True North Page 11
Peary presented the third and largest meteorite to the American Museum of Natural History, where it went on display with the others in the cavernous Seventy-seventh Street lobby. He did not, as the press and public generally assumed, make gifts of the meteorites. Rather, they were on loan subject to a buyer being found by the museum or by the sales agent he had retained to sell other valuable Arctic artifacts—furs, skins, ivory, narwhal tusks, and similar souvenirs obtained in trade with the Eskimos for such staples as coffee, biscuits, and candy—he was now diligently bringing back on each trip. In most cases, he avoided being assessed any duty on his property by having all items marked as museum pieces. Peary eventually placed what was then an astronomical price on the three sky stones, known by the Eskimos for generations as saviksue (great irons): $50,000.
That summer Peary also brought back Eskimos, alive as well as dead, and left them all at the American Museum of Natural History. Asked by an assistant curator of the museum, an anthropologist, to bring him one live Eskimo to study for a year, Peary instead delivered six: two of his best hunters and sledge drivers from Smith Sound, who had helped him secure the big meteorite, the wife of one of the hunters, and three youngsters. They had been promised by Peary, according to one of the natives, “nice warm houses in the sunshine land, and guns and knives and needles and many other things.”
No such promises had to be made to acquire the remains of recently deceased natives, some of whom Peary had personally known. He simply ordered their fresh graves opened, and their bodies and the implements they were buried with—to aid their lives in the spirit world—gathered up and placed in big barrels for transport to the museum. The remains, which included a hunter named Qujaukitsoq, his wife, and young daughter, all of whom died during an epidemic, were sold by Peary to the museum as anthropological specimens.
Room was made for the six Eskimo visitors in the museum’s basement. In an early October heat wave, they soon became sick. Within a few months, after being taken to a farm in upstate New York to recuperate, four were dead, succumbing to pneumonia brought on by strains of influenza to which they had no resistance. Only two boys, Uisaakassak and Minik, survived.
One of the dead was Minik’s father, Qisuk, whose remains—along with those of the other Eskimo dead—were returned to the museum, where plaster casts were made of the bodies and brains, the bones cleaned, and the skeletons mounted for display. To assuage the grief of the eight-year-old boy, a mock funeral was staged for his father. Inside the coffin was a log.
Although short of his fund-raising goal, Peary made preparations to depart in summer 1898, hoping that publicity would generate additional interest among potential backers. On the morning of February 16, 1898, Peary brought in the morning paper and glanced at the headlines. The day before, the battleship USS Maine had been blown up by a mysterious explosion and sunk in Havana Harbor, killing 260 American sailors. Maine had arrived in Havana a month earlier to protect U.S. citizens and property after riots in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. With anti-Spanish sentiment inflamed (“Remember the Maine!”)—only later did it come out that the deadly explosion was an accident and not an act of sabotage—Peary expected his leave to be canceled by the Navy, but it was not.
He decided against volunteering for the war that everyone knew would soon be fought, and continued with his Arctic planning. He was, after all, forty-two years old, and he genuinely believed this would likely be his last chance. He departed on July 4, 1898, aboard Windward, two months after war with Spain was declared by Congress.
Peary’s war was not with foreign powers but with the North Pole.
CHAPTER NINE
DESTINATION ANTARCTICA
STEAMING OFF CAPE HORN in storm-tossed seas aboard Belgica, a converted sealer outfitted with a scientific laboratory, photography darkroom, and the latest equipment for studying ocean currents and marine life, Cook knew nothing about the outbreak of hostilities with Spain. In fact, he would not learn of the Spanish-American War until after it had ended.
After returning from the luckless Miranda cruise, Cook had settled into his medical practice in Brooklyn. Although he lectured periodically about Greenland and Eskimo life, and still harbored hopes of exploring the Antarctic, he found his expanding medical practice demanding ever more of his time. For a number of years, his home and office had been situated in a modest brick building at 687 Bushwick Avenue, a quiet and fashionable neighborhood known for its many doctors’ offices. Cook made his house calls in a buggy pulled by a handsome white horse. He seemed the image of an established family physician doing precisely what he wished to be doing. His home was kept by his mother-in-law, Mrs. Forbes, and her three grown daughters were regular visitors. Before long, Frederick was courting one of his late wife’s sisters, Anna, a schoolteacher. None of this, however, had kept Cook from dreaming of exploration. One day he read an article in the New York Sun quoting a cabled dispatch from Antwerp about the delayed departure of the Belgian Antarctic expedition. The group’s physician had resigned, and Cook knew “in a flash” that this was his opportunity to do what he wanted. He at once cabled his willingness to join the expedition, and within hours he received a message of acceptance with instructions to meet the ship at Rio de Janeiro.
Coverage of Nansen’s long drift across the polar sea filled columns in newspapers and periodicals, as did the bold plans of a Swedish engineer, Salomon Andrée, who was about to launch an attempt to cross the North Pole in a hydrogen-filled balloon.* Other Arctic expeditions from Europe and America were also reported to be in the planning stages. Exploration of the Far North was again a hot topic, yet Cook was about to head in the opposite direction. About his southerly destination—“the dream of my life”—he could not have been more excited, and he eagerly set about organizing the equipment and supplies he had been accumulating for an Antarctic expedition.
Cook and Anna Forbes had by late 1897 announced their engagement, and perhaps she thought the former Arctic explorer was ready to settle down. She was to learn that nothing was further from the truth. However, Cook did come to harbor reservations about leaving his fiancée, given her precarious health. Fearing a grave illness—even tuberculosis—he took her to a specialist, who gave his assurances that Anna’s condition was not serious. Still, Cook hesitated at the last minute, missing the departure of a ship on which he had reserved passage, baffling his mother and sister, who had shown up dockside to bid him farewell. Three weeks later, notwithstanding Anna’s wish that he stay home, Cook boarded another ship bound for South America.
In Rio, Cook waited anxiously for two weeks. Upon the arrival of Belgica, he was introduced to the international crew. The chief scientist was Romanian and the second scientist a Pole, five crewmen were Norwegians, including the first mate, named Roald Amundsen, and the remainder were Belgians. Communication would at times prove tricky, with French the principal language in the officers’ cabin, German and French in the scientific labs, and elsewhere a hodgepodge of English, Norwegian, French, and German.
Cook learned that in addition to being appointed physician, he was to serve as anthropologist and photographer. The commander of the expedition was Adrien de Gerlache, a Belgian naval officer who had received the approval of the Royal Geographical Society of Brussels and funds from the Belgian government to make detailed scientific studies of the sea and lands within the Antarctic Circle for one season, returning Belgica to a South American port in time to avoid being trapped by the long winter.*
After several stops on the wild, eastern shore of South America, Belgica put in at the archipelago Tierra del Fuego, off that continent’s southernmost tip. In this picturesque setting, they lingered for a month, mapping the area’s coastline and studying its wildlife and aborigines, the vanishing Yahgans and the giant Onas, who were more than seven feet tall. It was summertime in this latitude, and Gerlache, a gentle and scholarly man who was more scientist than military office
r, was enthralled by the vegetation and rock formations. He encouraged the crew to collect and categorize plants, rock specimens, and fish, many of them species never before seen, while he took soundings of the water’s depth at various locations and marked them on his charts.
Finally, they steamed away from the breathtaking views of the snow-covered Andes into Antarctic waters, which Cook soon judged to be a breeding ground for the world’s worst weather. Caught in a terrible gale accompanied by driving sleet and snow, Belgica battled up each massive wall of water only to plunge into a trough before starting the climb to the next crest. Icy waves cascaded over the decks, and the ship heeled and rocked until it seemed close to foundering. The surfaces above deck were coated with ice, and the men crawled on their hands and knees to move about.
Clinging for their lives to the bridge, Cook and Amundsen heard a scream that made them “shiver because of its force and painful tone.” Fearing an accident in the engine room, Amundsen rushed below, while Cook struggled aft to the quarter deck to investigate. Looking astern, Cook saw in the water a young sailor, Carl Wiencke, who had managed to grab a line as he was falling overboard. Cook began reeling in the line and was soon assisted by several crewmen and the master of the ship, Georges Lecointe. As Wiencke was drawn closer, his grip on the line began to loosen. In the raging seas, it was impossible to launch a rescue boat. In an uncommonly brave act, Lecointe, a Belgian artillery officer who had served in the French navy, ordered himself lowered overboard in an effort to secure a lifeline around the struggling sailor. Lecointe sank immediately and resurfaced locked in a fierce fight for his own life, which he nearly lost. Wiencke, who had turned bluish in the icy water, was sucked under the ship by the current, and disappeared with what Cook later described as a “death mask on his face.” Belgica circled the area for an hour, but there was no sign of their shipmate. Wiencke, one of the youngest sailors on board, had many friends in the crew, and his loss was deeply felt.
Proceeding southward, they passed the South Shetland Islands, and the Antarctic continent soon came in sight.* Since this region was partly unmapped, they spent time tracing the outlines of the coast—valuable information for future mariners as well as geographers. A landing party consisting of Amundsen, Cook, and the ship’s two scientists went ashore to explore inland.
They camped the first night in a snowfield overlooking a glacier and endured a storm that struck without warning. When the weather cleared in the morning, they set out to establish a camp at a higher elevation. Cook and Amundsen, leading the way, came to a series of impassable crevasses at about 1,600 feet. Deciding to scale up a sheer ice face in an effort to bypass the gap, Cook and Amundsen roped themselves together. Amundsen was impressed with Cook’s practical skill and calmness, and willingly followed behind the experienced explorer, who used a hand ax to cut steps in the ice. After several failed attempts, they succeeded in getting across. At one high overlook, they could see a distance of fifty miles. Cook unfolded an American flag he had placed in his pack and unfurled it in the breeze; it was the farthest south Old Glory had ever flown. After a week of exploring, the party was summoned back to Belgica by urgent blasts of the ship’s whistle. An opening in the ice to the southwest had been spotted, and Gerlache wished to be off. Once underway again, everyone took turns on deck, marveling at the countless penguins, cormorants, gulls, albatross, and other seabirds.
In mid-February 1898, Belgica emerged at the south end of a passage that emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Winter was rapidly approaching, and it was still a long way to their destination on the Antarctic coast south of Australia, where four men were to be landed in the region of the South Magnetic Pole.* They were to establish a winter camp, while the ship and remainder of the crew returned to civilization. The exploring party—again to be composed of Amundsen, Cook, and the expedition’s scientists—was to be picked up by Belgica come spring.
Belgica’s course was adjusted to the west to make up for lost time. Soon they were fighting another terrific storm, this time with the added danger of icebergs looming in all directions. Throughout the day, the captain kept the vessel in the lee of a long ridge of bergs that provided shelter from the wind and swells. During the night, the watch officer lost track of the blocking bergs, and when the sun came up they were becalmed in a small basin, surrounded by towering icebergs. In the darkness and heavy weather, the vessel had been pushed by the sea and wind through an opening between icebergs, miraculously without being dashed to pieces. With no immediate means of escape, Belgica dropped anchor and waited.
That evening, the wind shifted, and two icebergs parted. Thanks to deft maneuvering by Captain Lecointe, Belgica was extricated from its predicament.
This close call in increasingly wintry conditions, which would only worsen as the season advanced, did not deter the expedition commander, Gerlache, from pushing onward. They had not gone far when their westward course was blocked by an impenetrable wall of ice. At the same time, a strong gale came up from the north, pushing them steadily south toward a field of broken ice. “The instinct of any navigator accustomed to the Polar seas would have been to use every effort to get away to the north and into the open sea,” the first mate, Amundsen, later attested. “This we could have done.” But Gerlache, realizing that the season for Antarctic navigation had passed and that there was no hope of reaching their original destination, wanted at least to secure a farthest-south record. Eying an opening in the ice to the south, he persuaded Captain Lecointe to head in that direction. According to Amundsen, who was not asked his opinion on the bridge that day—and naval discipline required him to keep silent until asked—the two commanders “could not have made a greater mistake.” He added, “I saw and understood fully the great danger they exposed the whole expedition to.”
Indeed, what Amundsen feared soon happened. By the time they had ridden out the storm, Belgica was a hundred miles inside the ice field, and the pack ice had closed around them in all directions. The narrow channel they had taken through the ice no longer existed. After four days of searching for an escape route, everyone reached the same conclusion: there was no way out of the ice. The situation was all the more perilous in that Belgica was neither equipped nor supplied for winter. There wasn’t enough winter clothing for the entire crew, nor enough lamps to keep all the quarters lit.
Cook and Amundsen, who had similar interests and experiences—Amundsen not only was “schooled . . . in fighting against the hardest elements of nature” but had also studied medicine for two years in Norway—nonetheless reacted differently to Belgica’s plight. To Amundsen, at home in the rigging of a ship at sea, being stuck in the Antarctic Circle was “a truly dreadful prospect,” while Cook, who knew about wintering over in harsh climes, was more philosophical: “To be caught in the ice is, after all, the usual luck of polar explorers.” Yet Cook well knew what to expect: a life “of hardship, of monotony and isolation, full of certain dangers and uncertain rewards.”
Belgica soon became wedged into the ice pack, hopelessly pinned between two large icebergs. Their position was 71 degrees south by 85 degrees west; some 300 miles south of the Antarctic Circle but still 1,100 miles from the South Pole. Halted well short of a farthest-south record, the men of Belgica were destined to make a greater contribution to the history of exploration: they would become the first to spend the long polar night in the Antarctic.
Amid the grinding of ever-shifting ice against the hull, they settled in for winter. Belgica would not remain stationary, but would slowly drift in whichever direction the floes moved.
Their duty now, everyone knew, was to prepare for the coming of perpetual darkness. All spaces had their coal supplies refilled from the ship’s hold, and some structural changes were made for safety and comfort. A blacksmith shop was built on deck amidships and a stove added to one of the berthing compartments. Storm windows and doors were put up to keep out the worst of the weather. Snow was shoveled up high around the hul
l for insulation against bone-chilling winds, and a gangway was secured to the port side.
Meanwhile, the scientific staff stayed busy. There was much life in the sea below and on the pack ice, and the Romanian naturalist eagerly studied everything. One ship’s officer, Lieutenant Emile Danco, realizing that Belgica was caught in the zigzag drift of the ice, carefully recorded the movement, which had never been documented. In the diminishing light, Cook experimented with photography using German and French cameras with Zeiss lenses and glass plates. Since no exposure meters had been purchased for the photo lab, he had to learn how to estimate light correctly, and ended up taking some striking images. When the supply of chemicals for developing was gone, he tried fixing the negatives in a bath of prussic acid and found that it worked surprisingly well.
One night when the clear sky was filled with stars, Cook decided to sleep outside. He unfolded his sleeping bag in a sheltered spot not far from the ship, buried himself in the warm furs, and went to sleep. During the night, the wind shifted so that it blew directly into the bag. By morning, Cook’s hair and beard were stuck by frozen condensation to the fur of his sleeping bag, and the back of his head was so solidly sheathed in ice that he was unable to move.
Amundsen awoke early that morning and went out to hunt. He saw a dark outline on the ice and, thinking it was a seal, raised his rifle and took aim. At the last moment, he realized that something about this seal looked strange. Investigating, he found the doctor eager to be chopped free from his icy bed.
In such close quarters, the crew developed either intense dislikes for one another or warm attachments. For Cook and Amundsen, it was the latter. In the young Norwegian, Cook saw someone with “more sense than most,” a man who had done a great deal of reading and put what he had read to good advantage. “You have a good head for observation on your shoulder,” he told Amundsen, who soon became Cook’s regular companion and right-hand man. If Cook had found a willing student in Amundsen, the Norwegian found a patient mentor in Cook, seven years his senior. They went on forages across the ice fields, during which the experienced explorer never stopped teaching and encouraging.