Harrison J. Hunt

Harrison J. Hunt, who lived from 1878 to 1967, was the surgeon on the Crocker Land expedition to the Arctic between 1913 and 1917. When the expedition's members were stranded in the ice for four years, Hunt became the first of them to return to civilization with news, after a hard four-month dog-sled journey made with six Inuit companions. He later described the experience in his book North to the Horizon: Arctic Doctor and Hunter, 1913-1917. Born in Bangor, Maine, he graduated from Bowdoin College and the Bowdoin Medical College, and after his Arctic years he worked at the Eastern Maine Hospital in Bangor. In 1925 he was appointed Medical Examiner of Penobscot County, Maine. He is also credited with finding the major biological specimens that the expedition sent back, the eggs of the red knot, which helped establish the migration pattern of that bird between Europe and northern Greenland.