Dinosaurs in the Attic (10 page)

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 their 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...."

Bitterly disappointed, they headed back over the Polar Sea. Whenever they looked back, MacMillan wrote, "the mirage of the sea ice resembling in every particular an immense land, seemed to be mocking us. It seemed so near and so easily attainable if we would only turn back." On the return leg the weather was splendid and the leads frozen. In just four days they had traversed the 150 miles back to Cape Thomas Hubbard, where they could see outlined against the sky the cairn that Peary had built in 1906 on the spot where he sighted Crocker Land. MacMillan and Green wearily ascended the cape, where they found a bit of silk flag and a note inside a cocoa tin in Peary's hand, recording the date and sighting. "Standing beside this cairn," MacMillan wrote, "Peary saw and reported Crocker Land to lie 120 miles due northwest. We looked toward the distant horizon. Glasses were not necessary. There was land everywhere! Had we not just come from far over the horizon we would have returned to our country and reported land as Peary did."

MacMillan ordered that he and Green should return to Etah by different routes. While he, MacMillan, would continue north to Cape Colgate to secure a written note (called a "record") left by the explorer Sverdrup, Green and Pee-a-wah-to would explore part of the western coast of Axel Heiberg Land—two marches down and one march back.

The morning they parted dawned gray and ominous. Leaden clouds covered the sky, and a hard wind was starting to pile up heavy drifts. As MacMillan headed from the camp he called good-bye to Green and Pee-awah-to; he wrote, "above the sound of the drifting snow I heard his faint reply in broken English and saw him turn toward the south."

An hour after leaving Green, MacMillan realized that the storm was going to be even worse than he thought. Soon the swirling snow was driving so hard they had to fight for breath. MacMillan searched in the gale for one of their earlier igloos just south of the cape. The wind was so violent that at times the dogs couldn't move, but at last the igloo was reached.

The next morning the gale was still gusting at full force. "The wind," MacMillan wrote, "dropped down upon us with the force of an avalanche. The flying snow eddied and whirled and wrapped us in a white mantle, until dogs and men seemed as white specters." As they struggled forward, a white wolf came bounding out of the gale and lurked around them for ten miles until they reached the dugout where MacMillan had holed up in April while waiting for Green. He knew it would be impossible to reach Cape Colgate, so he abandoned his plan and dug himself in to await Green's return.

Strong winds and shifting snows continued for several more days, and MacMillan became increasingly concerned about Green. Six days had elapsed, but Green and Pee-a-wah-to had only left with three days' food. MacMillan knew Green was still not fully seasoned to the north, but he also knew that Pee-a-wah-to was one of the finest Eskimo guides in Greenland. "Where could they be and what could have happened?" MacMillan wrote. "So constantly did I watch that point to the north throughout the day [May 4] that the picture is still in my mind—the broken ice, the sloping shore, the high bluff, the white hill."

Toward late afternoon, MacMillan finally saw a black dot with a sledge appear on the horizon. As the sledge got doser, he recognized it as Pee-awah-to's. An eerie meeting then took place.

"I ran along the ice foot," wrote MacMillan, "to meet the sledge. Yes, those were Pee-a-wah-to's dogs. As the question, 'Where's Green?' was about to burst from my lips, the driver, whose eyes were covered with large metal glasses, seemed to turn suddenly into a strange likeness of Green. He looked as if he had risen from the grave.

"This is all that is left of your southern division," he said.

"What do you mean—Pee-a-wah-to dead? Your dogs and sledge gone?" I inquired.

"Yes, Pee-a-wah-to is dead; my dogs were buried alive; my sledge is under the snow forty miles away."

As the two men talked, MacMillan learned the whole story of what had happened during those days on the ice. After consideration, they decided it would be best to deceive the Eskimos into thinking that Pee-a-wah-to had been killed in an avalanche of snow. The truth would probably have provoked the killing of Green and possibly other members of the expedition. When they finally reached Etah in early June, the Eskimos apparently did accept their explanation, and the expedition proceeded without interruption. Even the Museum was kept in the dark for over a year as to what had really happened.

Despite the great failure to find Crocker Land, the expedition still had other work to accomplish. In 1914 and 1915, the men explored unknown areas of Ellesmere and attained the summit of the Greenland ice cap. In 1915 the ship
Cluett
arrived to return the expedition to New York, but was crushed in the ice, leaving the expedition members and crew stranded in Parker Snow Bay with provisions for only three months. As a result, the expedition members returned north to the Eskimo settlement
it
Etah to bring food and skins back to the stranded crew of the
Cluett.
While there, Green and two others outfitted a sledge party to reach South Greenland in hope of getting help. After sledging a thousand miles southward Green and two other expedition members reached a small Danish port on the coast, only to discover that World War I and German attacks on shipping had made any sort of rescue impossible for the time being.

Finally, in July 1916, the
Danmark
arrived at the Greenland coast, and Green arranged for its charter to rescue the rest of the expedition. Green himself took another ship to Copenhagen and anxiously awaited news. In August the
Danmark
disappeared somewhere in the north without having reached Etah, and yet another year passed, the expedition hearing nothing and seeing no ship. (They would later learn the fate of the
Danmark;
it had caught fast in the ice, and over the winter its crew had mutinied.) In July of 1917, Green chartered yet another ship, the
Neptune,
a staunch Newfoundland sealer, to rescue his stranded friends. The
Neptune
made it. Finally, on July 29, 1917—five years after the start of the Crocker Land expedition—the ship steamed into Etah and carried the stranded party back to New York.

They brought back to the Museum thousands of photographs, Eskimo artifacts, and a wealth of new geographical and meteorological information about the Arctic. They also came back to a rather chilly reception at the Museum.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, then the Museum's president, was furious at the cost of the expedition. The Museum had originally committed "up to $6,000"; instead, the length of the expedition—and especially the chartering of no less than six ships—had cost the Museum a small fortune. The other financial backers of the expedition—the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois—had pulled out of their original financial commitments, leaving the Museum with a staggering bill of well over $100,000, just when wartime inflation was eroding the institution's capital. Furthermore, Osborn was not a little displeased with the scientific results of the expedition. MacMillan and Osborn quarreled over the book and film rights to the expedition, and when Osborn learned that MacMillan had been bad-mouthing the Museum to the National Geographic Society, he became infuriated. He called MacMillan into his office and demanded a written apology. Instead, MacMillan sent him a long letter highly critical of the Museum, full of grievances and alleged wrongs the Museum had committed against the expedition, of which he sent copies to several prominent institutions. And then a most unwelcome letter arrived from the U.S. Secretary of State, inquiring about an alleged murder of an Eskimo by expedition member Fitzhugh Green.

Green's journal is stored in the Rare Book Room of the Museum, and it tells a chilling story indeed. On April 30, 1914, according to the journal, Green and Pee-a-wah-to left MacMillan and rounded Cape Thomas Hubbard. Around the corner of the cape they were struck by violent winds and a rapidly building storm. Pee-a-wah-to went on ahead and Green followed in his tracks, but he had trouble getting his dogs to move, "no matter how I beat them" (Green wrote in his journal). Green finally caught up with the Eskimo, who had built a small igloo near a ridge of ice. The snow drifted so heavily over the igloo that soon they couldn't keep their air hole open, and as a result their stove wouldn't burn. Finally, when they were in danger of suffocating under the snow they cut a hole in the roof. "P. went out," Green recorded, "telling me to stay inside."

Pee-a-wah-to then built a second igloo directly on top of the first. Green wrote, "He said my dogs were O.K. but didn't tell me he had changed his own [i.e., dug up and moved them]."
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Green continued in his journal:

When we finally got out in a lull in the storm I found my team had been buried under about 15 ft. of snow. We dug in vain.... [Green's dogs and sledge were too deeply buried and had died.] The storm came on again. P. and I were both made sick by the fumes [of the stove] in the illy ventilated igloo.

Friday, May
1, 1914. We tried twice before we got away. A lull in the storm was always followed by more wind and snow as before.

P. refused to go south or stay here [i.e., he wanted to return to the base camp instead of continuing on in the face of the storm]. I was forced to follow as I had no dogs or sledge.

We got away finally at seven
A.M.
In a little while it was as bad as ever. I could not ride as my feet were very wet and several toes seemed to be frosted.