This morning’s return of seasonably wintry weather has us feeling like little explorer David Binney Putnam (1913–1992), seen here bundled up on the bow of the schooner Effie M. Morrissey, on a 1926 Arctic expedition up the west coast of Greenland.
Putnam was the son of publisher, author, and explorer George Palmer Putnam (1887–1950), the product of his first marriage to Dorothy Binney (1888–1982), a Crayola crayon heiress. George’s second marriage was to the celebrated aviator Amelia Earhart (1897–disappeared 1937).
David Binney Putnam would follow in the footsteps of his father and stepmother. He famously began his life of adventure by exploring the Galapagos Islands and Sargasso Sea at age 12, along with his father and naturalist Charles William Beebe (1877–1962). Following the voyage, his name was attached to David Goes Voyaging, the first in a series of boys’ adventure books published by his father’s publishing house of G. P. Putnam's Sons.
The voyage pictured here brought the thirteen year old along with the American Museum Greenland Expedition, organized by George Palmer Putnam, University of Michigan Professor William H. Hobbs, and the American Museum of National History. His experiences photographing and hunting narwhal, polar bear, walrus seals, and sharks on this adventure would later be recounted in an installment of this series titled David Goes to Greenland.
After his father married Earhart in 1931, David Binney Putnam began receiving flying lessons and played a minor role in joining her and other aviators in founding Northeast Airlines in 1933. He would later serve as a pilot for the Army Air Corps in World War II. Following the war, he settled in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he established a career in real estate, with periodic forays into motion picture production, banking and retail establishments, and searching for Spanish shipwrecks.
This photograph is part of the Hagley Library’s collection of Lammot du Pont, Jr. collection of aeronautical photographs (Accession 1975.360). You can view more material from this collection online now by clicking here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.
