Christopher Columbus is one prime example.
E. Peary who is widely believed to be the first person to have reached the North Pole in 1909.
This story, however, begins a lot earlier.
Several pieces fell across Greenland embedding themselves in the vast ice sheet.
Others fell in the ocean near Baffin Bay.
The meteorite is estimated to have weighed 100 tones before it exploded.
Robert Peary stands besides a large chunk of meteorite he salvaged from Greenland.
These artifacts became the first scientifically collected pieces of what became known as the Cape York meteorite.
It took him three years to plan and execute their extraction.
Photo credit: National Geographic
The meteorite finally secured on board.
There are photographs in the museum’s archives showing Qisuk and Minik standing naked on pedestals.
The idea was to keep them at the museum for a year and then send them back home.
Unfortunately, most didnt even make it to the next spring alive.
All of them fell sick to diseases they had no previous exposure to nor immunity.
Four died of tuberculosisamong them was Miniks father.
Only one survivor returned to Greenland, leaving Minik alone in the unfamiliar land.
Minik in New York
Peary distanced himself from the entire affair.
In the two volumes he wrote about his Greenland expedition, he never mentioned the Inuit even once.
Abandoned by Peary, Minik was adopted by William Wallace, the museum’s building superintendent.
Minik attended school and adapted fairly well to his new surroundings and completely forgot his native language and traditions.
When Minik discovered the ruse, he began a life-long quest to get his fathers remains returned to him.
In 1909, at the age of eighteen, Minik returned to Greenland on Pearys ship again.
Before leaving, Minik is said to have bitterlytold a reporter:
Youre a race of scientific criminals.
I know Ill never get my fathers bones out of the American Museum of Natural History.
I am glad enough to get away before they grab my brains and stuff them into a jar!
Minik posses for a photograph with three other Inuit who was brought to New York by Robert Peary.
Minik tried his best to adapt to the conditions of his homeland.
He even married a local girl, but the marriage failed.
Soon he began to miss city life, and in 1916 he returned to the United States.
He moved to Pittsburg in New Hampshire and became a lumberjack.
And just when he finally seemed to find happiness, the 1918 Spanish flu swept through and Minik died.
He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Media coverage of Mr. Harpers book eventually forced the museum to return the bones of Miniks father to Greenland.
Hundreds ofaboriginal skeletons, however, are still stored in American museums.
Some of these Peary had dug up after they were buried and brought them to America to sell them.
Ahnighito, or the Tent at the American Museum of Natural History.
Photo credit:Peter Roan/Flickr
