Dinosaurs in the Attic Page 8

  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 suffocatin
g 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]."*12

  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.

  We were both going over the glare ice and P. kept whipping up his dogs. I told him I could not keep up and he advised me to follow his trail. This was impossible. I then snatched the rifle from the load and warned him to keep behind me. A few minutes later I turned and saw him whipping up the dogs away from me.

  I shot once in the air. He did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.

  I had trouble finding the igloo at the Cape.

  Saturday, May 2, 1914. The storm abated considerably and I went over to Peary's cairn. I photographed it after removing record. I left a copy of Peary's record and the following of my own. [Green's record, which he copied in his journal, merely repeats why he shot the Eskimo.]

  Green later published an account of the killing in the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. "A moment before I had faced the end of everything," Green wrote. "He that had loomed hostile and a deceit between me and safety lay now crumpled and inert in the unheeding snow.

  "For once fate was balked ... I had baffled misfortune. The feeling sent red gladness to my anaemic humor ... the present was perfect, ecstatic. To prolong the moment was my impulse. I laughed, not fiendishly, but because I was glad."

  He lashed the body to the sledge and carried it through the storm to an abandoned igloo closer to his rendezvous point with MacMillan. He dragged the dead body into the igloo, and fell into an exhausted sleep, which was suddenly interrupted by a nightmare. When he awoke in a cold sweat, he found himself looking at the dead Eskimo. "A horrible sight met my eyes," he wrote. "his eyes were open, glaring and malignant, fixed upon me."

  Green leaped up and dragged the body outside behind an ice hummock. "Perhaps the wolves and foxes did not find it for several days," he wrote. "Made little difference I do not write to boast morbid delight in a truly sorrowful experience Let the right combination of circumstances, edged by the pitiless elements, cut a man to the quick and he will turn savage by the very logic he once boasted was his certificate of culture." It took Green two more days of horror battling the storm to return to the dugout camp where MacMillan was waiting for him.

  MacMillan has revealed little of his feelings about his assistant's killing the Eskimo. He repeatedly stated that since Green felt it was necessary to take the life of his Eskimo companion, it was not up to MacMillan to pass judgment. In Four Years in the White North, MacMillan touches on the killing and does present a veiled critism of his companion. He wrote:

  Green, inexperienced in the handling of Eskimos, and failing to understand their motives and temperament, had felt it necessary to shoot his companion. Pee-a-wah-to was a faithful assistant of Peary for more than two years, his last trip as one of the famous starvation party to the world's record of 87°6'. He had been my traveling companion from the first, and one of the best.

  In 1921 the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen learned the truth about the killing of Pee-a-wah-to. He wrote a long letter that made its way to a Danish Minister and from there to the U.S. Secretary of State. In turn, the Secretary of State sent it to Osborn, asking for an explanation. Rasmussen, himself part Eskimo, was a close friend of Pee-a-wah-to's. When Rasmussen had arrived in Etah in 1916, he heard about his friend's death and asked MacMillan for an account of it. MacMillan merely told him their prepared story about an avalanche. But the story seemed suspicious to Rasmussen, and when he ran into Green in South Greenland he posed him the same question. According to Rasmussen, "Green's face suddenly changed color, and in evident confusion he replied that this was a matter which Mr. McMillan [sic] had told the members of the expedition not to speak about." Rasmussen added, "I only regarded [this explanation] as evidence of Mr. Green's mental condition, for I knew that during the winters in the northernmost Greenland his nerves had become absolutely ruined."

  But then, several years later, Rasmussen picked up MacMillan's newly published Four Years in the White North and read the passage quoted above. He was enraged. He was especially incensed at the callous way MacMillan had described the shooting, ''just as if there was only a question of a dog." In his letter he demanded that MacMillan provide a full account of the Eskimo's death, and that the Museum take care of Pee-a-wah-to's widow and children. He added that there was no need to prosecute Green for his crime: "Green was most certainly a nervous wreck," he wrote, "who cannot be regarded as responsible for his act." The nature of exploration in those times brought explorers into extreme circumstances, and it was clear to everyone that Green really felt he was defending his life when he shot the Eskimo.

  The Museum replied that Green had helped Pee-a-wah-to's family while he was in Etah, that Pee-a-wah-to's widow had remarried, and that all of his children were either married or independent, except for one. An acrimonious exchange of letters took place. The Danes put the matter before a committee, which concluded in a report sent to the U.S. Secretary of State that Green had misunderstood Pee-a-wah-to's motives. The Eskimo, it reported, merely meant to exhort Green to keep going, thinking the white man meant to give up, and that he was only trying to escape from the deranged Green after Green fired the warning shot. It said, "Green, in a condition of despair and excitement, killed a well-meaning traveling companion." But the report noted that Pee-a-wah-to's widow had died and the children grown up, so that the claim for compensation was being dropped. The matter, having been brought up and dealt with by the proper authorities, was concluded.

  The Crocker Land Expedition was the last to explore the Arctic using dogs and sledges; indeed, it was one of the last expeditions to explore the unknown without motorized travel and modern equipment. A decade later the airplane would prove conclusively that Crocker Land, the "Arctic Atlantis," was just a vast, frozen sea, broken and heaved into masses of ice, covering the pole and stretching from western North America to Siberia and beyond.

  SIX

  The Great Dinosaur "Gold Rush"

  During the first ten years of Jesup's tenure at the Museum, a dinosaur "gold rush" was in full swing in the American West. This gold rush was fueled primarily by two wealthy men—Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope—who were engaged in a pitched scientific battle to see who could discover and name the most dinosaurs. The two men hated each other bitterly, vilified each other in public and private, and poured their personal fortunes into searching for and digging up dinosaurs—Marsh for the Peabody Museum at Yale and the U.S. Geologic Survey, and Cope for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and his own private collection.

  The extraordinary rivalry between these two eminent paleontologists began sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s. While the exact moment of the break is in question {the two men had originally been friends}, it probably came in a dispute over the fossil beds of Haddonfield, New Jersey, where the first American dinosaur had been discovered in 1858. At the time, Cope was living in Haddonfield and collecting specimens in the area. In the spring of 1868, Cope showed Marsh ar
ound the various quarries. Not long afterwards, Cope later alleged, Marsh paid off the quarry owners, and Cope suddenly found the quarries closed to him and open to Marsh. The rivalry intensified, although still on a professional level, when Cope reconstructed an Elasmosaurus skeleton and erroneously placed the skull on the end of the tail.*13 Marsh lost no time rushing a correction into print, in which he jokingly said that Cope should have named the animal Streptosaurus, meaning "twisted reptile." The article must surely have embarrassed and galled Cope.