It’s 1909: Robert Edwin Peary has been to the top of the world. Peary, the Pennsylvanian polar explorer and navy commander, has become the first man to reach the North Pole, lying 90 degrees north a few miles from the island of Ellesmere, near Greenland.
“The prize of three centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years,” Peary wrote in his diary. “Mine at last.”
Peary’s expedition left the Arctic aboard the S.S. Roosevelt, after one year abroad. “Only one short year of Arctic work!” thought Donald MacMillan, an explorer and former high school teacher on Peary’s crew, who had been forced to abandon the march to the Pole due to frozen heels. One year, that was all? The Roosevelt set off from Ellesmere into the Robeson Channel, where it became caught in the ice. “I secretly hoped,” MacMillan wrote later of that moment, “that Torngak, the evil spirit of the North, would keep her there.”
Torngak works in mysterious ways. The Roosevelt broke free of the ice, returning the expedition to America, where Congress would honour Peary and promote him to Rear Admiral. But almost immediately, his claim was tested. The American explorer Frederick Cook, thought missing or dead for more than two years, resurfaced in Denmark claiming he had reached the Pole in April 1908, one year earlier than Peary.
Fortunately for Peary, his supporters, including Donald MacMillan, found the perfect means to discredit Cook. In Cook’s account of his journey, he claimed an improbable route to the Pole that would have taken him directly through a huge, mountainous ice-island—but Cook made no mention of any land, and by his account he had waltzed unimpeded all the way over flat sea-ice. Peary himself had discovered that island in 1906, which he named Crocker Land, though he had never set foot there. To chart and study that island would disprove Cook definitively. Thus, in 1913, Donald MacMillan organised a scientific expedition to Crocker Land, with the financial support of the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society, and the University of Illinois’ Museum of Natural History. On the team were Fitzhugh Green (engineer and physicist), Maurice Tanquary (zoologist), Walter Ekblaw (geologist), and, of course, Donald MacMillan (leader—second choice.) The first choice to lead the expedition had tragically drowned after his being selected; an omen to which no heed was paid.
The Crocker Land Expedition set sail from the Brooklyn Navy Yard on July 2, 1913. “In June 1906, Commander Peary, from the summit of Cape Thomas Hubbard… reported seeing land glimmering in the northwest, approximately 130 miles away across the Polar Sea,” announced MacMillan to the press before departure. “That is Crocker Land. I am certain that strange animals will be found there, and I hope to discover a new race of men.”
Crocker Land did not exist.
It was all bullshit. There was no land where Peary described, nor did Peary record seeing any land in his diary at the time. It’s believed today that Peary’s “discovery” of Crocker Land was an appeal to the vanity of the man who bankrolled the expedition, George Crocker, the well-to-do son of a millionaire banker and railroad baron. All Crocker Land ever was, perhaps, one more squeeze on the teat of young Moneybags Crocker.
“You probably shouldn’t go on that expedition,” is what Peary should have told Donald MacMillan, but he said nothing. He let him go ahead and commit the next two years of his life to defending Peary’s honour in the Arctic. MacMillan sailed away in ignorant bliss, confidence unshaken, until, two weeks in, the ship struck rocks and ran aground on the Labrador Coast. MacMillan blamed that on the captain, whom he had seen the previous night drinking scotch in his underwear. Perhaps it is in that crude sign that we observe at last the hand of evil Torngak.
Eventually it would come out that Robert Peary probably never even went to the North Pole at all. He had made camp about five miles from where he thought the Pole to be, and decided abruptly that he would carry on alone, without anyone capable of making independent navigational observations. He returned shortly after, claiming to have travelled twice as fast as he had been to that point, saying, in effect: “Yeah, I found it; didn’t really take me very long, either.” Peary never submitted any of his notes for independent review, and today, his claim to the Pole is generally discredited.
MacMillan arranged a replacement vessel in good time, and the expedition made camp at Etah, Greenland: the northernmost settlement in the world. Things were good, for a while. The expedition spent a couple months building their headquarters, planning their route to Crocker Land and placing supply caches along the way. They built good relationships with the local Inuit, sharing food and supplies, and recruiting some (and some of their dogs) to the expedition as guides.
The march to Crocker Land began in February of 1914. MacMillan sent advance parties, and embarked on the route himself with Minik Wallace, an Inuit translator and guide, on the 13th. I understand the portent, MacMillan thought at the time, but I don’t care. Crossing Alexandra Fiord, MacMillan and Wallace passed two dead dogs lying on the trail. That’s probably not a good sign, though.
When MacMillan and Wallace caught up with the advance parties, they found many of the older Inuit had contracted the mumps, and the dogs weak and malnourished. They had come to a stop at an immense glacier, and the Inuit argued the dogs would all die if they attempted to climb it now. Instead, they recommended turning back to Etah and trying again in a couple months. MacMillan consented, thoroughly pissy about their work ethic.
“I decided to retreat to Etah,” MacMillan wrote, “and there eliminate the sick, the chicken-hearted, and the older and, consequently, the more influential Eskimos, who were apparently very much concerned over the fact that their dogs might die and thus compel them to walk a few hundred miles. In a discussion of this nature the younger men of the party always listen respectfully to the opinion of their elders and do as they advise. Young Eskimos for a long and dangerous trip are much to be preferred, as they are fond of adventure and willing to take a chance, while the older men wish to make certain of getting home.”
Young Eskimos like Minik Wallace. Minik was a curiosity, who, like MacMillan, had lived in the thrall of Robert Peary. Minik met Peary in 1897 when he was seven, living amongst the Inughuit in northern Greenland. Peary had been working with the Inughuit on his expedition, and invited some to return to New York with him. Minik, his father, and four others accompanied Peary to visit America, where Peary unexpectedly gifted them to the American Museum of Natural History. “What’s this shit?” thought both the Museum and the Inughuit, presumably.
The Museum took custody of the Inughuit, studied them and put them on display. Soon, the adult Inughuit died of tuberculosis, including Minik’s father Qisuk. At Minik’s request, the Museum organised a traditional Inughuit burial for his father. What Minik did not know was that the Museum actually buried a coffin full of rocks. The Museum kept Qisuk’s body for themselves, and put his skeleton on exhibit—in the building where Minik lived, now as the adopted son of the Museum curator. Minik didn’t find out about any of this for years, until some American children told him after reading it in a pamphlet. When Minik tried to return his father’s bones to Greenland, the Museum director pretended not to have them. At which point Minik, quite understandably, decided to get the fuck out of the United States.
It was March 1914 when the Expedition set out again on its 1200-mile journey to Crocker Land, with the temperature far below freezing. MacMillan, joined by Minik, Fitzhugh Green, Walter Ekblaw, and six more Inuit, successfully climbed the impassive Beistadt Glacier that had previously stalled their progress. It occurred to Minik then that another of the Inuit in the group had left his hot young wife back in Etah, so he abruptly quit the expedition and ran home, followed shortly thereafter by the husband. MacMillan was unenthused. Ekblaw, not long after, caught frostbite in his toes, and MacMillan held onto him, working him like the dogs until they had crossed to Ellesmere Island and absolutely had to send him home.
Seven hundred miles of “rolling blue ice” lay ahead to the northwest. It was only then that MacMillan thought their work had truly begun. “We were going into the unknown,” he wrote, “toward that point where land had been put down with a question mark.”
Into the unknown, then. On the night of April tenth, MacMillan scaled an ice ridge under the light of a full moon, and watched the ice float across the dark, writhing channels of the Polar Sea. After crossing the sea, the expedition made camp and Fitzhugh Green attempted a radio-echo sounding; lowering wire into a hole in the ice to measure its thickness. Green unspooled five hundred fathoms of wire into the hole without finding its bottom—then a thousand fathoms, then two thousand. Green and MacMillian glanced at each other and gave up.
Two weeks later, at last: Green ran into the igloo in the morning, yelling, “We have it!” MacMillan and the two Inuit—Piugaattoq and Ituuqasu—chased Green to a vantage point. And there she was, upon the crest of the horizon in all of its anticipated majesty: Crocker Land. “Great heavens!” MacMillan remembered thinking. “What a land! Hills, valleys, snowcapped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.”
MacMillan and Green stood in awe, then begun to plan their assent. Piugaattoq shook his head. “That’s just mist,” he said. A mirage. MacMillan and Green didn’t think so. Ituuqasu just shrugged. Let’s check it out anyway, MacMillan decided.
“As we proceeded,” wrote MacMillan, “the landscape gradually changed its appearance and varied in extent with the swinging around of the sun; finally at night it disappeared altogether…. You can imagine how earnestly we scanned every foot of that horizon—not a thing in sight, not even our almost constant traveling companion, the mirage. We were convinced that we were in pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning.”
MacMillan accepted the truth: the object of his quest was a mirage, a lie written across the horizon. These kinds of mirages were named fata morgana, after the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress and shape-shifter. The Sicilians had thought that these mirages, these appearances of false land, were Morgan’s witchcraft, intended to lure sailors to their deaths. So maybe Crocker Land was witchcraft, a hex born of a sordid, arcane tryst between Morgan or Torngak, or Morgan wreaking her own retribution against the last descendants of the men who wronged her thousands of years ago. Or maybe it was mere optical illusion, light rays bending in thermal inversion through layers of air in an atmospheric duct. There was a lot to unpack here, for sure.
The next morning, MacMillan turned the expedition back, and, almost immediately, got lost.
This he blamed on Ituuqasu, who had lost the trail back to Etah and didn’t feel the need to bring it up until MacMillan asked him directly. After a few weeks, the foursome made it to an igloo, low on supplies. MacMillan sent Green, Piugaattoq and some dogs southwest to survey the coastline, and once the group had split up, MacMillan and Ituuqasu found themselves caught in a snowstorm and a collapsing igloo, preyed upon by wolves.
Six days passed before Fitzhugh Green returned—alone. MacMillan left the igloo to meet Green’s sledge, carried by about half the dogs he had left with. “This is all there is left of your southern division,” Green said matter-of-factly. “Piugaattoq is dead; my dogs were buried.”
Green told MacMillan the story. Caught in the same snowstorm, Piugaattoq and Green took refuge in a hastily-constructed igloo. When the storm eased, Green emerged to find his dogs buried under fifteen feet of snow. Piugaattoq’s dogs were okay, and so on the return journey to MacMillan, Piugattoq travelled by fast, sleek dogsled while Green struggled to keep up on foot. Which pissed Green off, and after a while Green grabbed a rifle off of the sled and ordered Piugaattoq to keep behind him. Piugaattoq did, but when Green looked away for a moment, the Inuit raced away at full speed. “I shot once in the air,” wrote Green in his diary. “He did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.”
That was the story he told MacMillan, anyway. There were rumours, entertained by those who found Green’s account insufficiently salacious, that Green had been sleeping with Piugaattoq’s wife Aleqasina—whom Robert Peary had taken as a mistress years ago when she was fourteen.
MacMillan took all of this in, and came to a decision on what the official story would be. “Green,” as MacMillan wrote in his diary, “inexperienced in the handling of Eskimos, and failing to understand their motives and temperament, had felt it necessary to shoot his companion.” But this was not the story he would share with Aleqasina or Piugaattoq’s five children. MacMillan would tell them, and all the Inuit, that Piugaattoq had just died from one of those normal everyday hazards one encounters in the Arctic, nothing to do with him or Green or anybody, and so… shit happens. They left Piugaattoq in the ice.
On the way back to Etah, one of the dogs gave birth. MacMillan carried the puppy inside of his shirt to keep it warm. It crawled in circles around MacMillan’s body about forty times, eventually disappearing through a hole in his clothes, never to be seen again.
The remains of the expedition arrived back in Etah in the spring to deliver the catalogue of bad news. MacMillan told his colleagues Ekblaw and Tanquary the truth about Piugaattog, but forbade either of them from discussing it. Ekblaw could not have been less impressed with MacMillan (who had once been described in magazines as a “Christian gentleman”). “I’ll never again go under the leadership of a ‘Christian gentleman’,” Ekblaw wrote that October, “and if ever anybody calls me that it will mean a fight.”
MacMillan owned up to the non-existence of Crocker Land, at least, and its implications for the competing North Pole claims of Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. On Christmas Eve 1914, he and Tanquary left by sledge for Upernavik, five hundred miles south from Etah, where they could send word to America of the exhibition’s failure and request a rescue ship.
The second journey was weirder than the first. En route to Upernavik, MacMillan and Tanquary danced with Inuit girls to a squeaky Victrola, officiated a wedding, feasted on fetid seal and raw polar bear, debated socialism, met a boy raised by dogs, and encountered a mother whose starving children had almost destroyed her breast with their teeth, who had slit the tips of her fingers so her children might sup on her blood. Conditions worsened. The dogs, facing starvation, turned on the expedition in a pack fifty-strong; MacMillan fended them off with a whip. It was not long until MacMillan was forced to eat the dogs—and feed their meat to the living dogs—just to survive.
It was almost March. MacMillan had had enough. He tasked Tanquary with carrying the message the remaining miles to Upernavik. MacMillan returned to Etah, the closest thing available to home.
The message, if it got through, would reveal their mission to have been folly. The one thing the Crocker Land Expedition accomplished was the exact opposite of its goal: it had verified Frederick Cook’s claim to the North Pole and would hand him the prize Peary had sought for decades. It had been a year and a half, Piugaattog had been murdered, they’d fed dogs to dogs, the American hero Robert Peary had been exposed as a fraud, a hundred thousand dollars had been wasted on this ill-informed expedition, and when Tanquary returned from Upernavik he was so cold that when he removed his boots, he took his toes along with them. Could all of that have actually been for nothing?
At this moment it would probably have brought Donald MacMillan no solace to know that Frederick Cook had also lied about going to the North Pole. There was never any solid evidence that Cook’s expedition reached the Pole at all, much less a full year before Peary did (or rather, did not.) What’s more, what Cook presented as his route to the Pole was extremely similar to the route taken by the characters in an obscure Jules Verne novel, The English at the North Pole, in which the English don’t even go to the fucking North Pole but go insane and leap into a volcano—which sounds about right.
Tanquary’s message at Upernavik did get through. The American Museum of Natural History immediately send a ship to the rescue: a three-masted schooner named the George H. Cluett, captained by the esteemed American whaler George Comer. The Cluett sailed forth to the Arctic as quickly as possible, promptly becoming stuck in an iceberg and remaining trapped there for two years; just another chump in the ice.