True North Page 3

  With lofty ambitions, he set sail south in 1884. At the ship’s rail as they steamed past San Salvador, Peary’s thoughts were of Columbus, “whose fame,” he wrote to his mother that night, “can be equaled only by him who shall one day stand with 360 degrees of longitude beneath his motionless feet and for whom East and West shall have vanished—the discoverer of the North Pole.”

  Upon his return from Nicaragua the following year, Peary found in a used-books store an account of a failed attempt by Swedish explorer Baron A. E. Nordenskiöld to cross the Greenland ice cap in 1883. He learned there had been only three ventures of any distance into Greenland’s rugged interior, and no one had yet crossed it. The Arctic had interested him since his earliest readings on natural history, and “a chord had vibrated intensely” within him when he had read, as a boy, Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations. Peary now felt “touched again,” and devoured all he could on the subject. Deciding he must see for himself “this great mysterious interior,” he set out to raise funds for an expedition to Greenland. When he failed, he outfitted himself and bought passage on a sealer with $500 borrowed from his mother, and left in April 1886. The summerlong trip provided adventure, Arctic experience, and some reported success—upon his return he claimed to have penetrated the ice cap of Greenland one hundred miles inland, farther than anyone before him. In a precursor of debates to follow, doubts were expressed by other explorers—at first privately and later publicly—about the reliability of the young naval engineer’s navigation on this trip, and his resultant claim.*

  In a letter to his mother, written from Washington upon his return, Peary revealed perhaps his strongest motive for the difficult journeys yet before him:

  My last trip brought my name before the world; my next will give me a standing in the world. . . . I will be foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future instead of letting it come as it will. . . . Remember, mother, I must have fame.

  Robert E. Peary’s course in life had been set.

  PHILADELPHIA

  Spring 1891

  Cook had nearly given up hope of hearing from Peary.

  The very day he had read the article about Peary’s upcoming journey to Greenland, Cook had posted a letter, stating his medical qualifications and his desire to join the expedition. Two months passed before he received a telegram instructing him to come to Philadelphia for a meeting. He left immediately.

  Two inches shy of six feet, Cook combed his ash-blond hair straight back. His most remarkable feature was his eyes: large, expressive orbs that revealed a sensitivity befitting a man trained to help those in need. His nose and ears were oversized, and he had the strong hands of a laborer. His wide shoulders on a sinewy frame suggested someone who could put his back into a chore. A personable fellow, he was quick to smile and had a soft, melodious voice, characteristics that caused people to like him upon first meeting.

  When he arrived in Philadelphia and found the Peary apartment overlooking Fairmount Park, Cook rang the bell and waited with trepidation. He wore a black suit and starched white shirt topped with a stiff winged collar around which a wide necktie was trussed in a four-in-hand knot.

  A well-dressed woman came to the door, and Cook identified himself to her. She introduced herself as Josephine Peary. Invited in, he followed the tall, poised woman into the apartment, where they came upon Peary in the drawing room.

  Peary had met Josephine, the attractive daughter of Herman H. Diebitsch, a professor at the Smithsonian Institute, at a Washington, D.C., party in 1884 when he asked her for a dance. A cultivated young woman of boundless energy known in her youth as Peppy, she had attended business college and served as valedictorian at graduation, delivering what was then a daring address on society’s dismissal of women as fully contributing human beings in the workplace. After college, she won through competitive testing a position with the U.S. Census Bureau. Peary courted her as his travels—including his first trip to Greenland—allowed. He proposed marriage in 1887, following a second posting to Nicaragua as engineer in chief, during which he designed a new type of lock gates for the proposed canal, an invention for which he was awarded a U.S. patent. The couple were married in summer 1888. On their New Jersey honeymoon, they took along Mary Peary, determined to maintain her position in the life of her thirty-two-year-old son. Just months earlier, Peary, writing from Nicaragua, had tried to appease his mother’s growing irritation over the attention he was paying Josephine: “I have written you as often as I have Jo,” he explained, “though not always at the same time. Sometimes I have written to you, the next time to her.”

  Peary, dressed in a blue wool Navy officer’s uniform, struck an impressive figure. Over six feet tall, he had a barrel-chested muscular frame, full head of reddish blond hair, and discolored walrus mustache. His icy blue eyes emitted a stare that could pierce any subordinate.

  The two men shook hands.

  Cook had reason to be anxious. He had no experience whatsoever as an explorer, and as for any knowledge of northern latitudes, he knew them only from long winters in the Catskills. In fact, the trip to Philadelphia was his first overnight journey outside of New York State. Peary, on the other hand, was an experienced explorer and world traveler, having been on extended trips to Central America and the Arctic.

  Peary, too, had his anxieties. After returning from his earlier trip to Greenland and while trying to garner support for another effort to cross the frozen continent, he was devastated to read reports in 1888 that Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen had succeeded in doing just that. Peary was shaken by the news, looking so terribly stricken when he came home the afternoon he heard the news that Josephine thought someone in the family must have died. It sent him into a long depression and filled him with self-doubt. In the years since, he had been trying diligently to get back to the Far North and accomplish something noteworthy, but only in the past several months had he cobbled together the necessary backing for the undertaking. He had raised funds from various sources, including professional groups—Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences would have some of its members along for the ride on the expedition’s ship in return for financial support—as well as his own lectures and an advance sale to a newspaper of the rights to his letters from the voyage. Peary had also secured paid leave from the Navy, which currently had him stationed at League Island Naval Base helping design a new dry dock.

  The two men sat across from each other, and Josephine served tea.

  Peary launched into an explanation of the ambitious aim of his yearlong expedition, declaring that he proposed to determine the northern limit of the continent of Greenland, a geographical mystery at the time. Cook understood that the west-to-east line had already been taken by Nansen, and that retracing that course would generate little interest. He thought Peary’s idea to make a push into the unexplored north was a sound one.

  Peary segued into a discussion about the techniques of fieldwork, telling of the surveys he had made in Nicaragua and his earlier trip to Greenland. He said he considered himself a capable civil engineer, but admitted that acquiring a scientific background of Arctic regions had not been part of his schooling or training. His plans for the expedition, he explained, included taking experts in such fields as meteorology, geology, and biology. What Peary hoped for, he went on, was that Cook, in addition to serving as expedition physician, could handle some of the scientific work—specifically ethnology and anthropology—given his medical school studies.

  Medical education at the time included what was considered the entire realm of science. But Cook believed himself overloaded with “undigested book knowledge of little immediate use.” For example, one of the most exciting topics of the day in college was evolution, with biology—then called natural history—the groundwork for all scientific thought. Students so inclined were well prepared to argue against every phase of religious philosop
hy. Cook had absorbed “much of this insurgency,” although the net impact on him was to make him increasingly tolerant of other religious cultures he encountered, a valuable attribute when it came to his future dealings with indigenous peoples. Peary advised Cook to read up on anthropology and in the process assemble books that might serve as a valuable reference library for the trip.

  It hadn’t taken Cook long to size up Peary, whom he found to be “a thoroughly decent fellow and a strong character.” He also liked Josephine, who stayed in their presence for much of the visit, adding insightful comments. Near the end of the afternoon, the Pearys, who called each other Jo and Bert and appeared to be an affectionate couple, invited Cook to stay for dinner, but he declined because he had an appointment that evening in New York.

  Cook felt the meeting was nearing an end and that it had gone well, but the doctor realized that Peary, nine years his senior, hadn’t made him a formal offer to join the expedition. When they were alone, Peary turned toward Cook with his steely stare.

  “The life up there under the Pole is terribly hard,” Peary said. “We will be as much out of touch with the world as we would on some other planet. Some of us more than likely will never return. I advise you not to go if there is any fear in your heart.”

  “I am willing to take the chance,” Cook said, showing no outward hesitation but shivering inwardly at the hard Arctic life described by Peary. “This is my great opportunity and I won’t be held back by dread of hardships.”

  Peary had heard what he needed to hear. The two men agreed that Cook would serve as surgeon and ethnologist, for which he would be paid no more than what the other members of the expedition were to be paid upon their return: the sum of fifty dollars for more than a year’s work.

  Upon their handshake—with a contract to be signed later—Cook became an official member of Peary’s inaugural full-scale expedition to the Arctic, where both men, together and separately, were to live out their destinies.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NORTH GREENLAND EXPEDITION

  ON A WARM, sunlit afternoon in early June 1891, a schooner-rigged auxiliary steam vessel was towed from a pier at the foot of Baltic Street in Brooklyn. Her complement of sails was discolored from age and her wooden decks stained with the oil of countless slaughtered seals and whales.

  Under her own power, the fifty-year-old barkentine of 280 tons, her bow and hull sheathed with iron for Arctic travel, swung out into the East River. Up the bustling waterway, ferryboats and steamships saluted the publicized departure with shrill whistles and dipping flags, as passengers on deck waved white handkerchiefs and gave hail and farewell.

  Many in the crowd that had appeared dockside for the departure of SS Kite were there to glimpse the determined young woman the newspapers had been clamoring about. Never before had an American woman joined an Arctic expedition, and the sentiment of the day was divided: she was either very brave or extremely foolish. And why was her husband allowing her to go on an all-male expedition? Or, more pointedly, why had he agreed to take her?

  After goodbyes from friends and strangers alike, Josephine Peary had gone to her cabin to find it filled with flowers. Among them was a bouquet from Cook, who had been told by Peary, when he mentioned that his wife would be coming along, that it was to be a second honeymoon for the couple.

  If Cook had any reservations about Josephine’s participation, he kept them to himself. The same could not be said for other expedition members, all of them young, single men. The idea of sharing what would be close quarters with a married couple for more than a year had not gone over well.

  As to the wisdom of taking his wife on the expedition, Peary would explain that she was healthy and enthusiastic and that neither of them saw any reason why she could not endure conditions and environment similar to those in which Danish wives in Greenland passed years of their lives. “First and foremost,” Peary acknowledged, was her “desire to be by my side.” No doubt it was mutual. He noted, too, that Josephine had a strong inclination for the outdoor life, as when he had taken her “tramping” in the rugged woods of western Maine and she showed that she considered, like him, the open air “the breath of life.”

  Apart from the ship’s crew and nine scientists and professors from Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences along as passengers, the remainder of the seven-member North Greenland expedition party—set to disembark at the farthest northern point attained by the vessel—was composed of men who shared little except an appetite for adventure.

  A young Norwegian skiing champion and recent arrival in the United States, Eivind Astrup, who, like the others, happened upon a notice in the newspaper seeking volunteers, was the party’s only expert skier. Cheerful and broad-shouldered, Astrup, twenty, was still learning English but already knew about traveling on ice. He was the only member, other than Peary, to have been tested by the severe climatic conditions in northern latitudes.

  Another of the flood of young men who wrote to Peary asking to be considered was Longdon Gibson, twenty-six, of Flushing, New York. He was a marksman and experienced hunter and climber. A member of the Brown-Stanton party that had explored the Grand Canyon the preceding year, Gibson had learned boat handling while shooting rapids. At six-foot-three, solid and well conditioned, he would add a physical presence to the team.

  John M. Verhoeff, twenty-five, a geologist from St. Louis, admitted in his introductory letter to Peary that he rated his chances of returning alive no better than one in ten. A Yale graduate, Verhoeff had also studied meteorology. When Peary did not answer his initial query, Verhoeff wrote again, making an offer not to be refused: if selected, he would contribute $2,000 to the expedition, an amount that nearly covered the charter fee to hire Kite and her fifteen-man crew.

  The final member of the party was Matthew Henson, of average height and slightly underweight. A twenty-four-year-old Negro of freeborn parents from Maryland, he was orphaned by the time he was seven. At twelve he went to sea as a cabin boy, sailing from one exotic port to the next for five years. Upon quitting the sea, he worked various jobs—stevedore, bellhop, night watchman—before settling in Washington, D.C., where he was hired as a stock boy by one of the capital’s most prominent hatters and furriers. He was in the backroom one day when the owner asked him to find a size seven and three-eighths pith helmet. Bringing the requested hat to the front of the store, Henson heard his boss say, “This is the boy I was telling you about, Lieutenant.”

  Standing ramrod straight in a U.S. Navy officer’s uniform was a tall man with bushy hair the color of burnt sand. “My name is Peary,” he said as he tried on the sun helmet. “I need a boy to go with me to Central America, as a valet. Keep my clothes and quarters clean. Must be honest with regular work habits.”

  Henson jumped at the chance to travel to faraway places again.

  After a year in Nicaragua, Henson returned reluctantly to his stock boy job. Soon, Peary found him a job more to his liking at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as a messenger. It was there, working for Peary again, that Henson learned about the upcoming expedition to Greenland and eagerly volunteered, even though he was a newlywed, having married in April 1891. His position, as described by Peary, would be to serve as his “body-servant.”

  Peary seemed to harbor no doubts about Henson’s fitness for Arctic duty. Henson secretly did, however, wondering whether a man of his race, whose ancestors had lived for centuries in the tropical heat of Africa, could withstand the opposite in climatic conditions. But when confronted in an offensive tone by a naval officer who suggested that no Negro could survive subzero cold, Henson expressed such confidence in his ability to do so that the officer promised to pay him one hundred dollars if he returned “without any fingers or toes frozen off.”

  As Kite sailed into the open waters of Long Island Sound, conversation ceased and all onboard fell silent with their own thoughts.

  Josephine, w
ho had come back on deck for their boisterous departure from port, returned to her cabin. Looking at the bouquet sent by Cook, she later wrote in her diary, she felt the first pangs of homesickness with the realization that once these withered she wouldn’t see another rose for a long time.

  Standing at the rail amidship, Cook understood that the year to come would be an education as well as an adventure. He already had an inkling that “pioneering along the borders of the unknown” could become his chief vocation.

  Two days earlier, Peary had presented Cook with a four-page typed contract with “F.A. Cook” penned into nine blank spaces. The boilerplate contract did not describe his specific duties, only that he was to “obey all directions and fully carry out all instructions” by Peary. As Cook read the provisions, he saw that he was not to write or publish any book or other narrative that pertained to the expedition until one year after the “official narrative of said expedition, approved by Peary, had been published and offered for sale.” Cook signed “Frederick A. Cook M.D.” on the last page underneath Peary’s bold “R. E. Peary U.S.N.” The signatures were curiously dissimilar. Cook’s was cramped and utilitarian, while Peary’s had the thick, bold sweeps that would become his lifelong trademark and that could have been caused only by his pressing the point of the pen onto the paper in a conscious effort to make an eye-catching inscription.

  Every nook and cranny below deck was crammed with supplies and equipment. Topside, the deck was strewn with boxes and crates—lashed down to prevent shifting at sea—and laden with coal, leaving only narrow aisles. The stench of the old vessel with its oily bilge water was nauseating, and this, along with pitching decks in heavy seas, was to cause severe discomfort among newcomers to shipboard travel.

  The expedition’s equipment was modest and inexpensive, but they did have a full larder: a year and a half worth of food, including tea, coffee, sugar, milk, evaporated vegetables, compressed pea soup, biscuit, cocoa, and pemmican, a dried food made of meat, fat, a little sugar, and currants packed in tins—long a staple for polar expeditions because it did not spoil. They had only a small amount of fresh meat, which would not keep long aboard ship anyway; they intended to hunt game at their winter camp. They had lumber and timber to build sledges and living quarters, snowshoes and skis, guns and ammo, rubber boots for the ice, stoves and tins of alcohol fuel, extra woolen clothing, cameras and film.