The Crocker Land Expedition — four years chasing a continent that was never there

Summary

In 1913 an American scientific expedition sailed north to reach and explore "Crocker Land," a vast Arctic landmass that the explorer Robert Peary had reported sighting in 1906 from the far north of the Canadian archipelago. The land did not exist. The party, led by Donald Baxter MacMillan and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois, crossed hundreds of miles of polar sea ice in the spring of 1914 toward a horizon that proved to be a mirage — a Fata Morgana thrown up by the ice — and then could not get home. A succession of relief ships failed or were frozen in, and the men were stranded in northwest Greenland for four years, finally extracted in 1917. One human life was taken on the ice, not by the cold but by a member of the party: the ensign Fitzhugh Green shot dead the Inuit guide Piugaattoq, an experienced hunter who had correctly judged the land to be an illusion.

The expedition's central error was epistemic. It committed years, money and lives to verifying a sighting that the man who made it appears to have known was false — Peary recorded no land in his diary at the time he later claimed to have seen Crocker Land — and it pressed deep onto breaking spring sea ice in pursuit of an image that the Inuit on the party identified immediately as poojok, mist. The science the expedition gathered along the way, in geology, ethnography and natural history, was substantial and is preserved in major museum collections. But its defining facts are a phantom continent, a four-year stranding, and a killing on the ice for which no one was ever charged.

From a base at Etah, Greenland, the sledging march struck out across the frozen ocean in spring 1914; by 27 April MacMillan had to concede that the land they had followed for days was not there. On the return, having sent Piugaattoq and Green ahead together, Green shot the Inuk hunter and reported him dead. The men then waited out year after year as ships sent to bring them home were turned back or trapped, until Robert Bartlett's Neptune finally carried the last of them out in 1917.

Timeline

A continent reported, never seen

Crocker Land entered the record as a name on a map before anyone had set foot on it — and no one ever would, because there was nothing there. In 1906 Robert Peary, on one of his northern journeys, reported sighting a great landmass far out across the polar sea from Cape Colgate, in the high Canadian archipelago, and named it for the financier George Crocker, a backer of his work. It was the kind of report that, in the geography of the era, demanded an answer: an unexplored continent in the Arctic Ocean was a prize worth an expedition. That the prize was illusory is now established; Peary's own diary for the relevant days records no land in sight, and the sighting he later publicized appears to have been an invention or a self-deception. The Crocker Land Expedition was, in effect, dispatched to confirm a claim its author had reason to doubt.

The venture that set out in 1913 was a serious scientific undertaking, not a stunt. It was backed by the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois, and staffed to do real work: MacMillan as leader, the geologist and naturalist Walter Elmer Ekblaw, the zoologist Maurice Tanquary, the surgeon Harrison Hunt, the wireless operator Jerome Allen, and the navy ensign and engineer Fitzhugh Green. Its survival in the field rested, as all such ventures did, on the Polar Inuit of the Thule region, whose hunters, dog drivers and knowledge made high-Arctic travel possible at all. Among them was Piugaattoq, a hunter with about twenty years' experience of that country, whose judgment the expedition would have done well to trust and instead ignored, and ultimately destroyed.

After a damaged ship forced a transfer at the outset, the party reached Etah in northwest Greenland in 1913 and built its base there. The plan was straightforward in outline: winter, then in the next spring's brief window of firm sea ice, sledge north across the frozen ocean to Crocker Land, survey it, and return. Everything depended on the land being where the map said it was.

Following a mirage across the polar sea

The sledging march set out from the Greenland side in March 1914 and crossed Ellesmere Island to reach the rim of the frozen Arctic Ocean in April. As the supporting parties peeled off, the spearhead was reduced to four: MacMillan, Green and the two Inuit hunters Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk, driving their dogs out onto the sea ice toward the horizon where Crocker Land was supposed to rise. On 21 April, far out on the ice, they saw it — hills, valleys, the contour of a coast strung across the north. To MacMillan it looked like the land he had come to find. To Piugaattoq it looked like what it was: poojok, mist — the towering false landscape that polar pack ice and cold air conjure as a Fata Morgana, a mirage that recedes as one advances. The Inuk hunter said so. MacMillan, unwilling to turn back within reach of his object, ordered the party on.

They followed the apparition for days, deeper onto sea ice that the advancing spring was rotting beneath them, covering roughly 125 miles before the leader could no longer deny what his guide had told him at the start. On 27 April 1914 MacMillan conceded that Crocker Land did not exist; the "coast" was an optical fiction, and the expedition's entire reason for being had evaporated in the Arctic air. They turned for home across the same disintegrating ice they had crossed, now under the pressure of a closing season, with the dogs failing and the men spent — a retreat from a place that had never been there, paid for in the hardest miles the ice could offer.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Crocker Land Expedition came home having proved a negative — that the continent it was sent to find did not exist — and the four-year ordeal yielded no geographic prize, only the erasure of one. Its scientific harvest, however, was real and lasting: extensive collections in geology, botany, zoology, ethnography and photography, including thousands of images, now held at the University of Illinois (the Spurlock Museum) and at the Peary–MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, where the participants' journals also survive. The expedition helped close the era of phantom Arctic lands, and it confirmed for the record that Peary's Crocker Land had never been there to find.

The killing of Piugaattoq is the part the triumphalist accounts buried. For decades the Inuk hunter's death was recorded, where it was recorded at all, as an accident, and the man who shot him was never held to answer. Later scholarship and the surviving testimony have restored the fact of the homicide, and Piugaattoq is now named in the histories as what he was: the experienced guide who read the mirage correctly, was overruled, and was then killed on the way back. That the man whose judgment would have spared the party its deepest folly was the one life the expedition took on the ice is the case file's hardest irony, and the reason it is remembered as a partial loss rather than a clean failure.

Lessons

References

• Crocker Land Expedition WIKIPEDIA
• Crocker Land Expedition PEARY–MACMILLAN ARCTIC MUSEUM, BOWDOIN COLLEGE
• Mirage and Murder in the Arctic STORIED, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
• Murder Near the North Pole, Part III: The Death of Peeawahto EXPLORERSWEB
• Fate of the Crocker Land Expedition NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE