Free Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas Preston

scold me but what can I do? ... I have come to the conclusion that it is easier to go to the Arctic and do the thing you are interested in and want to do than it is to stay at home, bring up the children, fight your husband's battles and look out for the bread and butter for the family. I think hereafter I will do the exploring and let Mr. Peary take care of the home life.

    The Museum, anticipating ownership, had by this time already taken possession of the meteorites. While everyone generally agreed that Peary was due an extra payment for the irons, the amount of the payment was yet to be resolved. The Ahnighito caused a sensation when it was moved from Brooklyn to the Museum. First floated up the East River on a barge, it was unloaded at the East 50th Street Pier and placed on a massive, custom-built cart. A block-long line of twenty-eight horses in fourteen teams hauled it to the Museum. The trip drew flocks of whooping street urchins and clerks in derby hats, who noisily followed its progress through the streets.

    Twelve years after the Ahnighito's arrival in New York—five years after its delivery to the Museum—Mrs. Morris K. Jesup sent Mrs. Peary a check for $40,000, and the meteorites became the official property of the Museum. *10

    By most accounts, the Polar Eskimos enjoyed the rare visits of white explorers to their land, and it is not surprising that on two occasions, at the Eskimos' request, Peary brought them back on his ship to show them his own country. Unfortunately, the change from Greenland to New York was as much, if not more, of a shock to the Eskimos than the change from New York to Greenland was for the explorers. When Peary returned to New York in 1897 with the great Ahnighito meteorite, his ship, the Hope, also carried six Polar Eskimos from Smith Sound in Greenland. The Eskimos planned to spend the winter in New York City and then to go back north in the spring. (In 1894 the explorer's wife, Josephine, had returned to New York with an Eskimo girl from Smith Sound. The girl, whom the Pearys called "Miss Bill," lived with Mrs. Peary for a year and reportedly enjoyed herself immensely; the following year, Peary took her back to her family in Greenland.)

    Exactly why Peary brought six Eskimos back with him in 1897 is unclear. According to an account by the Museum's Director at the time, Hermon C. Bumpus, Peary told him that the Eskimos had asked to be taken to New York for the winter. A Museum anthropologist, the late Junius Bird, believed that Peary brought them back "that they might see how others lived," a common practice among eighteenth-and nineteenth-century explorers.

    It was not long before ill effects resulted from the radical change in climate. Soon after their arrival in New York, the Eskimos were observed to have slight colds, and in four of the Eskimos the colds developed into influenza, bronchitis, and then tuberculosis, one of many diseases to which it was later realized that the Eskimo have a poorly developed immunity. By the spring of 1898, the four had succumbed.

    Two Eskimos survived: an adult named Uisâkavsak and a little boy of about eight to ten years, named Mene, the son of one of the dead Eskimos. That spring, Peary offered to carry them back to Greenland on his ship, the Windward. The adult accepted, but Mene said he wanted to stay in America and was adopted by a Museum employee, William Wallace. Mene grew up in the Wallace home and later returned to Greenland, where he joined an American Museum of Natural History expedition to seek out a large, unknown continent thought to exist northwest of Ellesmere Island. Hired by the expedition's leader, Donald MacMillan, Mene was one of seven Eskimos and five Americans who set out from Smith Sound in March 1914. On the first leg of the expedition, the explorers endured a grueling trip across Smith Sound and up the eastern side of Ellesmere. When they reached the foot of the massive Beitstadt Glacier and were faced with adimb up a