The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  We watched as, with Dr. Cook, she was rowed ashore by two crew members. She and Dr. Cook walked up the beach towards the tent. About a third of the way there, Dr. Cook stopped and Mrs. Peary went on by herself.

  She walked down the beach in what might have been a silent, decorous protest against all that was primitive and backward—against her circumstances, the latitude, the landscape, the natives, the structure in which, inexplicably, her husband had of late been living.

  When she raised the flap of the tent and went inside, Dr. Cook sat down on a rock to wait. More than an hour later, Mrs. Peary re–emerged. Dr. Cook fell in beside her. They walked some distance, perhaps until they were sure that Peary could not overhear them, and then stopped. They spoke for a long time, face to face, Mrs. Peary with her back to the harbour. Then she turned abruptly away from Dr. Cook, as though he had said something that displeased her. He fell in beside her again, and they walked the remaining distance to the boat.

  They were rowed out to the Windward, where Mrs. Peary, her face as blank as before, went below deck to her quarters. She had told Dr. Cook that the expedition had been without a medical officer for months now, the man who had filled that role, a Dr. Dedrick, having been banished from Etah by Peary, who suspected him of trying to sabotage the expedition by tampering with his caches of supplies and undermining him with the Eskimos. Dr. Dedrick was now a few miles up the coast in a smaller village, the two men engaged in a long-distance standoff, each having vowed not to be the first to go back home—Peary because he believed that in his absence, Dedrick would make his own bid for the pole, and Dedrick because he knew what a torment his presence in Greenland was to Peary (tormenting Peary having become for him the last remaining purpose of the expedition). For so long pointlessly, uselessly marooned, unable to sustain any real belief in the existence of the outside world, each man could conceive of no greater ambition than to outlast the other. Not even the presence of his wife and child could divert Peary from his pursuit of the consolation prize of beating Dedrick, though he continued to pay lip service to the notion that once the snow returned, he would resume his quest for the pole.

  Minutes after being told by his wife of his mother’s death, he had started in again about Dedrick. She had told him of his mother’s death half a dozen times, and each time he wept for a while, only to return to his obsession as if he had forgotten not only what she said but the very fact that she was there.

  Dr. Cook went ashore again the next day and, escorted by Matthew Henson, walked down the beach to the tent and went inside.

  Hours later, when he returned, he went to Mrs. Peary’s quarters and told her that she had to do all she could to convince her husband to return home immediately, there being no chance that he would survive another winter in the Arctic. Mrs. Peary replied that she had tried a thousand times to convince her husband to leave and there was no point in trying again while he was in his present state—and that, at any rate, it fell to Dr. Cook to change her husband’s mind, since the Peary Arctic Club had sent him there to bring her husband home.

  “At times,” Dr. Cook told me, “Peary thought I was Dedrick, and poor Henson had to keep him from attacking me. He submitted to a medical examination, though he seemed barely aware that it was taking place and ignored me when I asked him to report his symptoms.

  “When I was finished, I told him that he would go exploring no more, and that, if he did, he would surely fail, for his body was such that to push it any further might prove fatal. I would not have been so blunt except that it seemed the best way of convincing him to leave.”

  Peary, Dr. Cook said, was haggard and wasted. His skin was hard in texture and hung from his bones in baggy folds. All that were left of the eight of his toes that because of frostbite had been removed some years ago were painful stubs that refused to heal. He had paid a great price for his falling-out with Dedrick. He had eaten almost nothing in weeks, and had not been eating properly for at least a year, forgoing the fresh meat offered to him by the Eskimos in favour of canned food.

  “His pallor is morbid,” Dr. Cook said. “There is an absence of expression in his eyes, as if he knows that for him, the game is up. But he would rather be misperceived as having died trying than perceived as having given up. I told him that he would never travel over ice and snow again, that without big toes the use of snowshoes was impossible. ‘Don’t tell anyone about my toes,’ he said, like a child who dreaded being teased. He really does want to keep the state of his feet a secret, especially from the Peary Arctic Club. He said he would stay in the Arctic one more year, make one last push for what he called ‘the biggest prize the world has yet to offer.’ I tried to persuade him that for him to stay another winter in the North in his condition would be madness, but he started in again on Dedrick.”

  “What should we do?” I said.

  “We will wait,” Dr. Cook said. “It may be that he will change his mind.”

  So began our strange vigil at Etah.

  • CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •

  EVERY DAY, HENSON SAT MOTIONLESS FOR HOURS ON A ROCK near Peary’s tent, staring out across the harbour, his hands on his knees, as though he was awaiting the arrival of yet another ship, another expedition led by someone more persuasive than Dr. Cook. Now and then he would jump up and go to the tent, presumably when Peary called to him, though I did not, by day, hear Peary’s voice. He carried things to the tent and carried things away, including enamel bowls whose contents he discreetly dumped in the water near the talus of the cliff. He washed Peary’s clothing and bed linen in a nearby stream and spread them out on the rocks to dry. The Eskimos regarded him with great deference and were quick to provide him with anything he asked for, especially if he said it was for Peary.

  The two ships, moored together, rose and fell as one—one double-hulled, double-decked, double-masted vessel.

  By mid-afternoon, the sky was such a pure deep blue I could sometimes see the stars. I thought it was just an illusion until I mentioned it to Dr. Cook, who said that at one time his eyes had been good enough to make out stars at this latitude and time of day.

  “The anomaly of summer,” Dr. Cook called what in New York might just have passed for early spring. Here there were ten months of winter and two months into which the other three accelerated seasons were compressed.

  Each time I breathed in, even on the warmest days, the air went down inside me like a gulp of ice-cold water, seeping through into parts of my body that I had never felt before.

  Massive, melting chunks of ice littered the shore like the wreckage of some all-white fleet of ships.

  The Eskimos, those who were well enough, worked ceaselessly in preparation for the winter. Wood was so precious in this treeless, scrub-less place that it was rare for them to light a fire at this time of year. They traded furs for wood, mystified as to why the whites would value something as commonplace as fur over something as rare as wood. Some spent their days salvaging wood left behind by other expeditions—abandoned shacks and rowboats, broken masts and spars, foot-thick planks like the ones that reinforced the Erik‘s hull.

  Every day, the Eskimos and some of the crew took up the coast to the walrus grounds the paying passengers who had not gone ashore farther south. All morning, all afternoon, we heard the sound of distant rifle shots. According to Captain Blakeney, the sons of the backers shot everything that moved. They came back to Etah in whale boats sunk to the gunwales with the weight of furs and tusks. They beached their boats just as the sun was going down, then retired to their bunks, eating and drinking from the private stock they had brought along.

  Every night in the captain’s cabin, Dr. Cook and I lay awake, talking, discussing the books I was reading. I was constantly aware that Mrs. Peary and Marie were just a few feet away in their quarters, Captain Bartlett having relinquished to them his cabin, whose location corresponded exactly to ours. The thickness of two hulls and the foot or so of space between was all that separated me from the Windward. Dr. Cook’s bed was on the s
ide of the Erik that faced the other way.

  I imagined Mrs. Peary and Marie on the Windward, lying awake, the night silent except for the lapping of small waves against the hull and the murmuring of voices from the other ship. At times, it was clear from Mrs. Peary’s voice that she was reading to Marie. Frequently, it sounded as if Marie, with prompting from her mother, was memorizing prayers.

  Dr. Cook, speaking softly so as not to wake the Pearys or be overheard by them, would tell me what Peary, as he lay on the floor of the tent, had said to him, or accused him of, that day.

  He said that Dr. Cook had “betrayed” him.

  “Dr. Stead, Dr. Cook, Dr. Dedrick,” Peary said. “It is my fate to be betrayed by doctors.” Exactly how Dr. Cook had “betrayed” him he did not say.

  “He is often delirious,” Dr. Cook said. “He believes that I have been sent here to replace him. I assured him that he was mistaken, that I will leave with him on the Erik as soon as he agrees to go. I told him he could go to the Erik if he wished and satisfy himself that I am not prepared for winter travel. ‘I have everything you need,’ he said. ‘You will use my gear when I am gone. If I go to the hold, you will close the door behind me.’

  “He lies there wide awake,” Dr. Cook said, “staring at what he can see of the sky through the opening in the top of the tent. I tell him that it would do him good to read, that it would help him concentrate his mind, but he ignores me. That is the last thing he wants, to concentrate his mind. He sometimes writes in his journal, but I have no doubt that he writes the way he speaks.”

  I imagined it, Peary staring up at a dot of clear blue sky or at passing clouds or birds, staring night after night at the same cluster of stars, the same fragment of a constellation from which, with his knowledge of astronomy, he was probably able to imagine the entire dome of heaven. It must have seemed that it enclosed no one else but him.

  “Can he not be moved against his will?” I said. “It is clear, from your description, that he is past the point where he can judge what is best for himself or his family.”

  “What seems clear now,” Dr. Cook said, “would not seem clear when we went back home. Not to Peary, probably not even to Mrs. Peary or to the members of the Peary Arctic Club. Perhaps not even to you and me. Looked at from home, nothing that happens up here seems clear. Any member of either crew whom he could prove defied him could be charged with insubordination or even mutiny.”

  Peary could not be taken back against his will unless it was absolutely certain that nothing less than doing so would save his life. Bridgman had put that in writing for Dr. Cook so that there would be no misunderstanding. “Absolute certainty,” said Dr. Cook. “I cannot say with absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow.”

  For a while to be a famous failure and after that to be forgotten—this was Peary’s greatest fear, said Dr. Cook. “He worries about his obituary appearing in the papers thirty years from now. He imagines people who have never heard of him reading that, in his day, he was considered the man most likely to make it to the pole.”

  I could not help wondering if Peary’s state was an indication of what lay in store for me and Dr. Cook. Might that be him or me one day, pent up in a tent for weeks, resisting rescue, ignoring some man who was trying to steer us through the shoals of our delusions?

  Peary was thousands of miles from the pole. At no time on this expedition, which now was three years old, had he even reached the polar seas. Could it be, I asked Dr. Cook, that the pole really was unreachable?

  “You should not jump to conclusions about Arctic exploration based on what you have witnessed here,” said Dr. Cook. “I have never seen an expedition reduced to such a state as this.”

  Only at night did I hear Peary’s voice.

  “Henson,” Peary would roar over and over until Henson reached his tent. Most of us, the dogs included, became accustomed to it, the night sound of Peary roaring Henson’s name, as if at the far end of the beach was located the warren of some nocturnal, sedentary creature given to asserting its existence by bellowing that two-part sound, the second syllable louder and more stressed than the first—”Hen-SONNNN”—drawn out more and more with each repetition, until the bellowing abruptly ceased. Peary’s voice, even at its loudest, had a note of resignation in it, as if he was a pain-racked patient screaming for a nurse he knew would never come.

  Often, as Peary was roaring for Henson, I heard Marie calling out to her mother on the Windward and then Jo Peary’s soothing voice. What explanation could Mrs. Peary have devised to reassure the little girl that, in spite of his roaring out to Henson in the middle of the night like that, there was nothing wrong with her father?

  Mrs. Peary, Dr. Cook told me, had cut her hair short to minimize the chance of catching lice. Marie, however, had protested so at the prospect of having hers cut that Mrs. Peary had relented. Mrs. Peary was determined to keep her child’s hair free of lice, as if that hair, being the last thing left untainted by their stay at Etah, was symbolic to her of the world to which they would soon return.

  Once a day, Marie would appear on the deck of the Windward with her mother, holding her hand, blinking at the brightness of the sunlight and the water. If Mrs. Peary, in this setting, looked incongruous, the little girl was not far short of an apparition. She wore a frilly white hat tied in a bow beneath her chin, had long, well-tended ringlets of red hair that rested on her shoulders. She had variously coloured knee-length coats but always wore white gloves and carried an unfurled sunshade with which she prodded at things on the beach.

  When they were rowed ashore for their daily walk, Marie would look down the beach at the tent, but she never complained when Mrs. Peary turned her the other way. Her mother must have explained her father’s long confinement in the tent in some way that satisfied Marie, though I could not imagine what it was.

  In her black stockings and buttoned boots, she made her way along the beach beside the caped, parasol-toting Mrs. Peary. Sometimes the Eskimos, clad in light pelts and furs and moccasins, all with the same shoulder-length tangled mass of black hair, would come down from their tupiks on the hill and follow in a train behind the Pearys, chattering and laughing, some of the women bearing babies on their backs. Among those who would follow behind them, every bit as unselfconscious as the others, was Peary’s Eskimo wife, Allakasingwah, with her son, himself an exotic, papoosed on her back. Allakasingwah, with the boy on proud display in her papoose, seemed to me, and I suspected to Dr. Cook, like some sort of native parallel of him and me. “I can assure you,” he said, “that when they go back to America, neither of the Pearys will speak of Allakasingwah and her son. The list of things that members of the Peary Arctic Club have had named after them by Peary will never include an illegitimate half-Eskimo.”

  Jo Peary was resigned to their presence and paid them no special attention. As Mrs. Peary knew a little of the Eskimos’ language and they knew a little of hers, they were able to communicate. Mrs. Peary smiled but stayed close by when the Eskimo children gathered round Marie to gaze at her hair and the frills of her hat. If they made to touch her, Mrs. Peary would rap their hands with her parasol, at which they would laugh.

  Unlike those of white adults, Marie’s face was close enough in height to theirs that they could scrutinize it. They peered closely at her pale complexion as if they believed that behind it, masked by it, was a face just like theirs. Marie submitted to their curiosity with the same mixture of obliviousness and patience with which a good-tempered pet will submit to the ministrations of strangers. It was as if Miss and Mrs. Peary had been acquired by the Eskimos for the purpose of extended observation.

  How much of all this, I wondered, will Marie remember years from now? How much of it does she understand? She had been here more than a year now, had wintered here on board the Windward while it was dark for months on end. What a task it must have been for Mrs. Peary just to keep her occupied, to structure her days, to prevent her from becoming bored and despondent. And to disguise her own
anxiety so that her daughter did not catch it, did not suspect what a predicament they were in. What a winter they must have had, pent up in the ship throughout four months of night, confined to their smokey, lantern-lit room, scarcely able to hear each other speak above the screeching of the wind, the creaking of the masts.

  Yet here she was, the little girl, looking not too much the worse for wear, thinner than she would have been if she was home, though not so thin as Mrs. Peary, who no doubt had gone without food sometimes or got by on less than usual so Marie would not be hungry. Compared with me, young Marie was a seasoned expeditionary.

  Sometimes, while Marie was in the care of Matthew Henson, Mrs. Peary would walk about the village on the hill with Dr. Cook and me. Her hands beneath her cloak, head slightly inclined, she nodded as he gestured here and there. He might have been the local governor, she a monarch paying a brief visit to the most far-flung region of her kingdom, observing, surveying the most primitive of her subjects while Dr. Cook spoke of the possibilities for betterment and progress.

  Dr. Cook introduced me to Mrs. Peary as the son of Dr. Stead. She had spent as much time with Dr. Stead as with Dr. Cook on the North Greenland expedition, at the same close quarters, with nothing between him and her but that symbolic makeshift curtain. But all she did was nod politely at me as if she was hearing the name of Francis Stead for the first time. I think she was so wearied with her husband’s quest, so worn down by her thirteen months at Etah, that she could no longer even pretend an interest in anything but going home. The presence of someone to whom all this was new and exciting, whose sojourn in Etah had just begun, she seemed to find almost unbearable. She would let nothing divert her from her one sustaining thought—that soon she and her daughter, and hopefully her husband, would be leaving, and none of them would ever set eyes on what she called “this wretched place” again.