The Cape York meteorite
The account
The Inuit of northern Greenland took iron from great stones fallen from the sky, until an explorer carried them away.
What investigators found
They are fragments of an iron meteorite that fell thousands of years ago; the largest is in a New York museum.
The story
For centuries, the Inuit of northwestern Greenland used the iron from large rocks near Cape York to make blades and tools, in a land without metal. They were pieces of an iron meteorite that had fallen thousands of years earlier. In the 1890s, American explorer Robert Peary was led to the rocks and decided to remove them. The largest fragment, called Ahnighito, weighs about 31 tons and reached New York in 1897.
On the same voyage, Peary brought six Inuit to the city. Most of them died soon afterward, and the boy Minik was left orphaned far from home, a story remembered today with sadness. The meteorite is at the American Museum of Natural History and is one of the largest in the world.