True North Read online

  Cook knew of Peary’s activities in the intervening years mostly from the dispatches that appeared from time to time in newspapers, although some details had recently been filled in for him. He learned that Peary’s current expedition—the one so boldly billed as an attempted “conquest of the North Pole”—had been eighteen months old when he was last heard from a year earlier. Peary had given his position as the southern coast of Greenland and reported plans to push north. When nothing more was heard from him, Josephine, in many ways as fiercely determined as the man she married, had boarded Windward, a relief ship sent the preceding summer by the newly formed Peary Arctic Club, a group of a dozen or so wealthy subscribers brought together by Morris Jesup to provide financial support for Peary’s explorations. Along with her daughter, Marie, Josephine headed north to find her husband. Since then, nothing had been heard from her party either.

  Peary’s backers feared the worst for the man upon whom they had pinned their hopes and reputations, as well as their funds. They had asked Cook to go north as second in command of a new relief mission, explaining that they wanted someone who knew the region and the language of its natives to direct, if necessary, a rescue of the Peary party. “Peary is lost somewhere in the Arctic,” said Peary Arctic Club officer and Brooklyn Standard-Union publisher Herbert Bridgman, who in 1892 had been in the audience for one of Peary’s Arctic lectures and had since become a fervent supporter. Bridgman knew and respected Cook and urged him to join in the search because, he said, “we need the benefit of your judgment.” From his experience with polar travel—including that of being stuck in unfavorable ice conditions—Cook surmised that Peary might simply be holed up and out of touch while awaiting more favorable conditions for travel. However, since the voyage was represented to him as an errand of mercy for a fellow explorer, Cook accepted, joining without compensation and providing his own equipment.

  When Cook had arrived August 7 off Etah harbor aboard the sealing ship Erik, he saw the relief ship, Windward, close-in at anchor.

  Josephine had indeed been reunited with her husband here, nearly a thousand miles from the Pole, although not before becoming a virtual prisoner of winter when Windward froze in the ice pack 250 miles south of her husband’s winter encampment. It had been a long, trying wait for Josephine before conditions allowed him to join her.

  Soon after Windward had arrived the preceding summer, a young Eskimo woman came aboard. To Josephine’s horror, Allakasingwah boasted of being the wife of Pearyasksoah (Big Peary). Ensconced in a papoose on the native woman’s back was a baby boy whose blue eyes and mop of reddish hair left little doubt as to his paternity. Allakasingwah, who greeted her man’s white wife as a kind of tribal sister, was more receptive than Josephine to the concept of sharing. Josephine recognized the native woman from a picture in her husband’s book, Northward over the Great Ice, published just prior to his latest departure. The image of her stretched out naked on a rocky outcrop had looked innocent enough; indeed, she was only in her early teens at the time. In retrospect the picture, captioned “Mother of the Seals (An Eskimo legend),” provided ample evidence of what had transpired after Josephine returned home aboard Falcon in 1894, leaving her husband behind to continue his work.*

  While Josephine did warm to the innocent, childlike “Ally” during the winter—even caring for the young woman when she fell dreadfully ill—the fact that her husband had given his mistress a child deepened her resentment of the affair. In January 1899, Josephine had given birth to a second child, a girl she named Francine. In a letter delivered that summer by a relief ship, she had written her husband of the joyous news. Tragedy struck seven months later when the baby died of cholera. That her husband had sired a healthy child of another woman when her own hadn’t survived seemed the final cruelty.

  When confronted, Peary had been unapologetic about his liaison with Allakasingwah, and Josephine found herself in the position of having to accept it, however reluctantly. In any case, the relationship would not end any time soon—in fact, Ally would bear Peary a second child. He had revealed his feelings about such matters as early as 1885, when he wrote in his diary after his first Greenland expedition, “If colonization is to succeed in the polar region let white men take with them native wives, then from this union may spring a race combining the hardiness of the mothers with the intelligence of the fathers. Such a race would surely reach the Pole if their fathers did not succeed in doing it.”

  Soon after disembarking, Cook had come upon Josephine. They had not seen much of each other since returning from the earlier expedition that wintered over at Red Cliff. She looked every bit as regal as he remembered: tall and willowy, with a long, graceful neck and chiseled cheekbones and chin. As a concession to the difficult conditions she had endured for more than a year, her brunette hair had been chopped unfashionably short. Otherwise, she was ready for a wintry stroll in Central Park, with her black cape-style coat that buttoned down the front, a jaunty cap worn at a tilt, and flat-heeled boots.

  Cook told her why he had come, and also the sorrowful news from home. Peary’s beloved mother had passed away at her Maine home the preceding winter. Cook was correct in thinking that Josephine would want to be the one to tell her husband.

  Whatever difficulties had arisen between the Pearys had seemingly been put aside by Josephine. Her most urgent concern appeared to be for her husband’s health, and she urged Cook to examine him promptly. She also beseeched Cook to persuade her husband to return home on Windward with her and their daughter.

  Exhorting her husband to leave the Far North was unlike Josephine. Even while wintered in aboard Windward and still separated from him, she had written him a note she directed the Eskimos to deliver as soon as conditions allowed, imploring that he not try to reach the stranded ship in the dead of winter for concern it would “interfere with [his] work.” Although Josephine had steadfastly supported her husband’s polar efforts through all the heartaches of a life lived so much alone, she also expressed in the same letter her deepest longing: “Oh, Bert, Bert. I want you so much. Life is slipping away so fast—pretty soon all will be over.”

  She told Cook that her husband was a “physical wreck” and that his coming home, where she could “love and nurse” him, offered the only hope for his regaining his strength. “He must come home,” she said.

  Now standing before Peary, who had reluctantly agreed to be examined, Cook found himself in a comfortless cabin before the man who had taken him to the Far North for the first time a decade earlier. He was still a larger-than-life figure, considered by some to be the best “Ice Man” in the world, and yet Cook could see the “aging effect of his failing physique.”

  Peary slowly unbuttoned his clothing. As he did, his hands quivered.

  Burnt by years of exposure to frigid winds, his face wasn’t bronzed as much as broiled in patches. A different pallor loomed underneath his outerwear. To Cook, Peary was a remarkable gray-green with a tinge of yellow.

  Since entering the cabin, Cook had felt there was something odd about Peary that he wasn’t able to identify. He still had the strange mannerism Cook had observed upon their first meeting: the constant twitching nostrils. That, combined with the big teeth, which looked wolfish whenever he bared them, suggested a wild animal about to pounce. Cook finally realized what it was: gone was something from the eyes, a keen, youthful alertness that Peary had always projected. It had been replaced by what could only be described as a vacant gaze.

  Cook observed that Peary’s weight was subnormal and his muscular development uneven; in the doctor’s opinion, both were due to poor diet. The muscles in the arms and chest were good, but the skin was hard in texture, hung in folds, and lacked the quick response of healthy skin. His reflective reactions, tested at his knees and elsewhere, were blunted.

  To Cook, all outward appearances suggested some morbid disease.

  Examining the eyes, Cook saw signs of some
recent inflammation not only of the eyeballs but of the surrounding soft tissue as well. Asked about it, Peary said he suffered from night blindness. Is it getting worse? Cook inquired. Yes, came the answer in a hoarse whisper.

  To a series of similar questions, Peary responded that he had little appetite and complained of bad digestion and shortness of breath.

  Cook continued his examination, which he later noted in detail:

  The teeth were in bad shape with caries and pyorrhea. There were premonitory symptoms of scurvy in his gums. The membranes of nose and throat were undergoing some atrophy. The gastric intestinal tract at all times refused to function normally. . . . The heart action was irregular and responded too rapidly to mild physical exercise. . . . The arteries were hard indicating progressive organic degeneration. . . . There were varicose veins of serious importance in both legs and a peculiar distension of small veins in other parts of the body.

  Peary was quick to ascribe his infirmities to the stress of his current circumstances, but Cook did not concur. While the symptoms and signs found in Peary were common for brief periods to all polar explorers, Cook saw in him a worrisome chronic effect. It was his medical opinion that Peary suffered from a “well marked and deep seated anemia.”

  Near the end of the exam, Cook made a shocking discovery. Peary’s feet were horribly crippled by old ulcers, the result of repeated frost bite. In addition, eight of his toes had been amputated under less than ideal conditions, leaving painful stubs that had refused to heal. Cook was stunned, for he knew what this meant.

  The physician stepped back and told Peary he could dress. “You are through as a traveler on snow on foot,” he said, “for without toes and painful stubs, you can never wear snowshoes or ski.”

  Peary made no comment. He had lost his toes the first winter of the current expedition. After departing from home in July 1898, Peary had planned to sit out the long polar winter, and when it ended early the following year, to push farther north two hundred miles to establish an advance base at Fort Conger. But that first December, he happened across the camp of Norwegian Otto Sverdrup, who claimed to be mapping the region.* The accidental encounter did not go well, although the lack of cordiality came entirely from Peary. Sverdrup, starting what would turn into a four-year undertaking, asked whether Peary would be so kind as to take his men’s outgoing mail. Peary agreed on the condition that “nothing should be made known with regard to the [Sverdrup] expedition itself.” Peary had no intention of carrying news about another explorer’s business in the Arctic. Peary came back to camp agitated, convinced that Sverdrup was going to make a try for the Pole. “Sverdrup may at this minute be planning to beat me to Conger,” Peary told Matthew Henson, who once again had come north with his longtime employer. “I can’t let him do it!” Peary increasingly believed the Arctic to be his private domain and regarded with suspicion any man whose ambitions might converge upon his own. Henson pointed out that it would be best to wait until spring because it was “stormy and damned cold on the trail.” Peary would have none of it. He ordered an immediate push north. On an insane journey through cold as intense as minus sixty-nine degrees, Peary, Henson, and the expedition’s physician, Dr. Thomas Dedrick, made it to Conger. Once there, Peary removed his shoes, and several of his toes snapped off at the joint. The doctor removed the rest of the deadened toes. Peary was strapped to a sledge and taken back to camp. He remained in terrible pain for weeks. When he was able to walk, it was with difficulty and in a shuffling stride.

  Cook had come upon Peary’s darkest secret: the loss of the toes was a formidable handicap, meaning that he would find it hard to walk alongside the dog-driven sledges as Arctic explorers customarily did. Instead, he would take up space on the sledges that was ordinarily reserved for provisions and equipment. It was not an image that would have gone over well at home with his supporters or the public.

  Cook now understood just how correct Josephine had been in her dire assessment of her husband’s health and why he had to cease his activities. Cook strongly advised a period of recuperation at home. Peary scoffed at the notion. He had ample provisions to get him through another season and one more year of leave from his naval duties, he explained. He intended to stay and make another attempt for the Pole.

  Cook warned Peary that if he remained in the Far North and his anemia grew worse, it could prove to be very harmful to his health, perhaps even fatal. “Have you learned nothing in ten years?” Cook asked. “Your present condition is directly due to long use of the embalmed food out of tins.”

  Peary rose to his full height, and his face reddened, as Cook knew it did before an outburst of his notorious temper. Peary’s great chest heaved. “That is all bunk!” he cried. The fire had returned to his eyes.

  The subject had been a sensitive topic between them since their earlier expedition together when Cook first observed that Eskimos did not get scurvy and anemia. The reason, he decided then, was that the Eskimos ate liver and raw meat.* At the time, Peary had rejected the notion of learning dietary lessons from the Arctic natives. Now the old impasse had been revisited, and even Cook’s mention of his success treating severe anemia with diet on Belgica left Peary unconvinced.

  While he would not take Cook’s advice, Peary did ask a favor. Shortly before Cook’s arrival, Peary had dismissed Dedrick as expedition physician; a series of disagreements between them had developed into a rift. After the arrival of Erik, Peary had ordered Dedrick home, but the doctor had taken his belongings and moved inland. Peary now asked Cook to go ashore and persuade his fellow physician to return home on the ship.

  Cook found the young doctor living in an Eskimo hut. He learned that Dedrick came from New Jersey, where he practiced medicine and also published a small newspaper. Although he had no previous Arctic experience, Dedrick seemed to have adjusted to the harsh environment and was well liked by the Eskimos, with whom he lived. His being in such close quarters with the natives and providing them with ongoing medical attention had upset Peary and led to their final split, Dedrick claimed.

  Dedrick told Cook he did not believe he should go home as long as the Peary party remained and the potential existed for future illness and injury. “I intend to do my duty and not desert human beings,” he said.

  Cook persuaded Dedrick to accompany him back to Erik for further discussion. Peary refused to meet with Dedrick, however, and designated as his stand-in Herbert Bridgman, who, along with several other Peary Arctic Club members, was traveling as a passenger on Erik. When it became clear that Dedrick could not be induced to return, Bridgman consulted with Peary, then informed the doctor that his salary of $1,800, due him for services rendered, would be forfeited. Bridgman added a potential death sentence: “You understand that you will not be given one ounce of food from this ship.”

  Nor was he. Cook gave Dedrick some furs, ammunition, and food from his own store. Before his departure, Cook last saw the young outcast doctor heading back to his stone hut on the lonely, dark coast of Cape Sabine, the scene, twenty years earlier, of the death by disease and starvation of most members of the Greely expedition.

  Peary’s announced his plan to have Cook replace Dedrick as expedition physician, but Cook explained he could not do so unless his medical colleague voluntarily resigned from his official position.

  Before getting off the ship, Dedrick left a letter addressed to Peary, promising, “You will never by any voluntary act of mine be deprived of my medical services nor of a helping hand so long as you remain in the Arctic. If I am not to remain at your headquarters, you can depend on my being at the nearest possible point that I can effect a landing and maintain life.”

  That same day, August 24, Windward sailed for home with Josephine and six-year-old Marie aboard. Josephine stood tall and proud as she bade her husband goodbye, although she knew full well that she was, in effect, abdicating for the time being her position to the young Eskimo woman.

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nbsp; After Windward’s departure, Erik weighed anchor and took the Peary party forty miles across Smith Sound. Upon landing Peary, Henson, their Eskimos, dogs, and sledges, Erik departed south for home with Cook and Bridgman aboard.

  That winter of 1901, on the shores of Smith Sound, tragedy struck.

  When the details reached Cook in Brooklyn, he was sickened by what he perceived to be the blatant disregard for the welfare of the natives, without whom white men stood little chance of surviving, let alone accomplishing their bold Arctic endeavors. Dedrick, Cook would learn, had remained at Etah, living with the Eskimos. As the winter and polar night advanced, Dedrick got news that the Eskimos with Peary were sick and required medical assistance. Dedrick immediately set out on foot across the dangerous sea ice of Smith Sound. When he reached Peary’s camp, Peary refused to allow the physician to attend to the afflicted Eskimos and ordered him out of the camp. Before departing, Dedrick asked for some coffee, a little sugar, and a few biscuits for his return journey. These Peary refused him. After Dedrick left and with no physician in attendance, six of Peary’s Eskimos died in fever and pain. It was, Cook believed, a dark page in the history of Arctic exploration.

  Come spring, Peary, hobbling on his deformed feet when not riding on a sledge, made another push north. At that point, the surviving natives were disinclined to work for him, and his original contingent of fourteen had dwindled to four when he started across the frozen sea ice north of Conger. Those who accompanied him did so with the promise of rewards.

  On April 21, 1902, Peary, stormbound for days and making little progress over rough ice, gave up and turned south with his weary band. His farthest north point was 84 degrees, 17 minutes, 27 seconds—still 343 miles from the Pole.

  Peary was back at Cape Sabine the next month when Windward arrived to return his party—and Dedrick—to civilization after four years.