Holly Day Mirage In 1906, eager to turn back and come home, Admiral Robert Peary claimed to be able to make out the distant peaks of an ice-free land just off the coast of the North Pole. Great clouds of steam rose from this land obscuring most of the details, but through his spyglass, he declared he could see great beasts moving around, perhaps oxen, perhaps something else. The Inuit who accompanied him seemed to confirm his story with a legend of a land somewhere past the great, glacial masses of the Pole warmed by geysers and unfettered sunlight, where the seabirds stayed yearround and there was abundant game and fishing, and that was probably what he had seen through the eye of his spyglass. They went on to say that occasionally, a hunter would wander far enough out on the ice to reach this land and when he did, it was so warm and comfortable that he’d never return. Peary, unable to see the proper outline of the land through his insufficient spyglass drew a rough outline of where he thought this place was on the maps he had made of the Arctic a small island of solid ground surrounded by a moat of melted ice named it Crocker Land, in honor of one of the financiers of his trip. One can only imagine how the harsh, blunt consonants of “Crocker Land,” must have sounded, the random association of this land with an unknown, New York City banker to the Inuit guides, who probably had a much more beautiful name for the half-glimpsed fantasy all future aerial photographs disproved.
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