The Navigator of New York (41 page)

He stopped speaking and faced the fire. I was surprised to see him so upset.

“I don’t think anyone will be fooled by this letter,” I said.

Dr. Cook did not reply. He slowly tore up the paper he held in his
hand and fed it to the fire piece by piece, as if he was burning the only existing copy of Peary’s letter, as if this ritual burning of it would somehow prevent readers from being taken in by it.

I replied in private to Peary. At Dr. Cook’s urging, I wrote as euphemistically as Peary did, saying that it was an honour to have “helped” him, especially as he and Francis Stead had once been “colleagues.”

S
OMETIMES AS WE CROSSED THE BRIDGE THE WIND SMELLED
faintly of the open sea, reminding me of my first crossing from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, of a childhood that seemed more unreal as each day passed.

I began to notice the city again, having stopped doing so for some time, so caught up was I in my new-found popularity.

It seemed that there were no locals in Manhattan, no one who was so accustomed to the city that he didn’t stop to gawk at it. Everyone gawked as though they had just arrived from somewhere else, which in a way they had, given the pace at which the city was remaking itself.

It was not just one makeover that was taking place. Manhattan was not just one city but dozens of overlapping ones. Just when the barest glimpse had begun to take shape in your mind of what one of these cities would look like a year from now, the plans for that city were discarded in favour of new ones. Half-finished buildings were demolished. Builders of one block looked as if they had no idea what would rear up from the rubble of the one beside it.

The men who walked the iron beams high above the ground stood staring off into space, dangerously transfixed by the progress of a building greater than theirs that was going up many blocks away, too far for them to make out the men or even the machines that were making it, so that it must have seemed to be climbing skyward by some means of self-construction.

Week by week, month by month, the frieze of Manhattan, of
which we had so fine a view from Brooklyn, changed. A partial view of a building, a conspicuous sliver of yellowed stone that I had grown accustomed to, was there one day and gone the next, the gap it left soon filled in with a different colour. The silhouette of the skyline changed as though a child was rearranging it at random, moving and removing building blocks, topping them with attenuated steeples that rose up so far they stood out by themselves against the sky.

At night, Dr. Cook and I drove past building sites where steam-powered cranes stood immobilized like mechanical giraffes, where massive steam-shovels sat in silence. From some of the cranes, iron girders that, when work stopped, had been on their way to outstretched hands hung suspended in the air, high above us. Some of the shovels were crammed with debris. It was as if the city, in the morning, would not slowly come to life, but would reanimate abruptly. Everything and everyone that had stopped in mid-motion would, as though at the flick of an electric switch, resume their motions. All that dispelled this illusion was the absence from the machines of their operators, an absence that at this time of night could only be inferred, since it was too dark to see inside the cabs.

It seemed that the streets were still faintly ringing with the din that had died down hours ago and would soon start up again. To the city, Dr. Cook said, darkness was a recurring, cyclical inconvenience, an imposed respite from activity and progress, a problem that no doubt would soon be solved by some invention. As he explained to me how steel-frame construction had revolutionized architecture and transformed the look of cities, how steel frames and elevators were making it possible to erect buildings three and four times taller than the tallest ever built before, I stopped listening.

It seemed that everything that before had made me uneasy about the city reassured me now. The ongoing erasure of the past, the prospect of an unknown, unfixed future, appealed to me. Perhaps it was because I had seen the people who were behind it all—men who seemed to know what they were doing, and who, after all, were merely men, boyishly impressed by explorers and adventurers, not the sinister-seeming
tyrants whose caricatures appeared in all the papers, not the poor-exploiting, arch-villainous tycoons in some editorials and printed sermons.

Now when I ran my errands for Dr. Cook, I was not directed to the “rooms on the right” just inside the front doors, the business rooms of the great houses of Manhattan. I was invited into the parlours, and sometimes the libraries and the drawing rooms, of the members of the Peary Arctic Club, who seemed to want to do little more than beam at me approvingly.

The city never failed to set Dr. Cook going, talking, expostulating. It was now the fashion, he said, owing to Peary’s futile four-year expedition to the Arctic, to believe that the North Pole could not be reached.

As no one but Peary was legally allowed to write about the expedition, no one knew just how little it had accomplished, which Dr. Cook said was just as well. If it was known just how complete a failure it was, no one would ever put another cent towards an expedition to the North.

Now all the talk was of the South Pole, which Dr. Cook said no longer interested him. It had been established that it was a fixed point in the middle of a great landmass, an ice-covered continent, and therefore would be easier to reach than its ever-moving opposite “atop” the world.

Much was being made of the duration of Peary’s expedition. “Four years,” people said. “Not even in four years could Peary make it to the pole.” As if to say that if Peary could not do it, no one could.

“I have always known that his success would mean my failure,” Dr. Cook said. “But now it seems that even his failure means my failure. Four years. If only they knew how much of that time he spent trying for the pole and how much he spent huddled in tents and huts and tupiks and igloos in a state of such despair that he was indifferent as to which of death or rescue found him first.

“Now that he is out of the running, Peary is
eager
to promote the idea that the pole cannot be reached. He seems to have settled for the
consolation prize of being remembered as the man who
proved
it was unreachable.

“Not even as much money as I would be willing to accept from Marie could outfit me for an expedition to the pole. The backers have lost interest in the North for now. It seems there is not one of them who does not already have his name on some cape or bay or inlet that Peary blundered onto in his quest to reach the pole. I tell myself that in time they will want something new named after them, and their interest in the North will be revived.

“I know how bitter, how cynical, that sounds. But as I said at the Vanderbilts’, to turn away forever from the pole, to content myself with simply knowing that it’s there, eternally, affrontingly unreachable, but
there
, to join with Peary in setting for the cause of exploration such a precedent of failure and defeat—all this seems unthinkable. The compass of fashion will spin round for us again. The needle will be dead on north again someday, Devlin.

“For the moment, I have found for us a lesser but still intriguing goal, one that will keep us fit for polar travel and our names in the papers and before the backers. Not long ago, a mountain in Alaska was surveyed at 20,300 feet, the highest point of land in North America. I am going to climb it with your help. I am going to be the first man to reach the summit of Mt. McKinley. It can be done in a single season and will not keep me apart from Marie for as long as a polar expedition would, which should placate her somewhat. And we may learn something from it that will make our achievement of the greater goal more likely.”

Dr. Cook and I were invited to other society balls and gatherings. Each time, he had to make up some excuse for the absence of Marie. None of these functions seemed to me to be quite as splendid as the Vanderbilts’ had been, perhaps because I was growing accustomed to socializing, taking for granted both my desirability as a guest and the company of others, as if I had never craved companionship, never in my life been bereft of it.

I was disappointed by any gathering that Kristine did not attend. Whenever she spotted me, she smiled and we made our way towards each other. We spent entire evenings dancing and talking, so that Kristine was often teased for monopolizing me. “She is quite fond of you, Mr. Stead,” Clarence Wyckoff said. He peered closely at me. “My God,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone turn so red in my life.”

I was invited out so frequently that I began to encounter other people I had met before, old men and women, young men and women, all of whom seemed no less pleased to see me than they had been the first time.

If they felt that Peary’s letter was lacking in graciousness or gratitude, or that its tone was in any way inappropriate, they did not say so. What an honour for me it was, they said, to have such a man as Lieutenant Peary thank me in public for having saved his life. And what a pity it was that Lieutenant Peary did not live in New York but was bound by his naval career to “horrid” Washington. How marvellous it would have been for him and me to appear together in public.

When asked what “adventure” Dr. Cook and I were planning next, I told them we were going to attempt to climb Mt. McKinley in Alaska—the tallest peak in North America—no serious assault of which had yet been made, since it had only recently been “discovered” and surveyed, though the natives of Alaska had known of it for centuries.

“But what about the Arctic poles?” some of them asked. “Is it true that they cannot be reached?” I assured them that Dr. Cook and I had not abandoned our quest to reach one or both of the poles, but the climbing of McKinley could be accomplished in one season, one summer, such as the one that we had spent in Greenland. It would, Dr. Cook had said, be good training for me, better than embarking so soon in my career on a polar quest that might last for years, and for which I might not be physically or psychologically prepared.

Had I done any mountain climbing before? Just the normal amount required of anyone who lived in Newfoundland, I joked, but I was taken seriously, everyone nodding as if they knew just what
I meant, just how skilled a climber I had to be from the simple fact of having grown up where I had.

I told them that I would climb as much of McKinley as Dr. Cook would let me, or as much of it as I was able, whichever came first. “The climbing of McKinley,” I said, quoting Dr. Cook, “is just a temporary detour on the way to the greatest prize of all.”

I received looks of wonder and admiration as I described the preparations Dr. Cook had made. I did not mention that his main backer for this expedition was his wife, or that the American Geographical Society, of which Peary was the president, had been among the many bodies that had refused his request for funding. Or that the Peary Arctic Club had made only the token contribution of an aneroid barometer that measured altitude and a pocket sextant.

We travelled by train to the Pacific Northwest, leaving New York on May 26, 1903, accompanied by several of the usual “gentlemen adventurers” whose fathers paid Dr. Cook to take them with him.

I saw, for the first time, the great expanse of America, most of which was still unsettled and was thought likely to remain that way forever. On a steamer called the
Santa Ana, we
sailed up past Vancouver Island, entering the Inner Passage, negotiating the desolate islands of Alaska, stopping at Juneau, Sitka, Yakutat. It was the route taken by those who had travelled to the Klondike in search of gold, said Dr. Cook.

We reached Tyonek on June 23, there debarking with our pack-horses, which were left to swim ashore to Cook Inlet, after which they were so exhausted as to be of almost no use to us.

Not until August 21 did we establish a base camp at the foot of Mt. McKinley, after two months of sometimes dangerous but mostly tedious travel through the dense, mosquito-infested bush of the Alaskan wilderness.

The climb itself seemed anti-climactic, would have seemed so even had it been successful. For two weeks, the seven of us completed what was little more than a steep walk to an elevation of about seven
thousand feet, just above which the largest of McKinley’s glaciers began. From there, Dr. Cook and a journalist named Robert Dunn went on alone, reaching a height of 11, 300 feet before they were forced by unscalable walls of ice to head back down.

Dr. Cook and I were back in Brooklyn by the end of December, with Dr. Cook telling reporters that he would have another go at Mt. McKinley, perhaps the following summer.

For me, it had been little more than a long, if arduous, camping trip. Compared to polar exploration, mountain climbing seemed to me a waste of time and money. When I said as much to Dr. Cook, he merely urged me to be patient.

We were celebrated in the Brooklyn and Manhattan papers for our attempt at McKinley. Dr. Cook convinced me not to belittle the expedition or my part in it. Robert Dunn published a frank, unvarnished account of our adventure in a magazine called
Outings
, highlighting the petty bickering that had taken place among the members of the climbing party.

Dr. Cook was at first convinced that his reputation was ruined, but all that the public cared about and fastened upon were the hardships we endured and the obstacles we overcame. A trip by raft down an uncharted glacial river was the highlight. While Dr. Cook and Dunn piloted the raft, the rest of us took turns pulling from the water men who had fallen overboard. I was plucked out twice, gasping for breath because of how cold the water was. Several times, I helped pull others out. Whenever I remembered my two plunges into that icy green water, I thought of my mother and fancied I had some idea of what her final moments had been like.

Dunn did not make me out to be any more or less heroic than the others, only describing me as “slavishly devoted to Dr. Cook, whose side he took in all disagreements and whose orders he obeyed no matter how foolish they appeared to the rest of us to be.”