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  Ahwelah and Etukishook stood together, facing their tribesmen. They held their distance, and no one said anything at first, but merely gazed in disbelief. All appeared to realize at the same instant that it was not a dream or an illusion, and suddenly everyone seemed to be talking at once.

  A tall blond stranger, handsome and rather dashing, stepped forward from one of the sledges and approached the doctor. The two white men were astonished to see the other.

  Speaking his own language for the first time in more than a year, the doctor spoke first. “I am Frederick Cook.”

  The other man looked as if he had seen a ghost. Quickly regaining his composure, he introduced himself as Harry Whitney and added, as if in the parlor of one of his private clubs, “We feel honored to greet you.”

  The survivors were loaded onto the sledges, and off they went, pulled by howling dogs anxious to return to the village the way horses yearn for the barn. Little was said on the short dash to the village, where the emaciated men were brought in from the cold. A meal was prepared with dispatch by the native women—meat broth, fresh biscuits, hot coffee.

  “You have been away for fourteen months,” Whitney said when he had a moment with Cook, “with food for two months. How have you done this?”

  Cook did his best to satisfy Whitney’s curiosity, but at this moment food and sleep were paramount.

  Whitney understood, and held off further queries. “Doctor, you are the dirtiest man I ever saw,” he said, smiling. “We have a bath ready for you—a tub of hot water, plenty of soap and brushes and big clean towels.”

  Later, Cook went to the one-room shack he had wintered in a year and a half earlier and left stocked with food and supplies for his return. It was meant to serve, with its priceless store of supplies, as his relief station. He was shocked to find two white men he did not know living in it; all winter they had been partaking of his goods. In addition to the food, there had been skins and ivory tusks worth thousands of dollars. The two interlopers, it turned out, were crewmen from Roosevelt, a ship built tough for ice travel and named after the U.S. president, and were on orders of their commander to utilize anything they needed. The skins and ivory had been seized and already taken away.

  A bitterness rose within Cook that would not soon abate.

  It was April 1909, and Roosevelt, having left northern Greenland eight months earlier, was now four hundred miles to the north, and its commander, Robert E. Peary, was leading a large, well-stocked dog sledge expedition northward over the Arctic ice cap attempting to fulfill what he had long considered his rightful destiny: discovering the North Pole.

  Isolated from the rest of civilization, Peary had no way of knowing the dramatic declaration Cook was planning to make to the world:

  The North Pole had already been reached.

  PART ONE

  MEN

  OF

  DESTINY

  CHAPTER ONE

  CALL OF THE NORTHLAND

  FREDERICK ALBERT COOK was five years old when he saw his father in the coffin. The afterimage that stayed with him all his life consisted of two searing details: the under-chin whiskers of his dead father and the mud-colored suit in which he was buried. He would also never forget “the tears and a cold cry which made me shiver . . . at the coffin.”

  The family lived in an old farmhouse at the fork of two creeks, near Callicoon Depot in Sullivan County, New York. All about them were the rolling, tree-studded foothills of the Catskills, which drained into the Delaware River.

  Dr. Theodore Koch, born and educated in Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1848, settling at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, where he began anew his practice of medicine. He changed his surname to the English equivalent, Cook, while serving in the Civil War as a Union Army medical examiner. He and Magdalena Long, also a German emigrant, whose family had fled New York City during an 1850 cholera epidemic, married and had five children—four sons and one daughter. Frederick Albert Cook, born June 10, 1865, two months after the end of the war, was the second youngest.

  Although the senior Dr. Cook had a busy medical practice, most of his rural patients paid their bills with homegrown farm goods, and cash was always in short supply. After his death from pneumonia in 1870, years of hardship followed for his family, even though occasionally his widow was able to collect on an old unpaid medical debt in order to buy food and clothing. The boys tried planting crops on the farm of fifteen acres, but most of it was too rocky to till and they had little success. The children received their lessons in a little red schoolhouse four months of the year, and the two older boys found work.

  Frederick’s inquisitive nature nearly cost him his life at a young age. Fascinated by the lure of a swimming hole, the boy plunged in fearlessly where the water was over his head. He never forgot the ensuing struggle to survive; in the process of churning his arms and kicking, he learned how to swim.

  He grew up loving the outdoors and roamed the Catskills, spending nights under the stars and learning outdoor survival skills. Lacking money to buy a sled for winter coasting, he cut young trees and built his own. He soon earned a reputation for building the best and fastest sleds in the region, a skill that served him well in future years.

  Eventually, after the oldest brother, William, took a job in New York City, the family moved to Brooklyn, where they hoped to find more opportunity. Deciding that one of her sons should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor, Magdalena selected Frederick. To this end, he was kept in school longer than his brothers, although he was still expected to help support the family. He hired on at a wholesale produce market where he started at 2 a.m. Though he often worked until noon, Frederick managed to graduate on time from Public School no. 37. About his formative years, Cook would write that he felt “restless” and had “a yearning for something that was vague and undefined.”

  After working as an office boy for a real estate company, he started a small printing business, which he ended up selling to buy a milk delivery route. Door-to-door milk service was a somewhat novel idea at the time, but soon he was adding customers. As demand increased, he bought a horse and, with the help of his brothers, built a wagon designed to transport the glass bottles that were coming out on the market. He had several employees and wagons in operation by the time he entered medical school. The early hours of the milk business—starting at 1 a.m. every day—allowed him by 10 a.m. to be in class, where he stayed until 4 p.m. He studied at home each evening and then slept until it was time to begin his milk route, blessed, as he would be for the rest of his life, with the ability to get by on only a few hours’ sleep a night.

  During a massive blizzard in 1888, New York City came to a standstill, leaving Frederick unable to make milk deliveries or attend class. To replenish the family’s coal supply, he rigged up sledge runners on an eighteen-foot boat built by one of his brothers for summertime at the beach, and hitched two horses to it. On the way back from the coal yard, he picked up other customers willing to pay a premium for coal deliveries. He was in the coal business around the clock for a week, and before the specially outfitted boat was retired, a photographer took a picture of him standing with his innovation. The image ran in a magazine as an example of individual resourcefulness during the storm.

  For two years, he attended Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons at Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, making the commute starting on horsecars that rattled through the streets of Brooklyn before depositing him at the ferry terminal. After crossing the East River to Manhattan, he walked to school. When the Columbia medical department moved more than thirty blocks farther uptown, he transferred to New York University, at the foot of Twenty-sixth Street.

  The following year, Cook, twenty-four, became engaged to Mary Elizabeth Forbes. Known as Libby, she was an attractive blonde of medium height and build. Having noticed her previous
ly at church, he was properly introduced to her at a Methodist social. A pioneering woman stenographer—most such positions were then held by men—she worked in the offices of a Manhattan shoe factory. After a short courtship, they married in 1889. Even as Frederick strove to finish his medical studies, their life together was idyllic for a time. Libby soon became pregnant, and they shared the joyful anticipation of the new arrival. Early the following year, Libby gave birth at home to a baby girl, who lived only a few hours; then she herself struggled for a week battling a rampant infection.

  In the midst of the ordeal, Cook’s presence was required in downtown New York for his final university examinations. He rushed through the tests, anxious to return to his young wife’s sickbed. By foot, ferry, and horsecar, he reached their modest rented home in Brooklyn and hurried to Libby’s side. He remained with her throughout the night, and the next day labored with their family physician in an effort to save the woman he loved.

  As evening approached, there was a knock at the door. A messenger handed Cook an envelope from his school. Inside was a card bearing his full name, and under it a single word. Sitting on the edge of Libby’s bed, he showed her the card with the simple inscription “Passed.” A smile took shape on her weary face. Libby died that evening, in his arms.

  He walked the streets that night with no destination. The gas streetlights barely illuminated his path through a thick fog that draped him like a shroud. He could not comprehend the unfairness of life—his baby and wife taken in rapid succession as he stood on the cusp of a professional career for which he had worked so hard. Miles of Brooklyn’s streets passed beneath his aimless steps that night before he returned to the empty structure that had so recently been a home filled with laughter and love.

  Emotionally shattered, he agreed to move to Manhattan with his mother and sister. Before doing so, he sold his interest in the milk delivery business to his brother William. Although his wounded heart was hardly into it, Frederick opened an office in one room of their rented house at 338 West Fifty-fifth Street and hung out his shingle. During the next few months, only three patients sought out the services of the newest and youngest physician in the neighborhood.

  In spite of growing “anxiety over the disappearing pennies,” he found time for further studies. Seeking escape in books on world travel and exploration, he became intrigued with the published works of Arctic explorers. Among his favorites were two Americans: Elisha Kent Kane, a physician who made his first voyage above the Arctic Circle in 1850 and three years later went farther north than anyone had previously gone, and Charles Francis Hall, leader of the ill-fated Polaris Arctic expedition in 1871, who in his years spent in the Far North demonstrated the value of learning the ways of the Eskimos in order to survive the harsh polar climes.

  Alone one gloomy winter day in 1891, Cook read in the New York Herald about a new expedition to Greenland being planned by Robert E. Peary, who in the summer of 1886 had attempted to cross the Greenland ice cap before being forced back by storms. The article said that Peary, a Navy civil engineer stationed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, was seeking expedition members, including a surgeon.

  Cook knew instantly what he must do. Of his feelings at that moment, he later wrote, “It was as if a door to a prison cell had opened. I felt the first indomitable, commanding call of the Northland.”

  ROBERT EDWIN PEARY was a young boy when he, too, lost his father to pneumonia. Born May 6, 1856, in Cresson, Pennsylvania, to Charles and Mary (née Wiley) Peary, the future explorer came from French and British ancestry. His paternal side went back three generations to Stephen Peare (from whose name evolved Peary), a man of the sea who once rounded the Horn on his way to the South Pacific. In the New World, Peary’s ancestors on both sides formed a long line of “Mainers,” mostly lumbermen.

  His father became a successful builder of barrelheads and staves in Pennsylvania. Upon Charles Peary’s sudden death, at age thirty, his share of the business amounted to nearly twelve thousand dollars, which went to his widow, Mary, a gentle and pious woman who would be left forever melancholy by her husband’s untimely death. With her three-year-old son “Bertie” at her side, she packed their belongings and returned by train to her native Portland, Maine, along with her husband’s body for burial.

  Mary Peary shared the dark shadows in which she lived with her only child, a boy whom she raised more like a girl, something she knew considerably more about. Implanting in him the idea that he was too weak and delicate to play with other boys, she strove to keep him from their company. On the rare occasions when he was allowed out to play, she made him wear a sunbonnet to protect his fair, sensitive skin from sunburn. The bonnet, and a lisp that would betray him all through life during moments of excitement, led to his being teased by other boys as a sissy and having to engage in fistfights to prove otherwise. Returning home bruised and battered only reinforced his mother’s determination to keep him safely with her.

  For Robert, going away to boarding school at age eight was an important escape from his mother’s protective sphere. His letters home revealed not only his great devotion to her but also his delight at having “good times playing with the boys in the gymnasium and out on the baseball ground.”

  Peary returned home and entered Portland High School in 1870. That same year, he fell ill with typhoid fever and nearly died. He was nursed through the ordeal by his omnipresent mother, who brought to his bedside books on natural history in the hope of raising his spirits. Before long, he would describe the study of nature as “a never-failing source of happiness to the earnest seeker after wisdom.” When he recovered, he crammed a full school year’s worth of study into three months to catch up with his class.

  Mother and son lived as if connected through psyche and mood; however one turned, the other followed. The lack of a male figure in his life, and the uncommonly close relationship with his melancholy mother, shaped his emotional makeup. He could be self-assured, and also emotionally insecure and filled with self-doubt. He could be social and likable, and by turns stoic and distant.

  He worked hard in school and was one of the speakers at graduation. His address about natural history, now a passion in his life, was entitled “Nature’s Mysteries.” It included this question: What would man find at the North Pole?

  Peary’s academic standing earned him a scholarship to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, some thirty miles up Maine’s coast from Portland. It was a move he was not to make on his own. His mother moved to Brunswick, too, so they could continue to live together. While there is no record of his objection to her move, some relatives opposed it, believing that it was time for the young man to be on his own. To such advice, Mary Peary replied, “I am going to college.”

  Peary chose a civil engineering major and continued on track as a highly competitive student. By graduation in 1877, he was Phi Beta Kappa and ranked second in his class of fifty-two. Instead of setting off to make his mark on the world, however, he agreed to move with his mother to the isolated hamlet of Fryeburg, on Maine’s southwestern border with New Hampshire.

  Upon their relocation, he was quickly drained of the confidence and verve he had found at Bowdoin. He fought the doldrums with long walks alone in the hills, where his love of nature seemed to revive him. Becoming an eager student of taxidermy, he soon won a reputation for skill and artistry in the mounting of game birds. He was also hired to make a survey of Fryeburg, his first real job.

  A notice posted in post offices and colleges around the country in early 1879 caught Peary’s attention. Applications were invited from qualified young men for four vacant positions as draftsmen with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington, D.C. Without telling anyone for fear of embarrassment in the event of rejection, Peary applied, sending in the Fryeburg land survey as a work specimen. The survey by the former star student earned him one of the coveted jobs, which resulted in his leaving home, and his mother finally, at age tw
enty-three. But six months later, in writing of his broken engagement with a Fryeburg girl, he made it a point to assure his mother of her continued supremacy in his life. “Now it is you and I only, my Mother, and Providence permitting I will make the coming years of your life happy enough to make up in some degree for the sorrow, pain and anxiety. . . .”

  Peary eventually grew weary of the realities of his job, which entailed for the most part endless hours of lettering practice in a windowless office of the Coast Survey Building on Capitol Hill. He wrote his mother asking for permission to quit, explaining he had a “resistless desire to do something,” adding, “I wish to acquire a name which shall make my Mother proud and which shall make me feel that I am peer to anyone I may meet.” Three weeks passed before she replied. When she did, she advised him to be glad he had “a respectable job” and to be “more contented.” That night he penned in his diary, “I bow to her wishes though it may change my entire life.”

  The following year, Peary was drawn to a public notice that invited young civil engineers to apply for a commission in the U.S. Navy. As before, he did not tell anyone of his intentions, for fear of failure.

  After submitting an application and being interviewed by an examining board, Peary was awarded a commission and assigned to the Navy’s department of yards and docks. Three years later, having distinguished himself on several construction projects—including overseeing the building of an iron pier in Key West—he was assigned along with other naval engineers to survey a proposed ship canal to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. He was dispatched to Nicaragua, one locale being considered along with a site in Panama.