True North Page 12

  The sun disappeared at midnight on May 15, not to be seen again for more than two months. Soon thereafter, wind storms became so severe and continuous that it was impossible to spend much time outside, and no one got much exercise. From then on, there was little for the men to do but idle away the time with talk and daydreams, most often of home and loved ones.

  As the weeks passed, the men grew listless and ill tempered. They complained about the lack of planning that had caused them to be trapped for the winter, about the officers, about each other, about their chores, about the moisture that condensed around their bunks, and about everything else.

  The first to report to sick bay was Lieutenant Danco, suffering heart problems. Beyond ordering bed rest, there was little Cook could do for him. The weakened Danco seemed to rally near the end, and his last words to Cook were optimistic: “I can breathe lighter and will soon get strength.” He died on June 5. “His life . . . steadily . . . sunk with the northerly setting of the sun,” Cook wrote in his journal. Danco’s health had been adversely affected by the “prolonged darkness,” the physician believed, which had “disturbed [his] equilibrium” and sent him to “a premature grave.” The body, sewn into a sailcloth bag, was borne by sledge to a spot where a hole had been cut in the ice. A low moon lit the grayish night sky as a few remarks were spoken; then the body, with weights attached to it, was offered to the deep.

  The death of the most popular officer on the ship weighed heavily on the crew. “The melancholy death, and the incidents of the sad burial of Danco, have brought over us a spell of despondency which we seem unable to conquer,” Cook wrote on June 8. “I fear that this feeling will remain with us for some time, and we can ill afford it.” According to Cook, a “spell of shivers” hung over the crew. “We are constantly picturing to ourselves the form of our late companion floating about in a standing position . . . under the frozen surface and perhaps under the Belgica.”

  Next to die was Nansen, the ship’s cat. Always affectionate and eager to be stroked, the cat became irritable, ate little, and seemed to be in a stupor just before its death. The passing of their pet further depressed the men.

  The first to break was a French sailor, Ernest Poulson. He appeared on deck one morning stark raving mad, swinging a knife and injuring several crewmen before leaping over the side and dashing across the snow. Amundsen gave chase, while Cook treated the wounded. When Amundsen caught up with Poulson, he was dead, having fallen on his own blade.

  During the funeral procession that followed, the men were frightened and sobered, and even the officers were stunned to silence. Before they headed back to the ship, Cook climbed atop a hummock and got everyone’s attention.

  “Men, we’re going through a bad time,” Cook said into the howling wind. “I am sure that with enough thought and planning we’ll get out of it. But we must maintain level heads. We must be strong. Otherwise, we will all die.”

  With that, Cook turned to Amundsen and exhorted his friend to sing. Amundsen broke into a Norwegian sea chantey, and the men joined in on the march back to the ship, momentarily distracted from their predicament.

  Two weeks later, a sailor climbed the mast and shouted, “Open water!” pointing to where there was only unbroken ice. In his hallucinatory excitement, he lost his grip and fell to his death on the main deck. Another burial followed.

  In addition to the obvious mental stress, Cook began to notice worrisome physical symptoms among the crew. Gums grew spongy, eyes and ankles showed puffiness, faces were pale and oily. Reports of headaches, insomnia, indigestion, and loss of appetite were widespread. Any exertion brought shortness of breath, and some men were troubled by rheumatism. The doctor checked pulse rates and found them irregular. One day a man’s pulse would be strong and vigorous; the next day, weak and twice as rapid. Strong young men were wasting away. Cook diagnosed “a form of anemia peculiar to the polar regions.” A precursor to scurvy, it was a condition he had seen before among the members of the first Peary Arctic expedition, although the crew of Belgica had it far worse.

  Cook was convinced the sun offered therapeutic value that was missing in their lives. As a substitute, he experimented with the light of an open fire. A man placed naked in front of an open fire, soaking up the heat and rays for an hour or more, could go from having a weak pulse to a normal one. One of the first to receive this treatment was Captain Lecointe, who felt so ill and weak that, resigned to his death, he had prepared his will. In addition to what the sailors called the “baking treatment,” Cook prescribed a diet of fresh meat not only for his patient but for the entire crew. “We must have fresh meat or we will die, all of us,” he said. But there was no longer fresh meat in the ship’s larder.

  Cook and Amundsen tried cutting a hole in the ice and fishing, but to no avail. They then took harpoons and clubs and crossed the ice fields to where they had seen a community of penguins. They were docile creatures and easy to kill, so much so that Amundsen felt remorseful. Since the meat was needed, Cook had no problem with the distasteful chore. Next on the menu was seal, as Cook and Amundsen went out to hunt seals basking on the ice.

  Back at the ship, they boiled and broiled the meat. Although the flavor was strong and took some getting used to, Lecointe devoured everything put in front of him. After a few weeks of Cook’s daily artificial sun treatments and a diet of fresh meat, Lecointe had recovered so completely that he was back at his duties. The men were heartened by what they considered a miracle, and everyone eagerly ate the meat—even those who had previously refused because of the taste—and rushed to get in front of the open fire sans clothing. Fewer showed up at sick call, and spirits were noticeably uplifted. As the symptoms abated, the men exhibited increased energy and less depression.

  On July 22, after an absence of some seventy days, the sun appeared. Everyone was anticipating the happy event, and men were crowded into the rigging and crow’s nest and waiting at elevated spots on the ice from which to watch. That first day only a slice of the sun appeared and stayed visible just a few minutes; however, it was a joyous event that marked not only the return of the sun’s rays but also tangible hope for escape from their ice prison.

  As the amount of sunlight increased daily, Cook and Amundsen “entered into a co-partnership . . . to make new and more perfect traveling equipment.” They started with building a sledge of their design from hickory planks and other materials Cook had brought aboard. Most polar sledges of the day were heavy and cumbersome platforms weighing 150 pounds; their solid wooden runners often split from the shock of travel over the uneven surface of the pack ice. Cook believed that lightness, flexibility, and added strength were required. The styles of the two men complemented each other; Amundsen could easily identify the defects of certain equipment, and Cook had a way of coming up with an improved design, which they worked side by side to construct. Their finished sledge weighed 75 pounds, with a framework of seasoned hickory curved to shape and braced with cross struts. The runners were shod with iron strips. To the upstander was fixed a movable framework that supported a double-walled tent over the body of the sledge. Portions of the frame could be removed and used as framework for a canvas boat; until then, the canvas doubled as a tarpaulin. Next, they worked on crafting a tent that could withstand the worst storms and weighed only 12 pounds, required just one pole, and could be set up by one man in a few minutes. They also fashioned boots made of penguin skins, and improvised seal-oil lamps from a design Cook had learned from the Eskimos.

  As Cook and Amundsen became fast friends, they found they had both held in high regard Eivind Astrup; Amundsen had gone to school with him, and Cook had befriended him on the 1891–93 Peary expedition. They shared remembrances tinged with regret, as Astrup was now gone. A New York Sun article, datelined Oslo, had reported the sad news on January 22, 1896. Astrup had started out on skis a few days after Christmas to visit friends in a town fifty miles away, taking with him only a single
day’s ration. When he had been gone three weeks with no word, his alarmed friends formed a search party and came upon his frozen corpse in the wilderness.

  To Cook and Amundsen it seemed incongruous that the strapping young man from the rugged mountains of Norway, who had grown up skiing in all weather and terrain and survived far worse conditions in the Arctic, would perish so close to home on a pleasure outing. His friends, including Cook, with whom Astrup had stayed in Brooklyn for a time after the latter’s return from his second Peary expedition in fall 1894, knew that Astrup had gone back to Norway the following year still brooding over the unfairness and ingratitude shown by Peary, the man he had once idolized. Peary had openly rebuked Astrup for deserting him in 1894 rather than volunteering to spend a second, unplanned year in the Far North. It was a charge that left Astrup feeling humiliated and betrayed.

  On his own, Astrup had made a monthlong survey of the Melville Bay area on his last expedition with Peary; subsequently, he wrote a detailed report published by the Norwegian Geographical Society. The Paris Geographical Society hailed Astrup’s work as “the principal result of the expedition.” To Peary, the lavish praise was a personal affront. In his own book, in which he included Astrup’s entire Melville Bay survey, offering it as work done under his tutelage, Peary discreetly labeled the young Norwegian’s independent literary efforts—which went counter to Peary’s longtime policy of restricting the publication of any expedition accounts other than his own—as a “discourtesy.”*

  What was not known was whether illness, injury, or depression had played any role in Astrup’s demise. Cook and Amundsen speculated aloud—why hadn’t he taken more supplies and been better prepared? Unless he never intended to reach his destination. Had despair and gloom worn him down? Or was it something else? A jilted romance? Perhaps a serious health problem? Cook and Amundsen, unable to embrace any reasonable explanation for his death, were left to wonder.

  While awaiting the breakup of the ice pack, Cook and Amundsen went on sojourns to test the new equipment. To their mutual satisfaction, everything worked as designed. During one outing, however, they were trapped for a time on an ice floe that had broken off from the pack before finding their way back.

  Although ice conditions in the region grew increasingly unstable through spring and summer as the ice shifted and cracked, the vessel was still held fast in the ice pack. Late August and early September brought the lowest temperatures yet, and any hopes of the early melting and breakup of the ice in which they were stuck were soundly dashed.

  As more months passed, supplies of food and fuel grew alarmingly low. Despondency swept through the crew like a pox. It did not seem fair: they had made it through the winter but still Belgica could not move.

  Fall passed slowly; Christmas 1898 arrived; then the new year began. There were no holiday festivities. The prospect of being stuck another year loomed, and everyone knew what that would mean.

  One day, Amundsen thought he saw from the crow’s nest a basin of water about half a mile from the ship. He and Cook went out to investigate. When they returned, Cook announced to the officers and crew that as the surrounding ice melted and broke up, the basin would expand and lead to open water. It seemed at the time a brash statement.

  “The rest of us thought nothing of it as, naturally, water would form here and there,” Amundsen later reported. “Somehow, though, to Dr. Cook’s restless mind this basin seemed an omen of hope. He declared his firm conviction that the ice would break, and that, when the opening came, it would lead to this basin. . . . He proposed what sounded at first like a mad enterprise.”

  Cook proposed digging two shallow trenches—one from the bow and the other from the stern—connecting the ship to the basin. If, as he suspected, the ice fractured along the manmade lines, he reasoned, Belgica would find open water. Amundsen backed Cook’s plan before the officers and men.

  A sign of the crew’s growing desperation was that they went along with the idea, which everyone understood would tax their strength and endurance, already weakened by the year of captivity. There was also the shortage of warm clothing—only enough to put a few men on the ice at a time. Amundsen proposed making clothing out of some extra wool blankets. He and the ship’s carpenter cut out the patterns and sewed them into baggy suits. When the crew dressed in them, everyone burst out laughing and a few men rolled on the deck. The suits had been made from red blankets, and the men looked like a collection of Santa’s elves.

  For three days, the men labored with picks, axes, cleavers, shovels, and any other useful implement they could find, chopping through the ice, several feet thick in some places, to open water. By the time the trenches were completed, it was clear there was a complication. With winter approaching, the sun was no longer as intense as it had been, and its heat was not enough to keep new ice from forming in the trenches. Perhaps if they had dug the trenches a couple of months earlier, it would have worked, but now it was too late.

  Since the sun could not be counted on to break up the ice, Cook concluded that they would have to cut their own channel directly to the basin. From the commander to the lowliest seaman, all hands agreed they had nothing to lose, and so Belgica’s crew went back to work with their tools. They also ignited sticks of tonite, an explosive more powerful than dynamite, to break up ice, which averaged four feet thick. The strenuous work continued around the clock in eight-hour shifts, with scientists, officers, and crewmen toiling side by side.

  After a month, they were done. One night, everyone turned in, with the plan to put out lines in the morning and pull the vessel through the narrow channel. Upon awakening, they were shocked to see that the channel banks had been pushed together during the night by the pressure of the ice pack. This demoralizing circumstance did not last long, however, as a shift in the wind soon opened up the channel again. No time was lost in getting multiple lines hitched to the bow over the side, and the men slowly dragged Belgica forward into the basin, where finally, for the first time in a year, the ship sat afloat. Men cried at the sight, and spontaneous cheers went up.

  For a time, they seemed no closer to making their escape. Then: “The miracle happened—exactly what Cook had predicted,” Amundsen reported. “The ice opened up and the lane to the sea ran directly through our basin! Joy restored our energy, and with all speed we made our way to the open sea and safety.”

  Belgica had drifted in the pack ice more than one thousand miles, roughly following along the 70th parallel to a longitude of 101 degrees west.

  Eager to continue his research among the Indians on the isolated coast, Cook disembarked in South America, and Belgica headed home across the Atlantic. Within a month Cook had worked his way into Uruguay, where at Montevideo a letter from home caught up with him, providing him with the sad news that his betrothed, Anna, had passed away. Her health had improved for a time, he learned from her family, but upon speculation as to the loss of Belgica—not heard from for more than a year—she “seemed to pine away.”

  Cook returned to Brooklyn in June 1899 to an empty house and a shuttered medical practice. He managed to revive the latter out of financial necessity and, while still in mourning, went to work on a book about the Belgica expedition. As time allowed, he finished a 400-page narrative, Through the First Antarctic Night, which was published in the first year of the new century. The book, the only account in English of the Belgica expedition, found a readership interested in polar exploration. In its dedication, Cook wrote,

  TO THE LITTLE FAMILY, THE OFFICERS, THE SCIENTIFIC STAFF, AND THE CREW OF THE “BELGICA,” WHOSE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES MADE THIS STORY OF THE FIRST HUMAN EXPERIENCE THROUGHOUT A SOUTH POLAR YEAR; TO THESE MEN, WHOSE CLOSE COMPANIONSHIP AND STURDY GOOD-FELLOWSHIP MADE LIFE ENDURABLE DURING THE STORMS, THE DARKNESS, AND THE MONOTONY OF THE ANTARCTIC. . . .

  With publication of Through the First Antarctic Night, Cook was recognized as the only living American to have explo
red both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Although he tended to downplay his critical role in the escape of Belgica—whereas Amundsen credited his “ingenuity” for having “saved the day”—Cook went back on the lecture circuit under the auspices of Peary’s promoter, Major Pond, who labeled the physician-explorer “as modest and unassuming as he is accomplished” and added, “Among Arctic explorers I do not regard any one as more bold [or] more to be depended upon for accuracy of statement.”

  For services rendered during the Belgian Antarctic expedition, Belgium’s King Leopold II awarded his nation’s highest honor, the Order of Leopold, named for his father, the first king of the Belgians, to Cook—the only non-Belgian in the Belgica crew so decorated.

  Other polar expeditions were planning to set off both northward and southward, and Cook’s name came up several times as a possible participant. Responding to one inaccurate report, Cook told a newspaper reporter, “I have been exploring for many years now and I think I’ll give somebody else a chance.”

  With that, Cook went back to being a family doctor.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE ICE MAN

  NORTHERN GREENLAND

  1901

  In the shadows of the ship’s cabin illuminated by a flickering oil lamp, Cook could see that Peary had aged beyond his forty-five years. The doctor’s impression of the figure before him was of “an iron man, wrecked in ambition, wrecked in physique, and wrecked in hope.”