Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds

Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex, Louis Pope Gratacap’s The New Northland (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting. Richard Fallon explores this “lost world” novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors. June 17, 2026 “Lost world” novels are known for their metafictional manoeuvres. This subgenre of adventure fiction, which thrived between the 1880s and the 1920s, presents fantastic, breathless odysseys as documentary accounts — that soar above the reality to which they remain attached via decidedly conspicuous strings. Take, for example, the pseudo-footnotes of H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure (1886), the framing of James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), or the hoax photographs and sketches in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). This was a literary tradition that one avid reader, Louis Pope Gratacap, knew extremely well. The product of his enthusiasm was a kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting — novel titled The New Northland (1915). Gratacap was a New York man. Born in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in 1851, he studied at the City College of New York and the General Theological Seminary before finding his geological calling at the Columbia University School of Mines. In 1876, the year of his graduation, he joined the staff of the newly opened American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), then in Central Park’s Arsenal. By 1880, he was assistant curator of mineralogy, later rising to curator of mineralogy (and, for whatever reason, conchology). This remained Gratacap’s role until his death in 1917. By all accounts, he was extremely good at it. When the obscenely wealthy financier J. P. Morgan donated to the museum two matchless hoards — the Bement Collection of Minerals and Tiffany Gem Collection — Gratacap’s talent for organisation, conservation, and display placed them in their most flattering light for researchers and tourists. He was, one obituary averred, “preëminently a ‘curator,’ and the mineralogical and precious stone collection of the American Museum of Natural History” was, thanks to Gratacap’s efforts, “probably the best displayed collection in this country or abroad.”1 The same obituary suggested that it was this tireless care for collections that prevented Gratacap from publishing any substantial original research. But it’s hard to look at Gratacap’s bibliography and feel he was stymied. His extensive output, still barely explored by scholars, included museum catalogues, mineralogical primers and guidebooks, papers on local natural history, philosophical and religious speculations, political pamphlets, and novels in various genres, including A Woman of the Ice Age (1906), The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908), and The Mayor of New York: A Romance of the Days to Come (1910). He also kept a series of diaries, held today in the New York Public Library, which detail his cultural rovings. Part of the man’s renowned erudition was facilitated by his commute: for most of his working life, Gratacap kept up a three-hour round trip commute to the museum from his home in West New Brighton, Staten Island, where he lived with his brother, also a bachelor. Most of this travel time was spent reading. The New Northland does not let you forget that Gratacap was a well-read man. The novel tells the story of a group of Americo-Nordic adventurers — Alfred Erickson, Hlmath Bjornsen, Antoine Goritz, and Spruce Hopkins — who, with Inuit help, travel from Alaska to a warm Arctic region called Krocker Land. Here, they encounter prehistoric animals, lush valleys, and the metropolis of a decaying Hebraic race of humans, the Radiumites (or Radiumopolites), who use radium to transmute base materials into gold. Krocker Land’s mineralogical details are, it goes without saying, lovingly expounded upon. After a whirlwind of love, avarice, and death, Erickson flees these aureate precincts and returns through the freezing wastes to share his story with the outer world. Topical science, polar exploration, biblical archaeology, alchemy, an obsession with racial ancestries and mineral resources — these are not unfamiliar plot ingredients to consumers of better-known works of lost world fiction. But Gratacap was not a casual consumer. He was a full-on fan, and this fact takes his novel past simple derivativeness and into more interesting territory. The New Northland, published quite late in the trend of lost world fiction that exploded following the publication of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in 1885, foregrounds its generic awareness to a frankly distracting extent. Ironic reflexiveness and what literary scholars called intertextuality was a common feature of lost world novels (usually called “romances” by contemporaries), each one trying to top the impishness and inventiveness of the last.2 This could mean raiding science and the news for new monsters to encounter. The Pall Mall Gazette, for example, once joked that the appearance of a titanic Brontosaurus in C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (1900) “out-Riders” the comparatively quaint giant crabs found in H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain (1887).3 The art of outdoing could manifest in direct callouts. Doyle’s original draft of The Lost World contained several references to his own literary competitors, but he ultimately cut down on these tactless allusions. Nonetheless, the published novel retains a cheeky reference to the climactic battle of King Solomon’s Mines, when the noble Greys fight evil King Twala and his minions. About to face off against an army of ape-men, Doyle’s jaunty aristocrat Lord John Roxton pronounces that “the ‘Last Stand of the Greys’ won’t be in it”.4 Gratacap, in contrast, name-drops with gusto. Erickson’s excitement in approaching Krocker Land is spurred on by hopes of encountering the kinds of thing he’s read about in lost world novels: We had become decidedly crazy about it all, for, unexpressed, but cherished in our deepest hearts were fantastic hopes of some indescribable faunal, floral, human remnant, like Conan Doyle’s “Lost World” or the Kosekin in De Mille’s “Strange MS in a Copper Cylinder” in the Antarctic, and that romantic and sufficing Paradise that Paine depicted in “The Great White Way,” or even the nightmare trances and inventions, the megalithic splendors and horrific glories of Atvatabar, or the mythic creatures in Etidorhpa.5 These were novels of the last few decades, perhaps enjoyed by Gratacap on the commute to and from his museum desk. More broadly, The New Northland draws upon a rich stock of fantastic literature. On multiple occasions, Erickson compares the tremendous scenery around them to Gustave Doré’s acclaimed 1861 illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, while the “endless park” at the centre of Crocker Land is dubbed the “Valley of Rasselas”, a reference to the beautiful but wearisome “Happy Valley” of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759).6 We also hear that Erickson’s voyage is “more marvelous than that of Marco Polo, of Father Huc, of Mandeville, of Munchhausen, of Sinbad, the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, of Ariosto, of Gulliver, of Ulysses, of Peter Wilkins, of Camoens, of Pomponius Mela”.7 This is classic Gratacap. In addition to its unrelenting allusions to fantastic fiction, The New Northland thoroughly foregrounds the era’s multimedia landscape, taking the conventional up-to-dateness of lost world fiction to new heights. Erickson’s story reaches us through the journalist Azaziel Link, who begins the novel in a verbose “Editorial Note”. Link is unashamedly “yellow” — that is, a product of the modern “yellow journalism” (or “new journalism”) that arose in the late nineteenth century, associated with publications run by men like William Randolph Hearst. This populist approach to making newspapers, employing ultra-accessible formatting and blurring the line between lurid investigative reporting and sheer fiction, had made possible hitherto unimagined circulation numbers.8 Link compares his shameless brand of journalism to the tough love of a mustard plaster: “the ‘yellowness’ of newspapers may amaze modesty, startle discretion, and afflict innocence, but it cures interior disorders”.9 It is through him we hear that the sensational tale we are about to read has already been serialised “in the daily issue of the New York Truth Getter”.10 We, the readers, are late to the party, learning about Erickson’s adventures in a belated book edition — complete with fake title page. Erickson and his colleagues are hardly less media-savvy than Link. The upbeat American, Spruce Hopkins, proposes that the story of their adventures in the Arctic will cause a panic “because nobody will be able to work until they’ve finished the story. . . . Our copyright will be worth a king’s ransom”.11 Its cinematic potential, too, isn’t lost on them, although their unfortunate lack of a camera prevents them from making “a mint” with the “movies”.12 This is, of course, ten years before Doyle’s The Lost World was filmed. Gratacap’s knowingness can put him on thin ice. Erickson’s first-hand narrative is undermined at one point by a tongue-in-cheek “Editorial Apology”, which explains that Link has made “substantial emendations” to the explorer’s words “for the purpose of imparting a literary atmosphere”, even at the risk of making readers “doubt its authenticity”.13 On one hand, this explains why Erickson’s account is suspiciously crammed with poetic quotations; on the other, it corrupts the account’s verisimilitude. Lost world fiction often playfully undermined readerly immersion, but the notion that we are not always reading the narrator’s original words seriously threatens to derail the novel’s pseudo-documentary conceit. Gratacap was also unaware that another convention that made King Solomon’s Mines and The Lost World such hits was that they were all quite short and snappy.14 The New Northland is not. Whatever Gratacap’s shortcomings as a novelist, he did possess a unique selling point: ensconced in one of the United States’ leading natural history museums, Gratacap could blow Doyle and Haggard out of the water when it came to cutting-edge science. Take Krocker Land itself, the paradisical home of the Radiumites. This was a barely disguised reference to Crocker Land: an alleged land mass north of Ellesmere Island, Canada, spotted by Commander Robert Peary on a 1906 attempt at the North Pole. The AMNH itself sponsored the Crocker Land Expedition to find this mysterious Arctic realm. Led by the scientist Donald Baxter MacMillan, the Expedition had left Brooklyn Navy Yard in July 1913. The same year, ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson launched the Canadian Arctic Expedition, which also held the potential to evaluate Peary’s geographical claim. Neither team had returned by the time Gratacap’s novel hit stores in 1915. Not only does Gratacap’s novel fictionally vindicate Peary’s claim, its conclusion also does away with pretence and confirms that Krocker Land is Crocker Land. Erickson is finishing the relation of his tale when Link’s daughter rushes in with an evening paper: “Father, this paper has a telegram from St. John’s, Newfoundland, saying that Donald McMillan [sic] has reached Krocker [sic] Land, and below it is one from Point Barrow, saying Stefansson has reached Krocker Land”. Link and Erickson look at each other tensely. Have the journalist and explorer been scooped? “RUSH THE COPY” screams the latter.15 In fact, neither MacMillan nor Stefansson, nor anybody else, reached Crocker Land. As might be expected, lost worlds were less glamorous than authors like Gratacap implied. The thwarted Crocker Land Expedition turned deadly when the engineer and physicist Fitzhugh Green returned from a trek to inform the team that his Inuk guide Piugaattoq (or “Pee-ah-wah-to”) was dead. As the AMNH’s archives state, “later, it is revealed that Green had murdered Pee-ah-wah-to, but no legal action is ever taken”.16 Viewed from the comfort of New York, Gratacap’s metafictional Krocker Land was very different to the sordid and violent reality of Arctic colonialism. That is not to say that Gratacap’s story doesn’t exhibit its own callousness about races and civilisations deemed “lesser”. The Inuit people who serve the Radiumites are given little serious attention and less respect throughout the novel, while the ruling Radiumites themselves are the subject of the narrator’s prurient musings about cultural degeneration. They “show a sort of frustrated culture”, remarks Bjornson, a geologist of sorts, adding that it is “a well known circumstance that civilizations decline or even degenerate”.17 The question of when the Radiunites split off from other Semitic stock and began their decline provides the characters with plenty of scope for ethnological, philological, and mythographical musings. The contrast these allegedly primitive or enervated races make with the virile Nordic protagonists is intended to be very stark — and would be starker, were it not for the complicating fact that, in several casual asides, we learn that our narrator Alfred Erickson is Jewish. This detail, however, is not developed. The topic of racial difference and its spurious scientific basis would have been impossible to ignore at Gratacap’s museum. The AMNH’s president was, after all, the notorious white supremacist palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (nephew of J. P. Morgan, donor of the aforementioned gem collections).18 Gratacap made no allusions to Osborn’s growing interest in tracing human racial difference far back into deep time, but the man’s shadow can certainly be traced to one aspect of this novel. In 1905, Osborn had named and described what would soon become the ultimate dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex. The New Northland is arguably the first work of fiction to feature this dinosaur, three years before it reared its head in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s more famous pulp adventure The Land That Time Forgot (1918). In fact, it was only in December 1915 — around nine months after Gratacap’s novel was published — that the AMNH was to unveil its first mounted T. rex skeleton.19 Gratacap’s bizarre framing and some admittedly underwhelming illustrations have disguised his novel’s milestone in dinosaurian representation. Not long after entering the warm Arctic valleys, the team encounters a wild boar in combat with a hideous monster: The elongated head of a saurian armed along its jaws with sword-like teeth, a long curved neck, a thorax but slightly enlarged over the width of the rest of the body, provided with a short pair of front legs, terminated by claws perceptibly webbed, and opening and shutting with a nervous rapidity, noticeable dull-colored scales striping its sides, a pair of much longer hind legs on whose skin-enwrapped, stilt-like support it had raised itself, and then a prodigious tail, heavy and fat at its protrusion, but lengthening out into a thin python-like body whose involuntary movements swayed it to and fro in serpentine motions through the flattened weeds. It is, Erickson suggests “a saurian—a tyrannosaurus or something like it—of the Cretaceous”.20 The characters dub this creature the “Crocodilo-Python”, and soon discover more of them. As the illustration makes clear, Gratacap’s AMNH-affiliated artist, Albert Operti, was either unfamiliar with this Cretaceous dinosaur or not working with the assiduous description quoted above. Nor does Operti’s second depiction of the Crocodilo-Pythons, showing the Radiumites feeling these animals with corpses, do much justice to what would soon become the most iconic of dinosaurs. An enthusiast of polar exploration who had joined Peary on Arctic expeditions in 1896 and 1897, Operti was more at home depicting the novel’s snowscapes. More substantially than getting into fights with pigs, Gratacap’s tyrannosauroid creatures play into the novel’s overarching lore. Erickson’s team learns that Krocker Land is, perhaps, Eden, the cradle of humanity, and thus the physical origin point of countless garbled myths and symbols diffused across the world. Among these diffused topoi is that of the snake and the tree: Satan and the Tree of Knowledge, the dragon who guards the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides, the dragon gnawing at the World-Tree Yggdrasil, and so on. This symbolism perhaps explains why Gratacap gave the otherwise confusing serpentine aspect to his “tyrannosaurus or something like it”, reflected in both the tail’s description and the name “Crocodilo-Python”. These animals seem, in fact, to be in the process of evolving from dinosaur to snake — reflecting, in a naturalistic manner, God’s curse upon the Edenic serpent, who must crawl on its belly as punishment for its successful temptation of Eve. Technically, then, the creature is not quite Tyrannosaurus rex, but some ancestor that has evolved along lines “quite isolated or diverse from those established by Barnum Brown, Williston, Lowe and others for the sauropsida”.21 In Krocker Land, Genesis and geology — sin and sauropsida — are reconciled. This tangled contribution to comparative mythology is a fitting place to end, even if The New Northland is here far from exhausted. As a respected museum curator, Louis Pope Gratacap attained a high level of specialist expertise. As a prolific reader and writer, he relished the freedom to move between specialisms, as well as between disciplines and genres, high and popular culture, reality and romance. Lost worlds, where mythic and scientific pretensions could coexist with self-awareness and humour, were appropriate literary sandpits for Gratacap’s serious play. Richard Fallon is Research Associate in Natural History Humanities at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. Previously, he was Deputy Research Leader of Collections and Culture at the Natural History Museum in London. His work explores natural history collections, palaeontology and religion, popular science, and the relationship between science and literature. He is currently editing The Lost World for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle. Enjoyed this piece? We need your help to keep publishing. The PDR is a non-profit project kept alive by reader donations – no ads, no paywalls, just the generosity of our community. It’s a really exciting model, but we need your help to keep it thriving. Visit our support page to become a Friend and receive our themed postcard packs. Or give a one-off donation. Already a supporter? A huge thank you for making all this possible.