Antarctica (16 page)

All his life, Andrew Winslow corresponded with crew members and kept news clippings on those who led public lives. From these, and Andrew’s unpublished journals, we know the following:

Captain Elias Barth
continued commanding ships until he died, elderly and happy, in the port of Bermuda.

Kosta Kontonikolaos
worked as a circus animal trainer/performer, and, like a modern-day Homer, told the
Mystery’s
saga to all who’d listen. Almost everyone understood it to be fiction, but a small cult of people, mostly kids, believed him — including Kosta’s children and grandchildren, of whom there were many.

George Oppenheim
began a slow recovery from a little-understood condition we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. As a psychiatric social worker, he detected and treated the condition in countless soldiers returning from the First and Second World Wars.
Luis Rivera
worked as a longshoreman on the notoriously corrupt and violent New York City docks — and in the 1950s, on the verge of retirement, he helped lead the fight for unionization.
Robert,
as Robert Makela, prosperous importer of goods from Africa, marched on Selma with his four children in 1963 at age seventy-eight. He walked all the way.

Peter Mansfield,
after years of sailing, published an archive of sea chanteys, now out of print.
David Ruskey
enjoyed great acclaim for his nature photography but always asserted his best work was left in a desolate Antarctic cove. Upon earning a doctorate of divinity,
Reverend Jacques Petard
led a thriving Lutheran parish in Chicago.
Pete Hayes
became a sixth-grade math teacher. Meteorologist
Harv Talmadge
helped the U.S. Weather Bureau recover its reputation a decade after it mispredicted the disastrous hurricane in Galveston, Texas. Starting with a Hoboken saloon,
Tim O’Malley
and
Rick Stimson
eventually established four popular Chez Tim et Richard restaurants in New Jersey — “Out-of-This-World Food, Down-to-Earth Prices.”
Horst Flummerfelt,
foreseeing the mass popularity of the automobile, opened a booming garage and auto-parts store.
Chris Ruppenthal
and
Bruce Cranston
moved to Los Angeles and found success in the burgeoning talking-film industry.
Wyman Kennedy
worked his way from carpenter to building contractor, finally retiring to a cottage he built with his children on Squam Lake, New Hampshire.
Dr. Montfort
lived up to his promise of lifetime free medical care to crewmates. One patient was
Vincent Lombardo,
who, after retiring as a sailor, had a brief career in musical comedy, appearing most notably in
Mabel of the High Seas
on Broadway.

Most of the sailors saw action in the First World War, which was then called the Great War. Documents show that
James Windham
was killed in Arras, France, in 1917, and
Mike Sanders
died on the Western Front a year later.

Philip Westfall
was released from police custody after Horace Putney’s intervention. Upon receiving his inheritance at age eighteen, he was billed the entire amount of the stolen money, with interest, which he finally finished repaying at age thirty. He moved to a small but tastefully appointed cottage in the Cotswolds with his German shepherd, Schmetterling, and was never heard from again.

Arnold Waxflatter,
also known as Nigel, was convicted on all counts and served a full ten-year sentence, repeatedly denied early release because of poor behavior. He settled in New York City, made a fortune in the stock market bull run of the 1920s, lost it all in the Crash of 1929, and was last seen selling health elixirs door-to-door in Arizona under the name Chet Farkas.

Information on other crew members is still being sought from friends and relatives.

Jack Winslow
never sailed again. He enrolled at Columbia University at age forty-five and finished the undergraduate degree he’d begun at Harvard. He became friends with
Lawrence “Chappy” Walden
after a chance encounter while on vacation in Maine. Jack finally returned Walden’s good luck gesture (with a piece of wood and grommeted rope from the
Mystery,
which Colin had saved) and eventually the two went into business, establishing the Northeastern Geological Survey Institute.

When he died at age eighty-three, in 1950, he considered himself a lucky man indeed.

For
Colin
and
Andrew Douglas Winslow
, the
Mystery
expedition was just the first of many adventures in a new century.

Colin was twenty-three when he served in the war. He lost the use of one arm because of an injury suffered while saving the life of a fellow soldier. Afterward, he stayed close to his father and brother in New York City, marrying and raising four burly sons, all of whom learned how to sail on Long Island Sound by the age of six.

Andrew followed his father’s footsteps to Harvard but graduated with high honors. He was decorated for valor in the war for his work against German submarine attacks. Settling in Greenwich Village, he married, had a daughter, and lived a comfortably bohemian life as the author of a series of popular sea adventures.
Aurora Australis
, a thinly veiled account of the voyage of the
Mystery,
was his best-seller.

When the
Titanic
sank in 1912,
Horace Putney
jumped aboard a lifeboat, disguised as a woman. He perished while attempting to climb onto the rescue ship, slipping and falling back into the sea. He had never learned to swim.

He took the truth about the
Mystery
down with him.

The public did not pay much attention to the story about the ill-fated voyage. Ruskey searched the
Nobadeer
for his vest-pocket camera and film, but they were gone. Later Nigel admitted to hiding the equipment for himself among the blubber. Taking it for trash, the
Nobadeer
crew later dumped it in the sea somewhere off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. No photos survived.

In the absence of physical evidence, Jack Winslow sought out the shipbuilder, Samuel Breen, only to find that Breen had died of a heart attack shortly after the
Mystery
set sail. Breen’s records were haphazard. They showed plans for the
Mystery,
but they gave Buenos Aires as its destination. Horace Putney still owed him more than half the money for the ship.

Breen’s estate was never able to collect it.

The dockworkers in Buenos Aires confirmed the ship’s arrival and departure, describing the crew as inept and badly organized. They fully believed that the ship could have been scuttled or capsized. For years after the expedition, the
Mystery
’s sailors tried to reveal their stories to the American press — and for a while a few reporters championed their cause. But after the shocking death of Robert Scott’s party, Roald Amundsen’s sensational and controversial conquering of the South Pole, followed by the amazing (and documented) survival sagas of Ernest Shackleton and Douglas Mawson, the press simply lost interest.

For years, the men of the
Mystery
met at convivial annual meetings that became less and less frequent. The last was held in Mansfield’s home in Wayland, Massachusetts, in 1941, just before the United States entered the Second World War.

The plight of the
Mystery
remains a legend no more. But somewhere in this country a few Winslow great-grandchildren know the whole story.

And nothing stays secret forever.

Peter Lerangis

New York, New York

January 30, 2000

Peter Lerangis (b. 1955) is a bestselling author of young adult fiction; his novels have sold more than four million copies worldwide. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lerangis began writing in elementary school, inventing stories during math class—after finishing the problems, he claims. His first piece of published writing was an anonymous humor article for the April Fools’ Day edition of his high school newspaper. Seeing the other students laughing in the corridors as they read it, planted the idea in his head that he could be a writer. After high school he attended Harvard University, where he majored in biochemistry and sang in an a cappella group, the Harvard Krokodiloes. Intending to go on to law school, Lerangis took a job as a paralegal post-graduation. But after a summer job as a singing waiter, he changed his path and became a musical theater actor.

Lerangis found theatrical work on Broadway, appearing in
They’re Playing Our
Song, and he toured the country in such shows as
Cabaret
,
West Side Story
, and
Fiddler on the Roof
, acting alongside theatrical greats such as Jack Lemmon, John Lithgow, Jane Powell, John Raitt, and Victor Garber. During these years, Lerangis met his future wife, Tina deVaron, and began editing fiction, a job that would eventually lead him to writing novels of his own.

Lerangis got his start writing novelizations under the penname A. L. Singer, as well as installments of long-running series, such as the Hardy Boys and the Baby-sitters Club. He eventually began writing under his own name with 1994’s
The Yearbook
and
Driver’s Dead
, two high-school horror novels that are part of the Point Horror series of young-adult thrillers.

In 1998, Lerangis debuted Watchers, a six-novel sci-fi series, which won Children’s Choice and Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers awards. The first book in the Abracadabra series,
Poof! Rabbits Everywhere
(2002), introduced Max, an aspiring magician who struggles to keep a lid on the supernatural happenings at his school. Lerangis followed that eight-book series with the immensely popular Spy X novels, about a pair of twins drawn into international espionage.

The stand-alone novel
Smiler’s Bones
(2005), based on the true story of an Eskimo brought to New York City in 1897, won critical acclaim and a number of awards. Most recently, Lerangis has collaborated with a group of high-profile children’s authors on Scholastic’s the 39 Clues, a sprawling ten-novel adventure series.

At times, Lerangis’s life has been as thrilling as one of his stories. He has run a marathon, rock-climbed during an earthquake, gone on-stage as a last-minute replacement for Broadway legend Alan Jay Lerner, and visited Russia as part of a literary delegation that included First Lady Laura Bush. He lives with his family in New York City, not far from Central Park.