The Navigator of New York (53 page)

Then, one day when I woke up, the sound was gone. Dr. Cook, who was lying beside me, took my hand. “Don’t be afraid, Devlin,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Don’t be afraid, my son. Go back to sleep.”

It seemed that the moment the wind came back, we all woke up at once. We shouted as though to someone passing overhead who did not know that we were lost—someone who, if we could only make ourselves heard to him, would dig us out.

The sound began to climb the scale again, growing louder every minute, as if the wind, though blowing with the same force as before, had changed direction and the snow was being swept away. We were never so glad to hear the rising of the wind. We greeted the return of sound as we so often had the return of light.

In less than an hour, the snow within which we had lived for weeks was gone.

The surfeit of fresh air was as unbreathable as water for a while. But even as we coughed and gagged, we smiled at each other like boys who, because of their own recklessness, had got into trouble and survived by the sheer luck for which they were famous.

When the wind subsided, we made our way out. Except for what had made its way inside the crawlspace, there was no loose snow, only frozen crust from before the storm. The dogs, the discontinuation of whose barking I had not noted, were gone. Whether they survived, were claimed as wild by someone else, we never did find out.

We somehow managed to walk from Cape Sparbo to Etah, where we arrived in mid-April and found a hunter named Harry Whitney staying in our box house, having been left by Peary, who the previous summer had set out for the pole.

The box house. Etah. The Eskimos in their tupiks on the hill. How could all this still be here? It was like returning in old age to one’s childhood home to find it just the same as when you left.

Dr. Cook chatted with Whitney, who spoke disparagingly of Peary, said that Peary had mistreated him and that he had not got his money’s worth on this hunting trip.

Dr. Cook had kept a record of our journey in a mass of notebooks, which he said contained scientific proof that we had reached the pole. The covers of the notebooks had disintegrated. The ragged and filth-ridden pages were held together with paste and reindeer lashings. There was no question of our waiting with Whitney for Peary and his ship, since Peary would never allow us on board. The nearest shipping port was Upernavik, to which we would have to walk on foot, which would take about four months. Dr. Cook said he was certain that if he travelled this distance on foot with the notebooks, they would fall to pieces.

“I must leave these notebooks with you, Mr. Whitney,” he said. “May I trust you to bring them back safely with you to New York and leave them with my wife? Otherwise, they will soon be of no use to anyone.”

Whitney assured Dr. Cook that he would take good care of the notebooks and would say nothing of them to Peary.

Dr. Cook told me we had to get to Upernavik as quickly as we could, there being no telling when Peary would return from up north or how far he would claim to have gone.

At Upernavik, we parted with Etukishuk and Ahwelah. They were bewildered at the fuss we made over them, hugging them and trying not to cry. When we were through, they smiled sheepishly, then turned and headed back towards Etah.

A Danish ship called the
Hans Egede
took us on board. It was bound for Copenhagen but detoured to Lerwick, the most northern city of Scotland, the capital of the Shetland Islands and the nearest port with a wireless. The Danes told us that going straight to Copenhagen would give Peary a better chance to stake his claim first. They favoured us over Peary, if only because to them would go the honour of transporting us, not only back to civilization, but to their own country, which would be the first to celebrate us and our accomplishment.

From Lerwick, Dr. Cook telegraphed to the Lecointe Observatory in Brussels the news that we had reached the pole on
April 22, 1908. He sent the telegram September 1, 1909. We had spent the past sixteen months making our way back.

I sent a telegram to Kristine: “I am safe and will soon be home.” I wondered if after all this time, my safety still mattered to her. Dr. Cook sent one telegram to his wife and another, two thousand words in length, to the
New York Herald. The
latter was a sketchy account of our attainment of the pole that the
Herald
ran on its front page on September 2.

“I felt an intense loneliness, despite the presence of Mr. Stead and the Eskimos,” wrote Dr. Cook. “What a cheerless spot to have aroused the ambition of man for so many ages. An endless field of purple snows. No life. No land. Nothing to relieve the monotony of frost. We were the only pulsating creatures in this world of ice.”

We travelled to Copenhagen.

What an unlikely way this was for a man to make his first journey to the Old World from the New. I had all but walked to Europe from the pole. To Denmark, by whose tribes those of England were defeated. From whose people those of England were descended. Old Denmark. Old Copenhagen. Dr. Cook, the Eskimos and I had journeyed like a tribe of four against the course of time. We had gone back to the Stone Age at Cape Sparbo. Lived in a cave, hunted animals with weapons that we made from bones.

As the
Hans Egede
steamed into the harbour at Copenhagen, I was reminded again of my first sight of Manhattan. The harbour was a brilliant blue, reflecting the sky that had cleared from a storm the night before. It was cluttered with small boats, many of them flying the Stars and Stripes. A chorus of ship’s whistles and sirens went up. Bands we could not see began to play, each blaring forth a different song, the only one I recognized “See the Conquering Hero Comes.”

Life seemed to have become a series of discoveries set in motion by our having made it to the pole. Cape Sparbo, Upernavik and Copenhagen might all have been unknown to the outside world until we found them, so foreign did everything seem to me. Dr. Cook said it was twenty-seven months since we had set out by train for
Gloucester from Manhattan. The number thirty, the idea of a month, meant nothing to me. To measure time in numbers or in distance seemed absurd. I wondered for how long this feeling would last.

W
E MADE PORT AT
C
OPENHAGEN, SUDDENLY AWARE OF WHAT A
sight we were. Dr. Cook and I were wearing the ragged skins of seven different kinds of animals. At quayside, the crown prince of Denmark shook our hands and doffed his hat to us. They had cleaned us up some on the ship. The day before, I had had hair down to my shoulders, as had Dr. Cook. I had been filthy for so long that no amount of soap and water could restore my complexion to normal. But no one seemed to mind.

Thousands of people had come out to get a look at us. No one knew just what sort of tribute was appropriate. Some sang the Danish anthem, some the American. We were introduced to clergymen who seemed as mystified as we were as to why their presence had been called for. By the end of the day, our hands had become so raw from being shaken that to shake them was forbidden, to remind people of which we wore gloves indoors and out.

How anomalous, how tenuous Copenhagen seemed in comparison with the vast emptiness we had travelled through to get there. It seemed to me that everyone in Copenhagen lived in denial or ignorance of the great darkness that contained them as surely as the sea contains a sunken ship. Buildings, bridges, horse-drawn cabs and motor cars, electric lights—all seemed inconsequential.

Though much was made of Dr. Cook’s having ushered me ahead of him at the last moment so that I could be the first to reach the pole, it was seen as a purely symbolic gesture. The expedition had been his. As one of the Copenhagen papers put it: “Dr. Cook generously
allowed his fledgling protégé to walk the last few feet to the precious spot. So although we say hurray for Mr. Stead, it is Dr. Cook whom we honour as the first man to reach the pole.”

For a while, Dr. Cook revelled in how eager people would be from then on to take advantage of us, in how much money we had already been offered. From
Hampton’s
magazine, Dr. Cook accepted an offer of thirty thousand dollars for exclusive story rights, despite the objections of those who assured him he could get ten times that. From Frederic Thompson, the lecture-circuit promoter, $250,000 for 250 lectures. Harper and Brothers would soon make a bid for book rights.

We spent three weeks in Copenhagen at the Hotel Phoenix, where crowds gathered all night in the rain beneath the windows of our rooms, exhorting us to show ourselves, which we did from time to time to much cheering and applause. We stayed in adjoining suites and took turns going to the windows, going together only once or twice, which brought the loudest cheers from the crowds. “Cook and Stead, Cook and Stead,” they chanted.

After we were installed in our hotel by government officials, who assured us that all our expenses would be taken care of, my first thought was of food. I all but fainted just reading the room-service menu and would have gorged myself had Dr. Cook not warned me against it, explaining that I would be sick if I ate any amount of anything, so shrunken was my stomach, and especially sick if I ate rich food, to which my body would react as if it were poison.

Everywhere we walked in Copenhagen, beautiful young women followed us. Once, as we disembarked from a cab, a group of them showered us with flowers, then began to hug and kiss us. They ran after the vehicles in which we travelled through the streets, shouting, “Ve looff you, Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead.”

At first, we were repulsed by all the luxury after so many months of deprivation (to which we had become so accustomed that we could not get to sleep except by stretching out on the floor beside our beds). It took me two weeks to wean myself from the floor and fall asleep atop a mattress.

We visited Bernstoff Castle, where we had tea with Princess Marie of Denmark and the visiting Princess George of Greece. Both the princesses spoke fluent, if heavily accented, English, as did most of the people in whose houses we were guests.

How strange it seemed, after two and a half years away from civilization, to return to it and find that everyone’s first language was one I did not understand, as if this were the measure of how long we had been away. The language of the Eskimos had not made me feel as incongruous as the language of the Danes did.

I was surprised that, although from a distance they looked just like the ones back home, I could not read a word of the newspapers. Everything seemed familiar but skewed, slightly off, as if my ordeal had altered my perceptions, as if in time the gibberish written and spoken everywhere in Copenhagen would resolve back into English, the streets and buildings would resume their former shapes, and people would once again wear what they had worn and look as they had looked when I saw them last.

I went about the city in a daze with Dr. Cook, walked with him and our hosts through narrow cobblestone streets. Everyone in our coterie spoke English, but all around us was this unintelligible hubbub of voices. There were times when, almost overcome by residual fatigue, so dizzy I could barely stand, I believed that I was still following behind the sled, that I had just awoken from a dream in which we had made it to the pole and back again, only to find ourselves in a world that in our absence had somehow been transformed, a world in which, though we were treated well, we would never feel that we belonged but would always, for some reason inscrutably related to our having been to the pole, be looked upon as strangers.

Dr. Cook seemed to be in all ways unfazed, merely patting me reassuringly on the back when I tried to explain to him the strange sense of displacement I felt.

“It will pass,” he said, speaking, I presumed, as one from whom such feelings had passed after previous expeditions.

Dining with the royal family of Denmark (the names of whom I
hadn’t known until we were introduced), including an eight-year-old prince and a ten-year-old princess, did nothing to dispel my sense of other-worldliness.

All of them put aside their unimaginable lives for the duration of our visit, as if our adventure was more remarkable to them than an account of one day of their lives would have been to us. As surreal as a fairy tale it was. Two explorers from New York come back from the North Pole, emerge from the Arctic on foot to have dinner with the king and queen of Denmark. We seemed to have travelled as far in time as we had in space, back to a former century in which there were castles, kings and queens, crown princes and royal astronomers. Of the castles and mansions we visited, I retained almost no impression. I remember only antiques contained by structures that were themselves antiques.

Dr. Cook, because he had been the leader of the expedition, had many honours conferred upon him by the Danes. The Danish Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal was presented to him by King Frederick at the Palais Concert Hall. I was standing beside him, and no sooner had the medal been placed around his neck than he took it off and placed it around mine, to a thunderous ovation from the audience.

T
HERE WAS A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF SCEPTICISM IN EDITORIALS IN
newspapers around the world about Dr. Cook’s claim of having reached the pole, editorials that were reprinted in the Danish papers.

The New York editorials, aside from those of the
Herald
, were reservedly, noncommittally congratulatory. The British papers said they would reserve judgment on Dr. Cook’s claim until his “proofs,” about the very existence of which there was some question, had been examined.

But the explorers of the world quickly came to Dr. Cook’s defence—explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, just back from a farthest south in the Antarctic, and Gen. Adolphus W. Greely, of the infamous Greely expedition.

“The word of a gentleman explorer has always been sufficient ‘proof,’ “ said Roald Amundsen. “I can see no reason why this should not be the case with Dr. Cook.” Ernest Sverdrup professed to having not the slightest doubt that Dr. Cook and I had reached the pole.