Perhaps I was wrong. There was no telling why Uncle Edward had arranged things as he had. But I was perversely flattered by the notion that Dr. Cook might have gone to such lengths as blackmail to communicate with me. And I felt a little more certain of where I stood with Uncle Edward.
• CHAPTER EIGHT •
My dearest Devlin:
This is the last letter you will receive from me until I return. We are travelling by sled. The last members of our support group turn back tomorrow, bringing with them from each of us letters for our loved ones. Previously, I have, at this point of an expedition, felt a certain gloom come over me, there being no one to whom I could say “goodbye for now” except my siblings (with whom I have never been very close). I must confess that even with you and Anna to write to, I feel some measure of gloom. One always feels it on the eve of undertaking in earnest such a feat as for the chosen few of us begins tomorrow.
The expedition, once it does begin, is certain to fail. My goal, which I have not disclosed to the backers of the expedition or the crew, is that we will learn enough this time that the failure of the next expedition will be slightly less than certain. That is how the poles will be achieved, by a succession of enlightening, educative failures. But that is not what people want to hear. It is not what the backers want to hear. The backers. This is my second time as commander of an expedition and already I am sick of them. Rich men and women pay me for naming something I discover after them, some island, cape or bay, which on maps now bears their name. The more money someone gives me, the more prominent is the landmark I name for him. Millionaires pay me to take their sons with me on my expeditions so that I can mould them into men.
I have been named co-commander of this expedition to the South Pole. What a waste of time it seems, to be trying for the South Pole, to be headed for the Antarctic instead of the Arctic, where I have been so many times before and which I know so much more about. It is the North Pole I want—”the top of the world, not the bottom,” as Peary once put it.
But I must try to focus my mind. I can learn much from this expedition that I can put to use in the Arctic. The North Pole will be reached. It will not take forever. I believe it will happen before I am too old for leading expeditions. And I believe no man alive is more likely to get there first than me.
When there is light enough, I read The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, my copy of which is held together with surgeon’s plaster. The Rubáiyát. Not exactly an antidote to Antarctic gloom! “In the fires of spring, your winter garment of repentance fling!” I speak that line over and over in my head. What it means in the context of the poem no longer matters. How I long, as I trudge across the ice, weighted down by my winter garments of repentance, to fling them off and feel warmth from a source outside my body.
At night, there is something about the air, the water, the ice, the land that fixes my attention and makes it impossible for me to sleep. To see the night sky, I have taken to lying on the ice some distance from our tents in my sleeping bag. At first, my teeth chatter, every muscle in my body quivers. I want the heat to leave my body faster and thereby faster warm the air inside the bag. I close the bag until all that remains open is a kind of blow-hole, a slit through which I can breathe and see the stars. Others watching from their tents say that in the moonlight, they can see my breath spouting up at intervals. They think me strange and wonder how it is that I can stand the cold, why it is that, although I have to myself the largest sleeping quarters, I come out here every night like a child on a camping trip. They would not tolerate my oddness if I was not in charge. There is no wind, no sound but that of the snow that crunches loudly underneath me when I move. I am glad I cannot sleep, much prefer this silence to the clamour of my dreams.
My dearest Devlin, such is the nature of polar exploration that I have no idea when you will hear from me again. I hope that you will think of me and in your prayers remember me. I bid you goodbye for now.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
August 17, 1898
Moses Prowdy had told me, and Aunt Daphne had confirmed, that my father’s ships had sometimes made port in St. John’s, my father declining to contact us despite his close proximity. I wondered if Dr. Cook had been in St. John’s since the North Greenland expedition, since finding out that he was my father. By checking back issues of newspapers in the library, I was able to determine that he had not been, that he had not gone north since the Greenland expedition. Perhaps for reasons having to do with more than just the whims of “the backers.” Once he turned his attentions back to the North Pole, his ships might stop off in St. John’s. Would he want to see me, arrange some sort of meeting? Or would he avoid me as my father had done? I was old enough now to seek him out should a ship of his make port. A chance for us to meet, though he had said nothing about it in his letters. Since he did not want anyone to know that he was writing to me, he would not want a public encounter with me. But I vowed that if he ever stopped off at St. John’s, I would find a way to introduce myself to him, or at the very least set eyes on him without giving anything away.
I decided to find out as much as I could about Dr. Cook, to piece together a version of his life from the books he wrote and the magazines and newspapers that carried accounts of his expeditions. But it was impossible to do so. As he had been forbidden to write or give interviews about expeditions that were led by other men, there was not much to read about him from his early days of exploration.
He had published, as per his agreement with expedition commanders like Lt. Robert Peary, articles only in scholarly journals that paid him nothing and were read by no one but the handful of doctors who believed the cause of medicine could be advanced through polar exploration. These included “The Most Northern Tribe on Earth,” New York Medical Examiner, 1893; “Peculiar Customs regarding Disease, Death and Grief of the Most Northern Eskimo,” To-Day, June 1894; “Gynecology and Obstetrics among the Eskimos,” The Brooklyn Medical Journal, 1894; “Some Physical Effects of Arctic Cold, Darkness and Light,” The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1897. “The Aurora Borealis as Observed from the Kite“ was a clinical, twelve-page description of the northern lights. I read all these, unable to understand most of them, searching for the rare, brief anecdotes and impressions he allowed himself. But nothing of the Dr. Cook of his letters to me could be found.
• CHAPTER NINE •
THE BELGICA was six months overdue. I HAD BEEN FRETFUL long before I had reason to be, and now I had good reason. There was speculation in the papers that she had ventured too far south and, before she could make it back, the ice had closed in behind her. Unless her wooden hull could withstand the compression of the ice, she would be crushed and all aboard her lost. Doom-dreams woke me in the middle of the night. I read again Dr. Cook’s report on the inscrutable disappearance of Francis Stead on the North Greenland expedition. Francis Stead, whose body had never been recovered and must even now be wedged in the fissure of some glacier, looking not much different than it did the night he fell. I read, over and over, Dr. Cook’s letters to me. If not for having my copies of his letters to look at, I might have stopped believing he had ever written to me. It sometimes felt as if all that stood between him and obliteration was me. As if, as long as I kept him in mind—read his letters, tried to summon up an image of him as, at this or that moment, he might really be—he at least had a chance of making his way back from that other world to this one. But if I was not vigilant, if I let long spells of time go by without paying him the slightest thought, he would be lost.
I did not know, could not have endured knowing, what the waiting would be like. I took from the library and read Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations in which explorers were referred to as “navigators”; I read Dr. Elisha Kent Kane’s book Arctic Explorations. It was an account of life on board a ship that was frozen in for months in the Arctic at Smith Sound. A ship that returned long after it was written off as lost. I looked for other such books, tales of shi
ps long thought to be sunk and men long thought to be dead returning to the world. I stumbled upon one about the men of the Greely expedition, shipwrecked at Cape Sabine, who were rumoured to have eaten their own dead to keep from starving. Though Greely denied the rumours, it was now commonly believed that they were true. I read about the Franklin expedition, which was lost without a trace and had itself become the quest of other doomed expeditions.
Surely Dr. Cook and I had not found each other after so long only for him to disappear so soon. Every morning, I waited eagerly for Uncle Edward to come downstairs, hoping to see the red handkerchief protruding from his pocket, unable to help hoping, though I knew it was pointless, knew it would be in the papers, not in a letter from him, that I would first hear of Dr. Cook’s return.
I wondered what Uncle Edward was thinking, wondered if he, too, was scanning the papers for news of the Antarctic expedition. If he knew how long the Belgica was overdue. Perhaps what I was dreading he was hoping for: that the world would never hear from Dr. Cook again.
In time, the Belgica was so long overdue that it was assumed by even the most optimistic that some misfortune had befallen her.
I all but resigned myself to Dr. Cook’s having perished in his bid for the South Pole. There were fewer stories, fewer updates in the papers stating when the ship was supposed to have returned and made port in Patagonia.
Then one morning, thumbing through the first of the papers after Uncle Edward was done with it, I saw the headline: “BELGICA RETURNS SAFELY.” And a subheadline: “All Crew Survives But One.” All but one. I scanned the story for the name of Dr. Cook, and unable to find it, I read more slowly. After having spent thirteen months trapped in the southern ice, the Belgica had turned up at Punta Arenas on March 28, 1899. The member of the crew who had died was a Lt. Emile Danco. No mention was made of Dr. Cook.
I was now less concerned for his safety than I had been when the ship was missing, but I was still uncertain, still unwilling to tempt fate by presuming he was safe. The first stories about returning expeditions were often inaccurate.
Finally, a month after the first press reports, Uncle Edward came downstairs for breakfast sporting the now somewhat faded red handkerchief. A letter had arrived for me from Dr. Cook.
I might have had the last one from him only the day before, to look at Uncle Edward. I saw nothing in his face, neither disappointment nor relief, nor any indication that this day was in any way remarkable. Uncle Edward had as good as come downstairs proclaiming, “Dr. Cook is alive and well,” yet he did not so much as glance at me. I looked at the handkerchief, looked and looked at it, afraid to look away in case, when I looked back, it would be gone. I was for a moment certain I would cry, but the urge to do so was succeeded by a wave of elation that made me let loose with a laugh that Uncle Edward pretended not to notice.
“What’s so funny, Devvie?” Aunt Daphne said.
“Nothing,” I said, and obviously tickled to see me in such good spirits, she did not pursue the matter.
My dearest Devlin:
You have grown to near manhood since I wrote you last. No doubt you have read much about my expedition in the papers. I hope you did not fret too much for my safety; on the other hand, I would hate to think that over the course of my long silence, you lost interest in my fate. I fear it may be impossible to rejoin a world that has for so long been reconciled to my extinction.
We accomplished nothing really except a farthest south. We may or may not have set foot on the Antarctic continent. No one seems to know or care.
I would have written to you sooner except that, in Montevideo, I found waiting for me a letter informing me that my beloved Anna had, during my absence, passed away. I am told that for a while after my departure for the pole, she seemed to be recovering, but once the press reports began, with the speculations that the Belgica and all its crew were lost, she suffered a relapse and slowly succumbed to an illness that was more sinister than the specialists who examined her before I left New York had led me to believe. I have been fighting the double demons of guilt and sorrow since hearing the sad news of her passing.
I will write you again when these afflictions do not press so heavily upon my heart.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
April 15, 1899
“My beloved Anna.” He had mentioned his fiancée in previous letters, but I had not thought of her, this kindred soul who, a thousand miles away, had been suffering the same ordeal as I was and had died unaware of my existence. How well I could picture the course of her decline.
Before I heard from him again, he published an account of the Belgica expedition in the New York Herald. I read it with great interest, but the photographs he published in a series of articles in Century magazine affected me even more. Each month, I borrowed Century from the public library and smuggled it into the house beneath my coat. I wasn’t sure what Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne would do if they saw me with it. I doubted that Uncle Edward would take it from me, but I didn’t want my reading of it to be prefaced by anything he said.
Dr. Cook dedicated the articles to the memory of Francis Stead, the “resourceful, patient, kind and reflective Dr. Stead, to whose courage and ingenuity the surviving members of the North Greenland expedition, myself included, owe their lives.” He said that had Francis Stead lived, he would one day have taken his place among the great explorers of the world, “although I can think of no man to whom self-glorification mattered less, no explorer whose motives were more pure than Dr. Stead’s. He laboured in the service of mankind, his goal the furtherance of human knowledge. For him, as for all explorers worthy of the name, exploration was not a contest but a calling.”
I fastened on this description of Francis Stead’s character. No one, not even Dr. Cook in his letters to me, not even my mother or Uncle Edward in his excoriations, had ever described him at such length. The dedication and description were no doubt inspired in part by guilt, and were perhaps written in the knowledge, or with the possibility in mind, that I would read them.
The Century articles were less interesting than the photographs. They were written in the tone of adventure stories. “Dr. Cook confronts perils of the Arctic and survives!” read the subheadline to one story, whose headline read, “STRANDED.” The articles were nothing like his letters, and it occurred to me that the former might have been ghost-written.
In a future letter to me, Dr. Cook would say this of the photographs:
“How often I told myself that if we did not survive, the photographs I took would be our legacy. I remember thinking, What a pity if by the time they are found, they are spoiled, or are spoiled by some well-intended fool before they make it home. I wrote a letter for whomever might have happened on the ship after we were gone, instructing him on the importance of the photographs and their proper care. My main concern, of course, was for the welfare of the crew, but I could do little more for them than they could do for me. I stayed on deck or on the ice all day exposing plates. One hundred of them. With the poison we had planned to use to kill animals for specimens, I made prussic acid, which passed for a fixing agent when my hypo ran out. Needless to say, I had the darkroom to myself. To think that, out there in the Antarctic, my life was never more at risk than when I was at my photographs!”
According to the credits, all the photographs had been taken by Dr. Cook. Polar bears, penguins. One of the ice-bound Belgica looking almost haloed in the moonlight, its masts, spars, rigging, furled sails and lifeboats rimed with frost. Three crew members, two of whom, according to the caption, “hailed from Newfoundland,” looking cheerful despite their thirteen-month confinement in the ice. There was one photograph of the burial in a trench of ice of Lt. Emile Danco, who, in spite of Dr. Cook’s ministrations, had died from pneumonia.
By far the most interesting of the photographs were those of Dr. Cook—that is, those he had taken of himself. I had seen photographs of him before in newspapers, but none like these.
There were
six photographs, each titled “Dr. Cook, self-portrait.” It seemed somehow apt that he should have no one to take his picture but himself. To me, it was the measure of his solitude, the loneliness of the life he led. Who better to photograph a man who, having gone for so long without friendship, had written as he had to a sixteen-year-old he had never met?
He always photographed himself in profile, always from the right, never, except in one case, looking at the camera, seeming not to know that it was there as he stared off at some point outside the frame. This illusion was subverted by the caption, “self-portrait,” and by the high quality of the photograph, evidence of the effort he had put into it, into making himself seem disdainful of the camera. The amount of contrivance that had gone into making the photograph seem uncontrived.
I tried to imagine him out there in the Antarctic, setting up his camera on its tripod, looking to an observer as if he was preparing to photograph whatever the lens was pointed at, then coming out from beneath the blanket to assume his position in front of the camera, composing his expression, clicking the button on the shutter release that was attached by a cord to the camera. He could not have been satisfied with just one try. He could not have been sure that in one try, or even in ten, he would get a photograph that he liked or would survive the journey home. Click after click of the button, puff after puff of smoke, slide after slide of magnesium igniting, the polar white for an instant becoming whiter with an incandescence that in the photographs was reflected in his eyes. Dr. Cook, posing for hours, engrossed in self-commemoration in the middle of the Antarctic, watched from afar by his subordinates, who, while he was thus engaged, went about some tedious tasks he had assigned them. Self-portrait. Another way of saying that in every one of these pictures, in his right hand, which is always out of frame, he holds the shutter release.
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