The Field Expedition

The Field Expedition was the last of four achaeological expeditions led by James Field to the island of Greenland. With a crew consisting mostly of graduate researchers from Miskatonic University, the expedition was successful in discovering the ruins of the Hyperborean city of Ulthar as well as the True Rite of Transcendence, which Field was able to partially translate. They met an ill fate, however, as members of the crew became increasingly paranoid, eventually killing each other off. In the end, the only member to survive was Professor Field himself, who appeared off the coast of Norway with half of the True Rite of Transcendence, completely mad.

Personel
The expedition was headed by Professor James Field of Miskatonic University. Because of the nature of the expedition, several other Miskatonic Professors were also brought along, including Professor Fred Hagan of Archaeology and Professor Ken Jenkins of History. However, the majority of the research crew consisted of graduate students at Miskatonic University, with some also coming from nearby Harvard.

The expedition also received 20 seamen from the U.S. Navy in order to man the ship that brought the research crew to Greenland. Once the expedition arrived in Northern Greenland, the Naval operators were set to do grunt work.

Background
The Field Expedition was the last of several similar expeditions sponsored by Miskatonic University into the North Sea. During the first expedition, Professor Field heard myths among the local Inuits of a once great civilization that lived in Iceland and Greenland. These people, the Inuits alleged, had built great cities made of stone and had practiced all sorts of advanced magics. Believing these people to be the Hyperboreans mentioned in some eaerly Greek histories, Field scoured the islands searching for evidence of this lost civilization, finding only small pieces of evidence that they existed-- a pottery shard here, a tablet with strange markings there, but nothing substantial enough to really prove his ideas. Almost a year later, he returned home with a heavy heart.

Several subsequent expeditions failed to produce any further evidence of Field's alleged Hyperborean Civilization, and the university threateened to cut funding to any further expeditions. Field's hoped rested on one last expedition, which would be sent to the North of Greenland, in the hopes that the frozen Northern Wastes of the country might yield evidence that the warmer, more heavily inhabited areas of the country had hidden from him. He scheduled the trip for mid-July and prepared one of the largest teams he had ever assembled for what he thought might be his last hoorah.

Setting Off
The Field Expedition left from Boston Harbor on July 27, 1911 with a crew of fifteen researchers and twenty boatmen, donated to the expedition from the U.S. Navy and arrived in Northern Greenland on July 31. The group searched for several days for evidence of Hyperborean settlement before finally coming across a ring of stone columns in the snow. Digging around the columns, it soon became clear to the group that they had stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient city.

Ulthar
The expedition spent several months unearthing the ancient Hyperborean city of Ulthar. Once a city of a hundred-thousand strong, the ruins of Ulthar were far greater than anything Field could have imagined. Within a month, the expedition had only unearthed about a tenth of the city, and while Field was a good way in to deciphering the language used on the tablets and carvings in the city, it was evident that the group had a lot more to unearth.

Yet not all was well with the expedition, and members of the group began to become paranoid of each other. The researchers began to suspect the navy men of collusion in some kind of conspiracy and the navy men began to suspect the researchers of plotting against them as well. All of them felt some kind of presence within the ruins, and some reported seeing a silent figure in the distance.

Expedition Failure
In early November, Professor Hagan was found dead in the middle of the expedition's camp, having torn his own throat out. In the chaos that ensued, a group of crazed researchers attacked several of the navy men in their sleep, resulting in four further deaths as the navy men opened fire on the researchers. Eventually Professor Field was able to calm both sides down enough to stop attacking each other, but tensions remained high.

Over the next few months, more and more members of the group wound up dead or insane. People were hung, stabbed, and killed in all sorts of brutal ways over this time period as the camp fell further into fear. Eventually the expedition was reduced to a third of its formal size, much to Professor Field's chagrin. Yet as the group's leader, he felt obligated to keep it together as much as possible.

One day, after a particularly violent blizzard, he woke up and found the remainder of the group gone entirely. They appeared to have walked out into the snow, but where they went he couldn't be sure, and the likelihood that they survived was nil. This was enough to push Field over the edge as he feverishly translated the tablets even further. During this time, he claimed to have receive insight from a black cat that had wandered into the camp. The cat, Field claimed, helped him to translate the True Rite of Transcendence. One day, lost in his waking dream, he blacked out entirely. He had no memory of the time after his blackout, but he was later discovered off the coast of Norway, feverish and mad, the last remaining survivor of the ill-fated Field Expedition.