The Navigator of New York (29 page)

I guessed that Bridgman was fifty. He was bald, his scalp as smooth, as unblemished, as if it had not grown hair since he was twenty. He had, as if for compensation, a florid moustache that, directly beneath
his nose, had begun to grey. His eyes, even had he not been bald, would have been his most prominent feature, but his baldness drew attention to them, made them seem even smaller than they were and his stare of appraisal that much more difficult to meet.

“You must have been quite young when your father took up exploration,” he said.

“Yes sir, I was,” I said. “I don’t really remember him.”

“I remember him very well,” Bridgman said, but he gave no sign that he intended to elaborate. How, his eyes seemed to ask, do you feel about what he did to you and your mother? What are you doing with that doctor’s bag that bears his initials? As if I was as deluded about my father as he had been about himself. Did I have no better sense than to see him as some sort of hero whose life was worth emulating?

“So you’re working with Dr. Cook,” Bridgman said.

“I’m working
for
him, yes sir,” I said.

I could see his mind working. Does this boy think that by consorting with explorers, he will come to some understanding of his father? Establish some sort of connection with him?

More than under anyone else’s gaze, I felt, under Bridgman’s, like an apologist for Francis Stead, his delegate, his representative.

D
R
. C
OOK CALLED ME TO THE
D
AKOTA DRAWING ROOM ONE DAY
to tell me that he had been asked by the Peary Arctic Club to lead a “relief expedition” for Peary. It was by then almost thirty months since Peary had set off from Philadelphia with two other Americans—and more than a year since I had arrived in New York.

“The club tells me, ‘Peary is lost somewhere in the Arctic. We need the benefit of your judgment,’ an admission that Peary himself would never make and, if he is found alive, will rebuke his backers for making, even if my intervention saves his life. I feel that as a fellow explorer, I cannot refuse their request. As you know, I have been north only once since the expedition on which Francis Stead was lost. The prospect of going again appeals to me.”

Dr. Cook said that aside from the unwritten code among explorers that obliged him to do all he was able to bring about Peary’s rescue, two other considerations inclined him to accede to the Arctic club’s request. One was that Peary was unaware that, in his absence, his mother and his infant daughter had passed away.

The other consideration was that Jo Peary and her daughter, Marie, were also missing in the North, unheard from since departing Godhavn, Greenland, on August 24 of last year. Mrs. Peary had left Maine with her surviving child when she received a letter from Peary that was meant to reassure her that he was healthy, but had just the opposite effect. She told the Peary Arctic Club that she was going to “fetch” her husband back. It was uncertain if she and her daughter
were now with Peary. Mrs. Peary had planned to go as far north as safety and comfort would allow; if by then she had still not found Peary, she would stay put and wait for his return.

“Therefore I must break the vow I made to have no more to do with Peary,” Dr. Cook said.

“When will you leave?” I said.

“Very soon. As this expedition will be a short one and will take place in the summer, I was able to convince Bridgman to let you come along with me. I assume that you would like to.” He smiled at me, then laughed when he saw how pleased I was by this surprise. Before I had time to stammer out an acceptance of his invitation, he began to tell me what needed to be done before we left.

“Suppose you don’t come back?” I overheard Mrs. Cook say to her husband one morning when she went to see him in his office.

The question kept running through my mind.

But I looked forward to the coming expedition with far more excitement than dread. Death, to me, was my mother’s death, and Francis Stead’s. My own did not really seem possible. Was I a fool to be subjecting myself to the certain suffering of a polar expedition, even one that it was expected we would return from before winter set in? I did not feel like one. I felt fortunate, as though I had been chosen at random to receive some honour I did not deserve.

Dr. Cook and I took the Intercolonial Railroad to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, where we boarded the
Erik
. Already on board were several young men whose fathers were members of the Peary Arctic Club. Paying guests whose fees covered roughly half the cost of the expedition, most of them would be dropped off in Labrador and southern Greenland, where they would spend their time trophy hunting until the ship returned. They had their own compartment, a bunkhouse whose cramped dimensions they complained about incessantly, especially when they learned that I, who was younger than most of them and had no social standing, would be sharing Dr. Cook’s less Spartan quarters.

Dr. Cook put an end to their complaining by telling them “my story.” Soon, all of them believed that this would be my one and only visit to the Arctic, a visit I was undertaking to satisfy a lifelong yearning to set eyes on the land where my father disappeared and from which his body had never been recovered. Now the other young men regarded me with a mixture of sympathy and awe. They kept their distance from me, as if they wanted neither to intrude upon my pilgrimage nor to allow my presumably solemn mood to dampen theirs.

Dr. Cook and I shared the captain’s cabin at the aft of the ship, a grandly named, sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged room not much larger than the pantry at 670 Bushwick. A bunk was built for me along the wall opposite the one to which Dr. Cook’s bed was attached. The bunk was like a large dresser drawer whose sides would keep me from spilling out onto the floor in rough weather. Everything in the cabin was tied or bolted down. An oak desk and a chair without arms were bolted to the floor. You had to squeeze into the chair, which was permanently drawn up to what for someone had been an ideal distance from the desk but was for Dr. Cook a touch too far, so that he had to sit on the edge of the chair as he wrote or read.

Dr. Cook had brought along hundreds of books, which he crammed into what little shelf space there was in the cabin; all the shelves had detachable wooden bars across them to keep the books from falling out. “You will have a lot of spare time,” he said. “More than most people ever have. It will give you a chance to read these books. No one who hasn’t read them can claim to be educated.” He had read them all, he said, and was working his way through them for a second time, more slowly. If not for these books, he said, he might not have survived the thirteen months he spent aboard the ice-trapped
Belgica
as it drifted back and forth across the Antarctic Ocean. I scanned the spines of the books: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Pascal, Hobbes, Sterne, Fielding, Melville, Darwin, Tolstoy. At college, Dr. Cook had studied only medicine and other sciences. He was otherwise self-educated, having figured out for
himself which books were worth his time, and having made his way through them without guidance of any kind.

The
Erik
was an enormous black sealing ship from Newfoundland, recently salvaged from a wreck, whose hull was now reinforced with squares of oak planking fourteen inches thick. It was hoped it would hold up against whatever ice we would encounter. The chunky ship, with its distinctive, overlarge sealer’s bowsprit jutting out a third of the ship’s length from the nose, looked like a teapot with a straight, elongated spout.

Attached to her aft masts, a hundred feet above the deck, and a good thirty feet above the height of most crow’s-nests, were two barrels in which would be stationed “ice spotters” who would have to scan the sea ahead of us through billowing black smoke from the stack in front of them.

We left North Sydney on July 14, crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence, followed the northwest coast of Newfoundland to the Straits of Belle Isle. On July 21, we rounded Cape Ray Light, on the south coast of Labrador, and, after putting some of the hunters ashore, set out for Greenland’s Cape Farewell, across the ice-strewn Sea of Labrador.

On the south coast of Greenland, we put in at Godhavn, where the rest of the hunters went ashore and the Danish governor told Dr. Cook he had no news of Peary. Some Eskimos there said that Peary and his ship, the
Windward, were
lost, but Mrs. Peary and her little girl were safe at Upernavik.

To reach Upernavik, we had to cross the Umanak Fiord. As there was almost no chance that we would encounter ice of any thickness in the fiord, the ice pilots came down from their masts. At my request, Dr. Cook convinced Captain Blakeney to let us climb up and stand in the barrels. Only because the water was so calm would he allow it, he said, though my impression was that he would have taken any request of Dr. Cook’s as an order. A Canadian, he had been hired on short notice, having spent the past ten years painting houses, a vocation he discovered when he was fired from the navy.

Dr. Cook and I ascended the mast ladders together, Dr. Cook
waiting for me when I lagged behind. On his instructions, I stared at the rungs and at my hands to keep from getting dizzy. Even though there was no wind, the ship rolled some from side to side on a tidal swell that on deck I had barely noticed—rolled more and more, it seemed, the higher up we went, the cross spars creaking from the weight of the furled sails, my mast swaying like the tree it once was until it seemed certain it would snap off beneath my feet and fall with me still climbing it, still riding on the rungs.

“Is your mast moving?” I shouted across to Dr. Cook, who was twenty feet away from me, though he might as well have been a mile away for all the good he could do me if I got into trouble.

He smiled reassuringly at me through the web of rigging. “Don’t look down until we’re in the barrels,” he said. “I’ll climb into mine first to show you how it’s done.”

We had to climb above the barrels and lower ourselves down into them, for they had no gate or door. I watched as Dr. Cook did it with an agility that I hoped was not essential to the task. He shinnied around the mast, so that for a short while there was nothing under him to impede his fall but vines of rope. Then, with the rungs now on the far side of the mast, he climbed down into the barrel with such ease that I realized he must have done it many times before.

“Your turn,” he said. The hardest part was switching sides. I did not shinny around the mast as he had, but kept my left hand and foot on the ends of the rungs as I felt around the mast with my right hand and foot. If not for having long legs, I would have had to do it Dr. Cook’s way or climb back down the ladder in defeat. My right foot found the rung first, then my right hand.

“You’re almost there,” Dr. Cook said. “Let go on the left.” I did, and was soon clinging with both hands to one side of the rung and, more ominously, standing with both feet, with all my weight, on one side of it. I quickly shifted my hand and foot to the other side and climbed down into the barrel, where my legs gave way beneath me and I found myself sitting down, panting for breath, heart pounding as I looked up at the sky.

“Devlin,” Dr. Cook shouted. “Devlin, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I shouted, then I realized how absurd I must seem to him, shouting unseen from inside the barrel. I struggled to my feet. He would have seen first one hand then the other grip the edge of the barrel, then the slow emergence of my head as I peered out above the edge to find that I was standing with my back to him. I turned around, expecting to see on his face some mix of sympathy and consternation, but was relieved to see there instead a grin of fond amusement. “It’s easier my way,” he said, and we both burst out laughing.

The barrel came up to my chest. I leaned my arms on the edge of it and looked sideways, down the inland length of the fiord. It ended in an illusory vanishing point, a black blur where opposing cliffs that were fifty miles apart seemed to converge like railway tracks. There was a faint, cooling breeze. The sun shone dimly through a gauze of high white cloud.

I could see far inland—beyond the hills on which nothing grew but grass that in June had pushed up through the snow and would do so again in September when the snow returned, beyond a summer-softened glacier whose leading edge had crumbled into icebergs months ago—all the way to where the ice had brought up for good ten thousand years ago.

Dr. Cook pointed. “McCormick Bay is about six hundred miles northwest of here.” The site of Redcliffe House.

There was almost no chance, he had told me before we left, that Peary had made it even that far north. Nor, in that case, was it likely that
we
would.

“Do you think they can hear us down there?” I said. We both looked down at the few crew members who were on the deck.

Dr. Cook shook his head. “Our voices carry whichever way we’re facing,” he said, which at the moment was straight ahead. I nodded.