1941-1945 US Navy, permits and licenses

This series contains materials related to expeditions led by Donald MacMillan with crew including Miriam MacMillan, geologist and botanist Walter Ekblaw, ichthyologist Alfred Weed, ornithologist Alfred O. Gross, geologist George Borup, ornithologist-turned-dentist Dr. Adelbert Fernald, botanist Rutherford Platt, and many Bowdoin students and alumni. Included are crew and provisioning lists; licenses, permits, manifests, bills of health, and customs forms; contracts between MacMillan and funding bodies; charters for Schooner Bowdoin, S.S. Diana, and S.S. Danmark; expedition notes, narratives, and reports; member agreements; ornithological, geological, meteorological, and botanical information, scientific readings, and cairn records from various arctic expeditions. Of note is a statement from the 1938 MacMillan Greenland Expedition crew providing honorary crew status to Miriam MacMillan, who went on nine arctic expeditions with her husband and was responsible for photography and motion picture filming, collecting data, and provisioning the MacMillan-Moravian School in Nain, Labrador. Also included is an important collection of nearly one hundred mounted plant specimens collected during the 1929 Bowdoin Baffin Land Expedition, and notecards with vocabulary for MacMillan's pioneering Inuit dictionary.

In addition, this series contains materials from MacMillan’s crew experience on Robert Peary’s 1908-1909 North Pole Expedition and clippings and articles on the Peary/Cook controversy, along with documents and keepsakes found by MacMillan at Ft. Conger, left by the members of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.