[Scenario Seed] Crocker Land

[Catsmate]

Crocker Land - a saga of fraud, murder and arctic exploration.

It started in June of 1906 with a veteran polar explorer, Commander Robert Peary, reporting that he'd sighted a landmass about 200km north west of Cape Thomas Hubbard in the Arctic.
With no time to explore it, he was attempting to reach the North Pole (he failed), Peary named the new territory Crocker Land in honour of one of his financial backers, George Crocker.
In fact there was nothing there, as Peary recorded in his diary. The whole thing was a fraud, probably intended to persuade Crocker to continue financing his explorations.

• In that it failed as Crocker was far more involved in rebuilding efforts in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire.
  

Three years later the non-existent land was of some importance. Peary and a rival, Frederick Cook, both claimed to have reached the North Pole. As Cook's alleged route would have taken him across the area where Crocker Land was supposedly located his failure to report any landmass became important to those backing Peary's claim.

• It's quite likely that neither group reached the actual Pole.
  

So in 1913 an expedition of eight men set out to find and explore Crocker Land. They were:

• Donald Baxter MacMillan: leader
• Walter Elmer Ekblaw: geologist, ornithologist and botanist
• Fitzhugh Green: engineer and physicist
• Maurice Cole Tanquary: zoologist and  the surgeon
• Harrison Hunt: physician and surgeon
• Minik Wallace; guide and translator
• Jerome Lee Allen: electrician, radio operator
• Jonathan Cook Small: mechanic and cook
  

Two additional Inuit guides, Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk, joined later.

The expedition started badly, their ship (the Diana) departed New York on 2 July 1913, but ran agound two weeks later after hitting rocks on the Labrador coast. The expedition transferred to a second ship (the Erik) and finally blamed the disaster on the ship’s captain, who was drunk. The expedition’s members transferred to the Erik, and finally reached Etah  in northwest Greenland in the middle of August. The men constructed a base there, a large building of more than 120 square metres, with Inuit assistance. Radio contact was attempted but never achieved so the team were reliant on mail deliveries by ship or dogsled for communications.

• This itself would be a good location for a "base under siege" adventure; cut off from communications in the arctic...

During the winter of 1913-14, the explorers established a series of supplies caches and constructed shelters along part of their planned route to Crocker Land. Initially they'd planned to depart in February, but illness and problems with their sled dogs delayed this until 11 March 1914. Ten men set out with about a tonne-and-a-half of supplies.

• They were Ekblaw, Green, MacMillan, Wallace and six Inuit.

The journey was estimated to be about two thousand kilometres.

Problems continuted. At Beitstad Glacier, on Ellesmere Island, they took several days to scale the glacier, experiencing temperatures of about -45°C. Ekblaw suffered frostbite there and Minik Wallace departed the expedition (supposedly to seduce the wife of one of the local Inuit). With supplies running short the team was reduced, MacMillan, Green and four Inuit continued to the shore of the Arctic Ocean (reached on 11 April 1914). Three days later four men, MacMillan, Green, Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk set out across the sea ice.

Finally on 21 April 1914 an immense land was seen on the northwestern horizon.

Green was no sooner out of the igloo than he came running back, calling in through the door, “We have it!” Following Green, we ran to the top of the highest mound. There could be no doubt about it. Great heavens! what a land! Hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon. I turned to Peea-wah-to anxiously and asked him toward which point we had better lay our course. After critically examining the supposed landfall for a few minutes, he astounded me by replying that he thought it was poo-jok (mist). E-took-a-shoo offered no encouragement, saying “Perhaps it is".

                                                                                                                                                Donald B. MacMillan, Four Years in the White North

Pressing on for several more days they realised the landmass wasn't really there.

 “We were convinced that we were in pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning. . . . My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams; my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment
                                                                                                                                                Donald B. MacMillan, Four Years in the White North

Disappointed they turned back towards Etah. In fact they gave up at an opportune time, less than two days later the sea ice began to crack. The group split into two teams,

MacMillan and, Ittukusuk, Green and Piugaattoq, to cover the ground that was rapidly becoming a chaotic mass of colliding and grinding blocks of ice. When the teams rejoined Green was alone; Piugaattoq was dead.

“Green, inexperienced in the handling of Eskimos, and failing to understand their motives and temperament, had felt it necessary to shoot his companion.”

                                                                                                                                                Donald B. MacMillan, Four Years in the White North

MacMillan would report that Piugaattoq died in a blizzard, in fact Green shot him; probably after his (Green's) dog team died in a blizzard.

The expedition's problems didn't end there; thanks to the unwillingness of their backers to spend money, and the Great War, they wouldn't be picked up until August 1917, with two relief ships ending up stuck in the ice.
While a grand adventure story, the expedition was a scientific failure; very little data of value was produced and the main objective wasn't achieved; Crocker Land didn't exist.

So what had Peary, MacMillan and Green seen in the high arctic? Assuming Peary had actually seen anything it's probably a form of mirage called a Fata Morgana caused by a combination of atmospheric conditions which cause distant objects to appear larger or inverted. In the case of Crocker Land it's likely that pack ice near the horizon was distorted to appear as a mountainous coastline.

Unless of course it really was there....


Game use.
Well it's an interesting story, and quite suitable to drop a group of PCs into. Do they know much about the expedition? If so do they try and stop the killing of Piugaattoq? Dissuade MacMillian from the whole waste of time?
Or are they too busy trying to survive in one of the most hostile environments humans have (yet) tried to explore. How are their Survival (Arctic) skills?

For a less down-to-Earth adventure maybe Crocker Land is real and the expedition did find it. So what happened there to cause them to deny finding it? And why has no-one seen it since? The parallels to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness are obvious and rife with possibilities for alien bases, ancient civilisation remnants and other weirdness.


Comments? Suggestions? Ideas?

[starkllr]

I love this! As you say, you could easily insert aliens or other weirdness, or keep it as a historical, since there is plenty for the players to do (especially if their TARDIS gets caught under the ice somehow and they need the help of the expedition to retrieve it.

For plenty of similar ideas, the British explorations of the 19th century to the Arcitc, Antarctica and Africa offer you a limitless set of possibilities. Check out a fun book called BARROW'S BOYS (by Fergus Fleming) for a good survey of the topic.

[Catsmate]

I've always had an interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration, and the weirdness associated with it. From Franklin's lost expedition, to Byrd and the Nazi redoubt. Lots of possibilities out in the desolate and unexplored cold.
Plus some truly fascinating and odd people; Siskoid's last blog roundup linked to this post on Peter Freuchen who's one of them.

He stood a trifle over two metres tall, studied to be a doctor at university, participated in several arctic journeys (including a 1,700km dogsled trip across Greenland), wrote fifteen books, avoided alcohol, starred in an Oscar winning film, lost a leg to frostbite in 1926 (he amputated his gangrenous toes himself with pincers and hammer), was involved in the Danish resistance against Germany (he was imprisoned and sentenced to death before escaping to Sweden), married three times (his first wife was Inuit [Navarana Mequpaluk], his second was Magdalene Vang Lauridsen, a Danish margarine heiress and his third was Dagmar Freuchen-Gale, teacher, artist, editor, and a top fashion illustrator), a friend of Mae West and Jean Harlow (whom he once lifted over his head at a Hollywood party, she wasn't wearing underwear), won the top prize on the US quiz show The $64,000 Question.
He's also probably the only man to ever cut his way out of a snow shelter using a chisel fashioned from his own feces.

He's up there with Giovanni Belzoni, Julie D'Aubigny and Percy Fawcett, characters no author would dare create.

His autobiography Vagrant Viking is available here.

[starkllr]

He's also probably the only man to ever cut his way out of a snow shelter using a chisel fashioned from his own feces.

I'm not even sure where to begin with that...

[starkllr]

Although, if you dug up an old copy of GURPS Ice Age, there's probably a table in there somewhere with stats for tools handmade from feces and other low-tech materials...