Fig 1.
Map showing location of Fort Conger within Quttinirpaaq National Park on Northern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada.
Fig 2.
Diagram showing the location of the original Fort built during the First International Polar Year in 1881 by Adolphus Greely with his expedition members and the three wooden shelters built during Robert Peary’s expedition in 1900. Peary dismantled Fort Conger to build the smaller huts his expedition members used. Only some floorboards and other timbers are left of Fort Conger but the Peary huts are still standing.
Fig 3.
Fort Conger and huts built by Robert Peary at Lady Franklin Bay, Ellesmere Island.
(A) Fort Conger as it appeared when it was built in 1881. (B) Peary and his expedition members dismantled the fort in 1900 to make smaller huts more suitable for surviving the Arctic winters. Floor boards, beams and other timbers remain at the site from Fort Conger. (C) Three wooden shelters made from the wood taken from Fort Conger and used by Peary’s expedition are still present at the site.
Fig 4.
Peary expedition shelter and wood showing decay.
(A) One of the huts showing it was built low into the ground and had a double wood wall that was filled with sod and soil for insulation. (B) Wood from Fort Conger in ground contact showing advanced stages of wood degradation.
Fig 5.
Scanning electron micrographs of transverse sections from historic woods at Fort Conger.
(A) Sound pine wood showing intact tracheid cell walls. (B) Advanced stages of soft rot from Fort Conger timbers with extensive soft rot attack and cavity formation within all secondary cell walls. (C) Wood from the Inughuit hut with a progression of soft rot attack exhibiting incipient stages of attack with small individual cavities in the cell walls (bottom of photo) and more advanced stages with many coalescing cavities (top of photo). (D) Advanced decay in wood from Henson’s hut with the S2 layer of the secondary walls completely riddled with cavities and many of the cavities coalescing into lager voids. (E) and (F) Soft rot in wood from the Inughuit hut showing advanced stages of decay with secondary cell walls almost completely destroyed but the middle lamella and S3 region of the secondary wall, the wall layer closest to the cell lumen, remaining. Bar = 50μ in A to E and 25μ in F.
Table 1.
Wood identification and type of decay in samples from the Peary Huts and residual wood left at Fort Conger.
Table 2.
Fungi isolated from historic wood of Fort Conger and the Peary Huts.