my ordeal had altered my perceptions, as if in time the gibberish written and spoken everywhere in Copenhagen would resolve back into English, the streets and buildings would resume their former shapes, and people would once again wear what they had worn and look as they had looked when I saw them last.

  I went about the city in a daze with Dr. Cook, walked with him and our hosts through narrow cobblestone streets. Everyone in our coterie spoke English, but all around us was this unintelligible hubbub of voices. There were times when, almost overcome by residual fatigue, so dizzy I could barely stand, I believed that I was still following behind the sled, that I had just awoken from a dream in which we had made it to the pole and back again, only to find ourselves in a world that in our absence had somehow been transformed, a world in which, though we were treated well, we would never feel that we belonged but would always, for some reason inscrutably related to our having been to the pole, be looked upon as strangers.

  Dr. Cook seemed to be in all ways unfazed, merely patting me reassuringly on the back when I tried to explain to him the strange sense of displacement I felt.

  “It will pass,” he said, speaking, I presumed, as one from whom such feelings had passed after previous expeditions.

  Dining with the royal family of Denmark (the names of whom I hadn’t known until we were introduced), including an eight-year-old prince and a ten-year-old princess, did nothing to dispel my sense of other-worldliness.

  All of them put aside their unimaginable lives for the duration of our visit, as if our adventure was more remarkable to them than an account of one day of their lives would have been to us. As surreal as a fairy tale it was. Two explorers from New York come back from the North Pole, emerge from the Arctic on foot to have dinner with the king and queen of Denmark. We seemed to have travelled as far in time as we had in space, back to a former century in which there were castles, kings and queens, crown princes and royal astronomers. Of the castles and mansions we visited, I retained almost no impression. I remember only antiques contained by structures that were themselves antiques.

  Dr. Cook, because he had been the leader of the expedition, had many honours conferred upon him by the Danes. The Danish Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal was presented to him by King Frederick at the Palais Concert Hall. I was standing beside him, and no sooner had the medal been placed around his neck than he took it off and placed it around mine, to a thunderous ovation from the audience.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT •

  THERE WAS A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF SCEPTICISM IN EDITORIALS IN newspapers around the world about Dr. Cook’s claim of having reached the pole, editorials that were reprinted in the Danish papers.

  The New York editorials, aside from those of the Herald, were reservedly, noncommittally congratulatory. The British papers said they would reserve judgment on Dr. Cook’s claim until his “proofs,” about the very existence of which there was some question, had been examined.

  But the explorers of the world quickly came to Dr. Cook’s defence—explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, just back from a farthest south in the Antarctic, and Gen. Adolphus W. Greely, of the infamous Greely expedition.

  “The word of a gentleman explorer has always been sufficient ‘proof,’ “ said Roald Amundsen. “I can see no reason why this should not be the case with Dr. Cook.” Ernest Sverdrup professed to having not the slightest doubt that Dr. Cook and I had reached the pole.

  But only Amundsen continued to speak publicly in support of Dr. Cook after what was called “the revelation at the Tivoli.”

  A reception was held for Dr. Cook and me at the ballroom of the Tivoli Casino, the gilded walls of which were hung with wreaths of roses in our honour.

  During the celebration, a man tiptoed from the back of the room to the head table and handed Dr. Cook a piece of paper as if he was officially serving him with some legal document. Dr. Cook glanced at it, then handed it to me. The paper read: “Peary Says Stars and Stripes Nailed to the Pole. Claims the Pole as His.” Someone snatched it from my hands.

  Dr. Cook’s expression was suddenly so at odds with everything else—the garland of flowers that he wore around his neck, the white tablecloth spread with glasses of sherry and champagne, the merrymaking Danes with their glasses held aloft. A melting ice sculpture, someone’s version of the North Pole, lay in front of him.

  The man who delivered the piece of paper said that Peary had, that very day, laid claim to the pole, and had said he could prove, as he was sure Dr. Cook could not, that he had been there. Peary and the members of the Peary Arctic Club were hinting that in claiming to have reached the pole, Dr. Cook was more than just “mistaken,” and that the world would soon know what they meant. The Danes on either side of Dr. Cook all looked grimly resolved, as if they had just heard that a long-predicted war had broken out at last.

  Dr. Cook recovered his composure. He smiled and, holding aloft a glass of champagne, proclaimed to my astonishment that in the discovery of the pole, there was such glory that he would not mind sharing some of it with Peary.

  In the wake of the revelation at the Tivoli Casino, there were new revelations every day. A controversy began that we were told was crowding all else from the front pages of the New York papers.

  We learned that while we were returning from the pole, in the summer of 1908, Peary left Washington for Cape Sheridan on the Roosevelt. Shortly after his arrival, as the papers reported in mid-August, he encountered an emaciated, scurvy-ridden Rudolph Franke. The papers said that Dr. Cook had told the at first disappointed and resentful Franke that if he kept on going north, he would either die or “wreck” the expedition. Dr. Cook assured me he had said no such thing.

  By the time Peary found him, the papers said, Franke was glad that Dr. Cook had sent him back, so unnerved was he by the prospect of another winter in the Arctic. Franke said that when he last saw him, Dr. Cook was well and proceeding north with Mr. Stead, a group of Eskimos and a team of dogs, his intention being to leave everyone else behind once he believed he was close enough to the pole to attempt the last leg on snowshoes. But Dr. Cook had not returned to Etah as expected in the summer of 1908. By the fall of that year, the whereabouts of both the Cook and Peary expeditions had been unknown.

  It was reported in the Herald that Peary, a year later, on his way back from the pole in August, had encountered Harry Whitney at Etah. He was said to have caught Whitney in possession of some notebooks that Dr. Cook had asked him to take back to New York and give to Mrs. Cook. Peary said that he would strand Whitney in the Arctic if he tried to take on board anything of Dr. Cook’s. It was said that at Peary’s instructions, Whitney and Robert Bartlett, Peary’s first mate, buried Dr. Cook’s notebooks at Etah, though exactly where, no one, not even Whitney and Bartlett, seemed to know.

  “Perhaps it was unwise of me to have left things of such value with an associate of Peary’s,” Dr. Cook told the Danish press, “or indeed to have let them out of my sight, but I dared not take them with me on my journey by foot over Greenland lest they fall to pieces.”

  I confirmed Dr. Cook’s account of how decomposed the notebooks had been and said that Whitney had been t
he only hope of preserving what was left of them.

  “Until I have those notebooks, nothing but another expedition to the pole using the very same route as I used could prove with absolute certainty that I was at the pole,” Dr. Cook told reporters. “Polar explorers, through the ages, have always been taken at their word. Why have I not been extended this courtesy, while Peary, who has no more proof than I do, has been taken at his word—by the press at least, if not by the people of America.”

  Associates of Peary’s countered these accusations with a host of their own, saying that Dr. Cook’s account of reaching the pole was so vague and simplistic that it might have been written by a child and was therefore impossible to verify.

  It was said that Dr. Cook’s account of his attainment of the pole differed every time he told it. His compass and sextant readings, inasmuch as he had reported them at all, were inconsistent. His description of the land he crossed and saw on his way to the pole seemed to contradict those of other explorers, whose reports were far more detailed and scientifically composed. The only thing he said consistently was that he knew he was at the North Pole because his compass needle pointed ninety degrees dead south—but it had long been known that at the North Pole, a compass would read ninety degrees south.

  It was said that astronomers took exception to Dr. Cook’s descriptions of shadows at the pole. He had kept no record, or at least had none in his possession, of the variations in the earth’s magnetic field, which would have registered on his compass as he neared the pole. Had he kept such a record, these variations, the numerical value of which could not be predicted by scientists, could have been confirmed by a future expedition. Peary had not kept a record of these variations either, though he claimed he could prove that he had made allowances for them in his navigations.