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

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.