GREENLAND EXPEDITION OF 1939 



By CAPT. ROBERT A. BARTLETT 



Nczv York City 



In the last week of April 1939 we began fitting out the Morrissey 

 for her annual summer trip to the Arctic, in order to be ready to set 

 sail before the end of June. Again Dr. Waldo L. Schmitt, Curator 

 of Marine Invertebrates, United States National Museum, gave us 

 a willing hand in supplying the necessary equipment to collect all 

 kinds of plant and animal life. David C. Nutt, making his fourth 

 voyage on the Morrissey, was in charge of the scientific collections 

 and biological investigations. 



Besides the wide range of material collected for the Smithsonian 

 Institution, four musk ox calves were captured alive for the New 

 York Zoological Garden. Extensive series of birds were collected 

 for both the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the New 

 England Museum of Natural History in Boston. The collections ob- 

 tained for the Boston museum are largely the result of the interest 

 and enthusiasm displayed by John K. Howard, Jr., who made his 

 first visit to the Arctic this year. Rupert Bartlett got together a 

 splendid collection of flowering plants, his best of several seasons. 

 Our surgeon, Dr. Walter Kemp, was of great assistance to the field 

 collectors and in the troublesome matter of preserving our varied 

 hauls of marine life. 



For permission to collect all these things in Greenland we are in- 

 deed indebted to the Danish Government, and we are very grateful, 

 too, for the permits given us by the Department of Natural Re- 

 sources of Newfoundland to collect specimens of Newfoundland bird 

 life. 



Capt. J. F. Hellweg, U.S.N., Superintendent of the U. S. Naval 

 Observatory, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy kindly sup- 

 plied us with necessary instruments, books, and charts. In return, 

 we furnished them with detailed records of ice conditions and berg 

 movements, surface temperatures, and meteorological data. These 

 were forwarded direct to Washington by radio. Drift bottles were 

 put overboard on many occasions. 



Our complement on the Morrissey this summer included David 

 Nutt, Dartmouth College, a veteran of three of my previous expedi- 

 tions ; John K. Howard, Jr., Groton School ; Doron Warren, Lafayette 



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