• CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN •

WE MADE PORT AT COPENHAGEN, SUDDENLY AWARE OF WHAT A sight we were. Dr. Cook and I were wearing the ragged skins of seven different kinds of animals. At quayside, the crown prince of Denmark shook our hands and doffed his hat to us. They had cleaned us up some on the ship. The day before, I had had hair down to my shoulders, as had Dr. Cook. I had been filthy for so long that no amount of soap and water could restore my complexion to normal. But no one seemed to mind.

Thousands of people had come out to get a look at us. No one knew just what sort of tribute was appropriate. Some sang the Danish anthem, some the American. We were introduced to clergymen who seemed as mystified as we were as to why their presence had been called for. By the end of the day, our hands had become so raw from being shaken that to shake them was forbidden, to remind people of which we wore gloves indoors and out.

How anomalous, how tenuous Copenhagen seemed in comparison with the vast emptiness we had travelled through to get there. It seemed to me that everyone in Copenhagen lived in denial or ignorance of the great darkness that contained them as surely as the sea contains a sunken ship. Buildings, bridges, horse-drawn cabs and motor cars, electric lights—all seemed inconsequential.

Though much was made of Dr. Cook’s having ushered me ahead of him at the last moment so that I could be the first to reach the pole, it was seen as a purely symbolic gesture. The expedition had been his. As one of the Copenhagen papers put it: “Dr. Cook generously allowed his fledgling protégé to walk the last few feet to the precious spot. So although we say hurray for Mr. Stead, it is Dr. Cook whom we honour as the first man to reach the pole.”

For a while, Dr. Cook revelled in how eager people would be from then on to take advantage of us, in how much money we had already been offered. From Hampton’s magazine, Dr. Cook accepted an offer of thirty thousand dollars for exclusive story rights, despite the objections of those who assured him he could get ten times that. From Frederic Thompson, the lecture-circuit promoter, $250,000 for 250 lectures. Harper and Brothers would soon make a bid for book rights.

We spent three weeks in Copenhagen at the Hotel Phoenix, where crowds gathered all night in the rain beneath the windows of our rooms, exhorting us to show ourselves, which we did from time to time to much cheering and applause. We stayed in adjoining suites and took turns going to the windows, going together only once or twice, which brought the loudest cheers from the crowds. “Cook and Stead, Cook and Stead,” they chanted.

After we were installed in our hotel by government officials, who assured us that all our expenses would be taken care of, my first thought was of food. I all but fainted just reading the room-service menu and would have gorged myself had Dr. Cook not warned me against it, explaining that I would be sick if I ate any amount of anything, so shrunken was my stomach, and especially sick if I ate rich food, to which my body would react as if it were poison.

Everywhere we walked in Copenhagen, beautiful young women followed us. Once, as we disembarked from a cab, a group of them showered us with flowers, then began to hug and kiss us. They ran after the vehicles in which we travelled through the streets, shouting, “Ve looff you, Dr. Cook and Mr. Stead.”

At first, we were repulsed by all the luxury after so many months of deprivation (to which we had become so accustomed that we could not get to sleep except by stretching out on the floor beside our beds). It took me two weeks to wean myself from the floor and fall asleep atop a mattress.

We visited Bernstoff Castle, where we had tea with Princess Marie of Denmark and the visiting Princess George of Greece. Both the princesses spoke fluent, if heavily accented, English, as did most of the people in whose houses we were guests.

How strange it seemed, after two and a half years away from civilization, to return to it and find that everyone’s first language was one I did not understand, as if this were the measure of how long we had been away. The language of the Eskimos had not made me feel as incongruous as the language of the Danes did.

I was surprised that, although from a distance they looked just like the ones back home, I could not read a word of the newspapers. Everything seemed familiar but skewed, slightly off, as if my ordeal had altered my perceptions, as if in time the gibberish written and spoken everywhere in Copenhagen would resolve back into English, the streets and buildings would resume their former shapes, and people would once again wear what they had worn and look as they had looked when I saw them last.

I went about the city in a daze with Dr. Cook, walked with him and our hosts through narrow cobblestone streets. Everyone in our coterie spoke English, but all around us was this unintelligible hubbub of voices. There were times when, almost overcome by residual fatigue, so dizzy I could barely stand, I believed that I was still following behind the sled, that I had just awoken from a dream in which we had made it to the pole and back again, only to find ourselves in a world that in our absence had somehow been transformed, a world in which, though we were treated well, we would never feel that we belonged but would always, for some reason inscrutably related to our having been to the pole, be looked upon as strangers.

Dr. Cook seemed to be in all ways unfazed, merely patting me reassuringly on the back when I tried to explain to him the strange sense of displacement I felt.

“It will pass,” he said, speaking, I presumed, as one from whom such feelings had passed after previous expeditions.

Dining with the royal family of Denmark (the names of whom I hadn’t known until we were introduced), including an eight-year-old prince and a ten-year-old princess, did nothing to dispel my sense of other-worldliness.

All of them put aside their unimaginable lives for the duration of our visit, as if our adventure was more remarkable to them than an account of one day of their lives would have been to us. As surreal as a fairy tale it was. Two explorers from New York come back from the North Pole, emerge from the Arctic on foot to have dinner with the king and queen of Denmark. We seemed to have travelled as far in time as we had in space, back to a former century in which there were castles, kings and queens, crown princes and royal astronomers. Of the castles and mansions we visited, I retained almost no impression. I remember only antiques contained by structures that were themselves antiques.

Dr. Cook, because he had been the leader of the expedition, had many honours conferred upon him by the Danes. The Danish Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal was presented to him by King Frederick at the Palais Concert Hall. I was standing beside him, and no sooner had the medal been placed around his neck than he took it off and placed it around mine, to a thunderous ovation from the audience.