Cold Read Free Page B

wrote about himself, “My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes — two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet.
     These are the steps of my downfall. Like an ass I mixed a small spoonful of curry powder with my melted pemmican — it gave
     me violent indigestion. I lay awake and in pain all night; woke and felt done on the march; foot went and I didn’t know it.
     A very small measure of neglect and have a foot which is not pleasant to contemplate. Amputation is the least I can hope for
     now, but will the trouble spread?”
    Later he wrote, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” And after this, he had but one final entry: “For God’s
     sake look after our people.” Scott ended his days eleven impossible miles from a supply depot that would have saved his life.
    Frostbite is a common theme among polar explorers. Captain George E. Tyson was marooned with his crew on an Arctic ice floe
     in the winter of 1872 and spring of 1873. “The other morning,” he wrote, “Mr. Meyers found that his toes were frozen — no
     doubt from his exposure on the ice without shelter the day he was separated from us. He is not very strong at the best, and
     his fall in the water has not improved his condition.”
    Food, or a lack of food, is another common theme. Roald Amundsen, when he beat Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole, used
     sleds pulled by dogs. The dogs doubled as a food supply. Amundsen had this to say about men who pursued their destinies at
     the poles: “Often his search is a race with time against starvation.”
    Robert Flaherty published the story of Comock, an Inuit. In the narrative, Comock explains how he and his family lived on
     Mansel Island in the Canadian Arctic early in the twentieth century. They were on the island alone, isolated for ten years
     from their extended families and the villages that dotted the Arctic. They were at times well fed.
    “Look at our children,” Comock’s wife said to Comock. “They are warm.”
    And Comock, in his narrative, added, “There were little smokes rising from the deerskin robes under which they slept.”
    But later, food became scarce. “We shared with our dogs the dog meat upon which we lived,” Comock reported. One of his companions
     said that seal meat offered warmth, while dog meat did not. Comock feared the dogs would eat the children.
    Frederick Cook, who probably reached or at least came close to the North Pole in April 1908, almost a full year before Robert
     E. Peary, ran into trouble and could not return to civilization quickly enough to defend himself against Peary’s own claim
     and what has been described as Peary’s slander. Like Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Cook concurred with Dante, but with more drama
     and self-aggrandizement: “We all were lifted to the paradise of winners as we stepped over the snows of a destiny for which
     we had risked life and willingly suffered the tortures of an ice hell.” But after two days at the pole, he described a feeling
     of anticlimax. The pole itself, after all, was just another frozen camp in a frozen landscape. “The intoxication of success
     was gone,” he wrote in his memoir. “Hungry, mentally and physically exhausted, a sense of the utter uselessness of this thing,
     of the empty reward of my endurance, followed my exhilaration.”
    And who has heard of Lieutenant George De Long? In an 1879 attempt to reach the North Pole, De Long and twenty men abandoned
     their ship to the ice. They dragged three small boats across the ice for nearly three months before finding open water. One
     boat was lost, but two made it to Siberia’s Lena River delta. This was early October. Though suffering from frostbite and
     exhaustion, the men were not complainers. De Long wrote, “The doctor resumed the cutting away of poor Ericksen’s toes this
     morning. No doubt it will have to continue until half his feet are gone, unless death ensues, or we get to some settlement.
     Only one toe left now.