My dearest Devlin:
In my second letter to you, I spoke of redressing the harm I have done. What, if these letters are the first step on the path to atonement, is to be the second step?
I decided, during my long confinement in the Antarctic, that I owe you nothing less than to be your father. I also decided that a public acknowledgment of my patrimony would be folly for both of us, not only for the reasons I set forth in my first letter, but because it would deprive me of my most valued possession, and therefore would prevent me from giving or leaving it to you.
I am an explorer. Before all else—doctor, brother, husband (should it be God’s will that I become one)—but excepting father, I am an explorer. What greater thing, therefore, can I offer than to make you one? What greater thing can I offer you but my vocation?
When you are old enough, and strong enough, will you go with me on my expeditions? It would mean a great deal to me, more than you can possibly imagine, if one day you said yes.
As I wrote to you before, I have often taken the sons of rich men with me on my journeys to the Arctic. They think that by sailing to the North with Dr. Cook, they make their passage into manhood. At the same time, I am under instruction from their fee-paying fathers to satisfy their every need and make sure they endure just enough hardship to convince them that they are having an “adventure.” A trip north with me has been the graduation present of many a student from Harvard and Yale.
I mention these young men only to allay any concerns you may have about your lack of experience in Arctic travel. I am quite adept at taking young men to the Arctic and bringing them back home alive and well again. With the Arctic, as with all things, there has to be a first time. Even to those of us who know it best, it was once unknown.
It must seem strange to you, my extending this invitation, in light of what happened to Francis Stead and the part in it that, however inadvertently, I played.
I must confess that it is not only by way of discharging my debt to you, not only so that, as father and son, we might assay a common goal, that I am making this request. Nor am I unaware of how presumptuous it is of me to ask that you commit to such an undertaking with a man whose hand you have yet to shake, whose face in the real light of existence you have yet to see, who has forbidden you to write to him.
If you were to join me on my expeditions, I would make you my protégé. And if, under any circumstances, it becomes apparent that I will never realize my life’s ambition, you, my son, if by then you felt I had prepared you well enough, could take up my quest.
I have felt more oppressively than ever lately, in the wake of the Antarctic expedition, what the Eskimos call piblocto, the weight of the world, pressing down upon me. The strain of standing alone beneath that weight, supporting it without even the hope of being relieved of it at some point in the future now seems more than I can bear. Often, during the long wait in the Antarctic for a deliverance that for all I knew might never come, I thought of you, took solace in knowing that even if I died, I would leave behind a son who might himself have sons and daughters. I thought of my first wife, Libby, and our unnamed baby girl, and of how, when Francis Stead told me that the boy whom all the world thought was his was really mine, it seemed that both of my lost children had been restored to me.
Not even if he had sons old enough to play the part could Robert Peary see the point of protégés. The only success that will please Peary is his own. But I, too, it seems, am trapped. No one but you can free me from the isolation of ambition. Nor would renouncing my ambition free me, even if I could renounce it, for I believe that I was called to my vocation as priests and ministers are called to theirs. I believe that, as I once wrote of Francis Stead, I labour not only for myself, but in the service of mankind.
It may seem to you that there are any number of young men who would be willing to pledge themselves to me—men in their twenties who, unlike you, are now old enough to go with me on my expeditions; men I could now be tutoring instead of waiting for you to come of age, thus increasing the likelihood that I or someone of my tutelage will gain the prize. But none of them is my son.
You are only twenty years old. It may be that you are too young to understand the implications of saying yes or no. For yourself and for me. It would not be fair to exact from you a promise that years from now you might regret but would hold yourself to anyway because you gave your word.
You could say no and think that your doing so was the cause of some misfortune I might suffer in the years to come, some mishap in the Arctic that, if not for my preoccupying doubt, would not have happened.
So let me be clear about what it is that I am asking of you. First, any feelings of guilt on your part would be unwarranted. You should not accept my invitation out of fear of what will happen to me if you do not. I have described my condition only so that you could better understand my nature, not to extort from you the answer that would please me most.
I am sure that your aunt and uncle, for obvious reasons, would not want you to take up exploration. Weighed against the consideration of whatever distress you might cause them are things for which I and no man I have ever met can find the words.
One either feels in one’s heart and in one’s soul a desire for the sort of life I lead or one does not. It is my hope that you do. If you do, if, as I suspect, the lure of the Old Ice runs as surely in your blood as it does in mine, no litany of the hazards you would face would deter you. If I am wrong and you do not feel as I do, then such a litany would likewise be unnecessary.
But you are young. And therefore, the only answer that I will not accept, at least not now, is yes. You may tell me no, or you may tell me perhaps, but you may not tell me yes. (Write your answer on this envelope and leave it for your uncle Edward as you did with the other letters I sent you.) If your answer is perhaps, then we will leave it so until you are old enough to fully understand what saying yes or no might mean. If your answer is no, I will understand and will make no further efforts to convince you. But I will go on writing to you.
If, by the time you are old enough to travel in the Arctic, I have not reached the pole, I will take you with me and teach you everything I know, things that fewer than half a dozen men alive could teach you.
And if, at some point, I am forced to renounce exploration, I would not be sorry if you attained the pole instead of me.
If, with my help, you reach the pole first, I will have ensured that no man who does not deserve it wins the prize.
Dr. Frederick Cook
April 19, 1900
He had forbidden me to tell him yes? “YES,” I wished I could have written in large letters on the envelope. What would he do if I wrote “Yes”? Would it please him or make him wonder if I was so excitable that he could not count on me to be discreet? I wrote “Maybe,” wishing more fervently than I ever had before that I could write to him directly and tell him that any time he said the word, I would follow his instructions, whatever they might be. Next week, next month.
I felt no apprehension at the prospect of exploration. On the contrary, it was life as I would live it unless I went exploring that I dreaded, a life like Uncle Edward’s. To become a man who could take no joy in being married to such a woman as Aunt Daphne, that was what I dreaded.
Exploration. How appealing, in spite of all its dangers and its desolation, in spite of Francis Stead, it seemed to me. There was a lesson to be learned from the life of Francis Stead. It was not because of the rigours of life in the Arctic that he had walked out across the glacier that night. It was the rigours of the life he could not put behind him that made him do it. From the life and death of my mother, too, there was something, if not to be learned, then at least to be remembered: it was not because her husband took up exploration that she died.
To Dr. Cook and all others who wrote about it, no greater life could be imagined than that of an explorer. I was certain that the hardships and risks involved in it would not deter me. I would much rather have been on board the Belgica for thirteen months with him than home here fretting for the safety of a man I’d never met.
It didn’t matter that nothing in my life so far had prepared me for polar exploration, that I had yet to set foot on a boat or fire a gun or sleep outdoors. It didn’t matter that I had never seen a dog sled, let alone a team of dogs. Expeditionaries relied on their crews, their ships’ captains, their manservants, their native guides to perform the thankless task of keeping them safe so they could make their bids for glory.
How different was my upbringing from Dr. Cook’s, of whom I was half composed; he was a city man, as most explorers were, who, relatively speaking, came late to exploration. As Dr. Cook had learned from men like Peary, I would learn from Dr. Cook. “Even to those of us who know it best, it was once unknown.”
The wisdom, the reflectiveness, his sceptical but sympathetic view of life as it was lived in cities, the desire to accomplish something he would be remembered for and thereby set himself apart from the common run of men, but only if that something was truly worthwhile—all these qualities, I felt certain, he had acquired or refined since he took up exploration. “Whoever reaches the pole first will do so in the name of humankind, cause a worldwide enlivenment of spirit, wonder, awe and fellowship,” he had written in a magazine article. I had believed it when I read it, but not like I believed it now.
“Will you go with me on my expeditions?” The instant I read those words, it seemed to me that I had been waiting for that invitation all my life, hoping for it. As Dr. Cook on the ice-trapped ship had awaited his deliverance, not knowing when or if it would ever come, so had I been waiting. I believed that I had as much cause as anyone to be sceptical of civilization. At the same time, I did not wish to renounce it altogether.
Civilization. Except by becoming an explorer or by doing what my mother had, one could not escape from it. Exploration was certainly the only escape that did not involve surrender or retreat. Men who simply ran away and spent their lives in service to a succession of masters accomplished nothing.
He had said nothing to me of how our association would come about, what we would tell others of how we came to be associates, what reasons he would give the public for conferring upon me, a stranger, an honour that many young men of his acquaintance would have eagerly accepted.
Most important, he had said nothing to me of when he would send for me, of how, without ever having met me, he would deem me “old enough and strong enough” for exploration. I was still drifting like the Belgica in the pack ice, still waiting for my deliverance, which though it seemed assured now, might not seem so six months or a year from now.