The Navigator of New York (51 page)

My illness had been more psychological than physical, so I was not as debilitated as I had feared. Every now and then, during the first week or so, I became so fatigued that I had to sit on one of the sledges
for a while and let myself be pulled along, a useless passenger, a burden to the dogs, mere dead weight to the expedition.

But I was soon able to match the pace of the others, soon learned from them the knack of half running on my snowshoes and taking my turn behind a sled on the smooth terrains. Dr. Cook unloaded the fourth and smallest of the sleds from the largest one, of which he was the driver, piled some of his equipment and supplies on it and entrusted it to me. I swiftly learned the knack of “driving” it, the main secret of which was to trust the dogs to know where they were going. Dr. Cook gave me a pair of amber-tinted goggles like those he wore to prevent snow-blindness. The sight of me goggled like Dr. Cook so amused the Eskimos that they could not look at me without bursting into grins.

Once we were clear of the ice blocks on the shore, the ice was fairly smooth. But we soon began to encounter the usual polar obstacles. Pressure ridges that took days to cross, open water, leads that forced us to detour from our route. If no way could be found around pressure ridges, we chopped our way through them with our ice axes, which we could not have done had there not been so many of us—fourteen men hacking away at the ice like miners at a vein of ore, our purpose being not to chop a passage straight through the ridge, but only to fashion a kind of road on which the sledges could be dragged or pushed uphill.

One day, encountering nothing but flat ice, we travelled twenty-nine miles in fourteen hours. Another day, we made no forward progress at all, only chopped our way through a ridge that we did not cross until the next day.

At Bay Fjord, the temperature was −83 °F. We found muskoxen there, enough to provide us with supplies for the polar bid and for caches that we laid out at intervals for our return journey.

Upon our arrival at prominently marked locations on his map, Dr. Cook announced their names. Eureka Sound, Nansen Sound, Svartevoeg—the last aptly named, for the cliffs there were jet black. Then the utmost north of Axel Heiberg Land, from which both Dr. Cook and I saw the polar sea for the first time.

There we left all but the barest essentials, sending back six of the
Eskimos. When we were just short of losing sight of land, Dr. Cook sent back four more Eskimos. Dr. Cook chose to accompany us to the pole two men named Etukishuk and Ahwelah. He chose them, he said, not because they were the best or strongest guides, but because they were young, impressionable and credulous. They would do what he told them to. They would not defy him.

Each day left everyone so exhausted that it was hard to believe we had ever found it difficult to fall asleep. I slept as I had never slept in my life, straight through the night, without dreams, without moving, waking up in the same posture I had assumed upon crawling into my sleeping bag. I lay down my head and, the next instant, felt Dr. Cook’s hand on my shoulder and heard him say, “Morning.” He always sounded as if he had come in from outside to wake me. He never seemed to sleep. He said it was the dogs, which at the first sign of the sun began to bark, that woke him, but no amount of barking would have woken me. Sometimes I woke up to see him scribbling in his notebooks as if he had been doing so all night.

We would be underway for barely half an hour when the dogs would stop barking, so caught up were they in the rhythm of the march. There was no need to urge them on, no need for us to speak to one another. Dr. Cook consulted his compass in mid-stride, and all the other sleds simply followed his. Only when a sextant reading was required did we stop, and even then we did not speak. The only sound heard while Dr. Cook consulted his instruments was the laboured breathing of the men and the dogs. I realized that we always breathed this way, but that the sound of it was drowned out by the stamp and shuffle of our feet, the jostling tumult of the dog teams in their traces, the rasping screech of the wooden runners on the snow.

We otherwise stopped only to light an alcohol stove, to melt snow in a teapot, to stare at that little miracle of flame, to huddle round it to keep it from being blown out by the wind. It seemed that all that remained in the world of the element of fire was that blue flame.

Our two pleasures were hot tea and sleep. We ate the pemmican without relish, for it was nothing more than fuel, as brittle as taffy.

Soon, we were travelling where the Eskimos had never been. They had even less knowledge of the use of the compass and the sextant than I did. We were out of sight of all land, all landmarks. There was nothing by which the rest of us could gauge our progress, nothing in the distance to which Dr. Cook could point and tell us how long it would take us to reach it, for everything ahead of us, behind us and around us was moving, imperceptibly in flux. If we were to take exactly the same route back, nautically speaking, Dr. Cook said, we would come across nothing that looked familiar. We would find no trace of the igloos in which we slept. Had we laid down a trail of paint behind us, we would look in vain for it when we returned, even if, in the interval, not a flake of snow had fallen. The ice of which our “route” was composed would long have been dispersed, for its location and shape were changing constantly.

This was something on which it was best not to dwell, for it gave rise to the sense that, more than moving, we were
being moved
, all but floating, helplessly and aimlessly caught up in some illusion on this seemingly fixed and solid surface. We could not look behind us at the start of every day and see where we had come from, for what lay behind us looked nothing like it had when we stopped the night before. For that matter, what lay
ahead
of us looked nothing like it had when we stopped the night before.

Through all of this our only guide was Dr. Cook. He alone knew where we were, was charting our progress on his maps. He would point to a place on a map, and we had no choice but to take his word for it that we were there, though we did not understand how he had calculated our position.

With his instruments, he kept track of the weather and the ice conditions, calculated the ocean currents, kept a daylight log, noted the lengths of our shadows at different times of the day. I envied him his ability to read those instruments and apply the data that he gathered from them to the maps, to locate himself in this non-coordinated sea of white.

The Eskimos, who had never been out of sight of land before,
were terrified. They were unused to trusting someone else to navigate. Unable to understand even the concept of a map on which no land appeared, they probably suspected that we were lost, that Dr. Cook mistakenly believed he knew the way and that none of us would ever see our homes or families again.

The two showed no animosity towards Dr. Cook, but once the day’s march was done, they whispered between themselves, shaking their heads sadly as if our fates had already been decided.

Occasionally, Dr. Cook took photographs and tried to develop them inside the tent, but we could not make it quite dark enough and nothing appeared on the paper but a faint spot of light.

Man-wide cracks formed in the ice during the calm that followed every storm, cracks caused by the sudden drop in temperature. One night, as we slept in our tent, a fault-line opened right beneath us. When we awoke, the tent was slipping into it from both sides. We barely scrambled out in time to avoid dropping straight into the water, or being caught in the trench and crushed when the fault-line closed again.

The polar sea was unlike the sea between South America and Antarctica, Dr. Cook said. The ice, though it moved ceaselessly, was older, denser, thicker, more compressed. To reach the South Pole, which lay at the heart of a continent, one would have to cross more land than sea. And just knowing that beneath the ice, beneath one’s feet, lay land made the place seem less alien. As you walked on the polar sea, you could not feel the movement of the ice beneath your feet. I sometimes fancied that there was no water under it, that the ice went on forever, as though a million years ago, it was thrust up like white lava from the centre of the earth.

But then we would come upon a steaming lead of open water that seemed like an apparition. The ice had so recently parted that the water had just begun to freeze. And at fifty, sixty, seventy below, we could
see
it freeze. First, crystals formed and proliferated like flowers until a veined scale of ice extended from side to side. Through this new but porous ice, vapours rose like steam, only to freeze instantly to a
kind of dust-like frost that fell back to the ice and gathered there until the ice became opaque. Dr. Cook took algae samples, though often there was not even algae, only sterile water.

To escape a storm coming from the west we were forced to cross one such lead, sleds and all, before it had finished freezing. The ice gave and sagged and cracked beneath our feet like half-shattered glass. Dr. Cook told us to spread our snowshoes as wide as possible to disperse our weight. Somehow we made it across.

Sometimes we thought the dogs that we released had scented game, only to find, upon catching up with them, that all of them were sniffing the long-abandoned blowhole of a seal or a polar bear. Eventually, we were so far from land that there was not even the possibility that we would encounter other forms of life.

The days grew longer, until the time of least light was a prolonged dusk and then a near sunset, a midnight sun. The ice looked like a field of fire—orange, blue, purple—an unfuelled fire that, without consuming anything, would burn forever. During the time of the midnight sun, we travelled at night, when the sun was lowest, to escape the blinding glare from which not even our goggles could protect us. We slept by day, though it seemed a foolish waste to do so, to simulate night inside the igloos or the tent while outside there was so much light. What we had longed for during the polar night, we now had more of than we could use.

We woke up sometimes to find the igloos buried in snow, snow driven by winds that, as we lay inside our sleeping bags at night, we pretended not to hear. We knew that day had come only because light came very faintly through the walls.

What an effort it took, every morning, to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag. How tempted we all were to remain inside our bags, to never leave them, for they lent us such an illusion of safety, tempting us to forget that all that warmed us was the heat of our own bodies. We kicked each other awake, each hoping one of the other three would be the first to rise, the first to venture out and disinter the dogs, of which all that showed on such mornings was their rime-encrusted snouts.

In the sleeping bag, I marvelled in the warmth of my own skin. I would withdraw one hand and wait till it was cold, then bring it back inside and touch my face with it. How warm it made me feel, that singular shock of cold.

There came a time when the polar sea always had the same twilight tint of blue about it, as if we were caught in a late-winter afternoon, a day that was forever ending yet never ended, as though time had stalled at this melancholy hour of reflection that back home had always seemed so fleeting, so precious.

Soon, too tired, at the end of a day’s march, to build igloos, we all slept in the small silk tent, falling asleep on the floor of it the instant we stopped moving, four of us so exhausted we did not notice the cramped quarters. We slept in our furs, hoods, snowboots and mitts, no longer bothering to light the little stoves.

My hair, and Dr. Cook’s, was as long as the Eskimos’. When we did remove our hoods, the hair hung down to our shoulders, fell forward in front of our faces when we inclined our heads. It was best not to cut it, Dr. Cook said, for it was keeping us warm, as were our beards, protecting our faces from frostbite. It was our one natural advantage over the Eskimos, who had no facial hair.

What kept the natives going I could not understand. We had our purpose to sustain us, our reasons for being where we were, but they had none except their loyalty to us, which they gave because we asked them for it, not in exchange for their “pay” (which was nothing next to what they could have earned had they remained at home and hunted). Sometimes they were so tired they could barely raise their arms to crack their whips or their voices to urge the dogs to move.

One day, Ahwelah chanted over and over: “
Unne Sinig pa—so ah tonie I o doria” (We
should not fear death when to go on living is unbearable). From then on, Dr. Cook no longer took his turn riding on the sleds but walked in front of them, for he knew that the Eskimos would take his walking as a challenge to them and would be more determined not to let him down.

I was myself determined not to let either of them come to harm,
determined that they would not die while helping two white men make it to the pole. We killed the weakest of the dogs and fed them to the others, keeping some for ourselves. Eventually, we had to feed the dogs our spare sleeping bags, on the reindeer hides of which they chewed for hours.

“We are 160 miles from the pole,” Dr. Cook told me when he came into our tent from outside one night. “If we are at all delayed in getting there, we may not have sufficient supplies to make it back. I do not know what to do. If this was the Antarctic, I would conserve supplies by leaving the three of you behind and travelling the last stage by myself. But if we were to separate on this drifting ice, I would never find you. When the risks are so great, I cannot expect men to obey my orders. The three of you will vote as to what we should do. I will abstain.”

All three of us voted to continue.

Often the wind blew straight against us, forcing us to walk bent over, staring at the ice, unheedful of what lay even immediately ahead of us, Dr. Cook steering his sled by nothing but his compass, each dog team following the boots of the driver of the team in front of it.

It occurred to me that only we would ever know if we made it to the pole, for we would never make it back alive and our bodies, if they were found, would be nowhere near the pole, having drifted with the ice.