My dearest Devlin:
This is the last letter you will receive from me until I return. We are travelling by sled. The last members of our support group turn back tomorrow, bringing with them from each of us letters for our loved ones. Previously, I have, at this point of an expedition, felt a certain gloom come over me, there being no one to whom I could say “goodbye for now” except my siblings (with whom I have never been very close). I must confess that even with you and Anna to write to, I feel some measure of gloom. One always feels it on the eve of undertaking in earnest such a feat as for the chosen few of us begins tomorrow.
The expedition, once it does begin, is certain to fail. My goal, which I have not disclosed to the backers of the expedition or the crew, is that we will learn enough this time that the failure of the next expedition will be slightly less than certain. That is how the poles will be achieved, by a succession of enlightening, educative failures. But that is not what people want to hear. It is not what the backers want to hear. The backers. This is my second time as commander of an expedition and already I am sick of them. Rich men and women pay me for naming something I discover after them, some island, cape or bay, which on maps now bears their name. The more money someone gives me, the more prominent is the landmark I name for him. Millionaires pay me to take their sons with me on my expeditions so that I can mould them into men.
I have been named co-commander of this expedition to the South Pole. What a waste of time it seems, to be trying for the South Pole, to be headed for the Antarctic instead of the Arctic, where I have been so many times before and which I know so much more about. It is the North Pole I want—”the top of the world, not the bottom,” as Peary once put it.
But I must try to focus my mind. I can learn much from this expedition that I can put to use in the Arctic. The North Pole will be reached. It will not take forever. I believe it will happen before I am too old for leading expeditions. And I believe no man alive is more likely to get there first than me.
When there is light enough, I read The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, my copy of which is held together with surgeon’s plaster. The Rubáiyát. Not exactly an antidote to Antarctic gloom! “In the fires of spring, your winter garment of repentance fling!” I speak that line over and over in my head. What it means in the context of the poem no longer matters. How I long, as I trudge across the ice, weighted down by my winter garments of repentance, to fling them off and feel warmth from a source outside my body.
At night, there is something about the air, the water, the ice, the land that fixes my attention and makes it impossible for me to sleep. To see the night sky, I have taken to lying on the ice some distance from our tents in my sleeping bag. At first, my teeth chatter, every muscle in my body quivers. I want the heat to leave my body faster and thereby faster warm the air inside the bag. I close the bag until all that remains open is a kind of blow-hole, a slit through which I can breathe and see the stars. Others watching from their tents say that in the moonlight, they can see my breath spouting up at intervals. They think me strange and wonder how it is that I can stand the cold, why it is that, although I have to myself the largest sleeping quarters, I come out here every night like a child on a camping trip. They would not tolerate my oddness if I was not in charge. There is no wind, no sound but that of the snow that crunches loudly underneath me when I move. I am glad I cannot sleep, much prefer this silence to the clamour of my dreams.
My dearest Devlin, such is the nature of polar exploration that I have no idea when you will hear from me again. I hope that you will think of me and in your prayers remember me. I bid you goodbye for now.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
August 17, 1898
Moses Prowdy had told me, and Aunt Daphne had confirmed, that my father’s ships had sometimes made port in St. John’s, my father declining to contact us despite his close proximity. I wondered if Dr. Cook had been in St. John’s since the North Greenland expedition, since finding out that he was my father. By checking back issues of newspapers in the library, I was able to determine that he had not been, that he had not gone north since the Greenland expedition. Perhaps for reasons having to do with more than just the whims of “the backers.” Once he turned his attentions back to the North Pole, his ships might stop off in St. John’s. Would he want to see me, arrange some sort of meeting? Or would he avoid me as my father had done? I was old enough now to seek him out should a ship of his make port. A chance for us to meet, though he had said nothing about it in his letters. Since he did not want anyone to know that he was writing to me, he would not want a public encounter with me. But I vowed that if he ever stopped off at St. John’s, I would find a way to introduce myself to him, or at the very least set eyes on him without giving anything away.
I decided to find out as much as I could about Dr. Cook, to piece together a version of his life from the books he wrote and the magazines and newspapers that carried accounts of his expeditions. But it was impossible to do so. As he had been forbidden to write or give interviews about expeditions that were led by other men, there was not much to read about him from his early days of exploration.
He had published, as per his agreement with expedition commanders like Lt. Robert Peary, articles only in scholarly journals that paid him nothing and were read by no one but the handful of doctors who believed the cause of medicine could be advanced through polar exploration. These included “The Most Northern Tribe on Earth,” New York Medical Examiner, 1893; “Peculiar Customs regarding Disease, Death and Grief of the Most Northern Eskimo,” To-Day, June 1894; “Gynecology and Obstetrics among the Eskimos,” The Brooklyn Medical Journal, 1894; “Some Physical Effects of Arctic Cold, Darkness and Light,” The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1897. “The Aurora Borealis as Observed from the Kite“ was a clinical, twelve-page description of the northern lights. I read all these, unable to understand most of them, searching for the rare, brief anecdotes and impressions he allowed himself. But nothing of the Dr. Cook of his letters to me could be found.