True North Page 10

  For three days, in intermittent fog and rain, they proceeded north along the edge of the ice floe, seeking an opening. The expanse of ice, the proximity of icebergs, and the shifting blanket of the fog combined to impress and frighten the passengers. Miranda was occasionally surrounded on three sides by unbroken ice, although with the water calm there was no imminent danger as long as care was taken in the handling of the ship.

  On August 6, they worked their way through a field of broken ice and made port at Sukkertoppen, a Danish sealing and whaling village situated on a coastal island in the shadow of an impressive mountain. For three days, the passengers found much to explore along the deep, beautiful fjords. They strolled on surrounding glaciers, hunted reindeer, collected plant specimens, got to know the Danish families who resided there, and met the local Eskimos. After farewells, the ship headed back out to sea.

  Seven miles from Sukkertoppen, the ship heaved sharply to starboard after three jarring bumps. At the time, Cook was being served breakfast with other passengers in the dining area, where plates and glassware went flying. As others dashed off to their lifeboat stations, Cook ran to the bridge, where he found more confusion. Even the captain could not immediately account for what had happened.

  Cook was surprised at what he did not see looming off the bow: no iceberg, which he thought must have been the cause of the crash. Rather, it turned out Miranda had struck a submerged reef, which, it was later determined, was clearly marked on the chart in the pilot house. There she was now stuck, with sizable sea swells working to give her a pounding against the rocks.

  Once they maneuvered off the reef, a crewman appeared on the bridge with the first damage report from below: the hold had three inches of water, but the portable steam pumps were up and running.

  Inexplicably, the captain announced his intention to proceed northward to the harbor of Godthaab, two days away. Cook would not hear of it, and insisted that they return forthwith to Sukkertoppen to assess the damage.

  The captain refused. Cook was a man who never seemed hot under the collar and never raised his voice for effect, but in this instance he pushed back. After a heated discussion that some observers thought might end in fisticuffs, the captain finally agreed to turn around.

  That decision may have saved lives, because Miranda was discovered, on inspection at Sukkertoppen, to have severe damage to her hull that had caused flooding to the ballast tanks. She was still afloat, but for how long no one knew.

  Cook realized that if he was to bring his party back safely, outside help was required. To that end, he decided to take a small boat up the coast, where he was told a number of American fishing boats were working the waters.

  Several volunteers joined Cook for what turned out to be a rough journey through stiff winds, high seas, and pelting rain. On August 16, after sailing and rowing nearly a hundred miles, they arrived at Holsteinborg, where Cook learned from the Danish governor that several American schooners were a few miles up the coast. An Eskimo kayaker made contact the next morning with the nearest schooner, Rigel, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, delivering to the captain a signed letter from Cook telling of the damage to Miranda and the number of Americans in his party, and asking, “Will you kindly come to our rescue?”

  Rigel, which had spent the summer fishing for halibut on the northern coast of Iceland and had just arrived off Greenland two weeks earlier to finish out the season, anchored at Sukkertoppen on August 20 alongside Miranda.

  After a conference between the two captains with Cook in attendance, it was decided that both ships should try for Nova Scotia. The prudent course of action, all agreed, was to move the passengers onto the sailing vessel, which would be towed behind Miranda at the end of a stout 1,000-foot hawser. In the event the larger ship foundered, Miranda’s crew would be transferred to Rigel.

  Once they were underway, things went smoothly until the second night, when the two ships were in the middle of the Davis Strait—three hundred miles from Greenland—fighting a heavy sea. A ballast tank burst on Miranda shortly after midnight, and she blew the signal of distress and lowered a red light that by prearrangement meant the steamer was sinking.

  In the dark, pitching sea, the scene for the next three hours was one of high drama. Rigel remained attached to the larger ship but with a crewman standing by with an ax ready to sever the line at a moment’s notice. Dories made the trip from Miranda with members of her thirty-three-man crew, but in the high sea it was a struggle to haul the small boats safely alongside Rigel. First came the members of the steward’s department; last to arrive was the captain and the rest of his bridge crew, who before departing had lashed the rudder to one side and released the hawser from the fantail of the crippled ship.

  Soaked but safe, all hands stood elbow to elbow on the deck of Rigel and watched as Miranda—her lights still burning, smoke pouring from her stack, and propeller turning—steamed off into the mist, never to be seen again.

  Rigel reached North Sydney, on the northeastern shore of Nova Scotia, on September 5, and Cook’s party split up. Some wanted no more of ocean travel and purchased railway tickets home. The rest, including Cook, ended up bound for New York on Portia, which looked spookily like Miranda.

  It turned out Portia and Miranda were sister ships of nearly identical British design. That wasn’t all they had in common: one day out of New York, off Vineyard Haven Sound, Portia rammed a small sailing vessel.

  Rushing up on deck, Cook found a jumble of ripped sails, broken spars, and pieces of a mast from the sailing ship, which had been cut in half with only the stern section still visible. In the next instant, Cook saw two men being sucked under with the wreckage before any assistance could be rendered. Of the five crew members aboard Dora N. French, of Bangor, Maine, four were lost.

  The extensive press coverage about the ill-fated Miranda excursion—complete with questions about the sobriety of the captain and crew—did little to generate interest in more sightseeing trips to Greenland, and Cook remained home the following summer (1895).

  His Brooklyn medical practice expanded, and he even took in a partner; still, he found his days very tame compared with those spent in the Far North. Cook’s notes on his patients give a glimpse of the tedium of his practice: “Nelson Green . . . spleen enlarged. Frequent nausea, dizziness. Fetid odor of breath, disgusting taste in mouth in morning.” And: “Mrs. Green . . . flatulence, constipation. Wants obesity reduced.”

  Cook was understandably eager to get back to exploring, and he again focused his energies on the Antarctic. As for the North Pole, which had a stronger claim on the imagination of the public than did its southern counterpart, Cook was convinced it would be reached before the end of the century—if not by an American, then by one of the capable European explorers, such as Fridtjof Nansen and Otto Sverdrup, who were making regular forays to the Far North. He did not think there was room for his entry into the race for the North Pole.

  The South Pole was another matter, and one potential backer Cook attempted to interest was the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. They met on a wintry day at the Union League Club, a conservative social club at East Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. To Cook’s surprise, Carnegie had read several books by Arctic explorers. He was particularly interested in the work of Europeans such as the Norwegian Nansen and the Britons Francis Leopard M’Clintock and John and James Ross (uncle and nephew, respectively). For reasons Carnegie did not make clear, he seemed to have less interest in the accomplishments of American explorers.

  Cook hoped to change that.

  Carnegie, a diminutive man only a few inches over five feet, had made his journey from rags to riches, and was by then a captain of industry—known as the “king of steel”—and one of the wealthiest men in America.

  Cook presented a concrete proposal: to follow up in the Southern Hemisphere on the claimed discoveries of the Wilkes expedition—offic
ially known as the U.S. Surveying and Exploration Expedition (1838–42)—a circumnavigation of the world involving six ships and hundreds of men that charted, among many other areas of the world not yet surveyed, several hundred miles of the coastline of Antarctica. Cook wished to go farther, of course—to the South Pole or as close as possible, with his exploring party.

  At the end of the meeting, Carnegie said, “Doctor, I would like to get interested in your ice business. . . . See me next Monday or write me.” Cook sought out Carnegie the following week, and they sat in a corner of the same club room. This time, the doctor came prepared with a list of the values of scientific research, and he made a point of talking “utility fast and strong” for the benefit of the businessman before him—a man who, in the steel business, had been quick to adopt modern technological innovations such as the open-hearth furnace and increased managerial efficiency through vertical integration.

  At a crucial moment, Carnegie was summoned to another room. When he returned, his thoughts seemed elsewhere. “Doctor, there is so much to be done in this world nearer by,” said the industrialist.*

  Cook sensed he had lost whatever momentum had been built.

  Upstate New York in winter has “all the ice we will ever need,” said Carnegie, who questioned the need for expensive explorations to other icy lands.

  Carnegie had clearly missed the point of polar exploration, and for the second summer in a row Cook had nothing to explore and nowhere to go.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BOUNTY HUNTING

  FOLLOWING HIS RETURN from the Arctic in fall 1895, Peary resumed his official duties at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. As he regained his stamina and spirits, he went back on the lecture circuit in the evenings and on weekends, telling the familiar tale of his sledge trip across northern Greenland three years earlier.

  Peary’s narrative came to life whenever he spoke of the meteorites he had unearthed, and particularly of the one great “iron stone” that remained in the Far North, promising that one day he would bring Tent home.

  He strove to find a way to make that happen. To augment the funds he raised through lectures and other contributions, he sold round-trip passage to university teachers and students; they would be dropped off at various locations on the Greenland coast to conduct Arctic fieldwork and be picked up on the way back. By the next summer, Peary had enough money to charter a ship.

  Returning from his last trip with Woman and Dog had diverted attention from Peary’s failure to achieve little else. Woman was the second largest meteorite in any collection in the world, the largest being the Cranbourne meteorite (8,000 pounds) in the British Museum. The meteorites were put on display at the American Museum of Natural History, endearing him to his newest benefactor, the museum’s president, Morris K. Jesup, who took up Peary’s latest cause with the Navy and helped him secure a summer leave.

  Peary sailed aboard Hope in July 1896, reaching Cape York in early August. The ice was thin enough in Melville Bay for the ship to push through to the small island where Tent was located. They were able to anchor next to a natural rock shelf that ran down from the meteorite’s location.

  Racing against the onset of winter conditions, Peary organized an excavation of the site. The stone was then lifted with heavy hydraulic jacks and placed on a trolley. A bridge way was constructed with railroad ties across the rock shelf, and the meteorite was slid down to the ship by winch and steel cable.

  At that point, Mother Nature intervened. A sudden and furious southeaster broke up a ridge of icebergs that had been protecting their flank from the pressure of the ice pack. As the ice now closed in for what would surely be a months-long winter captivity for ship and crew, they had no choice but to pull out, leaving the meteorite beached like a giant whale.

  Peary came home to further bad news.

  The newspapers were filled with exciting reports of one of the most dramatic developments in the history of Arctic exploration. Nansen, using as his base of operations Fram, a small ship designed to drift in the ice pack, had left the ship after it had been icebound for two years and marched toward the North Pole the preceding spring, achieving a new farthest-north record of 86 degrees, 13 minutes. Before he was forced to turn around due to storms and melting ice, the Norwegian had stood within 225 miles of the Pole, bettering by nearly 170 miles the record for the highest explored latitude on the globe (83 degrees, 24 minutes, north), set nearly thirteen years earlier by the Greely expedition.* Then overtaken by winter, Nansen had spent nine months in a hut of stones and walrus hide. Unable to find Fram, a wandering Nansen happened upon the ship of an English explorer, Frederick Jackson, who returned him safely to Norway.

  For Peary, it was a painful reminder of Nansen’s trump of his earlier effort, when the Norwegian had been the first man to cross Greenland. After his initial disappointment, Peary seemed galvanized by the competition. Using the January 1897 occasion of his receiving an American Geographical Society award, Peary declared the goal of his next expedition as “the conquest of the North Pole.” He would launch his effort, he explained, from a base in northern Greenland, where he would be prepared to stay five years, if necessary. He estimated the cost at $150,000.

  “Nansen has wrested from the Stars and Stripes the record of the highest north which it had held for a dozen years, and has placed the Norwegian flag far in advance,” Peary said with his usual dose of patriotic fervor. “The Pole is certain to be reached soon; it is only a question of time and money, and not so very much of the latter, and unless we are alert we shall be left in the rear. . . . I know there is not an American man or woman whose heart would not thrill with patriotism to see the realization of this project, and know that it was American money, intelligence, energy and endurance that had scaled the apex of the Earth, and lighted it with ‘Old Glory. . .’. No man could . . . without personal exertion or discomfort, obtain a more royal and imperishable monument, than to have his name written forever across the mysterious rocks and ice which form the setting for the spinning axis of the Globe, the North Pole.”

  Peary found the reaction to his plan “immediate and emphatic.” Within a month, the American Geographical Society offered its full support, with the understanding that Peary would continue to solicit other backers.

  The Navy had other plans for Peary. His request for a five-year leave to undertake his first assault on the North Pole was rejected, and orders were cut for his transfer to the shipyards at Mare Island, California.

  Peary found the forces against him in the Navy “determined, concentrated, and bitter,” and none of the strings he had previously pulled worked this time. Within two weeks of his scheduled exile to the west coast, Peary by chance was introduced to Charles A. Moore, a prominent New York politician, who caught the explorer’s enthusiasm about his planned assault on the Pole. Moore, who had supported William McKinley in the presidential election months earlier—New York State’s thirty-six electoral votes went to McKinley in his race against William Jennings Bryan—made an appointment with the secretary of the Navy to lobby on Peary’s behalf. When Moore explained the nature of his request, the secretary said, “Anything but that.” The subject of Peary’s duty status had obviously become a sore point at the highest levels.

  Undeterred, Moore walked across the street and received an immediate audience with President McKinley, who had been sworn into office only weeks earlier. “You remember,” Moore pointedly asked McKinley, “that you said to come to you if I ever wanted anything?”

  McKinley nodded. As a former longtime member of Congress and twice governor of Ohio, he knew about paying back political favors.

  “I want Lieutenant Peary of the Navy granted five years’ leave in order to continue his great work in the north.”

  Obvious relief passed over McKinley’s face. He had been anticipating having to deliver on a much larger favor. “Is that all? . . . Of course I’ll do it.”
/>
  McKinley dictated a memorandum, which Moore, who could not resist the temptation, hand-delivered to the Navy secretary a few minutes later. Peary’s orders for Mare Island were revoked straightaway, and a month later he was detached from his official duties for five years’ paid leave.*

  Before turning his attention to his polar expedition, Peary had unfinished business in northern Greenland. Again partly financed through the sale of passage to scientists and other sightseers—including a couple who wished to spend their honeymoon at Godhavn—Peary put together a party and chartered a ship for the specific purpose of retrieving Tent. Josephine and their now four-year-old daughter, Marie, went along on the summer journey. In the process of loading the meteorite onto the ship, a U.S. flag was draped over it at one point, and Marie dashed a little bottle of wine against it, christening the rock that had fallen from the heavens in a fireball, Ahnighito, her own Eskimo name.

  Leading meteorite authorities agreed that the recovery of the Cape York meteorites—including Ahnighito, which weighed nearly forty tons, by far the largest in any collection in the world—was a valuable find. From the beginning, it seemed, Peary’s motives were not altogether altruistic. As if to ensure clear and undisputed title, he made a point of acquiring from a Danish official a bill of sale for the meteorites, although there is no evidence anything of value was received by the Danes or local natives in return for the meteorites. He also required the passengers on Hope to sign a statement concerning the recovery of the meteorite being “entirely confidential” and agreeing that the incident could simply “be covered by the statement that I have the meteorite on board” and nothing more. Although Peary had previously spoken colorfully about the meteorites’ having been responsible for the rise of the natives to the iron age of tools and weapons, he subsequently justified his removal of the buried treasures by noting that the “savage stress of [the] natural environment” of the Eskimos allowed “them no room” for any real appreciation of their “celestial guests.”