Miriam MacMillan

Miriam Norton Look MacMillan (née Look; June 13, 1905 – August 18, 1987) was an American sailor, writer, lecturer, photographer, and explorer.

From 1937 onward she was a chief photographer in nine Arctic expeditions on the Bowdoin schooner to Labrador, Baffin Island, and West Greenland within 660 miles of the North Pole.

In 1948 she detailed her 1937–1939 expeditions in her adventure memoirs, Green Seas and White Ice.

Throughout her expeditions, MacMillan created thousands of photographs, audio recordings of Inuktitut songs, and films of Umiak sailors. Her parents were Amy G. Wood Look and Moses Jerome Look, a civil engineer who built dams.

A 1947 photograph displays MacMillan on the Bowdoin schooner using wire recording to document Inuktitut languages.

A 1948 photograph in Northwest Greenland shows MacMillan at the wheel of the Bowdoin schooner, beside her camera tripod.

On June 13, 1954, MacMillan and her husband were featured in a front-page rotogravure photograph on the Boston Sunday Herald.

Later life and death In 1967, she became an honorary curator of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum.

In 1980, MacMillan received the honorary Doctor of Science degree from Bowdoin College.

In 2010, MacMillan was added to the Brunswick Women's History Walking Trail alongside Congregationalist freewoman Phebe Ann Jacobs, milliner Dolly Giddings, botanist and artist Catherine Furbish, St. John's teacher Sister Pauline Langelier, restaurateur Pauline Siatras, and famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Novels Green Seas and White Ice (1948), historical account of her travels Etuk, the Eskimo Hunter (1950), children's fiction book inspired by Inuit culture Kudla and His Polar Bear (1953), children's fiction book inspired by Inuit culture