The Navigator of New York

by Wayne Johnston

  Peary’s supporters said that in what few calculations Dr. Cook had divulged, he had failed to take into account the curvature of the earth, instead talking as if he believed the world was flat. They said that his two Eskimo guides, who at first confirmed that they had gone with him to the pole, had retracted their stories. They were said to have laughed when asked if they and Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead had made it to the Big Nail, asserting that at no point on their journey had they ventured out onto the polar sea far enough to lose sight of land.

  Dr. Cook’s supporters: Peary, too, had no records, had made statements that were contradicted by the works of earlier explorers. As for the Eskimos, it was well known that in their eagerness to please white men, they would agree with any statement that was made and were therefore bound to contradict themselves.

  Peary’s descriptions of the effect on the ice of the ocean currents and of the weather conditions were almost identical to those of Dr. Cook, who had published his report first. But Peary’s went unquestioned, while every detail of Dr. Cook’s was scrutinized.

  Dr. Cook pointed out that Peary had sent back the only member of his expedition who had sufficient knowledge of the compass and the sextant to verify that he was at the pole. This man was Capt. Bob Bartlett, whom Peary said he sent back because he did not think that Bartlett had earned the right to share in the glory of reaching the pole, never having made a bid for it before. Matthew Henson and some Eskimos had, according to Peary, gone with him to the pole. To them, as they were not white but belonged to what Peary called the “inferior races,” went none of the glory.

  Peary’s supporters replied that Dr. Cook, too, had sent back the only member of his expedition who could have verified his claims, Rudolph Franke.

  Franke, Dr. Cook’s supporters pointed out, was a cook who was making his first trip to the Arctic and had no knowledge of navigation, unlike the experienced explorer and ship’s captain Bob Bartlett. They added that “Dr. Cook did not send back his long-time assistant, Devlin Stead,” but Peary’s supporters dismissed the idea that Mr. Stead could settle the controversy, declaring that he had no navigational knowledge and adding that, in any case, he would back up anything Dr. Cook said, so blindly was he devoted to him.

  The controversy became so nightmarishly complicated that I wondered how laymen could possibly be convinced that Dr. Cook had beaten Peary to the pole.

  “I wish I understood the science of it all,” I said. “If I did, I would be spending all my time defending you with proofs, with arguments, instead of just vouching for your honesty. You must not lose any time. You must defend yourself. Show what you remember of your records to experts who can verify your claims.”

  “There are no experts who can verify my claims,” said Dr. Cook. “Nor any who can verify Peary’s. As for understanding the science of it all, no one does. Science is, as yet, too primitive. There is an expert in every subject, and not even the experts understand each other. As I told the press, my claim can be proved only by someone who retraced my footsteps as I remember them. And who is going to undertake an expedition to the pole just to prove that someone else got there before him?”

  He waved his hand as if to dismiss the whole idea of defending himself against Peary and the members of his Arctic club. I decided to drop the matter temporarily, but to return to it before we left for home.

  In the middle of all the controversy, the celebrations continued.

  Dr. Cook met in the chancery of the University of Copenhagen with the rector magnificus, Professor Torp, and the royal astronomer, Professor Stromgren, whose technical questions Dr. Cook answered so satisfactorily that it was decided the university should confer upon him an honorary degree. This was done at the Great Hall, where he told the audience members—who had heard that, elsewhere, his claim was being met with scepticism and, in Peary’s case, outright accusations of fraud—that the two Eskimos who went with us to the pole would confirm his story, as would his records of observations, which, though not now in his possession, soon would be.

  He stood in an elevated, canopied pulpit, leaning out over the rail of it towards his audience like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.

  “I can say no more. I can do no more,” said Dr. Cook, extending his arms. “I show you my hands. I show you my hands. They are clean.” A great ovation followed.

  That night, he received a telegram from Admiral de Richelieu: “Green-eyed envy and jealousy are doing their envenomed work, Dr. Cook, but we believe in you.”

  We heard that the Danish poet Dr. Norman Hansen challenged to a duel a member of the press who had dared to call Dr. Cook’s claim of reaching the pole “a fairy tale.”

  Again, we had dinner with the Danish royal family at the Charlottenlund Palace, where we sat at the right hand of King Frederick.

  Mountains of telegrams of congratulation were sent up to our hotel rooms, along with telegrams inviting us to dine, to speak, to simply “appear.” We no longer mentioned Peary, not even to one another.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE •

  IT WAS ARRANGED THAT WE WOULD SAIL HOME ON THE Oscar II, the flagship of the Danish-American Steamship Company. Among those seeing us off were officials from the university and various geographical societies.

  All I could think as we stood at the rail of the ship and waved to the thousands who on the shore were bidding us goodbye was that our odyssey had only stalled in Copenhagen and now had begun again.

  I knew that our course would take us southwest through the North Atlantic to America, but this knowledge did not impress me as much as the fact that soon we would once again be out of sight of land.

  Not that there was much solitude to be had on this crossing of the Oscar II.

  It was as if the population of a small city had been appointed our official escorts from the Old World to the New. The discovery of the pole was the sole theme of the voyage.

  In the dining room, in the ballroom, on the promenade deck, we were applauded. I sometimes felt like we had discovered the pole ten years earlier and had been hired for the entertainment of the passengers, paid celebrities of the Danish-American Steamship Company.

  Parties were thrown in our honour. The whole voyage was a party. Honeymooning couples, retired travellers, professors of everything on their way to give lectures in New York—all said that they believed in us. I hoped the voyage would never end.

  “I hardly know how I came to be caught up in all of this,” Dr. Cook said one night, throwing up his arms and looking about him as if his cabin was packed with celebrants.

  “You did what you set out to do,” I said. “All of this is no more than you deserve.”

  “The Danes are a wonderful people,” he said. “They all but adopted us as two of their own. If we were Danes, our own countrymen would not turn against us.”

  “No one will turn against us,” I said.

  He shook his head slightly.

  “It is too much,” he said. “Don’t you think so? All this adulation, all this worship for just two men. I am overwhelmed. The accomplishment of two men should not mean so much to others.”

  “We beat Peary to the pole,” I said. “You once wrote me that it was your intention to make sure that no man who did not deserve it won the prize. You have done exactly that.”

  “The North Pole now seems to me to lie behind a veil,” he said. “There was so little there to perceive that my memory of the place is all but blank. What I remember best is the agony of getting there and the agony of getting back. I feel as though I have been celebrated enough already. The Danes did more for me than any man deserves. I wish I could simply put a stop to it now. Just say, ‘No more,’ and for the rest of my life be left alone. History will record our accomplishment. That is all I have ever really wanted: that you and I be remembered for what we did together.”

  “You are tired,” I said. “You should have been resting these past few weeks.”

  “There will soon be time to rest, I hope,” he said. “I am done with exped
itions. I will be a father and a husband and a doctor from now on.”

  To whom, I wondered, would he be a father if he was done with expeditions? What part, from now on, would I play in his life?

  “The other pole,” he said, “the unscaled peaks of other continents, all the yet-to-be-accomplished feats of exploration and discovery seem pointless to me now. I have fulfilled my life’s dream, though it seems an ignis fatuus. I suppose there remains only for me to collect on my achievement, which I must do, for I owe it to those who, because of my absence, have endured so much. Prizes, book contracts, a year, at most two, lecturing around the world, and then it will be back to Brooklyn for us for good. I can hardly stand to think of spending that much time among so many people after so much time up north.

  “I will never forget it, Devlin, living with you in that cave. One hundred nights we spent in that wretched dwelling at Cape Sparbo.

  “It is hard to explain to you, Devlin, what I am feeling and why. I have a strange, foreign feeling of being native to nowhere, of being, no matter where I go, exotic.”

  “I feel the same,” I said.

  “We have been to the white/dark desert of the Arctic. It is as devoid of features as the sea. Yet it exerts on the soul a greater pull than all the marvels, all the wonders of New York.

  “One day, as I lay there in that cave by myself, waiting for you and the Eskimos to come back from checking the traps, I felt the presence of your mother.”

  “I felt it, too,” I said.

  He seemed not to have heard me. “And I was suddenly, and for the first time ever, certain that we would not make it back alive. I was certain that we would die. I felt that I had betrayed her yet again. Betrayed you. How can I step back into the world without your help, Devlin?”

  “You will have my help,” I said.

  “It seems as though something has happened in the world since we stopped attending to it. Even Copenhagen seemed always to be on the brink of some—it is hard to say just what—some culmination. Something in Copenhagen was stirring that I fear is roaring in New York. How long has it been since we were there?”

  I began to wonder if he was having some sort of breakdown. “Twenty-eight months,” I said. “We left in the summer of 1907.”

  “The summer of 1907,” he said. “And now it is the fall of 1909. So long.”

  BOOK SIX

  • CHAPTER FORTY •

  ON SEPTEMBER 20, AT THREE IN THE AFTERNOON, THE Oscar II dropped anchor off Fire Island in Upper New York Bay. The American Arctic Club, which, unlike the Peary Arctic Club, had accepted Dr. Cook’s claim to have reached the pole, had asked that the ship not proceed up the East River until the next morning so that plans for Dr. Cook’s reception could be finalized. The ship had already, at the club’s request, spent the previous night anchored off Sandy Hook, off Boston Harbor, for the same reason. Mrs. Cook had sent word that, because she was not feeling well, she would wait until the morning to see her husband.

  Ships that had assembled from all over the world for a naval review were moored on the Manhattan side of the river, the shape of each ship traced out in coloured lights, but the Brooklyn docks were as desolate and silent as they always were after dark, in contrast to the ceaseless clamour that rose up from them by day.

  Several celebrations were converging on the city all at once. It was three hundred years since Henry Hudson had “discovered” the river that ever since had borne his name. It was the one-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton. Millions of electric lights had been strung throughout the streets of the boroughs of New York, most of them in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It was said that Wilbur Wright was going to fly his new machine from Governor’s Island to the Statue of Liberty and back again. It was predicted that, over the next couple of weeks, millions of visitors would come to New York. And into the middle of all of this, Dr. Cook and I were soon to sail on the Oscar II.

  Dr. Cook sent for me. I was shown by a ship’s officer to his cabin. Somewhere inside the ship, an orchestra was playing, and passengers bearing champagne-filled glasses strolled about the decks.

  The officer, a Dane not much older than me who spoke fluent but heavily accented English, rapped twice, loudly, on the door of Dr. Cook’s cabin.

  “You may go in, sir,” he said, “but you are to close the door behind you.” He then tipped his hat to me and strode away as if he were following very specific orders.

  I opened the door and thought at first that the cabin was empty. It was quite spacious and unlit except for two oil lamps that flanked a row of porthole windows.

  I could dimly make out the lavish furnishings: six plush chairs around what might have been a card table, two sofas at right angles, a revolvable mirror in a wooden frame. I saw that a door on my left led to another large room. I slowly made for it and was about to say Dr. Cook’s name when he said mine.

  He was seated on an armless chair that was positioned in a direct line from the door, his legs stretched out so that the chair was resting on its back legs, his hands clasped behind his head, which he leaned against the wall. He said my name as though he were wearily relieved that I had come. His reflective, stock-taking posture, and the gloom of the cabin gave me the momentary sense that I had been taken to visit a well-accommodated prisoner whose guard was standing just outside the door. Slowly, deliberately, he let the chair fall forward, unclasped his hands, rose to his feet and sighed in the manner of someone who, though glad to see me, wished we were meeting under other circumstances. His face was thinner than when we left Copenhagen, every hollow and shadow, every feature, more pronounced. He had, several days before, admitted to me that he was so in dread of our arrival in New York that he could not bear to eat.

  His posture and his expression affected me in some way for which I would not find the words until after I had left the cabin. It was as though he had at last become the man I imagined him to be before we met. His were the eyes of a man humbly and indulgently resigned to the loneliness of greatness, a man who, though he knew he would never meet his equal, had a gentle, all-forgiving view of humankind. But at the same time, there was that barely perceptible look of amused disdain, a universal dismissiveness, an inclination to regard all things, himself included, as ultimately inconsequential.

  He stood up, put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length as if to gauge how much I had changed since we left New York more than two years earlier. I never felt more urgently the need to address him by some name, call him something, but I could not, especially not now, bring myself to call him Dr. Cook. Father. The word was in my mind. On my tongue. Perhaps he sensed this, for he turned me about and, with a hand on the small of my back, led me to one of the sofas.

  Suddenly, even allowing for physical weariness and his usually reserved manner in private, he seemed quite sombre. Perhaps, I thought, this is how you feel in the wake of some great accomplishment to which you have dedicated your entire life. Once the day you have so long looked forward to has come, what then? What next?

  I wondered if my being there was affecting his mood, if he was inhibited by the presence beside him of an impostor, of someone about whom he had fooled the world just as, some were saying, he was trying to fool it now with his claim of having reached the pole. How completely discredited his claim would be if it became known how we two were related.

  “I fear the coming months will be unbearable,” he said, “unless someone I can trust is at my side.”

  “Someone you can trust is at your side,” I said. “You must not doubt it for a moment.”

  He nodded but said nothing.

  “You mustn’t worry,” I said. “On the ship, they say that almost everyone in New York believes you. Almost everyone in America. Far more than believe Peary. It is only those who backed Peary who have their doubts about you. Or claim to. They know that you were at the pole a year before Peary got there, if he ever did. They know it.”

  He nodded and smiled. “Unless I am very mis
taken,” he said, “you suspect there are still some things that I have kept from you.”

  I began to protest, but he raised his hand.

  “Listen to me. There is something.”

  I did not feel the sort of dread I had felt on previous occasions when he had made this admission. I was his son. Together we had made it to the pole. The possibility of catastrophe had passed.

  “At Etah, Devlin, shortly before we arrived on the rescue expedition, Henson told Peary that he was saying some things during his bouts of delirium that he would not want others to hear. Peary told Henson to keep everyone away from him until he was well again. But Henson was so concerned that, without medical assistance, Peary would die.

  “The first thing Peary said to me was that he knew I could be trusted to keep to myself anything he said while I examined him. This is how Peary asks for something, by telling you that he knows you will give it to him. I told him I would be discreet. And I have been, all these years.”

  “What did Peary say?” I said.

  “He said, ‘It can be done, Dr. Cook. I have thought it through, and I am sure it can be done.’ “

  “The North Pole,” I said.

  Dr. Cook nodded. “That’s what I thought he meant. That he was sure he could make it. And that therefore I should take his wife and child back home but leave him behind. But there were times, over the next few days, when he seemed to be saying just the opposite. ‘I see now that it can’t be done, Dr. Cook,’ he said. ‘It simply cannot be done.’ I thought he was uncertain, wavering. So whenever he said, ‘I see now that it can’t be done,’ I told him he was right. When he said that he had thought it through and was sure it could be done, I disagreed with him and urged him to leave with us and thereby save himself.

  “This went on for days, until one afternoon, when he was seemingly lucid but really more delirious than ever, I realized that I had been mistaken all along. I had misunderstood him. When he had said, ‘I see now that it can’t be done,’ he meant that he had come to the conclusion that to reach the North Pole under any circumstances was impossible. ‘The pole will not be reached,’ he said. ‘Not by me. And therefore not by anyone.’