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Reading Risk in The Navigator of New York

In The Navigator of New York, Wayne Johnston explores the discourse of risk through a fictional account of the famously heated competition between Dr. Frederick Cook and Lt. Robert Peary to reach the North Pole. Narrated primarily through the voice of Devlin Stead, Cook’s illegitimate son, the novel examines how personal and professional risks have shaped the life of these explorers, their lovers and their offspring. As Johnston’s version of Cook, wrestling retrospectively with the consequences of having abandoned his pregnant lover, Amelia, explains in the second epigraph above, the trust she invested in him as an engaged woman from Newfoundland who visits New York City shortly before her wedding and his inability to economically and emotionally reciprocate have changed the direction of their lives forever. Amelia, in particular, pays for the risks she takes; she and her son, Devlin Stead, are ostracized by the St. John’s community, and she is eventually mysteriously murdered by her husband, Francis Stead. Cook, in the meantime, encounters Francis, who has become a fellow explorer, eventually learns of his crime and kills him in an act of revenge. To bond with the son he did not know existed, Cook then seeks out Devlin, writing him a series of lengthy letters that outline his parentage and share Cook’s obsessive passion for exploration. These letters spur the young man to risk it all by coming to New York and participating, with his father, in the race for the Pole; the results are physically and emotionally perilous, provoking Devlin to re-examine how he understands himself, his family, and his identity as a Newfoundlander. Reading Risk