True North Page 8

  Within a few days, Cook informed Peary by letter of his change of heart: “My Dear Mr. Peary: After a second and more careful consideration of the Arctic question, I have definitely decided not to go on the next expedition. I regret that I have left this to such a late day but trust that it will not seriously inconvenience you.”

  Peary wrote back from Washington, D.C.: “My dear Doctor: I need not say that I am very sorry to learn of your decision. Your decision will not seriously inconvenience me beyond the fact that it is a personal disappointment. I have letters from about a score of physicians who are eager to go with me.”

  Even though Peary’s handling of Cook’s request to publish his Eskimo research put an end to future collaborative ventures between them, the two men remained on friendly terms, continuing their correspondence for a time. In his resignation letter, Cook had volunteered to be of “any service” in preparing for the next expedition. Peary took him up on his offer, asking Cook’s advice on several points, such as the type of butter, evaporated milk, and beef peptonoids (to alleviate seasickness) to take along on the trip. Peary also had Cook perform medical examinations on everyone in the expedition party.

  Meanwhile, Cook went ahead with his modest efforts to be published. His article “The Most Northern Tribe on Earth,” appeared in the New York Medical Examiner that year. It opened, “Thinly scattered along the inhospitable shores of northwestern Greenland, from Cape York to Humboldt Glacier, is a tribe of Esquimaux of undoubted Mongolian origin. This tribe is to me the most interesting of any tribe that I have ever seen or read of on the globe.” He discussed “more than a few of the peculiarities of this tribe,” adding that he hoped the “scientific results” of his studies among these people would be published in book form. However, such a publishing event failed to materialize.

  Peary came off the lecture circuit having made, by his count, 168 talks and grossing $18,000. As for raising money elsewhere, he received a $1,000 contribution from the American Geographical Society, and Josephine, who had signed with the Contemporary Publishing Company, of New York, for My Arctic Journal: A Year Among Ice-Fields and Eskimos, donated her book advance to the cause. The New York Sun agreed to double what it had paid to publish dispatches and letters from the last expedition, and a few thousand dollars more was raised from other sources. Peary knew the total was insufficient to finance the entire expedition, although he had already chartered a ship for the voyage and begun ordering equipment and supplies.

  The pressure mounted to be underway in early summer and get as far north as possible during favorable conditions. Otherwise the expedition would have to be delayed for a year, which was intolerable to Peary because he would be wasting a year of his leave.

  To address the shortfall, it was suggested that Peary place on exhibit the ship he had chartered, charging the public admission to board the Arctic-bound vessel. Peary at first found the idea “extremely distasteful.” However, he soon realized he had no choice but to raise money in any way possible. Thus, as Peary gathered up his expedition members and supplies at ports of calls along the eastern seaboard en route north, the residents of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland, Maine—thousands at each stop—were afforded the opportunity to visit Falcon, a larger and more impressive ship than Kite, and “the quarters of the people made up the needed balance.”

  On the day Falcon was to depart Brooklyn, Cook went down to the dock to see the expedition off. Once aboard, Cook found the vessel filled with a last wave of admission-paying sightseers, as well as a contingent of reporters. Addressing the latter with Cook nearby, Peary expressed regret that the doctor was not able, on account of his “professional engagements,” to accompany the new expedition. While the reason given was faulty, Peary’s lament was likely genuine.

  Two weeks earlier, Peary had written his thanks to Cook for the “information and suggestions” provided, and he added, as if having struggled with how things turned out between them, “I am sorry that you are not going with us but I did not feel that I could urge you against your sober judgment.”

  Peary had a very personal reason to regret not having along on the trip a physician he knew and trusted: Josephine would again be joining him on the expedition, even though she was six months pregnant and would be delivering their first child somewhere in the frozen high latitudes.

  A FEW WEEKS after Peary left, Cook went north on another ship.

  Some months earlier, Cook had been asked to “advise on the treatment” of a Yale student said to be experiencing hallucinations about the Far North. Cook’s remedy was strikingly direct: give the boy his dream and send him north, so as to “feed the brain as you would the stomach.” Much to Cook’s surprise, the youth’s father, James Hoppin, a professor at Yale, contacted Cook about leading a small exploring party that would include his son, Benjamin. Cook deemed such a jaunt better than remaining home. At the professor’s behest, Cook went to New Haven for a meeting.

  As to the practicality and safety of the voyage, Cook believed Greenland could be visited aboard a seaworthy ship in comparative comfort during the summer. He knew of an available 78-foot fishing schooner, Zeta, which could be refitted as a yacht, and estimated the cost of the three-month excursion at $10,000. Hoppin enthusiastically agreed to finance the trip.

  When preparations were completed, Cook went by rail to Nova Scotia, where he joined Zeta and her eight-man crew, along with three “students of nature” who included the professor’s son. Only after they set sail, on July 10, was a public announcement made about Cook’s participation, which was described sensationally in one newspaper account as a “rapid and flank movement” on the Peary expedition. Cook felt some jubilation at heading his own seaborne party and quietly relished the idea of crossing paths with Peary in northern Greenland.

  Cook had goals beyond visiting the Danish settlements and photographing the landscape, natives, and animals (he would end up taking a thousand images). “I expect to prove by this trip that tourists can go there every year under the proper management, without danger to life or vessel,” Cook wrote from Nova Scotia shortly before departing. He also intended, if possible, to bring back a family of Eskimos, which he knew would generate publicity, as few full-blooded Arctic natives had visited America.

  Zeta, almost new and strongly built, looked more like a pleasure yacht than a vessel fitted for Arctic travel, and could make eleven knots in fair wind. After cruising up the northwestern shores of Newfoundland and along a stretch of Labrador coastline, they crossed the Davis Strait to Greenland.

  They made port at Upernavik, the northernmost Danish settlement, on August 16. Cook had hoped to get as far as Cape York, some four hundred miles north of Upernavik. He considered it a good omen that as yet they had encountered no heavy sea ice and only occasional icebergs, which they easily dodged. However, at Upernavik, the master of the ship, who was also its owner, eyed the cold, stormy weather brewing in the region and decided it was unsafe to proceed farther north because he had no insurance to cover the perils of Arctic travel.

  After two days at Upernavik, where Cook was reacquainted with the Danish governor and his gracious wife, Zeta turned south and made port at Swartenbaak. A few days later, they sailed on to another landing, where Cook traded natives for several Eskimo dogs—in all, he would in this way obtain six adult dogs and nine puppies. He had it in mind to bring the dogs home and breed them to pull sledges for future explorations, convinced as he was of their value to humans when it came to traveling great distances in the polar regions. Fully grown, an Eskimo dog weighed about seventy pounds and, when harnessed to sledges, could pull at a rate of one hundred pounds dead weight and travel with that load twenty miles a day without much difficulty.

  At the next stop, Cook took his small exploring party into a large inlet at Umanak Fjord, with the help of local Eskimos who paddled and steered their dory. Halted about sixty miles from the mouth of the fjord by an expansive
, ice-choked valley, they came to a gigantic glacier several miles long and half again as broad. As they watched, pieces of it fell off, forming new icebergs. It was possible to count hundreds of them in all sizes and shapes. Cook realized they had come upon a major birthplace for bergs emanating from western Greenland. Some became grounded not far from their origin, while others traveled hundreds of miles into the North Atlantic.

  They commenced a foot search for ethnological specimens and nearby came across an ancient burial ground. Interred in cairns of granite above ground were tools and hunting weapons expertly fashioned from stone, bone, and ivory—no doubt placed with the dead to ease their burden in the spirit world.

  Zeta crossed the Davis Strait in a favorable wind and sailed at a leisurely pace down the north coast of Labrador, an isolated and rugged region that offered some of the best wildlife and scenery in all of North America.

  They stopped at Rigolet, an active Hudson Bay Company trading post. Here, Cook found a community of full-blooded Eskimos, who were becoming scarce in south Greenland because of decades of intermingling with the Danes. He arranged with one family to take two of their older children to America as a kind of culture exchange; they would be exposed to the ways of the modern world and appear with Cook during lectures as proud examples of the Arctic people and culture. He promised the children’s father, a respected elder, to care for them as his own and see to their safe return the following summer.

  And so, Katakata, sixteen, and Milsok, fourteen—soon to be known as Clara and Willie, respectively—arrived with Cook in Brooklyn the first week of October.

  Not long thereafter, Cook went on tour under the management of Major Pond, with the Rigolet siblings dressed in Arctic garb and his pack of Eskimo sledge dogs, giving paid lectures as a way to promote interest in, and raise funds for, a new expedition he wished to take: this one to the Antarctic.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Snow Baby

  FALCON MADE THE usual stops up the coast of Greenland, taking on supplies and gathering Eskimos willing to accompany the expedition, until reaching its final destination at the head of Bowdoin Bay the first week of August 1893.

  Construction began on a winter structure near where the Pearys, while exploring the area the preceding summer, had pitched their tent in the midst of a fierce rainstorm. During that earlier stay, they had celebrated a wedding anniversary, so they christened their new home Anniversary Lodge.

  Before Falcon left for home, Peary took a party into Smith Sound to hunt walrus, many of which could be seen out of the water blissfully sunbathing on cakes of ice. With hunters manning small boats that came in at close range, two dozen beasts were quickly slain; weighing on the average fifteen hundred pounds each and adding an abundant supply of fresh meat to the winter larder.

  The ship cleared Cape Alexander without difficulty and made it halfway across the sound toward Cape Sabine before being halted by the ice pack, which stretched to the horizon. Forced to turn around, they stopped at scenic Olrich’s Bay to hunt reindeer and within hours had downed seventeen.

  Upon their return, Anniversary Lodge was completed—a sturdy one-story structure tar-papered on the outside for protection from the elements. The walls were a foot thick, with many windows to let light in until the arrival of the Arctic night. Encircling the house was a veranda, lined with wooden boxes containing canned and dried foods, sugar, flour, coffee, tea, and other supplies.

  Inquiries were made of the natives as to whether they had seen any sign of John Verhoeff in the past year. Although the superstitious Eskimos were as reluctant to speak of the lost geologist as of their own missing and dead, the answer was no. The natives did reveal that shortly after the expedition had departed, the supply cache left for the missing Verhoeff was raided by the unpredictable Kyo, who also single-handedly destroyed Red Cliff.

  Falcon departed on August 20, carrying the last letters home by the fourteen-member expedition party for a long while. “Everything points to the success which Mr. Peary hopes for,” Josephine wrote in closing her book’s final chapter, “Greenland Revisited,” which was taken back on Falcon to be delivered to her publisher. “What the future will bring, however, no one can tell.”

  One future event could be counted on, and it came to pass inside the Pearys’ bedroom at Anniversary Lodge a month after Falcon’s departure. For added warmth, the interior walls had been lined with wool blankets, over which family pictures were hung. A bright carpet covered the wooden floor, and a bookcase and pedal sewing machine were within easy reach. From the bed upon which Josephine went into labor, the view out one window was of a great glacier, and from another the high reddish-brown mountains that ringed the picturesque bay like sentinels.

  Not long after the first squalls of a newborn were heard on September 12, 1893, a stream of natives began to appear, some from miles away. The visitors were allowed entry while being kept at a distance, since they were uniformly unwashed. They filed through the house quietly, disappointed only when they could not touch the baby to see if she was warm and not made of snow, for she was so white. They came to call her An-poo-mik-a-ninny—“the Snow Baby.” The blond, blue-eyed infant stared at the shaggy-haired, brown-skinned visitors in furs, and whenever she smiled at one of them, rejoicing resulted, as this was considered very good luck.

  She was named Marie, after her only aunt. When it came time for christening, a middle name was added: Ahnighito—for the native woman who, when the Arctic night ended several months after the birth, lovingly made the baby’s first fur suit from the softest and warmest fox and fawn skins. Soon enough, Marie Ahnighito Peary, born farther north than any white baby in history, was wearing it for her daily outings with her mother.

  Other than the joyous birth, little else on the trip went right for Peary.

  In late October, the face of a nearby glacier fell off into the bay with a thunderous rumble, causing a tidal wave that traveled under the ice cap. When the powerful wave hit shore, it washed far beyond the high-water mark, smashing against the rocks the two whaleboats that had been secured for winter. It also engulfed a supply of fuel oil stored in wooden barrels, which were tossed about and slammed down on the rocks, breaking open most of the barrels and spilling their precious contents.

  At the time, Peary was twenty miles inland, in the process of establishing a large cache of supplies in preparation for his planned spring journey. When someone rushed out from Anniversary Lodge to tell him about the destruction of the winter’s fuel supply, Peary mumbled angrily about the “fates and all hell” being against him, and hurried back to camp to organize an effort to retrieve as much of the spilled fuel as possible.

  The lost fuel was a blow. It meant that they would run out before winter’s end and be forced to burn walrus blubber and seal oil for cooking and, most critically, to provide interior heat. Although survivable, the loss of the fuel oil would result in much discomfort for all; before the sun returned in the spring, ice several inches thick would form on the inside walls of Anniversary Lodge.

  In between new blizzards that kept them inside, Peary and his men made short sledge trips through winter’s darkness to surrounding Eskimo communities to secure more trained sledge dogs, and along the way hunted any fresh game they happened upon. Meanwhile, everyone worked on preparing their equipment for the upcoming trip, and the native women sewed tirelessly on the new fur and skin clothing to be worn by the explorers.

  Peary elected not to wait until spring. On March 6, 1894, with the Arctic night slowly receding and the hours of daylight steadily increasing, he set off with seven expedition members, five Eskimos, and ninety dogs pulling twelve sledges. The natives, still unwilling to venture onto the interior ice cap, agreed to go only as far as the supply cache.*

  Trouble found them almost immediately. A number of dogs fell ill with a dreaded disease the Eskimos called piblokto, which could quickly spread through a sledge
team and reduce it to a few weakened survivors. Several dogs had to be put out of their misery, and the rest had to work that much harder to pull the heavily laden sledges.

  By the time they reached the supply cache, two men were incapacitated, one with a painfully frozen foot and another, Eivind Astrup, whose snow and ice expertise Peary was counting on once they reached the ice cap, with a severe intestinal malady. Neither was able to continue on the journey, and both went back to Anniversary Lodge.

  Before the exploring party could again get underway, the weather worsened. Peary was determined to move forward, however, and they did so through temperatures that dropped to forty degrees below zero, winds of up to fifty miles per hour, and a blinding snowstorm. Only when the exhausted dogs were unable to pull any longer did Peary agree to camp and wait out the storm.

  By then, another man had a badly frozen heel, which eventually had to be amputated; he was taken back by the team’s physician, Dr. Edwin Vincent. That left Peary with three companions, including Matthew Henson. The plan to divide the party at Independence Bay in order to explore the new northern lands as well as those to the east now had to be scrapped for lack of manpower.

  When the storm abated, the dogs were in a pitiful state. Half of them had been frozen into the snow, some by their legs and others by their tails, and had to be chopped free with axes. Two were dead. Many of the trapped canines had gnawed on their leather harnesses, which had to be repaired.

  By the time they set off over the ice cap, two more men were suffering from frostbite, and the party managed only a few miles each day until stopped once again by a storm. For three days they waited; more dogs died, and the men suffered terribly in the cold. Peary had no choice but to turn around.

  His 1894 inland journey, for which he had held such high hopes, had gone just 128 miles into the interior of Greenland. He had fallen far short of duplicating, let alone bettering, his 1892 effort. It was a vanquished Peary who returned in mid-April to Anniversary Lodge with his depleted exploring party.