The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Cook’s descriptions of the polar scape, that “swirling, moving scene of dull white and nebulous gray,” always vivid and often lurid in the acceptably fevered style of that time, have a mystical quality, enhanced, perhaps, by his editor, T. Everett Harré of Hampton’s Magazine, whom Cook praised for relieving him of “much of the routine editorial work.” The land ice, he wrote, “ran in waves of undulating blue shimmering with streams of gold … the last vestiges of jagged land rose and fell like marionettes dancing a wild farewell.” The Big Lead, which Peary had encountered far to the east, was “a long river winding between pallisades of blue crystal … mottled and tawny colored, like the skin of a great constrictor.” The northern mirages “wove a web of … marvellous cities with fairy-tale castles.… Huge creatures, misshapen and grotesque, writhed along the horizon.…” The midnight sun was “pressed into a basin flaming with magical fires, burning behind a mystic curtain of opalescent frosts. Blue at other times, it appeared like a huge vase of luminous crystal, such as might be evoked by the weird genii of the Orient.”

  Cook’s most controversial discovery was of a huge new island to the west, which he named Bradley Land after his patron. “I think,” he wrote, “I felt a thrill such as Columbus must have felt when the first green vision of America loomed before his eye.” But Cook was no Columbus, and Bradley Land was as illusory as Peary’s Jesup Land and Crocker Land. It has been suggested that what both Cook and Peary saw may have been one of the mysterious “ice islands” – great floating masses that weren’t discovered until forty years later. But Cook’s description of Bradley Land doesn’t fit with modern photographs and descriptions of the ice islands T-1, T-2, or T-3.

  Cook said he saw two distinct land masses, separated by a gap of fifteen to twenty miles. The southern mass had an irregular, mountainous skyline, with peaks as high as eighteen hundred feet; the more northerly land had a flat, ice-capped surface with steep cliffs rising to twelve hundred feet. The ice islands of the Arctic rise no more than sixteen feet from the pack. At Cook’s distance – he was fifty miles away – it would have been almost impossible to spot one of these low masses.

  By April 11, Cook wrote, he found he had used up half his food supply, which meant that with the Pole still two hundred miles away, the party would have to go on short rations. Ten days later, half starved and wholly played out, they reached “the spot toward which men have striven for more than three centuries.”

  “In my own achievement,” Cook wrote, “I felt that dizzy moment that all the heroic souls who had braved the rigors of the Arctic region found their own hopes’ fulfilment. I had realized their dream. I had culminated with success the efforts of all the brave men who had failed before me. I had finally justified their sacrifices, their very death; I had proved to humanity humanity’s supreme triumph over a hostile death-dealing Nature. It seemed that the souls of the dead exulted with me, and that in some substrata of air, in notes more subtle than the softest notes of music, they sang a paean in the spirit with me.”

  He pinned a Stars and Stripes to a tent pole and, according to his book, took a series of observations that established his presence at the very top of the globe. He and his two companions had come six hundred miles in thirty-two days – a rate of nineteen miles a day. Now they had to cover an equal distance to get back to their starting point. Cook said he did not intend to follow their outward track, which would be half obliterated by snow. Instead he took a new course to the west, hoping to explore Bradley Land. But Bradley Land was not to be found.

  They were lost. “The route before us was unknown. We were in the fateful clutch of a drifting sea of ice. I could not guess whither we were bound. At times I even lost hope of reaching land. Our bodies were tired. Our legs were numb. We were almost insensible to the mad craving hunger of our stomach. We were living on a half ration of food and daily becoming weaker.”

  On May 24, Cook reckoned his position as well to the west of Axel Heiberg. “The following days were days of desperation. The food for man and dog was reduced … we traveled twenty days without knowing our position. A gray mystery enshrouded us. Terror followed in our wake.”

  Cook’s account of this period is sketchy. He says they made their way south through Hassel Sound, which separates Ellef Ringnes from Amund Ringnes, the two islands Sverdrup named for a couple of hometown beer merchants. About the middle of June, Cook wrote, they heard their first animal cry – the call of the snow bunting – and shortly after landed on a rocky coastline where they successfully hunted for bear and small birds. For the last ten weeks, according to Cook’s own figures, the three men and all their animals together had been forced to subsist on little more than six pounds of food a day plus whatever meat they could scrape from the carcasses of those overworked and emaciated dogs that died or were slaughtered.

  With fresh game sustaining them, they pushed on south. Soon they entered historic country – the maze of islands discovered during the search for Franklin. They travelled down Penny Strait between Bathurst Island and the Grinnell Peninsula of Devon Island. Cook’s first plan had been to continue down Wellington Channel and then on to the whaling grounds of the Atlantic by way of Lancaster Sound. But the lack of game in the area and the known presence of wildlife on the shores of Jones Sound changed his mind.

  They climbed the gaunt, dun-coloured scarps of North Devon and crossed over to Jones Sound, where they released their remaining dogs, jettisoned much of their equipment, and embarked in the portable boat that they had taken with them but had never used. There followed a perilous two months on Jones Sound. By early September they had reached the huge granite cliffs of Cape Sparbo on its south shore. They could go no farther; this would be their winter camp.

  They were destitute. All they had left were four rounds of ammunition, half a sled, the canvas boat, a torn silk tent, a few camp kettles, tin plates, knives, and matches – nothing else save for the tattered clothing on their backs. Thus equipped, they prepared to settle down for the winter on the site of an abandoned Eskimo village in a little bay surrounded by gloomy walls of granite.

  This three-man trek from the vicinity of Axel Heiberg to Anoatok on the Greenland coast by way of the Cape Sparbo wintering place stands as the most remarkable saga in the history of Arctic exploration. Even Cook’s severest critics, who tore his tale of polar discovery to shreds, allowed him that. For the next five months, the trio reverted to the stone age, living in a cave hollowed from the earth by tribesmen long dead. As Cook grubbed in the black soil, trying to expand this hovel, he experienced a “heart depressing chill.” There, half hidden in the muck, a hollow-eyed skull stared up at him, and he realized that he and his companions were making their home in a primitive tomb.

  With no food and no proper tools for capturing game, they were forced to live by their wits. They tried at first to kill muskoxen by hurling stones. When that failed they fashioned bows out of hickory torn from the sledge and arrows tipped with metal from the Eskimos’ pocket penknives. They managed with these primitive weapons to kill a duck and a hare, but the arrows could not penetrate the muskoxen’s tough hides.

  They used more sledge hickory to make harpoons and lances, the harder points carved from fragments of whalebone and muskox horn found scattered on the beach, and tried again without success. They tore the metal points off their sledge shoes and the rivets from their cookbox to tip more weapons. But the most practical hunting device was the lasso, made from sledge thongs twisted together. With one of these they managed, at last, to corral and kill one of the beasts. For the rest of the season, using lassos and lances, they hunted muskoxen whose carcasses sustained them. From the bones they made harpoons and arrowheads, knife handles, fox traps, and sledge mountings. The skins they fashioned into coats, hoods, stockings, mitts, lashings, and boots. The fat they used for lamp oil, with wicks made from peat moss. The meat became their staple food, supplemented occasionally by a hare, ptarmigan, or fox.

  The bears that prowled about the cave were a
double menace: they not only tried to steal the trio’s food but were also prepared to make a meal out of the humans. Cook and his two companions were like prisoners in their cave, with the bears as warders, prowling so close that it was not possible to move more than a hundred feet from the narrow entrance without “every dull rock rising as a bear ghost.” At night, they set fires at the mouth and stood six-hour watches to scare off the beasts. But by day the bears crowded up to the portal and snatched the blocks of blubber used for fuel. Sometimes they made a leap for the door, which, fortunately, was not large enough for them to enter. The Eskimos shot arrows through this tiny entrance, without much effect. Occasionally, when a bear’s head appeared in the silk-covered window near the roof, they were able to wield a knife at close range with what Cook called “sweet vengeance.” As a last resort they made a hole through the top of the den; when the head of a bear appeared, they thrust a flaming torch through the opening. It illuminated the snow for acres around with such a ghostly whiteness that it startled the humans more than it did the animals. The bears took advantage of the light to seize another piece of precious blubber.

  The sun vanished on November 3. It would not return for 110 days. On November 17, they heard the last cry of the ravens. Etukishook looked into the sky and called to one of the birds, “Go and take the tears from Annadoa’s eyes. Tell her that I am alive and well and will come to take her soon.… Bring us some powder to blacken the bear’s snout.…”

  “Dry the tears of my mother’s cheeks,” cried Ahwelah to the raven. “Then go to Serwah; tell her not to marry that lazy gull, Tatamb; tell her that Ahwelah’s skin is still flushed with thoughts of her, that he is well, and will return to claim her in the first moon after sunrise.”

  “Ka-ah, ka-ah, ka-ah!” replied the raven, or so it seemed to the two homesick and love-stricken natives in whose language the word ka-ah means “yes.” Alas, when they finally reached home, all the young women in the village were spoken for.

  With the bears in hibernation, Cook, in the flickering light of the crude oil lamp, began to set down his account of the polar journey and its aftermath. He was painfully short of writing material; all he had was a small pad of prescription blanks, two miniature memo books, four pencils, and an eraser. He scribbled away in a tiny, almost microscopic hand, keeping the points of his pencils needle sharp and employing a self-invented form of shorthand. In this way he managed, he said, to get 150,000 words on paper. Thus “absolute despair, which in idleness opens the door to madness, was averted.”

  Anoatok was more than three hundred miles away on the far side of Kane Basin. Cook was counting on finding a cache that Etukishook had asked his father to leave at Cape Sabine, near the site of Greely’s misfortune. On February 18, with the Fahrenheit thermometer registering –40°, the three men set off down Jones Sound toward Baffin Bay, hauling the little sledge they had repaired with muskox bones and sinew. They reached the mouth of the sound and turned north, following the sea ice along the Ellesmere coast. The deep, drifting snow, huge pressure ridges, and protruding glaciers kept them far from land.

  At last on March 25, with their food gone, they reached land – Cape Faraday, near Smith Sound. They fended off starvation by chewing on bits of skin, old walrus hides, and even a piece of candle. Four days later they managed to lasso a polar bear. Cook produced one of the four bullets he had squirreled away and handed the rifle to Ahwelahtea, who shot the bear, saving their lives.

  By the time they reached Cape Sabine they were again out of food. Luckily, Etukishook’s father had cached an old seal, so rotten now that it smelled like limburger cheese. They ate it greedily, along with a pound of salt left in the cache, which, Cook said, tasted like sugar to them, “for no salt had passed our withered tongues for over a year.” In the cache Cook found a crude drawing, “spotted with sooty tears,” that told the story of a bereft father searching for his lost son.

  The Greenland coast was only about thirty miles away on the far side of the sound, but the sound was open. Cook and his two companions were forced to make a seventy-mile detour on the shore ice as far as Cape Louis Napoleon before they could cross on the ice of Kane Basin. The only food they had was the rotten seal meat. When that was gone they were reduced to gnawing at their sealskin boots and lashings. “Life,” Cook recalled, “no longer seemed worth living.” But they kept on until, clambering up a tall iceberg, they spotted in the distance the village of Anoatok.

  Harry Whitney, who went out to meet Cook, found a gaunt spectre of a man, his hair falling to his shoulders, his bones protruding from his stretched skin – “the dirtiest white man I had ever seen,” Whitney called him. His two companions collapsed on one of the sledges, but Cook, in an act of bravado, tried to walk to the village. He didn’t make it.

  Now he found that Peary had put his bosun, the illiterate John Murphy – “a rough Newfoundland bruiser” – in charge of his hut. Cook’s version of what had happened is diametrically opposed to Peary’s. In his memoirs he charged Peary with theft of his furs, ivory, and supplies. Although Cook had left a native friend, Koolootingwah, in charge, Peary wrote that he had given the job to his own followers “to prevent the Eskimos from looting the supplies and equipment left there by Dr. Cook.” Cook took umbrage at that. “It was,” he said, “a mean, petty and unworthy slur upon a brave, loyal people, among whom thievery is a thing unknown.”

  Meanwhile, he had told Whitney that he had reached the Pole and pledged him to silence. He wanted to be the first to let the world know of his achievement. But Cook himself does not appear to have grasped the full significance of his feat. “… to me the Polar experience was not in the least remarkable, considered with our later adventures,” he wrote.

  Pole or no Pole, Cook’s assessment of his other accomplishments was eminently reasonable. His long journey to Axel Heiberg Island and then back through the Sverdrup Islands to Devon Island and Jones Sound was remarkable. No other white man had spent fourteen consecutive months in the High Arctic (Hall’s experiences were more than two hundred miles farther south) living much of the time like a prehistoric savage.

  At this point, the spring of 1909, Cook set out on another extraordinary trek. He wanted to reach civilization as quickly as possible to announce his news. The fastest route, he felt, was to go south from Etah to the Danish settlement of Upernavik and from there by native mail boat and later by steamer to Europe, then back to North America. Upernavik was more than five hundred miles as the crow flies to the south – and more than half again as far by a winding route that would involve the climbing of mountains and glaciers, the crossing of open lanes of water with the ice already in motion, and the dragging of heavy sledges through slush.

  Before he set off, Cook, according to his own account, made a very strange decision. He decided, he explained later, to leave his original notes, calculations, and instruments in a box in the care of Harry Whitney, who promised to bring it out later that year. Apparently Cook was quite prepared to separate himself from the proofs of his discoveries. In the annals of exploration, that was almost unheard of.

  But what exactly did he leave with Whitney? Did he leave all the calculations and observations he had made at the Pole, assuming there were any? Did he leave his journals? What about the 150,000 words he claimed to have written in a minuscule shorthand at Cape Sparbo – did he leave that too? Or did these pages exist? It passes credibility that Cook, no matter how sharp his pencils, how microscopic his shorthand, could possibly have got a book-length narrative onto a small pad of prescription blanks and a couple of memo booklets. Cook’s published account, My Attainment of the Pole, is only 10 per cent longer than the one he said he wrote in pencil, yet it occupies 566 pages of printed text.

  Cook would later downplay the importance of this material. “The instruments … had served their purpose,” he wrote. “The corrections, notes and other data were also no longer needed; all my observations had been reduced and the corrections were valuable only for a future re-examination.�
�

  Clearly, he did not expect a “future re-examination” any more than Peary did. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Peary there probably wouldn’t have been one. An explorer’s word was not questioned by members of the scientific establishment. If some harboured doubts – as was certainly the case when Isaac Hayes claimed he had reached Cape Hawks – they kept such doubts to themselves. If Cook said he’d climbed Mount McKinley, if Peary announced he’d found a new island, no one came forward to dispute those claims. There’s little question that had Peary not returned from the Arctic determined to discredit his rival, Cook would have been hailed in perpetuity as the first man to reach the North Pole. And if Cook hadn’t been in Peary’s way, then Peary’s unsupported word would have been accepted, as, indeed, in many quarters it was.

  No one was ever to know exactly what was in the packages that Cook left in Whitney’s care; Cook himself would change his story about what he took with him and what he didn’t take. There were instruments left with Whitney – that much is certain – and also clothing, supplies, geological specimens, and furs. When Peary arrived, Whitney took passage aboard the Roosevelt but didn’t bring Cook’s box because Peary wouldn’t let him. To be fair to Peary, he didn’t want to be charged with losing or damaging anything belonging to his rival.

  Whitney cached all Cook’s belongings at Etah, leaving them, in Cook’s phrase, to “the mercy of the weather and the natives” – a strange remark from a man who, in the same memoir, had castigated Peary for thinking the Eskimos thieves. The story is blurred because Whitney himself was remarkably tight-lipped about the matter when it finally became public. But if Cook left any documents behind, no trace of them has ever been found.

  Cook left Etah in the third week of April, accompanied by a throng of cheerful natives who spread the news of his feat from village to village on the way to Upernavik. According to his own account, Cook gave very little thought to the sensation that his discovery would cause. Uppermost in his thoughts was “an intense longing for home.” He insisted in his memoirs that “in the wildest flights of my imagination I never dreamed of any world wide interest in the Pole.… I regarded my entire experience as purely personal. I supposed that the newspapers would announce my return, and that there would be a three days’ breath of attention, and that would be all.…”