WE SET SAIL FROM GLOUCESTER ON JULY 3, 1907, DR. COOK having said his goodbyes to Marie and the children in New York. I said goodbye to Kristine while walking with her in Prospect Park, where she had agreed to meet with me when I told her I was going north again. It was the first such meeting we had ever had. “I wish you weren’t going,” she said after we had walked in silence for some time and had doubled back to our el train station, where she would go one way and I the other. She kissed me so quickly on the lips there was no time to kiss her back. “There,” she said. “Don’t say goodbye.” She ran up the stairs to her station platform.
Dr. Cook had arranged for four months’ supply of food, plus another year’s allowance in case of stranding or shipwreck. He ordered five thousand gallons of gasoline. He issued all the orders for equipment, overseeing everything down to the smallest detail.
We were not a week gone when I was wishing that I could go to sleep and wake up to find that two months had passed and we were headed home again, home to Kristine. I wished this was a polar expedition, the expedition on which he had years ago invited me to join him.
When the hunting trip was almost over, Dr. Cook gave to Bradley a letter for Mrs. Cook, which she would receive in about a month, and which, by way of breaking the news to me, he let me read.
I have wonderful news, though I fear that it may be some time before you are able to fully share in my excitement. I find that I have here a good opportunity to try for the North Pole and therefore plan to stay here for the year.
She would be unable to believe what she had read. I sat down and read it again, and still could not believe it. I had thought we were leaving for home in a week. I had been looking forward to it, but I was anything but disappointed now. We were trying for the pole. Not next year. This year, just as in my pipe dreams I had hoped. I hugged Dr. Cook, who laughed and clapped me on the back with both hands.
I have never known the game to be more plentiful. The Eskimos tell me it has been the best hunting season that even the oldest of them can remember. They predict that next year will not be nearly so good. They also predict that once the Arctic night has passed, conditions for travelling by dogs and sled will be ideal. If we winter here, with so much fresh meat to sustain us, I think we will be strong enough when the sun comes back to make it to the pole.
I know how surprised and disappointed you must be. But the opportunity is here, and I feel that I must take it. The conditions may never be more favourable. I will not be alone. Devlin is with me. It is important that you tell Bridgman as soon as possible that I am trying for the pole before he hears it unofficially from Bradley or one of the others. The news will cause quite a stir. I hope that whatever animus you hold against me now as you read these words will pass, and that you will do what you can on your end to help me. Please assure everyone that I left Gloucester with the intention of returning to Brooklyn in September and decided to try for the pole only because of how unforeseeably favourable to success I found all things to be in Greenland.
Please do not think badly of me. I know that if you think things through with an open heart, you will see that this is something I must do. Kiss Helen and Ruth for me.
Your loving husband,
Frederick
The young man who on the voyage had served as our cook, a German from Brooklyn named Rudolph Franke, accepted Dr. Cook’s invitation to join us on the expedition.
I wrote and gave to Bradley a short letter for Aunt Daphne, telling her that our plans had changed, that we were trying for the pole and would be away for longer than the expected four months. I also gave him one for Kristine. “I think constantly of you,” I wrote. “Perhaps I ought not to say so for the first time in a letter, but I love you.”
A few days before the ship departed, Dr. Cook, impressing upon me the need to be discreet, admitted that he and Bradley had been preparing for a polar expedition since long before the ship left Gloucester.
“Bradley agreed to back the expedition the day we met,” said Dr. Cook.
They had been partway through their lunch, Dr. Cook said, when he put down his knife and fork. “Why not try for the pole?” he asked Bradley. “It would cost only eight or ten thousand dollars more than you plan to spend.”
“Not I,” Bradley said. “Would you like to try for it yourself?”
Dr. Cook said he did not know which surprised him more, hearing himself blurt out the question or receiving Bradley’s instant agreement to back an expedition.
“We’ll fit you for the pole,” Bradley told him, “but we’ll say nothing to anyone about it. We don’t want the papers getting at it. Peary is waiting to go. We don’t want him to get to Etah first and take all the best dogs for himself. And I want to shoot on the way up, so I don’t want to be in a hurry. Look at it this way. If we get to Etah and the Eskimos are sick or there aren’t enough dogs or something else is wrong, we can say it was just a hunting trip and come back home.”
Dr. Cook said that Bradley wrote him out a cheque on the spot for ten thousand dollars. “This is for the pole,” he said, handing it to Dr. Cook. Then he wrote out another, larger cheque. “And this is for my part of the expedition.”
Bradley asked him about Mrs. Cook, and about me.
“I will put off telling them the truth for as long as possible,” Dr. Cook said. “After all, we may not try for the pole, in which case all my wife’s worry will have been unnecessary. It is a harmless lie that may spare her a few months of fretting and Devlin some disappointment.”
“Get there and get back,” Bradley said just as the ship left with its cargo of furs and tusks. Bradley, his hands on Dr. Cook’s shoulders, winked at me.
Bradley’s demeanour made Dr. Cook’s bid for the pole sound like a shady business venture from which, though Dr. Cook would take the risks, Bradley hoped to profit. In this, he was not unlike any backer of a polar expedition. Something about him, however, about the way he kept looking appraisingly at both of us, unsettled me.
“You might make it. Who knows,” Bradley said, laughing, as if he had bought a lottery ticket in aid of some worthwhile but amusing cause.
“How does Dr. Cook plan to make it to the pole without proper equipment or a ship?” Captain Bartlett asked me, having failed, he said, to get a satisfactory answer from Dr. Cook. I told him that I did not know what Dr. Cook’s strategy was.
“Even though your life depends on him?” said Captain Bartlett.
“I’m sure he knows what he is doing,” I said.
“No one starts for the pole from this far south in Greenland,” Captain Bartlett said. “Your ship should take you hundreds of miles north of Etah before it turns back. Dr. Cook will have to sledge all those extra hundreds of miles. It makes no sense. It can’t be done.”
As to whether our base camp was too far south, I could not say, but I knew that we were not, as was commonly believed among the crew of the Bradley, ill-equipped, for Bradley had left us with what Dr. Cook described as everything we would need to make it to the pole and back. When Bradley and the crew went up Smith Sound to the walrus grounds one day, Dr. Cook, Franke and I had unloaded a large amount of equipment and supplies that had been secretly put on board the Bradley in Gloucester, including several sledges of Dr. Cook’s design, as well as several compasses, a sextant, a thermometer, a pedometer that measured distance covered on foot, a chronometer, an anemometer for windspeed, an aneroid barometer for air pressure and altitude.
I stood with Franke and Dr. Cook on the beach, watching as first the ship itself and then the Bradley’s sails passed from sight.
I had been eager to be rid of the captain and Bradley and the others. But how strange the place seemed once they were gone. How different the beach at Etah seemed in the absence of Peary, without his tent at the far end, near the cliff. I had never seen the harbour at Etah empty of a ship before. There were not even kayaks on the shore, for the Eskimos carried them up to the hill at the end of every day.
It felt as though a ship at anchor was some natural object whose disappearance was a harbinger of winter. Already, though the ship was barely gone, I felt marooned. Before, it had seemed that all that separated me from home was time and space. But now it seemed that nothing led from here to there.
The harbour and the hills were exactly as they had been when we were here before to rescue Peary, exactly as they had been since then, in our absence. This should not have seemed odd, and yet it did. I felt as fixed here as they were. It was a curiously oppressive feeling, especially with what Dr. Cook called the “real” weather already setting in.
I looked at the tupiks and the Eskimos on the hill for reassurance. They were proof that winter in the Arctic was survivable. How unconcerned the Eskimos seemed, preparing in a cheerful frenzy for a winter that they knew would be like all the other winters they had made it through.
But I did not feel reassured. It was the long night that I dreaded most.
The Eskimos were refurbishing underground stone igloos that were decades old, but we would be spending the winter in a Redcliffe House–like dwelling. The box house, we called it.
We used the packing boxes that had carried our supplies to make walls that enclosed a thirteen-by-sixteen-foot space. We used the lids of the boxes for roof shingles and insulated everything with turf. A middle post supported the roof, and around that we built a table.
During the eight days it took to build the house, our supplies lay nearby, covered with the old sails that had been flying from the Bradley when Dr. Cook bought her in Gloucester. We installed a small stove, which without almost constant tending would go out.
Dr. Cook said he could think of no reason why, if all went well, we would not be back in Brooklyn by the end of next summer. We would be gone fifteen months at the most, he said, assuring me that we would not hang on pointlessly for years on end like Peary. We would try once, and if we did not reach the pole, we would go back home. And when we were ready, we would try again. There was no point attempting to convalesce up north.
My first night in the box house, I lay awake in my sleeping bag, trying to imagine the coming months. As a child, I had read every account of Arctic travel that I could get my hands on. But almost all were written in a flat, laconic style, as if to vividly depict either beauty or hardship would somehow contravene the explorer’s code.
What the chances of success were of this suddenly hatched plan to try for the pole I had no way of knowing. I had only the vaguest notion of what Dr. Cook meant when he spoke of the “unforeseeably favourable conditions.”
It was our good fortune, he told me, that these “conditions,” really did exist, though it was not, as he had led his wife to believe, because of them that we had stayed behind, which I was glad of, for I could not help thinking that a hunting trip that by sheer fluke had become a polar expedition could only have failed.