A Book Report on David Welky's A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

Tim Prasil

February 12

"The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart." -- Matthew Henson

Crocker Land Haunts Me

I keep returning to Crocker Land. It doesn't exist -- I know it doesn't exist -- but I can't seem to leave it behind.

And I can't explain what I find so fascinating about this and the many other cases of explorers spotting land in the Arctic, only to have the sighting proven false by those who followed. Robert Peary went public with his "discovery" of Crocker Land in 1907, but this certainly wasn't the first time such a thing had happened. For instance, in 1818, Commander John Ross observed a mountain range extending across what was actually a passageway west, one that could have let him sail farther in pursuit of the Northwest Passage. Convinced he had seen land, he turned the ships under his command around and even named what he thought he had seen the Croker Mountains! I recently added Ross to my "Crocker Land and Other Mapped Mirages of the Arctic" page.

The September 24, 1916, issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch includes this map of Crocker Land. It's a very generous interpretation of "the faint white summits of a distant land" Peary claimed to have observed.

This addition and my most recent return to Peary's Crocker Land were sparked by reading David Welky's A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier. It's a remarkable book that is both engagingly written and impressively researched. Its main focus is a 1913-1917 expedition, led by Donald MacMillan and intended to verify the existence of Crocker Land (along with several other goals). This voyage became the first solid step in invalidating what Peary thought he had seen. I cite a couple of interviews with Welky in my pages on Croker Land, but I only recently read the book he discusses in them.

Somehow seemed like a good spot for my copy of Welky's chilling yet tasty book.

While narrating MacMillan's problem-plagued, four-year journey, Welky poses a serious challenge to Peary's sincerity regarding his claim about having seen land off the coast of northern Canada. The historian writes:

Only Peary could say for sure, but numerous pieces of evidence indicate that he misled the world in order to advance his personal agenda. (255)

This evidence includes Peary's expertise in all things Arctic, including the mirages that might be seen there. There's also a conspicuous absence of references to Crocker Land in the following:

Peary's diary entries on the two days he supposedly spotted it;
a record he left behind at the area where he supposedly spotted it;
his photographs of the trip;
the diary of one of his shipmates on the trip home;
his newspaper interviews, letters, and speeches/lectures once he arrived back to the States;
and the drafts of his chronicle of the expedition prior to the one for publication (pp. 255-259).

That's a suspicious amount of not mentioning what would have been a very important discovery! Add to this Peary's record of making false claims, which I discuss below. Welky has good reason to go on to use unqualified language, referring to the Crocker Land claim as "Peary's fraud" and "a lie" (pp 261, 422). Indeed, he builds a strong case for exactly that.

A Precedent for Doubting Peary's Honesty

Welky wasn't the first to cast aspersions on Peary's veracity, however. In 1916, Congressman Henry T. Helgesen gave a speech to the House, arguing that government-issued maps based on the explorer's unreliable claims be corrected. The politician never exactly accuses Peary of intentional fabrication -- but he comes very close. At one point, he says, "For 20 years, Mr. Peary posed as the discoverer of the Peary Channel, the discoverer of the East Greenland Sea, and the discover of the insularity of Greenland." Subsequent exploration, continues Helgesen, established that the channel doesn't exist and the sea is dry land while Greenland's insularity had already been established by previous exploration (pp. 5-8). He moves on to other claims made by Peary, saying that one of them required the explorer "to occupy two widely separated points at one and the same time." Noting that MacMillan couldn't find Crocker Land where Peary had indicated, Helgesen dubs it "an imaginary dream" (pp. 5-11). He adds some "fictitious soundings reported by Peary" before including Peary's life-defining claim of being the very first to have reached the North Pole among his "false claims of discovery and achievement" (pp. 20, 24). What begins as a plea to correct maps ends as an effort to ensure "that scientific proof shall prevail and that history shall not be perverted" (p. 31). The speech is a relentless attack on Peary's character, and -- as one might after reading Welky's book -- one is likely to walk away with a very poor opinion of the famous Arctic adventurer.

Robert Edwin Peary Sr. (1856-1920)

Welky's Troubling Use of "Continent"

That said, there was one element of A Wretched and Precarious Situation that made me wonder if Welky might be misrepresenting Peary in order to further his challenge to that man's integrity. As far as I know, Peary's only descriptions of what he thought he saw were "the faint white summits of a distant land" when he first saw it and "the snow-clad summits of the distant land in the northwest" the second time, both of these observations chronicled in Nearest the Pole: A Narrative of the Polar Expedition of the Peary Arctic Club in the S. S. Roosevelt, 1905-1906 (pp. 202, 207). Early on, Welky says: "Whatever Peary had twice seen, whether island or continent, would henceforth and forever be known as Crocker Land" (p. 11). Thereafter, the historian persistently refers to Crocker Land -- not as an island -- but as a continent. (See pp. 15, 30, 48, 69, 78, 82, 121, 169, 189, 190, 241, 249, 256, 257, 258, 261, 262, 304, 321, 343, 357, 412, 419, 422, and 434. Yep, it struck me as curious enough to mark the pages where the word appears as a description of Crocker Land.)

I've found unexplored land in the Arctic referred to as a continent in newspaper articles -- sensationalized ones, such as the wild one in a 1922 issue of the Washington Times -- but I don't think that was ever Peary's term or implication. Now, whether a mirage or a lie, Crocker Land was bolstered by a 1904 essay by Dr. Rollin A. Harris, who advanced a theory regarding, as his title suggests, "Some Indications of Land in the Vicinity of the North Pole." (Welky relates Peary's claim to Harris's theory on p. 261.) Harris refers to this hypothetical place as "a large tract of land dividing the deep Arctic channel" (p. 257), but he doesn't use the word continent.

In fact, a map Harris provides suggests his "Indicated North Polar Land" to be roughly the size of Greenland, which is an island that's part of the North American continent. Granted, there's some debate in exactly how to define continent, but size matters. Greenland is about a quarter the size of Australia, the smallest member of the Continent Club. While Crocker Land might have been a very significant island -- maybe an archipelago -- Welky's labeling it a continent is curious. Is this intended to suggest that Peary's claim about Crocker Land was, not just any old lie, but a full-out whopper?

A Great Book for Us Armchair Explorers

Despite this semantic quibble, I highly recommend Welky's book, especially to readers who, like myself, are fascinated by what's revealed about human nature through Arctic exploration. The tenacity of MacMillan, the fraying nerves of his lead crew -- which, in one case, led to murder! -- and the drive to sail, paddle, tromp, and sledge across one of the planet's most desolate, deadly regions acts as a good reminder that human beings are both bold and bonkers.

If you're interested in what I discuss above, from the history of mapping Arctic mirages to my hesitancy in dubbing Peary a liar -- at least, in regard to his having spotted unexplored land -- my "Charting Crocker Land" project starts at Base Camp.

-- Tim