Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  FIVE

  The Search for the Arctic Atlantis

  The American Museum of Natural History has over the years been unusually lucky; almost all of its expeditions have returned with valuable results and collections. The Museum's success with polar expeditions, however, came to an abrupt end with the Crocker Land Expedition—perhaps the greatest scientific failure in the Museum's history.

  In June of 1906, nine years after successfully recovering the Ahnighito meteorite, Peary stood on the summit of Cape Colgate in the extreme northwestern part of North America—only nine degrees from the Pole—and carefully scanned the northern horizon with his binoculars. He was the first explorer to have reached this headland, and before him lay a vast, uncharted area covering over a million square miles. Later he recorded what he saw: "North stretched the well—known ragged surface of the polar pack, and northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the white summits of a distant land."

  Several days later he stopped at Cape Thomas Hubbard, closer to the northwestern edge of the unknown land. It was a splendid, crystal-clear day, and Peary again trained his glasses to the northwest. He wrote:

  The clear day greatly favored my work in taking a round of angles, and with the glass I could make out apparently a little more distinctly the snow-clad summits of the distant land to the northwest, above the ice horizon. My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits, even though I knew that the pleasure could be only for another in another season.

  He estimated that the unknown land lay about 120 miles offshore, and he christened it Crocker Land, in honor of one of his financial backers.

  In 1913 the Museum set out on its most ambitious polar expedition to date—to discover, explore, and map Crocker Land. The Crocker Land Expedition lasted from 1913 to 1917. It was to be the first time in the Museum's history that an expedition became a spectacular failure.

  By 1910 much of northern Greenland, Ellesmere Land, and the area around the North Magnetic Pole had been explored, and Peary himself had finally taken the geographic Pole in 1909. The discovery and mapping of Crocker Land thus became a top priority of Arctic exploration. While some geologists and geographers questioned whether Crocker Land actually existed, most others felt that the question was settled and began instead debating its size and extent. In 1911 a tidal expert with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey studied Arctic currents and concluded that a great landmass or island archipelago stretched from northwestern North America across to eastern Siberia. This was confirmed by several reports that mountain peaks had been seen from northern Alaska over the ice horizon of the Polar Sea.

  Now that the North Pole had been exposed as an icy wasteland, Crocker Land became the object of extensive scientific speculation. Some believed that Crocker Land would turn out to be, in the words of Peary, "an isolated island continent, an Arctic Atlantis, with a flora and fauna of its own." "Volcanic ashes have fallen on Greenland," wrote explorer Fitzhugh Green. "The Aleutians are buried furnaces. If there be an ice-cooled desert, why not a steam-heated paradise?" The Eskimos themselves talked about a distant land, a sort of Shangri-la, dotted with herds of game and warmed by the sun. According to the Eskimos, all who came across this land chose not to return.

  The Museum had supported Peary on his expedition to the North Pole and other Arctic explorations, and so it seemed natural that the Museum should organize an expedition to Crocker Land. The discovery of a new landmass would not only bring the Museum fame and glory, but it would open up a whole new area for zoological research and collecting. Perhaps even a new tribe of northern peoples would be discovered. Crocker Land was a tempting scientific plum indeed. The American Geographical Society, the Peary Arctic Club, and various American and British philanthropists backed the expedition as well.

  The Museum chose Donald B. MacMillan to lead the expedition. MacMillan had accompanied Peary on his last polar expedition, and knew the ways of the north. (The Museum's original choice for the expedition's leader, George Borup, drowned in a tragic accident while plans for the expedition were being fmalized.) Elmer Ekblaw and Ensign Fitzhugh Green assisted MacMillan; Ekblaw to work on geological and botanical studies and Green to handle the cartographic, meteorological, and seismological studies. (Peary himself had retired from Arctic exploration after his polar conquest.) Neither Ekblaw nor Green knew much about survival in the north, but the Museum noted confidently that Green came from "old Colonial stock" and that his experience in the navy "has already taught him how to command as well as obey."

  The Museum laid grand plans for the study of Crocker Land. First the expedition would make scientific observations in the far north. Then, as they headed across the Polar Sea toward Crocker Land, they would take soundings and make tidal and meteorological observations. They were to spend two months mapping Crocker Land itself and collecting specimens, then the expedition was to return to Greenland to make a first ascent to the summit of its ice cap.

  The expedition set sail in July 1913, on the Diana, carrying stoves, food, clothes, sledges, and scientific equipment. In Boston they picked up eleven tons of pemmican (a nutritious mixture of dried beef and suet, with raisins thrown in to help prevent constipation) and eleven tons of army hardtack. In Nova Scotia they took aboard seventeen tons of Spratt's Dog Biscuit. Then the Diana's drunken captain ran his ship aground off the coast of Labrador, and a new ship had to be chartered, at a cost of $15,000. This ship, the Erik, took the expedition north through Baffin Bay along the western flank of Greenland, to Smith Sound. This was a narrow sound at the head of Baffin Bay, separating Greenland and Ellesmere Land. The captain unloaded the expedition at Etah, a Polar Eskimo settlement that was at that time the most northerly human settlement in the world. It was now August and the party settled in for the winter, planning to begin the search for Crocker Land just before the Arctic dawn in February, when the ice pack would be hard and smooth.

  Peary had learned one great lesson in the north: to survive, one had to live, eat, and travel like the Eskimo. MacMillan, who had been with Peary in Greenland, introduced his companions to the ways of the Eskimo, who taught them about Arctic survival—skills such as building igloos (tents were useless), driving dogs, hunting game, wearing native clothing, and caring for the feet.*11 They planned to travel by dogsled and subsist on pemmican and on what walrus, musk-oxen, polar bear, and caribou they could get. Green later wrote that by learning the Eskimo way of life, they "bought their lives."

  As February drew near, MacMillan divided the expedition—nineteen Eskimos (including Mene Wallace), the three explorers, a surgeon named Hunt, and a zoologist named Tanquary—into four parties. On February 7, 1914, the first party, led by Fitzhugh Green, departed into the Arctic night over the ice of Smith Sound. Tanquary left the next day, Ekblaw on February 9, Hunt on February 10, and MacMillan on February 13.

  MacMillan had mapped out their route. They planned to cross Smith Sound to Ellesmere Land, cross the glaciated heights of Ellesmere, and descend to Eureka Sound on the far side. From there they would follow Eureka Sound northwest to Cape Thomas Hubbard, from which Peary had sighted the mountains of Crocker Land eight years before.

  On February 13, MacMillan and his party crossed Smith Sound in bitter cold, following in the footsteps of the three advance parties. While following north along the coastline of Ellesmere, he came across two dead dogs on the trail. On the night of February 14, they couldn't find hard-packed snow to build an igloo and were forced to sleep unprotected. In an effort to keep warm, MacMillan built a fire out of his biscuit boxes and accidentally set his sleeping bag on fire. ("I was warm at last," he joked in his journal.) The next day he joined up with the advance parties camped on the ice of Hayes Sound, and discovered that several of the Eskimos had caught the mumps. They all agreed the expedition had to return to its base camp. Back in Etah, MacMillan decided to prune the size of the group to "eliminate the chicken-hearted," and to try again i
n March.

  So on March 11, MacMillan, Green, and Ekblaw started out again, this time with just seven Eskimos and one hundred dogs. They traversed Smith Sound in a record six hours, and in five days had worked northward along Ellesmere to their crossing point at the Beitstadt Glacier, a nearly vertical wall of ice plunging into the frozen Beitstadt Fjord. The glacier stretched across the breadth of Ellesmere and, once it had been ascended, the crossing would be relatively easy. The Eskimo leader, Pee-a-wah-to, who had been one of Peary's most trusted companions on his polar attempts, chose a route up the glacier and began cutting steps in the ice with his hatchet. In a grueling day's work they managed to haul the sledges up the glacial wall. (By this point, Mene Wallace had left for home, ostensibly in search of an immoral conquest.)

  Several days of hard sledging brought them to the crest of the Ellesmere ice cap, almost a mile high. Here they commanded a spectacular view of Axel Heiberg Land, with its towering peaks and winding glaciers. Far below and to the west lay Eureka Sound, dimly visible through the Arctic haze. The team descended toward Bay Fjord, and reached the face of the glacier in one sixteen-hour march. (A "march," in Arctic parlance, is a day's journey by dogsled.) Again they faced a sheer wall of ice, but this time a long search failed to reveal a route down. Finally, Pee-a-wah-to discovered an ice ravine down the face of the glacier cut by meltwater, and the group descended to the head of Bay Fjord on the western flank of Ellesmere.

  Unfortunately, Ekblaw's feet had been badly frostbitten during the crossing, and he had to return to Etah immediately. MacMillan asked Green and four Eskimos to accompany Ekblaw back to the base camp, with the understanding that Green and his Eskimos would come back along the route and rendezvous with MacMillan at Cape Thomas Hubbard, their launching point for Crocker Land.

  MacMillan drove his dogsleds to Eureka Sound, where he found the ice scoured smooth by strong northerly winds—perfect for sledding. By March 30, MacMillan and the Eskimos had reached Schei Island, in the middle of Eureka Sound, where they found plenty of game, including musk-oxen, blue foxes, and Arctic hares. They were even rushed by a large pack of white wolves that had apparently mistaken them for musk-oxen; when the wolves discovered their mistake, they fled in terror. With such plentiful game, MacMillan decided to wait for Green on Schei Island. "Our four days at Schei Island," he wrote later, "stand out as one of the bright spots of our trip—a large, well-warmed, and well-lighted igloo, plenty of food, and a wealth of fresh meat for the dogs."

  After waiting five days without sight of Green, MacMillan left a cache of meat for Green's dogs and pushed north along Nansen Sound to Cape Thomas Hubbard. On April 11 he reached what he thought must be the cape, but violent winds and heavy drifts forced him upon arrival to dig out a shelter underneath a cliff. The next morning, above the howling of the wind, he heard crunching ice; Green and two Eskimos had arrived with loaded sledges, ready for the dash across the Polar Sea to Crocker Land. They holed up in the dugout and waited for the storm to pass.

  April 13 dawned sunny and brilliantly clear, and Green and MacMillan went off in search of the cairn that Peary had left at the spot from which he sighted the new land. At the summit of the cape they failed to find any trace of Peary's cairn, or of the mountains and glaciers that Peary had sighted "over the ice horizon."

  Undaunted, the next day they headed northwest over the rolling blue ice of the Polar Sea, in the direction of Crocker Land. As they drew away from the shore, they sighted Cape Thomas Hubbard to the north of where they had been camped, and were pleased that they had only missed it by a few miles.

  A day's journey on the ice brought them to a series of transverse pressure ridges—areas where tidal currents had compressed the polar ice into huge, broken ridges. After making camp at the bottom of the first ridge, MacMillan and Pee-a-wah-to climbed up it to get a view of what lay ahead. When they reached the top, no one spoke. Ahead of them stretched the bane of Arctic exploration—lanes of open water, or "leads," which had been opened by high tides generated by the full moon on April 10. To cross a lead, one must either go around it (which is often impossible, since a lead can be dozens of miles long), or wait for it to freeze over or close up.

  The following day the party hit the first lead, which was over a hundred yards wide, with no sign of any imminent closing up. They built their igloos and decided to take their first sounding. With an ice axe as a weight, Green began unreeling the sounding wire through a hole in the ice. Two hundred fathoms were passed, then five hundred, then a thousand, and finally two thousand before they gave up. They concluded that since they were only seventeen miles from land, a coastal current was carrying the light pick along at an angle. For five hours they slowly reeled in the line, when suddenly it snapped and the axe was lost. MacMillan searched through their belongings for another weight, but the only possibility was their last ice axe, which they didn't dare risk. MacMillan wrote angrily: "To think that my dogs had pulled that reel ... weighing about forty pounds, for nearly five hundred miles, only to have it thrown away without a single sounding!" He dumped the useless wire on the ice and they retired for the night.

  The next morning the first man up looked through the peephole of the igloo and shouted that the lead had frozen up. The men and dogs edged out over the rubbery saltwater ice; several dogs broke through but were retrieved, and they reached the other side safely. Twelve miles later they hit a second lead, which suddenly closed up into a grinding mass of ice, allowing them only a few harrowing moments to cross. Toward the end of the day they hit a third lead, where they made camp. Again, a cold night froze the lead and they were able to cross the following morning.

  Leads continued to plague the expedition. On April 19, MacMillan wrote in his diary:

  It has been a succession of leads throughout the day ... at 12:30, at 2:45, at 3:30, and at 4. We found them all covered with the same dangerous thin ice, which bends and buckles like rubber.

  As we crossed the last it came together and rose beneath our feet, lifting dogs, sledges and men with such a grinding, crushing noise that I could not hear the Eskimos yelling their instructions.

  They made it, however, and by the end of that day, they figured by dead reckoning that they were fifty-two miles offshore. ("Dead reckoning" is an estimate of position based on a guess of how many miles have been traveled in a given direction from a known point. It is the most unreliable form of navigation.) The peaks of Ellesmere to the east had finally slipped below the horizon, but mist had obscured their view to the west. MacMillan waited impatiently for a clear day.

  April 21 was such a day. Green rose early and MacMillan heard him cry, "We have it!" "Following Green," MacMillan recorded, "we ran to the top of the highest mound. There could be no doubt about it. Great heavens! What a land! Hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon." Pee-a-wah-to, however, displayed a singular lack of enthusiasm. When quizzed, he "astounded" MacMillan by replying that he thought Crocker Land was poo-jok, or mist. The other Eskimos were evasive and noncommittal. While still sure they had seen land, Green and MacMillan were nevertheless taken aback by the Eskimos, and they thought it might be a ploy to deceive them into turning back. But as the sun swung across the sky, the land changed its appearance. At sunset, it disappeared entirely.

  On April 22, MacMillan figured they were one hundred miles from shore by dead reckoning. The men's eyes were constantly turned west: "On this day," MacMillan recorded, "there was the same appearance of land in the west but it gradually faded away toward evening as the sun worked around in front of us."

  By April 23 the Eskimos were becoming restless and dissatisfied. MacMillan took out his map showing the location of Crocker Land in brown, and emphatically told the depressed Eskimos that they were going to the brown spot on the map. At noon the next day, Green stopped to take the first careful sighting of their actual position (rather than relying on dead reckoning), while MacMillan continued on. (Green hadn't taken a sighting of thei
r position earlier because it required remaining in one spot while the sun changed position in the sky. They had been in too much of a hurry.) When Green caught up with MacMillan at the end of the day, he explained that his sightings showed they were considerably ahead of their dead reckoning. In fact, they were actually 150 miles due northwest from Cape Thomas Hubbard. MacMillan was stunned. "We had not only reached the brown spot on the map," he wrote, "but were thirty miles 'inland'!"

  They climbed to the top of the highest pressure ridge and scanned every foot of the horizon. Not a thing was in sight. Ice stretched away on all sides, as far as the eye could see. Beyond that was clear blue sky.

  MacMillan and Green discussed their problem. They had food for two days' farther advance. To the west, however, the sea ice presented a new spectacle—a "perfect chaos" of pressure ridges crisscrossing in every direction. "Two days work through the ice would net possibly eight or ten miles. . . . It was late in the year; we had more than thirty leads behind us; a full moon was due on May 9; we had more than covered our distance." They could see no land fifty miles to the west; thus any land, if there, had to be at least two hundred miles offshore. It was physically impossible, therefore, that Peary had sighted land. He had merely recorded an Arctic mirage. "We were convinced we were in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning...."