Introduction - A Journey with Many Goals
George R. Putnam was an engineer and field surveryor for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey for around 20 years. While working on a project for MIT, he joined Admiral Robert E. Peary on his expedition to Greenland in 1986.
Peary was a famous American Arctic explorer and his 1896 trip to Northwest Greenland was one in a series of expeditions to the region occuring from 1894 to 1897 with the primary purpose of extracting the great meteorite at Cape York. The official accounts of these expeditions are chronicled by Peary in Northward Over the Great Ice, which describes the multi-year, multi-journey effort.
Peary's expedition was used as a research fieldtrip for botany students at Cornell University as well as an opportunity for other sceintists (such as Putnam) to collect data. Putnam's work involved recording magnetic data and gavitational pendulum observations. These results were published in 1897 in Terrestrial Magnetism: Volume 2, Issue 1 by the Journal of Geophysical Reasearch in March of 1897, as well as by MIT's Technology Quarterly later in the year.
Putnam recorded his perspective on the expedition in his personal diary, discussing the everyday life and procedures of collecting data and simply living during his time in Greenland, offering an alternative perspective to that of Peary's official report.
Sources:
Admiral Robert E. Peary - American Polar Society. (2019, October 3). American Polar Society. https://americanpolar.org/about/polar-luminaries/admiral-robert-e-peary/
Peary’s expedition to Greenland. (2021). Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany/about/historical-expeditions/pearys-expedition-greenland#:~:text=The%20bog%20blueberry%20(Vaccinium%20uglinosum,(1897):%20417%2D425.
Geoffrey Baker. (2011). George Rockwell Putnam. Lighthouse Digest. https://www.lighthousedigest.com/digest/StoryPage.cfm?StoryKey=3558