THE BELGICA was six months overdue. I HAD BEEN FRETFUL long before I had reason to be, and now I had good reason. There was speculation in the papers that she had ventured too far south and, before she could make it back, the ice had closed in behind her. Unless her wooden hull could withstand the compression of the ice, she would be crushed and all aboard her lost. Doom-dreams woke me in the middle of the night. I read again Dr. Cook’s report on the inscrutable disappearance of Francis Stead on the North Greenland expedition. Francis Stead, whose body had never been recovered and must even now be wedged in the fissure of some glacier, looking not much different than it did the night he fell. I read, over and over, Dr. Cook’s letters to me. If not for having my copies of his letters to look at, I might have stopped believing he had ever written to me. It sometimes felt as if all that stood between him and obliteration was me. As if, as long as I kept him in mind—read his letters, tried to summon up an image of him as, at this or that moment, he might really be—he at least had a chance of making his way back from that other world to this one. But if I was not vigilant, if I let long spells of time go by without paying him the slightest thought, he would be lost.
I did not know, could not have endured knowing, what the waiting would be like. I took from the library and read Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations in which explorers were referred to as “navigators”; I read Dr. Elisha Kent Kane’s book Arctic Explorations. It was an account of life on board a ship that was frozen in for months in the Arctic at Smith Sound. A ship that returned long after it was written off as lost. I looked for other such books, tales of ships long thought to be sunk and men long thought to be dead returning to the world. I stumbled upon one about the men of the Greely expedition, shipwrecked at Cape Sabine, who were rumoured to have eaten their own dead to keep from starving. Though Greely denied the rumours, it was now commonly believed that they were true. I read about the Franklin expedition, which was lost without a trace and had itself become the quest of other doomed expeditions.
Surely Dr. Cook and I had not found each other after so long only for him to disappear so soon. Every morning, I waited eagerly for Uncle Edward to come downstairs, hoping to see the red handkerchief protruding from his pocket, unable to help hoping, though I knew it was pointless, knew it would be in the papers, not in a letter from him, that I would first hear of Dr. Cook’s return.
I wondered what Uncle Edward was thinking, wondered if he, too, was scanning the papers for news of the Antarctic expedition. If he knew how long the Belgica was overdue. Perhaps what I was dreading he was hoping for: that the world would never hear from Dr. Cook again.
In time, the Belgica was so long overdue that it was assumed by even the most optimistic that some misfortune had befallen her.
I all but resigned myself to Dr. Cook’s having perished in his bid for the South Pole. There were fewer stories, fewer updates in the papers stating when the ship was supposed to have returned and made port in Patagonia.
Then one morning, thumbing through the first of the papers after Uncle Edward was done with it, I saw the headline: “BELGICA RETURNS SAFELY.” And a subheadline: “All Crew Survives But One.” All but one. I scanned the story for the name of Dr. Cook, and unable to find it, I read more slowly. After having spent thirteen months trapped in the southern ice, the Belgica had turned up at Punta Arenas on March 28, 1899. The member of the crew who had died was a Lt. Emile Danco. No mention was made of Dr. Cook.
I was now less concerned for his safety than I had been when the ship was missing, but I was still uncertain, still unwilling to tempt fate by presuming he was safe. The first stories about returning expeditions were often inaccurate.
Finally, a month after the first press reports, Uncle Edward came downstairs for breakfast sporting the now somewhat faded red handkerchief. A letter had arrived for me from Dr. Cook.
I might have had the last one from him only the day before, to look at Uncle Edward. I saw nothing in his face, neither disappointment nor relief, nor any indication that this day was in any way remarkable. Uncle Edward had as good as come downstairs proclaiming, “Dr. Cook is alive and well,” yet he did not so much as glance at me. I looked at the handkerchief, looked and looked at it, afraid to look away in case, when I looked back, it would be gone. I was for a moment certain I would cry, but the urge to do so was succeeded by a wave of elation that made me let loose with a laugh that Uncle Edward pretended not to notice.
“What’s so funny, Devvie?” Aunt Daphne said.
“Nothing,” I said, and obviously tickled to see me in such good spirits, she did not pursue the matter.
My dearest Devlin:
You have grown to near manhood since I wrote you last. No doubt you have read much about my expedition in the papers. I hope you did not fret too much for my safety; on the other hand, I would hate to think that over the course of my long silence, you lost interest in my fate. I fear it may be impossible to rejoin a world that has for so long been reconciled to my extinction.
We accomplished nothing really except a farthest south. We may or may not have set foot on the Antarctic continent. No one seems to know or care.
I would have written to you sooner except that, in Montevideo, I found waiting for me a letter informing me that my beloved Anna had, during my absence, passed away. I am told that for a while after my departure for the pole, she seemed to be recovering, but once the press reports began, with the speculations that the Belgica and all its crew were lost, she suffered a relapse and slowly succumbed to an illness that was more sinister than the specialists who examined her before I left New York had led me to believe. I have been fighting the double demons of guilt and sorrow since hearing the sad news of her passing.
I will write you again when these afflictions do not press so heavily upon my heart.
Yours truly,
Dr. F.A. Cook
April 15, 1899
“My beloved Anna.” He had mentioned his fiancée in previous letters, but I had not thought of her, this kindred soul who, a thousand miles away, had been suffering the same ordeal as I was and had died unaware of my existence. How well I could picture the course of her decline.
Before I heard from him again, he published an account of the Belgica expedition in the New York Herald. I read it with great interest, but the photographs he published in a series of articles in Century magazine affected me even more. Each month, I borrowed Century from the public library and smuggled it into the house beneath my coat. I wasn’t sure what Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne would do if they saw me with it. I doubted that Uncle Edward would take it from me, but I didn’t want my reading of it to be prefaced by anything he said.
Dr. Cook dedicated the articles to the memory of Francis Stead, the “resourceful, patient, kind and reflective Dr. Stead, to whose courage and ingenuity the surviving members of the North Greenland expedition, myself included, owe their lives.” He said that had Francis Stead lived, he would one day have taken his place among the great explorers of the world, “although I can think of no man to whom self-glorification mattered less, no explorer whose motives were more pure than Dr. Stead’s. He laboured in the service of mankind, his goal the furtherance of human knowledge. For him, as for all explorers worthy of the name, exploration was not a contest but a calling.”
I fastened on this description of Francis Stead’s character. No one, not even Dr. Cook in his letters to me, not even my mother or Uncle Edward in his excoriations, had ever described him at such length. The dedication and description were no doubt inspired in part by guilt, and were perhaps written in the knowledge, or with the possibility in mind, that I would read them.
The Century articles were less interesting than the photographs. They were written in the tone of adventure stories. “Dr. Cook confronts perils of the Arctic and survives!” read the subheadline to one story, whose headline read, “STRANDED.” The articles were nothing like his letters, and it occurred to me that the former might have been ghost-written.
In a future letter to me, Dr. Cook would say this of the photographs:
“How often I told myself that if we did not survive, the photographs I took would be our legacy. I remember thinking, What a pity if by the time they are found, they are spoiled, or are spoiled by some well-intended fool before they make it home. I wrote a letter for whomever might have happened on the ship after we were gone, instructing him on the importance of the photographs and their proper care. My main concern, of course, was for the welfare of the crew, but I could do little more for them than they could do for me. I stayed on deck or on the ice all day exposing plates. One hundred of them. With the poison we had planned to use to kill animals for specimens, I made prussic acid, which passed for a fixing agent when my hypo ran out. Needless to say, I had the darkroom to myself. To think that, out there in the Antarctic, my life was never more at risk than when I was at my photographs!”
According to the credits, all the photographs had been taken by Dr. Cook. Polar bears, penguins. One of the ice-bound Belgica looking almost haloed in the moonlight, its masts, spars, rigging, furled sails and lifeboats rimed with frost. Three crew members, two of whom, according to the caption, “hailed from Newfoundland,” looking cheerful despite their thirteen-month confinement in the ice. There was one photograph of the burial in a trench of ice of Lt. Emile Danco, who, in spite of Dr. Cook’s ministrations, had died from pneumonia.
By far the most interesting of the photographs were those of Dr. Cook—that is, those he had taken of himself. I had seen photographs of him before in newspapers, but none like these.
There were six photographs, each titled “Dr. Cook, self-portrait.” It seemed somehow apt that he should have no one to take his picture but himself. To me, it was the measure of his solitude, the loneliness of the life he led. Who better to photograph a man who, having gone for so long without friendship, had written as he had to a sixteen-year-old he had never met?
He always photographed himself in profile, always from the right, never, except in one case, looking at the camera, seeming not to know that it was there as he stared off at some point outside the frame. This illusion was subverted by the caption, “self-portrait,” and by the high quality of the photograph, evidence of the effort he had put into it, into making himself seem disdainful of the camera. The amount of contrivance that had gone into making the photograph seem uncontrived.
I tried to imagine him out there in the Antarctic, setting up his camera on its tripod, looking to an observer as if he was preparing to photograph whatever the lens was pointed at, then coming out from beneath the blanket to assume his position in front of the camera, composing his expression, clicking the button on the shutter release that was attached by a cord to the camera. He could not have been satisfied with just one try. He could not have been sure that in one try, or even in ten, he would get a photograph that he liked or would survive the journey home. Click after click of the button, puff after puff of smoke, slide after slide of magnesium igniting, the polar white for an instant becoming whiter with an incandescence that in the photographs was reflected in his eyes. Dr. Cook, posing for hours, engrossed in self-commemoration in the middle of the Antarctic, watched from afar by his subordinates, who, while he was thus engaged, went about some tedious tasks he had assigned them. Self-portrait. Another way of saying that in every one of these pictures, in his right hand, which is always out of frame, he holds the shutter release.
I could manage no suspension of disbelief when I looked at those photographs, could not help seeing the out-of-frame camera or the shutter release in his unseen hand.
“Self-portrait, 1898.” Glass-plate negative, the method used in studio portraits—a studio being the only place other explorers would have their portraits taken, for in a portrait one is meant to look one’s polished best. Like Peary, who in his portraits always looked so forthright, so earnest, so unashamed of wanting to create a good impression. But not Dr. Cook. In one photograph he faced away from the camera, almost at a right angle, turned just enough towards it that both eyes were in the picture, the far one hardly more than a glint of light on the bridge of his nose, the near one partially obscured by a lock of hair he could not have bothered brushing back. He looked as though no one would see the photographs but him, as if the camera was a means of self-examination, as if his intention was to produce a picture of himself that he could study in detachment, pore over to see what this individual could tell him of his species.
None of the photographs showed enough of his surroundings to give a sense of context. Some snow on a rock behind him, over his shoulder a glimpse of what only someone who knew the circumstances of the photograph would recognize as cloud or ice. One photo of him indoors, in profile to a bare wall. Another, captioned “Cook the photographer, by Dr. Cook,” must have been a photograph of his reflection in a mirror, taken so close to the mirror you could not see any of its border, Dr. Cook holding in his hands a large box camera and smiling: a photograph of a man staring into his own eyes. A clever trick. And perhaps, therefore, that smile.
The only hint to the uninformed of what was taking place when these photographs were snapped was his dishevelment: his long hair, uneven beard, sunken eyes, gaunt complexion; the frayed edges of his coat and shirt. He looked resigned to the fact that by the time the world saw these images of him, he would be no more.
I scrutinized Dr. Cook’s face in the photographs, searching for ways that he resembled me. I stood in front of a mirror that hung on the wall of my bedroom and compared my face to the face in one of the photographs from Century, which I had pasted on the glass (and which I took down afterwards so that no one else would see it). I looked at my reflected face. I looked at Dr. Cook’s face. I felt foolish. The mirror was no help. I had fancied that, using it, I would be able to see both of our images at once, but the only way to see Dr. Cook’s was to look away from mine and vice versa. I had never examined my face in this manner before, assessing every feature, staring into my own eyes. I felt self-conscious and at a disadvantage to Dr. Cook in his time-stopped, static world, his face composed, frozen, while mine changed from one moment to the next. It was not until I placed a recent photograph of myself beside the photographs of him that I was able to make a proper comparison, though still I did not find what I was hoping for. We did not look completely unalike, but nor was there an unmistakable resemblance.
I took from my bureau drawer a photograph of Francis Stead that I had cut from the newspaper, the photograph that had run with the story of his disappearance. I placed the three photographs side by side on my dresser. I looked as much like Francis Stead as I did like Dr. Cook. Or rather, I bore no particular resemblance to either. I placed a photograph of my mother (“Amelia, the wicked one”) in between those of my father and Dr. Cook, and the one of me directly below hers. My mother with Dr. Stead on one side and Dr. Cook on the other. (I did not, it seemed to me, even resemble my mother. I hoped this meant that in other, less superficial ways, we were also unalike.) Judging by how old she looked, the photograph must have been taken just before or just after her trip to New York, on one side or the other of her meeting with Dr. Cook.
I tried to imagine a blending of my mother’s features with those of Dr. Cook, but I could not. They were of opposite physical types, she delicate and small-boned to the point of near translucency, while he was generally large-featured. His hair was straight but thick, his forehead high. He had full lips, sharp cheekbones and a nose that looked thinner in profile than it did from the front. He had let his hair grow long on the expedition, though it looked as if he had washed and brushed it frequently. His beard was unkempt, but affectedly so, as if he was cultivating a certain look, as if he did not trust being an explorer to make him look like one.
Perhaps, when I was older, I would look more like Dr. Cook, I thought, until I realized that no one who did not have eyes like his could ever really look like him.
Though he almost never looked at the camera, the first thing I noticed in all the photographs were his eyes. Whether he was at the centre of the photograph or just within the frame—if his face made up the entire photograph or just a fraction of it—my eyes went instantly to his and would have, I was certain, even if I had never heard of him before. However much my face changed as I matured, I would never have eyes like his. It was partly because of their shape: the whites were so large that the asymmetric lids did not reach the irises, either above or below, so the irises were wholly visible. But there was something else about them, an impression they conveyed for which I could find no words.