Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Peary had several advantages over the earlier explorers who had searched without success for the meteorite. By now the Eskimos were trading iron knives, spearheads, and even guns with the white men and no longer had need of the saviksoah. More important, the Eskimos liked and trusted the young lieutenant. Peary found an Eskimo who agreed to lead him to the mountain of iron in return for a gun. On May 16, 1894, the Eskimo, Peary, and expedition member Hugh Lee started on their journey with a sledge and ten dogs.

  The Eskimo led them south along the Greenland coast, toward Cape York and Melville Bay. They sledged along the frozen bays rather than attempting the sheer cliffs and headlands of the fjords. May is possibly the worst month to travel in the Arctic. Warmer weather breaks up the ice pack, making sea travel difficult. Blizzards are frequent and fearsome events. As it happened, soft ice and a powerful blizzard immediately beset the party, and after two days the Eskimo guide refused to proceed farther, sledding off into the whirling snow. Peary and Lee doggedly pushed on to a nearby Eskimo village and found another guide, a man named Tallakoteah. Tallakoteah spoke of three irons, which he called "the Waman," "the Dog," and "the Tent." During the next week, Tallakoteah led the party through some of the severest conditions Peary had yet experienced in the Arctic. The sea ice began to disintegrate, and they sometimes found themselves balancing across cakes of floating ice and wading through waist-high slush. At night, freezing winds piled up huge drifts, covering their igloo and dogs. Finally, when the sea ice became impassable, the party had to haul its dogs and sledges up to the top of a thousand-foot plateau to avoid open water. On May 27, near the shore of Melville Bay, Tallakoteah halted on a large, level snowfield and planted his saw knife in the hard pack. He announced they had reached the Woman. From a hill, Tallakoteah pointed out the location of the other two meteorites. Peary was skeptical; all that was visible was a bit of "blue traprock" poking out of a drift. Nevertheless, the Eskimo deftly cut through the snow with his knife, exposing a smooth brown surface. Soon he had enlarged the hole to a pit three feet deep and five feet across. In the middle sat an ugly, squat lump of brown iron. "The brown mass," Peary wrote in his book, Northward Over the Great Ice, "rudely awakened from its winter's sleep, found for the first time in its cycles of existence the eyes of a white man gazing upon it." The explorer leaned into the hole 'and claimed the object by scratching his initial P into its malleable skin.*8 Surrounding it were hundreds of broken stones, with which the Eskimos had been hammering off flakes of iron for centuries. (The meteorite itself reveals a dented surface, completely covered with hammer marks.)

  Tallakoteah then told Peary the legend of the three irons. According to the local myth, they had once been a sewing woman and her dog who lived in a tent in the sky. An evil spirit hurled the woman, the dog, and the tent from heaven and they landed on earth as lumps of iron. Although Peary took this as proof that the Eskimos had witnessed the fall of the meteorites, today scientists feel that the three meteorites—all part of the same shower—fell thousands of years before the coming of the Eskimo to Greenland.†9 It is more likely the Eskimo made up the story, knowing Peary thought (absurd white man!) that the irons had fallen from the sky. A common problem that anthropologists face is the less-than-truthful informant.

  They left the meteorites in place, taking careful note of their locations, then headed back to camp. Although equally harrowing, the return trip was without major catastrophe.

  That August, Peary returned to Melville Bay with his ship, the Falcon, to collect the meteorites, but the ship was driven back by drifting pack ice. The following year, 1895, he returned with a steamer, the Kite, during Greenland's three-week "summer," anchoring in Melville Bay. He was received by a large group of Eskimos, who had gathered to witness the foolhardy white man's attempt to take their saviksoah. The Eskimos, who no longer needed the irons, didn't object to Peary taking them away. Besides, they believed the venture would end in an entertaining disaster.

  Working in haste before the winter ice would lock them in, Peary hauled the 900-pound Dog meteorite down to the water and floated it to the ship. The 2 3/4-ton Woman was next. They rolled and dragged it to the shore, placed it on a large ice floe overlaid with planks, and secured it with tackle. Just as the floating cake reached the boat it began to break up—much to the merriment and satisfaction of the Eskimos—but the tackle held and the Woman was hauled aboard. Peary wisely left the Tent behind, which, at thirty tons, was at least ten times larger than both other meteorites combined. It rested on an island about six miles from the others.

  Peary returned to Melville Bay in 1896 with a new ship, the Hope, several heavy hydraulic jacks, and a mass of chains, ropes, railroad rails, and heavy timbers. With the Hope anchored in Melville Bay, Peary and his crew dug around the meteorite, and soon could maneuver the hydraulic jacks under the giant iron. In Northward Over the Great Ice, Peary wrote:

  The first thing to be done was to tear the heavenly visitor from its frozen bed of centuries, and as it rose slowly inch by inch under the resistless life of the hydraulic jacks, gradually displaying its ponderous sides, it grew upon us as Niagara grows upon the observer, and there was not one of us unimpressed by the enormousness of this lump of metal.

  They had good reason to be impressed; it was the largest meteorite ever discovered. After much discussion they decided to roll it down the steep hill to the ship, using the hydraulic jacks to turn it over.

  It was interesting, though irritating, to watch the stubbornness of the monster as it sulked and hung back to the last inch. Urged by the jacks, the huge brown mass would slowly and stubbornly rise on its side, and be forced into a position of unstable equilibrium.... A few more pulls ... and the top of the meteorite would move almost imperceptibly forward, the stones under the edge of revolution would begin to splinter and crumble, then amidst the shouts of the natives and our own suppressed breathing, the "Iron Mountain" would roll over. When it struck the ground the hard rocks would elicit streams of sparks from its brown surface before they crumbled, the softer ones would dissolve into dust and smoke, and the giant would bury itself half its depth in the earth with a slow, resistless motion.

  The sheer weight of the meteorite began to wear out all three jacks, and the weather worsened. A gale broke the ice barrier holding the sea ice out of Melville Bay, and winds drove it toward the ship, threatening to trap the vessel for the winter. Peary and his crew worked feverishly through the night,

  a night of such savage wildness as is possible only in the Arctic regions. The wild gale was howling out of the depth of Melville Bay through the Hope's rigging, and the snow was driving in horizontal lines.... Towering above the human figures about it, and standing out black and uncompromising, was the raison d'être of it all.

  The next morning they abandoned the meteorite on shore and fled from the bay just before the ice pack closed in behind them.

  Peary wouldn't give up. He returned again with the Hope and still heavier equipment in the summer of 1897. The meteorite still stood on a low bluff at the shore of the island, and this time Peary brought the large ship right into a stretch of deep water next to the bluff, thereby putting the boat in an extremely dangerous position. Any storm or shifting currents could have nudged the ship against the shore, sending it straight to the bottom. Working fast, Peary's crew laid steel rails across the narrow stretch of water between the bluff and the deck. As the "monster" was inched along the rails, which had been greased with soap tallow, the ship groaned and lurched, causing an uproar among the Eskimos, who felt that heaven was finally going to punish Peary for his audacity. But the meteorite was at last brought on board, where it literally sank into the complaining timbers of the ship's deck. Peary's four-year-old daughter was aboard, and she broke a bottle of wine over it and uttered a string of nonsense syllables, "ah-ni-ghi-to," which immediately became the meteorite's name. (Officially, this meteorite has three names: the Tent [its Eskimo name], Ahnighito [its popular name], and Cape York [its scientific name, in keepi
ng with the nomenclature of meteorites, which are usually named after the nearest landmark]. The scientific name of the Woman and Dog is also Cape York.)

  "Never," wrote Peary later, "have I had the terrific majesty of the force of gravity and the meaning of the words 'momentum' and 'inertia' so powerfully brought home to me as in handling this mountain of iron." When the meteorite was safely aboard, the ship's navigator found his compass needles locked in the direction of the iron mass.

  The Hope arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the Ahnighito was unloaded by a 100-ton floating crane (it had previously broken a fifty-ton crane) and stored under a tarpaulin. There it sat in obscurity while Jesup and Mrs. Peary, acting as her husband's agent while he was trying to reach the Pole, haggled amicably over a price. Mrs. Peary wanted $60,000, but Jesup felt the price was too high, especially considering the Museum's large financial support of Peary.

  Mrs. Peary felt that these meteorites, gained at such effort, were worth a payment from the Museum above and beyond the normal support. She wrote a somewhat facetious letter to Jesup, in which she pleaded,

  The meteorites are all I have and I feel that I should make an effort to turn them into money and invest it so that my children will have something with which they may be educated to earn a living.... Mrs. Jesup would scold me but what can I do? ... I have come to the conclusion that it is easier to go to the Arctic and do the thing you are interested in and want to do than it is to stay at home, bring up the children, fight your husband's battles and look out for the bread and butter for the family. I think hereafter I will do the exploring and let Mr. Peary take care of the home life.

  The Museum, anticipating ownership, had by this time already taken possession of the meteorites. While everyone generally agreed that Peary was due an extra payment for the irons, the amount of the payment was yet to be resolved. The Ahnighito caused a sensation when it was moved from Brooklyn to the Museum. First floated up the East River on a barge, it was unloaded at the East 50th Street Pier and placed on a massive, custom-built cart. A block-long line of twenty-eight horses in fourteen teams hauled it to the Museum. The trip drew flocks of whooping street urchins and clerks in derby hats, who noisily followed its progress through the streets.

  Twelve years after the Ahnighito's arrival in New York—five years after its delivery to the Museum—Mrs. Morris K. Jesup sent Mrs. Peary a check for $40,000, and the meteorites became the official property of the Museum.*10

  By most accounts, the Polar Eskimos enjoyed the rare visits of white explorers to their land, and it is not surprising that on two occasions, at the Eskimos' request, Peary brought them back on his ship to show them his own country. Unfortunately, the change from Greenland to New York was as much, if not more, of a shock to the Eskimos than the change from New York to Greenland was for the explorers. When Peary returned to New York in 1897 with the great Ahnighito meteorite, his ship, the Hope, also carried six Polar Eskimos from Smith Sound in Greenland. The Eskimos planned to spend the winter in New York City and then to go back north in the spring. (In 1894 the explorer's wife, Josephine, had returned to New York with an Eskimo girl from Smith Sound. The girl, whom the Pearys called "Miss Bill," lived with Mrs. Peary for a year and reportedly enjoyed herself immensely; the following year, Peary took her back to her family in Greenland.)

  Exactly why Peary brought six Eskimos back with him in 1897 is unclear. According to an account by the Museum's Director at the time, Hermon C. Bumpus, Peary told him that the Eskimos had asked to be taken to New York for the winter. A Museum anthropologist, the late Junius Bird, believed that Peary brought them back "that they might see how others lived," a common practice among eighteenth-and nineteenth-century explorers.

  It was not long before ill effects resulted from the radical change in climate. Soon after their arrival in New York, the Eskimos were observed to have slight colds, and in four of the Eskimos the colds developed into influenza, bronchitis, and then tuberculosis, one of many diseases to which it was later realized that the Eskimo have a poorly developed immunity. By the spring of 1898, the four had succumbed.

  Two Eskimos survived: an adult named Uisâkavsak and a little boy of about eight to ten years, named Mene, the son of one of the dead Eskimos. That spring, Peary offered to carry them back to Greenland on his ship, the Windward. The adult accepted, but Mene said he wanted to stay in America and was adopted by a Museum employee, William Wallace. Mene grew up in the Wallace home and later returned to Greenland, where he joined an American Museum of Natural History expedition to seek out a large, unknown continent thought to exist northwest of Ellesmere Island. Hired by the expedition's leader, Donald MacMillan, Mene was one of seven Eskimos and five Americans who set out from Smith Sound in March 1914. On the first leg of the expedition, the explorers endured a grueling trip across Smith Sound and up the eastern side of Ellesmere. When they reached the foot of the massive Beitstadt Glacier and were faced with adimb up a nearly vertical wall of ice, Mene announced he wanted to return to Smith Sound, and MacMillan let him go. A second Eskimo, Tau-ching-wa, deserted only a few hours later. (Another Eskimo told MacMillan that Mene had decided to return to Greenland to enjoy the company of Tau-ching-wa's wife. This other Eskimo had alerted Tau-ching-wa, who decided that the expedition came second to his wife's virtue.)

  A year later, however, Mene rejoined the expedition, "very repentant over his failure of the year before," according to MacMillan. In the end, he proved himself an able explorer.

  There is an interesting story attached to the other Eskimo, Uisâkavsak, who survived his trip to New York. He returned to Greenland in 1898 aboard the Windward, and as far we know, he was the first adult Polar Eskimo to visit the white man's land and return to tell about it. (Miss Bill had been too young to understand much of what went on around her.) A Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen, was in Greenland around the time of Uisâkavsak's homecoming, and he described the Eskimo's return (quoted by Rolf Gilberg in his excellent monograph The Big Liar, translation from the Danish by Gilberg):

  When Uisâkavsak returned, he gathered around him a large audience to tell them of the marvels he had seen. "The ships," he said, "sailed in and out there, like eiders on the brooding cliffs when their young begin to swim. There weren't many free drops of water in the harbor itself; it was filled with ships. You'd risk your life if you tried to go out there in a kayak, you'd simply not be noticed, and you'd be run down unmercifully. People live up in the air like auks on a bird cliff. The houses are as big as icebergs on a glacial bank, and they stretch inland as far as you can see, like a steep chain of mountains with innumerable canyons that serve as roads.

  "And the people. Yes, there are so many of them that when smoke rises from the chimneys and the women are about to make breakfast, clouds fill the sky and the sun is eclipsed...."

  Rasmussen went on to report that Uisâkavsak was "intoxicated by his listeners' amazed expressions" and that "he could not stop talking." He told them about "streetcars, big as houses, with masses of glass windows as transparent as freshwater ice. They raced on without dogs to haul them, without smoke, full of smiling people who had no fear of their fate. And all this because a man pulled on a cord." Rasmussen reported that "Uisâkavsak's listeners began to doubt him seriously, but he gave them no time to think, and went on to tell them about the 'distance shrinker' (the telephone). He, Uisâkavsak, had stood and talked to Peary, who was visiting another village. Without shouting to one another, they had talked together through a funnel, along a cord."

  At this point, Rasmussen said, the tribe's respected leader stood up and shouted angrily, "Uisâkavsak, go tell your big lies to the women!"

  Eskimos consider lying to be a gravely serious matter, and Uisâkavsak, who had hitherto held a position of esteem among the Polar Eskimos, lost a great deal of respect and was relegated to an inferior position in the society. He was given the name "The Big Liar."

  "Rasmussen," Gilberg writes, "tried to restore Uisâkavsak's honor by confirming what was sai
d, but one of the influential Polar Eskimos discreetly advised him against this, for it might hurt [Rasmussen] personally."

  Uisâkavsak very sensibly stopped talking about his experiences in America, and he later moved south, away from the tribe, and discovered a rich hunting land unknown to them. Here was a place, he may have thought, where he could restore his honor and reputation. He later returned to his tribe's area loaded with wealth, and was accepted as a powerful hunter. Unfortunately, his wife died, and as there was a shortage of women in the tribe, he stole the wife of another Eskimo. This Eskimo, who had been with Peary on his trip to the North Pole in 1909, didn't take this lightly and later, with an accomplice, lured him out on the Inglefield Fjord. There they shot and killed Uisâkavsak, "The Big Liar."