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  When they returned to Red Cliff with the first Eskimo family, Peary was overjoyed and congratulated Cook. “If we have near one family,” he told Cook, “others will come as fast as we can find use for them.”

  Each morning a hunting party went out, and, under the tutelage of Ikwah, the results were bountiful—the mounted head of a six-point buck reindeer soon adorned the wall at Red Cliff, and grilled venison became a regular entree. Josephine, with her own Colt .38 revolver and cartridge belt strapped to her waist, eagerly joined them and proved to be an accurate shot, which impressed the men. Ikwah in particular became an ardent admirer. One evening, he put his arm around Josephine, who towered over him. She took it for friendship at first, but it soon became clear that the little hunter expected Peary to honor the Eskimo custom of sharing wives with visitors. When it was explained to him by Cook that white men did not have a wife-swapping custom and that it would not be possible, Ikwah looked very disappointed.

  One hunt in late August nearly turned tragic. In the whaleboat, Josephine, Cook, Astrup, Gibson, Verhoeff, and Ikwah came across a horde of walrus resting on ice floes. They had previously picked off walrus alone or in small numbers without any difficulty, but this army of a hundred decided to put up a fight. The snarling beasts attacked from all quarters, attempting to hook their tusks into the sides of the boat, which was in danger of capsizing. The men shot in panicked self-defense, one bullet tearing a hole in the hull above the waterline. Through it all, Josephine coolly reloaded and handed back weapons. When it was over, they had killed scores, although they were able to secure only one carcass weighing about a thousand pounds. With just a small knife, Ikwah skinned and sliced it into hunks that could be carried back to camp.

  The sun went down in early October and would not return for months. While constant darkness made travel on the ice very dangerous, it was possible to get across the ice by moonlight a few days a month. With the sea ice on the bay now frozen solid, the Eskimos from the island crossed over—men, women, children, sledges, and dogs—joining the growing community. Gifts were handed out—knives for the men, needles for the women, and a small mirror for the children, who took turns making funny faces in it.

  More Eskimos joined in the hunt. They secured seals, walrus, and reindeer, providing meat for food, fat for fuel, skins for clothing. Manee and the other Eskimo women, who knew their jobs as well as the hunters knew theirs, were all willing to work in exchange for the small considerations handed out. They cured skins the traditional way—chewing the side of the skin that had no hair until it was macerated and as soft as chamois—and began fashioning winter clothing. Even with rudimentary tools such as animal bones and driftwood used in the absence of needles, they could put twenty stitches to an inch in the thickest hide; with steel needles, they had the touch of a skilled surgeon. They turned out mittens, stockings, and trousers, all made of fur, and suits of winter skins.

  Peary was off the crutches that had been fashioned for him by Cook, and was walking about unaided, albeit gingerly. The leader’s attitude improved noticeably once he was able to oversee activities again. He was pleased to have a vibrant Eskimo community at his command and working to help him accomplish his Arctic mission. Even though he liked and admired them, and was less offended by their customs and morals than many white explorers who thought they should be converted to Christianity, he believed they valued life only as did a fox or a bear, purely instinctively. Beyond that, he took surprisingly little interest in learning about their culture and beliefs, or even their language, preferring to let Cook and others interpret for him.

  The Eskimos, residing in nearby igloos built for the winter, were allowed access to the larger room at Red Cliff House, now nearly buried by snow but comfortably heated. That winter an informal cultural exchange took place, as each group learned the other’s language and exchanged stories. They sang, danced, and smoked together. To Josephine’s chagrin, the native women followed their custom of removing the tops of their clothing while indoors (Eskimo men did the same) and nonchalantly sat around bare-breasted.

  Cook eagerly undertook his ethnological studies of the natives, keeping detailed notes of his findings. An assiduous student of their language, he kept adding to a list of words and phrases that became his dictionary. He visited their igloos and talked to them about their lives, customs, and legends. Once, when there was laughter and joking about the height difference between one of the taller white men and a much shorter native hunter, an eighty-year-old Eskimo offered, “The difference between men is not skyward, or in the length of gut, but in the way an idea gets into and out of the head.” To Cook, this gave a new slant on “the wisdom of all ages.” He had never heard it so well expressed.

  Immersed, Cook began even to look Eskimo; he stopped cutting his hair and changed from woolens to the warmer winter skins worn by the natives. From them, he found they had no government, council, or even tribal chief. They had no priest and only the most elementary religious conceptions, mostly having to do with evil spirits. They did not believe they were the product of one omnipotent God, although they had their own version of Adam and Eve and the creation. Ancient tradition held that there had once been a great flood that killed all but one man. He was on a mountain afterward and struck a rock with a stick. The rock turned into a woman. From those two all subsequent human beings had sprung. The Eskimo notion of heaven seemed to be based on the element of comfort. Heaven, as the natives described it to Cook, was a place with rugged landscapes such as they were accustomed to, but with perpetual sunshine, clear flowing streams, and unlimited walrus, reindeer, and birds. They had no laws, tribal or otherwise—each family was ruled by the man, who could even decide, with the consent of another married man, to trade wives. If no consent was reached, the men wrestled—and the winner took both women.

  That winter, Peary began individually photographing the community of natives. Men, women, and children were brought inside Red Cliff one at a time, asked to disrobe, and positioned in front of a wall next to the stove, which was kept lit. From the middle of the room, Peary snapped pictures of them from the front, back, and side with a camera provided by Eastman Kodak, while Henson supplied illumination from a hand-held oil lamp. In this way, natives with names like Nipzangwa, Oongwah, Klayuh, Tungwee, and Meyuk were photographed from a distance of ten feet. The Eskimos were bemused by the routine, especially when it was explained that their bodies would be compared with those of people from other regions of the world. The prospect seemed fine with them, although a few natives, lost in translation, somehow got the notion that the true purpose of the procedure was to make new people.

  Cook, who took physical measurements of each subject, noted that their bodies offered natural defenses against the cold. Parts susceptible to frostbite, such as nose, ears, hands, and feet, were smallish. Also, their frames carried a layer of fatty tissue—muscle delineation was nonexistent—that helped retain warmth. The average male stood five feet one inch and a half and weighed 135 pounds; the average woman was four feet eight inches and 118 pounds. The men wore their hair as long as the women and allowed it to fall over their faces during extreme cold to help protect their skin.

  As babies began to be born in the Eskimo enclave that winter, Cook learned that the services of a physician were neither required nor welcome. Survival of the fittest began at birth. When a woman went into labor and was about to give birth, she was placed alone in an igloo with enough oil, blubber, and frozen meat to last for two weeks. If she survived and a baby’s cry was heard, others would come in to assist mother and child. If all fell quiet in the igloo, it was sealed up and never entered again.

  As for the children who were born, Cook learned that for the first two years the child wore no clothing from the waist down and was carried tucked inside the pouch on the mother’s back, held closely against her body warmth. A child nursed for four to six years, or until the mother had another baby; the average period between children
was four years. When twins were born, both were killed, because it was considered impossible for the mother to carry and otherwise care for two infants. When a mother or father died and left a child under three years of age, the child was strangled with a sealskin thong. It was seen not as a cruel or heartless deed but as the best and quickest fate that could befall such a child in an unforgiving world. It was deemed critical for a child to have two parents, Cook wrote, “in a land where nothing is alive, either animal or vegetable, for months at a time to support a family. There must be a father to kill seal and a mother to foster the baby till it is old enough to care for itself. The Eskimos, one and all, deplore the custom, but it has descended to them from their ancestors, and they see how necessary it is.”

  Cook plunged eagerly into all realms of Arctic life. He was taught how to ski and snowshoe by Astrup, and from the Eskimos he learned techniques for building igloos and sledges and how to drive a team of their half-wild, wolflike dogs. He also worked on his proficiency with a rifle. Although most of the men had hunting experience, Cook had never shot a deer or other large animal. One morning when a herd of reindeer came in range, Cook “covered himself with glory,” according to Peary, by dropping five of them, setting the record for the most kills in a day.

  During the long winter night, the doctor observed that expedition members appeared anemic, with a peculiar greenish tint to their skin. He recognized this as symptomatic of scurvy, the debilitating and often fatal disease that befell sailors, polar explorers, and others on deficient diets. Although at the time there was no unanimous agreement as to its exact cause, some placed blame on external factors like lack of exercise.* Scurvy’s advance attack was insidious; pain seized feet and legs, rendering them useless; brown spots covered lower extremities, and leg bones blackened; gums turned putrid with sores, and nosebleeds were unstoppable.

  Descriptions of the sickness appeared in ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese writings, although the first documented cases were during the thirteenth-century Crusades. During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon’s plans included luring the British fleet to the West Indies, where he anticipated that a long engagement would render it scurvy ridden and ineffectual as a fighting force. But the British navy had long provisioned its fleet with substantial supplies of fresh lemon and lime juice, which was found to be a reliable preventative, and Horatio Nelson ordered extra juice rations for all his crews. At the same time, the French fleet, devoid of antiscorbutics, was decimated by the disease and ultimately defeated. Scurvy posed a serious health problem in prisoner-of-war camps, such as Andersonville in the Civil War, and it plagued most of the Arctic expeditions of the nineteenth century, including the Greely expedition of 1881, where it rivaled starvation as a major cause of death.

  Examining the Eskimos, Cook found their color normal and no other telltale symptoms. Recognizing that diet was a major difference in the lifestyles of the two groups, he reasoned that the expedition party should eat more like the natives, who ingested their meat raw about two-thirds of the time.

  “White men get scurvy. The Eskimos do not,” he told Peary, asking rhetorically why they shouldn’t learn this vital lesson from the natives.

  Peary said he was willing to learn from Eskimos, “but not in food. They eat only meat, mostly raw and disagreeable to us. We must have civilized food.”

  “In the process of cooking and preserving something vital to our lives is in part destroyed,” Cook argued. “The effect on all of us half-witted whites is the same, while the Eskimos are in full vigor. Raw meat is the answer.”

  “If I must eat raw meat, then I will quit this part of the world,” Peary said, ending the discussion.

  Cook, on his own, began to include raw meat in his diet.

  Cabin fever set in at Red Cliff. Gibson and Verhoeff were still not getting along; the latter had taken a serious dislike to both Pearys; Josephine was increasingly annoyed with the filthy conditions; the men were irritated with her because of the standards of attire and polite behavior her company imposed; and Henson was generally distrusted by the men because they believed him to be a spy in their midst, hurrying to Peary to report whatever he learned from being around them.

  To escape the pent-up quarters, Cook often slept outside in his reindeer sleeping bag, made for him by Manee, in temperatures as low as minus fifty degrees. He watched the “cold starry heavens” from an eye slit in the bag and considered the evolution of the universe to free his mind from smaller concerns. On such nights, under “beams of light which had been en route for a million years or more,” he learned to enjoy his solitude in the Arctic stillness.

  In late January, the southern sky began to lighten. The promised return of the sun brought, Cook observed, renewed hope in all as the world expanded from the four walls of Red Cliff to the great outdoors.

  Josephine, who had experienced an “uncanny feeling” during the three months of darkness, celebrated the return of sunlight, appreciating that “everything glistened and sparkled . . . almost like fairy land.”

  Peary couldn’t wait to get moving. In mid-February, he set off with Cook and Astrup, climbing two thousand feet above the head of McCormick Bay to check ice conditions and watch the sunrise of 1892. The trip was also a first test of his mended leg, which held up well. For all, however, the exercise proved exhausting; their heart rates increased alarmingly, and they had difficulty breathing after only moderate exercise. Cook diagnosed their reduced endurance as a product of inactivity during the winter and accurately predicted that after a couple of weeks they would regain their former conditioning.

  Josephine eagerly joined her husband in his fieldwork, surveying the unexplored gulfs and bays in the region, as well as studying the natives, whom she initially described as “queer little people” who looked “more like wild animals.” She was aghast at their unwashed appearance and oily odor, the latter a “very ancient and fish-like smell” that took some getting used to. An Eskimo’s idea of a bath, taken perhaps twice a month, shocked her; the natives cleaned themselves by rubbing the greasy dirt from their body with a bird skin, then hung the skin out to freeze and beat off the frozen dirt with a seal bone. Yet she warmed immediately to their friendliness, even though none had seen a white woman before. “Suna koonah?” (which one is the woman?), she was asked by one native woman. Once her gender was established, she was openly gawked at.

  With the Eskimo women, it was always the same upon first meeting: they were most curious about her manner of dress. Josephine wore the same long dresses and skirts as she had at home, though she added layers of warmth underneath. She had adopted native footwear, long deer skin stocking with fur on the inside and tan sealskin boots that she found most comfortable and warm. The subfreezing temperatures, in fact, did not bother her; she had been colder in New York City. She accounted for the phenomena as having to do with the unusually dry air in Greenland.

  Often, a group of natives—men and women—gathered outside the kitchen window to watch as she prepared a meal. The concept was a strange one to them because they never had a regular mealtime; all ate whenever they were hungry if food was available. Since they ate only meat, either raw or warmed in boiling water, and there was nothing resembling bread or vegetables, the preparation of a multicourse meal was a novelty to them.

  Once, an Eskimo hunter came to her and asked earnestly whether all the white women where she came from were lazy, too. Unlike the native women, who did most of the daily work that needed to be done except hunting, she did not bring the ice or water from outside, did not make boots for the men, did not cure the skins of animals killed in the hunt. A native woman attended to all the child care duties as well, kept an igloo’s blubber-fuel lamp going day and night because it was the only source of light and heat, and when her husband came in from the hunt and took off his skin boots, she chewed on them to keep the insides soft and pliable. By comparison, and as far as any of them could tell, the only thing Josephin
e did was play with the pots and pans on the stove.

  At times, she felt she was living in another world, cut off from all of civilization. On a stroll one day in the new light of approaching spring, she unexpectedly came upon a blooming daisy. She nearly cried; it seemed as if she had crossed paths with a dear old friend.

  A month was spent finalizing the expedition’s equipment and developing techniques of travel with teams of men and dogs working in coordination. There was a delay in March because of heavy weather, and in April a supply cache was established on a glacier about twenty-five miles inland. The project involved transporting freight over the ice from sea level to 2,500 feet on men’s backs. Cook was in charge, while Peary remained at Red Cliff resting up for the upcoming journey.

  Finally, the exploring party of Peary, Cook, Astrup, and Gibson—Verhoeff was left behind with Josephine—shoved off from the new supply depot to probe the uncharted interior, the mission for which the expedition had been formed more than a year earlier.

  Within a few miles of the jumping-off point, the Eskimo hunters balked en masse, refusing to venture into Greenland’s interior, which they fearfully explained to Cook was the domain of the dead where evil spirits resided. Peary grudgingly sent them back with Henson, who had a painfully frozen heel and would be unable to keep up.

  Cook wondered whether the Eskimos knew something they did not: the interior of Greenland was “one of the most damnable regions on Earth,” with bone-chilling winds and strange skies pulsating with light. It seemed like a land of immortal devils, a place not fit for human life.

  The four men pushed deeper into this lonely world. Whenever they stopped, they built an igloo as they had been taught by the natives. They had several close calls when their structures collapsed on top of them. Another time, they nearly suffocated in their sleep when they failed to ventilate the igloo properly and were saturated with the condensation of their breath. Cook would come away convinced that some of the mysterious deaths in Arctic regions ascribed to other causes might have been the result of this sort of failed ventilation, which could cause a man in his sleep to choke to death on his own breath.