The Navigator of New York (30 page)

He looked almost continuously at me as I regarded the landscape, glancing away briefly to note the cause of my stupefaction, then back at me again, so anxious was he to see the effect on me of every wonder we encountered, every fiord, vista, glacier and iceberg. Whenever
I looked at him, he laughed, then surveyed the view with a fond expression, as if mine had helped him to remember how he had felt when he first saw such things.

“Someday we will get there together,” he said, looking at the northern horizon as though imagining someplace beyond it—the pole, the ultimate Arctic, where the essence of everything that lay about us now would be revealed. I could not conceive of a place in comparison with which the one he had brought me to would seem deficient.

“We will get there first,” he said. I had never heard such fervour, such longing, not even in the voices of preachers when they spoke of heaven. It was as if only those who got “there” first would see it as it really was. By our having been there, it would, for all who might come after us, be transformed.

We saw the calving of a rare late-summer iceberg, a calving caused not by melting, but by the freezing that was already taking place at night. During the summer melting, water ran into fissures and, upon freezing, expanded. Over and over this happened, the fissures growing wider each night, other fissures forming from the first ones, forking out like lightning through the ice. It sounded as though explosives deep within the ice were detonating at intervals, with each blast, though muffled, followed by a general agitation, a faint vibration in the air and in the ground that loosened rocks and slabs of stone on the steeper cliffs like minor avalanches, most of which petered out before they reached the water, though sometimes we heard a single, satisfying “fump,” as if a rock had landed edgewise without a splash.

These fissures, Dr. Cook said, would result in icebergs next spring, or the one after that, or a spring ten years from now, when the depending weight of ice was such that whatever was holding it in place would break at last.

“We may see one or two break loose,” said Dr. Cook. They would be too small, he said, to make it as far south as St. John’s like the spring icebergs. But they would be bigger than any icebergs I had ever seen before.

I was surprised that the surface of the glacier, the walls of the fissures and crevasses, were so discoloured, grey-brown mixed in with white and green. I had expected ice as pristine as that which drifted past Newfoundland each spring. The ice I spoke of, Dr. Cook said, was so white because its outer layers had melted while it was drifting towards Newfoundland. Here, the ice bore on its surface sand that was blown onto it by summer storms, silt left behind by streams that flowed across it from the coastal mountains. Not to mention guano from a dozen kinds of birds, each of whose flocks numbered in the tens of thousands.

Simple exposure to the air, along with cycles of melting and freezing, caused chemical changes similar to rusting, he said. It was really only on the coast that the old ice looked like this. Farther inland, farther north, where nothing ever melted and the mountains that rose up from the ice were covered in snow and devoid of topsoil, the ice was almost perfect. But the only truly perfect ice was the ice of the polar seas.

The sub-surface ice explosions continued night after night, the sound channelled into echoes by the fiord. It might have been an exchange of artillery fire between two distant armies that preferred to fight at night. The explosions sent ripples across the water, just large enough to make the ship bob at anchor, the waves lapping against the hull as if a slight breeze was blowing.

As the nights grew colder, the explosions became more frequent, the artillery bombardment more intense, as if the armies were headed our way, one retreating, one advancing. A decrease in the frequency of the explosions, Dr. Cook said, would mean that less melting was taking place by day; that summer was nearly over and it was time for us to leave, unless we planned to winter here with Peary.

As if the retreating army had decided it would make a final stand, there came from within the glacier one night a constant volley of explosions. In the morning, Dr. Cook pointed out a massive section of ice that he believed was ready to give way.

Captain Blakeney kept the
Erik
far from where it was even remotely possible that any ice would fall, this degree of caution being
necessary because the berg, if it was big enough, would displace enough water to send out a series of waves that might damage or even swamp the ship.

It sounded as if massive trees were being slowly bent until they broke, a forest of them creaking, splintering, snapping. The snapping increased to Gatling-gun speed, geysers of ice chips erupting one after the other along a jagged line that traced out the shape of what would be one side of the iceberg. Huge chunks of ice rained down from the top, churning the water white. The staccato of snapping sped up until it became a single sound. There was a deafening severance of old ice from old ice. Then came a creaking screech, as if all that had broken so far were the branches of the tree, but now the very trunk itself had begun to give. I thought it would go on like this, breaking massively but gradually, with an excruciating reluctance. But then the whole thing plunged suddenly, silently, as if it had been hanging by a single cable that had just been cut. It seemed for an instant that it had not so much fallen as been erased from the bottom up; that there would be no splash, no sound. And then all the water that had been displaced rose up at once, as though something the size of the iceberg had been pushed up from the ocean floor to take its place. There was nothing to be heard or seen but water—water roaring, frothing up so high and wide it seemed certain that nothing so inert as ice would appear when it died down. Its height and shape persisted, fountain-like, for seconds. Then the first uprush of water fell and caused a smaller one, which had just begun when the iceberg surfaced, its great mass rolling, the water around it churning as though silent engines were propelling it from far below.

It was still rolling, yet to assume its surface shape, when we saw the series of ice-clogged waves bearing down upon the ship. They broke against the hull, which seemed to rear up beneath them like a horse. Each wave rammed the hull as if we had hit another ship head on. It was as though we were travelling against the current of a river thick with silt the size of boulders. The chunks of ice thudded against the hull with the frequency of hailstones.

When the waves subsided, the iceberg rolled again, teetering,
bobbing, its rusted side showing as if it might come to rest that way. But then it performed a slow back flip and the rust went under until the iceberg’s white underbelly showed. It stopped bobbing and at the same time rode higher on the water, as though eager to show, after all that thrashing and somersaulting, that it had the knack of floating now. A minute before, the
Erik
had had the water to itself, but it was now sharing it with this massive, unmanned vessel, buoyed up by what might have been its reflection, its submerged portion, which glowed murkily at such a depth I was certain it had run aground.

A great cheer went up from the passengers and crew when the iceberg settled on its final form. The surface berg was just higher than the main mast and so about a hundred feet above the water, which meant the sub-surface berg drew at least eight hundred feet.

But like all late icebergs, it would be short-lived. In the sunlight, it would melt. It would spring a thousand leaks. Fresh water would run down its sides in torrents as water from the sea was doing now. It would drift as treacherous, as deceptive, as an almost sunken ship of which nothing but an unmanned wheelhouse showed above the water. As its shape shifted, so would its centre of balance, until it rolled again and some long-submerged part of it took its turn above the water.

The ship undamaged, we made our way around the berg, then started up the ice-free fiord.

No one at Upernavik knew anything about Peary.

We steamed farther north to Cape York, where we arrived at midnight on the first of August. Captain Blakeney blew the ship’s whistle three times. In no time, kayaks were putting out from shore. Many Eskimos came on board, among them three who had served as guides on the North Greenland expedition and had worked with Francis Stead. Dr. Cook introduced me to them as the son of Dr. Stead. As if they thought my purpose for coming along was to rescue my father, they told me with as much regret as if he had departed from them only yesterday that they had no idea where he was. They looked at me as if to gauge my disappointment, my grief. The oldest of them, Sipsu, spoke rapidly but softly to Dr. Cook as if he was relaying to him a
message from someone else. He had told Dr. Cook that Peary was either at Etah or at Inglefield Gulf. Dr. Cook accepted their offer to accompany us to Etah and had their kayaks pulled on board.

The first thing we saw as we turned from the fiord into the narrows at Etah was the Eskimo village on the hill above the beach, a cluster of tupiks, which looked much like the wigwams I had seen in books. “The Eskimos stay here during the summer,” Dr. Cook said. “There are walrus grounds just up the coast.” People whom I mistakenly assumed were all Eskimos came running down the hill. Among them, I would soon discover, were most of the crew of the
Windward
.

Etah lay in a deeply recessed harbour. There was the
Windward
at anchor in calm waters, undamaged, sails furled, looking as though it had not moved in months. The captain, a short, compactly built Newfoundlander named Sam Bartlett, had been hoping that another ship would come bearing someone, anyone, who had the authority to release the
Windward
and its crew from their obligation to the Pearys and the expedition.

The mate of the
Windward
was Robert Bartlett, the captain’s cousin. Dr. Cook introduced me to them. They had heard of Francis Stead and offered me their condolences. They lived in Brooklyn, they said, but often spent their summers in Newfoundland. I wondered how long it would take for them to spread the word about me once the expedition ended.

The ships were moored side by side, tied fast with ropes. Where their gunwales met, a gangplank with rails of rope was put in place. Like the
Erik
, the
Windward
was a sealing ship. The two were so similar they might have been sister ships, their bowsprits like a pair of tusks.

“Where is Peary?” said Dr. Cook. Captain Bartlett pointed to one end of the rocky beach, where a tupik stood in the lee of a hill. Peary, he said, was in a bad way. He had not left the tent in more than a month. The only person who had seen him in that time was his black manservant, Matthew Henson, who even now was sitting on the ground a few feet from the entrance to the tent.

The Eskimos, saying that Peary was “asleep,” had been keeping
their distance from his tent, as had the crew of the
Windward
, some of whom, on the first day of his confinement, had made the mistake of asking him through the tent when he planned to sail for home. Peary had calmly replied, Captain Bartlett said, that the next man to ask him that question would be shot.

As for Jo Peary, she and six-year-old Marie were in their quarters, neither of them having seen or spoken to Peary since Mrs. Peary found out that he had fathered a child by an Eskimo woman. She had learned this from the woman herself, who, when Mrs. Peary met her, was bearing Peary’s child on her back. The child, a boy, was unmistakably Peary’s, his hair as red and eyes as blue as his father’s. The woman, whom Mrs. Peary described as “a creature scarcely human,” seemed to think, she said, that simply from having borne children by the same man, the two of them were “colleagues.”

Mrs. Peary had come to Greenland expecting a six-week summer stay. She had been stranded for thirteen months at Etah, and she and Marie had already been five months away from home by the time of their arrival.

When told through their door that a ship come to rescue them was just now steaming through the narrows, Mrs. Peary had replied that she had seen it through the porthole window but was staying below because she wished to speak in private with the leader of the rescue expedition.

“Commander Peary’s mother passed away in his absence,” Dr. Cook said. “I’m sure that in spite of their disagreement, Mrs. Peary will want to tell him herself.”

The captain took Dr. Cook below deck on the
Windward, saying
he would wait outside the door while the doctor spoke with Mrs. Peary.

About twenty minutes later they came back up on deck, Mrs. Peary behind them, emerging for what might have been the first time since the
Windward
had sailed from Philadelphia, her expression that of someone well accustomed to being stared at. She was dressed as though for a chilly day at Coney Island. She wore a long serge skirt, a
waist-length cloak that buttoned up the front, a flat cap with a spotted veil beneath which she had her hair, which must have been very short, tucked completely out of sight, so that it looked as though she had no hair at all. She was very thin. Her face, unframed by hair, seemed especially so, her jaw lines forming a sharply defined V whose forks ended in deep hollows beneath her ears; her neck was so slender that on the back it was furrowed down the middle.

She exuded many forms of aloofness all at once: that of a woman from the coarse company of men; that of a person of social standing from the company of people who neither had it nor understood its value; that of an expeditionary at the mercy of a crew than which there had been none worse in the history of maritime travel; that of a white woman among Eskimos, to whose level she would never sink no matter how long she was stranded with them in the Arctic. I remembered Aunt Daphne, ten years ago, looking at the photographs of Mrs. Peary that were taken on the North Greenland expedition. “What an extraordinary woman she must be,” Aunt Daphne had said.

Aloof. Extraordinary. Incongruous. It was as if Dr. Cook and Captain Bartlett had brought up with them from below a prisoner whose time to prove her usefulness had come at last.