Members of the expedition to the Arctic – from left, Elmer Ekblaw, Maurice Tanquary, Harrison Hunt, Donald MacMillan and Fitzhugh Green – along with another gentleman not fully identified, pose by the steamer Diana in a photo dated July 2, 1913. (Photos: courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library )

By John Franch

On July 2, 1913, members of the Crocker Land Expedition set sail, leaving the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Navy Yard on the steamer Diana. On the ship’s main mast, an orange-and-blue University of Illinois pennant fluttered in the breeze beneath the Stars and Stripes. Their quest: to find Crocker Land, a vast, mysterious land dotted with snow-clad peaks, reportedly seen by the famed polar explorer Robert Peary during his 1906 trip to the Arctic.

Donald MacMillan, a disciple of Peary, organized this later expedition in search of this so-called Crocker Land, named after George Crocker, a California banker and Peary’s financial patron. The University of Illinois would join the American Museum of Natural History and the American Geographical Society in financing this ill-fated voyage of discovery. Stranded in Greenland for years, the expedition members would endure near-starvation, frostbite and snow blindness, and an Inuit guide would pay the ultimate price – all in quest of an Arctic land that never was.

The omens were bad for the Crocker Land Expedition from the very start. Originally planned to launch in July 1912, the enterprise was delayed because of the sudden death of one of the expedition’s leaders. Under MacMillan’s supervision, the venture was reorganized and a crew selected that included two Illinois graduates: Maurice Tanquary, Class of 1907, and W. Elmer Ekblaw, Class of 1910.

The crew’s zoologist, Tanquary possessed an even temperament and hardiness that was to help him withstand incredible misery. Ekblaw, the expedition’s geologist, was extremely energetic, gaining a reputation among the crew as “a steam engine in pants.” Having an unquenchable zest for life, he once confessed that “I’ve never found this good old earth of ours a vale of tears.” This optimism would be harshly tested in the years that followed. (A devoted Illini, the gregarious Ekblaw indeed had won campus fame as a founder of Homecoming at the University of Illinois.)

Ekblaw played a significant role in securing the involvement of the University of Illinois in the Crocker Land Expedition. An accomplished salesman, he pointed out to UI President Edmund Janes James that the University would receive valuable collections of Arctic flora and fauna and, perhaps more importantly, “due credit” for its role in the enterprise. “It seems to me that this advantageous opportunity should not be lost,” Ekblaw asserted. Realizing the potential public relations benefits, the ambitious James obtained $10,000 from the Board of Trustees (roughly $200,000 in today’s money) for the expedition.

Despite this generous contribution from the University of Illinois, the Crocker Land Expedition was still “hard up,” as Ekblaw bluntly put it. He and Tanquary were forced to shell out more than $250 of their own money for underwear, caps, coats and sleeping bags – “things that originally it was stated the expedition should furnish.” In a letter to a UI professor, Ekblaw bitterly complained that the pair “won’t have enough money left when we get back for carfare.”

Besides Ekblaw, Tanquary and expedition leader MacMillan, the expedition’s crew included Fitzhugh Green, a Navy ensign; Harrison Hunt, a surgeon; an electrician, Jerome Allen; and mechanic and cook Jonathan C. Small, or “Jot.”

“If it were not for our house there would be nothing but five holes in the side of hillrocks, in which a few of the Eskimos live in the winter time,” wrote team member Maurice Tanquary of the expedition’s residence at Etah, above.

The voyage began auspiciously, with the skies clear, the seas smooth and the winds moderate. Just two weeks later, around midnight on July 16, disaster struck. The vesse n trying to avoid a large iceberg, had hugged the Labrador Coast too closely and crashed. MacMillan blamed the wreck on the rocks on the captain of the Diana, who had been partaking heavily of the six cases of whiskey stored in his room.

Switching to a new ship called the Erik, the expedition members at last reached the rocky, snow-flecked coast of northwest Greenland in mid-August. Here at Etah – at that time the northernmost settlement in the world – the men set up headquarters with the aid of the 19 Inuit in the area. Within three weeks, a 35-foot-square, eight-room house had been erected, complete with electricity.

Allen, the electrician, also constructed a radio shack at Etah, but, despite his best efforts could not establish communication with home. As a result, the explorers would be largely cut off from the world during their long stay in Greenland, except for infrequent deliveries of mail carried by dog sled in winter and ship in summer. (In fact, Ekblaw and Tanquary would receive three issues of The Alumni Quarterly via mail delivery while they were stuck in Greenland. Ekblaw welcomed this chance to learn the latest about his beloved Alma Mater, writing, “No news is so interesting as the news of the old school.”)

Preparations for the dog-sled trek in quest of Crocker Land began during the region’s long Arctic night, which lasts from October to February. Caches of supplies were placed along the proposed route. Then, on March 11, 1914, MacMillan, Ekblaw, Green and seven Inuit started out on the 1,200-mile-long journey to Crocker Land, their sleds preceded by a pack of 100 yelping dogs straining at the traces. Conditions were less than favorable: gale-force winds from the north, drifting snow and a temperature of 31 degrees below zero.

Tanquary and Ekblaw

Crossing Ellesmere Island northwest of Greenland, MacMillan’s men encountered a 4,700-foot-high obstacle in the form of the Beitstadt Glacier. With the front of the glacier being a nearly vertical wall of ice 55 feet high, the explorers spent an entire day scaling it, lugging their 3,000 pounds of supplies. It took another three days to ascend to the glacier’s summit, where the temperature registered 55 degrees below zero. Ekblaw was a casualty of this treacherous climb, suffering frostbite in one foot. He soon had to return to Etah, his hopes of planting his “pretty Illinois pennant” on a Crocker Land mountaintop dashed.

By April 11, MacMillan, Green and two Inuit – Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk – had reached the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the others having abandoned the chase. Venturing out onto the treacherous shifting sea ice, the four remaining dog-sled teams carefully navigated their way past numerous stretches of open water. Finally, on April 21 – a crystal-clear day – Green and MacMillan spied on the northwestern horizon what they believed was an immense tract of land. “Great heavens! what a land!” MacMillan later remembered. “Hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” It had to be Crocker Land! But Piugaattoq (MacMillan called him “Pee-a-wah-to”) knew better. The veteran of 20 years of Arctic exploration told MacMillan that the “land” was simply mist – a mirage.

Undeterred, MacMillan insisted that the journey continue, despite the lateness of the season and the imminent breakup of the polar ice. For five more days, the party trekked across the jagged surface of the Arctic Ocean, the shimmering “land” ahead always out of reach, “a will-o’-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning.” By April 27, the men had traveled some 125 miles on the frozen sea and had reached the supposed location of Crocker Land as recorded by Peary. With nothing whatever in sight, MacMillan decided to head back, satisfied at last that Piugaattoq had been right: Crocker Land did not exist. “My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams; my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment,” the expedition leader lamented.

It may have been small consolation to MacMillan and his companions, but the Crocker Land mirage they spotted was one of the largest ever seen. A very special kind of optical illusion called a Fata Morgana, the mirage had been caused by the refraction of light through thermal layers in the atmosphere.

The foursome managed to get off the Arctic Ocean in the nick of time. Only some 36 hours after their escape, the frozen polar sea had begun to crack, becoming “a hideous, grinding chaos of broken ice,” according to a newspaper account.

Back on land, MacMillan sent Green and Piugaattoq on an exploratory expedition to the west. The two quickly ran into trouble when a blizzard with gale-force winds engulfed them.

Piugaattoq constructed an igloo, but the snow fell so quickly that the pair found it difficult to keep the igloo’s air hole clear. During a lull in the fierce storm, Green ventured outside and was horrified to discover that his dog team had perished, buried beneath 15 feet of snow. Forced to walk beside Piugaattoq’s sled on the journey back, the Navy ensign found it hard to keep pace. Eventually snapping, he snatched a .22 caliber, high-powered rifle from the sled and, waving it at Piugaattoq, ordered the Inuit to stay behind him. A few minutes later, Green looked back and saw Piugaattoq trying to escape him, desperately whipping his dogs in another direction. In his diary, Green laconically described what happened next: “I shot once in the air. He [Piugaattoq] did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.”

Green would never be prosecuted for the murder; according to historian Kenn Harper, a later generation of Inuit suspected that Green had killed Piugaattoq out of desire for the latter’s wife, Aleqasina. A strikingly attractive woman, Aleqasina had been Peary’s mistress and the mother of two of his children.

Green reunited with MacMillan on May 4 and informed him of the fate of Piugaattoq, news which shocked and saddened MacMillan. “[Piugaattoq] had been my traveling companion from the first, and one of the best,” MacMillan would write. Trying to keep the matter quiet, the expedition leader told the Inuit that Piugaattoq had perished in the blizzard.

Ekblaw and Tanquary, however, learned the truth, and MacMillan “enjoined” the former from discussing the incident. Ekblaw would later call the killing of Piugaattoq “one of the darkest and most deplorable tragedies in the annals of Arctic exploration.”

Ekblaw would develop a deep disdain for MacMillan, perhaps in part because of his handling of the killing. Back in July 1913, Ekblaw had called MacMillan “an incomparable leader.” More than a year later, Ekblaw  expressed a very different view. “By the way,” he wrote to a UI professor in October 1914, “I’ll never again go under the leadership of a ‘Christian gentleman’ [a phrase used by the magazine The Nation to characterize MacMillan] … and if ever anybody calls me that it will mean a fight.”

While MacMillan and Green chased after phantoms in the spring of 1914, Tanquary and Ekblaw pursued their scientific studies at a Danish trading post 120 miles south of Etah. Based upon a letter Ekblaw wrote to UI President James in early June 1914, one would have guessed that the two Illini were leading an idyllic existence. “The snow has begun to melt,” Ekblaw wrote, “the birds are coming to their nesting sites, the plants are budding and bursting into leaf, and all day long day after day the sun circles the heavens, lighting every nook, every cranny, of these mountainous shores … Altogether, this season in the Snowland is exhilarating and delightful, like the first balmy days of spring in the Sunland.”

In reality, though, Ekblaw and Tanquary were wallowing in abject misery, their supply of canned food running dangerously low and starvation looming as a very real possibility. Ekblaw had also recently been struck with snow-blindness. “Never have I suffered such keen or intense agony,” he would recall. While the “paroxysm of torture” ended in a few days, their hunger did not. Carefully conserving the contents of a can of prunes, even eating the pits’ contents, Ekblaw and Tanquary managed to survive the summer. They were finally rescued on Aug. 11 by MacMillan and returned via motorboat to Etah.

Tanquary would shortly face even more hardship. He volunteered to accompany MacMillan on an epic dog-sled journey, delivering mail to southern Greenland. MacMillan wanted to get word to the outside world of the nonexistence of Crocker Land and of the expedition’s need for a relief ship the following summer. The two cast off late in December 1914 and soon became lost in a fog-shrouded, iceberg-studded bay. Wandering aimlessly for 10 days in horrific conditions, as temperatures dropped to 40 and 50 degrees below zero, the men quickly ran out of provisions and ended up killing and eating several of their dogs. Upon reaching an Inuit settlement, an exhausted MacMillan decided to head back to Etah, leaving Tanquary to complete the trip with a Danish trader and an Inuit guide.

On the return, when Tanquary removed his sealskin boots and hare-skin stockings, “great pieces of skin and flesh came off too, frozen to the stockings.” Enduring this frostbite, an “exquisite agony of raw, bleeding, rotting toes,” Tanquary somehow managed to drive his dog team the remaining 400 or so miles to Etah, reaching the settlement in mid-March 1915. His big toes were amputated, and it took him eight months to make a full recovery.

For Ekblaw, Tanquary’s incredible dash back to Etah was “the grittiest exploit of the expedition, a truly heroic deed worthy of record.” And in a case of exceptionally bad timing, UI President James would write Tanquary on June 14, 1915: “I trust that you are coming home with all your fingers and all your toes.”

Tanquary’s word got through, and the American Museum of Natural History sent a relief ship to Greenland during the summer of 1915. Unfortunately for the expedition members, the miserly Edmund Otis Hovey, a geological curator at the American Museum of Natural History, had chartered the George H. Cluett, a three-masted schooner ill-suited to Arctic travel, instead of a steamer. Supposedly, Rear-Admiral Peary himself had approved the selection of the Cluett as a relief ship.

Hovey paid a high price for his penny-pinching ways. With the curator aboard, the George H. Cluett sailed away from the Nova Scotia coast on July 19, 1915. The schooner soon developed engine trouble and began to run out of gasoline. Trapped in the Arctic ice for weeks, the drifting vessel at last attained safe harbor late in September after making an abortive effort to return home. Here, in a Greenland bay about 150 miles south of Etah, the ship would remain until the ice melted the following summer. As for Hovey, who had planned on being away from the United States for two months, he ended up being gone for two years.

Amazingly, a second relief ship dispatched the following summer also fell afoul of the Arctic ice. By this point, three of the expedition members – Tanquary, Green and Allen – had already returned to the U.S., having traveled some 1,000 miles down the western coast of Greenland by dog sled. Meanwhile, MacMillan and Ekblaw were busy exploring unknown stretches of the Arctic. Trekking to the northwest part of Ellesmere Island, Ekblaw would discover a beautiful, 30-mile-long fjord surrounded by towering peaks and sparkling glaciers. He named the fjord after Tanquary and christened a promontory of land at the inlet’s opening “Cape James” after the UI president.

Crocker Land Diary Watch Rare Arctic Footage Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum Curator Genevieve LeMoine narrates a three-minute film clip from Crocker Land footage. (Click image above: View using Quicktime)

In 1917 the American Museum of Natural History tried yet again to rescue MacMillan and his remaining men. For this attempt, the museum spared no expense, chartering the steamer Neptune and hiring as its captain Robert Bartlett, a seasoned ice navigator.

The third rescue attempt proved to be a charm. On July 31, 1917, the battered Neptune steamed into the harbor at Etah.

“Is that you, Bob?” an excited MacMillan cried out to the sturdy figure on the Neptune’s bridge.

“Of course!” Bartlett responded. “Who in hell do you think it is?”

Under Bartlett’s expert guidance, the Neptune reached the coast of Nova Scotia on Aug. 24. A motor boat shot out from the shore, and the vessel was boarded, inspected and given permission to proceed through a line of pontoon boats.

According to MacMillan, this line marked “our entrance from the quietness and peace of the North into the turmoil and bloodshed of warring nations.” Although the expedition members’ mail had told them bits and pieces about World War I, which had begun in August 1914, the modern-day Rip Van Winkles were not at all prepared for the dramatic changes ushered in by the war. When he returned home, Ekblaw, for one, was “surprised to see soldiers drilling in our streets and … airships circling overhead.”

Back in the United States, Ekblaw was in a hurry to return to what he called “the good old Illini campus.” On Sept. 6, he wired President James: “GREETINGS TO YOU AND ALL ILLINI WILL REACH UNIVERSITY NEXT MONDAY FORENOON.”

During his long stay in the Arctic, Ekblaw had written several times of his wish to attend the 1915 Homecoming. He would miss that Homecoming – and the 1916 one as well – but finally in 1917 was able to once again partake of the Illini tradition that he had helped create. For W. Elmer Ekblaw, Homecoming had an extra-special meaning that year.

Franch ’89 COM is a University of Illinois archival researcher and freelance writer based in Champaign.

Editor’s note: The material quoted in the story references correspondence housed in the University of Illinois Archives.