Charles Francis Hall

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Charles Francis Hall (1821 – November 8, 1871) was an American Arctic explorer. Little is known of Hall's early life. He grew up in Rochester, New Hampshire where he was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a boy. Eventually, he turned up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he went into business making seals and engraving plates, and later began to publish a newspaper.

Around 1857, Hall became interested in the Arctic and spent the next few years studying the reports of previous explorers and trying to raise money for an expedition. Hall's first two expeditions, in 1860-1863 and 1864-1869, were essentially lengthy solo travels among the Inuit. On the first expedition, the Inuit told Hall of surviving relics from Martin Frobisher's mining venture at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island. Hall travelled there to see them first-hand. Hall also learned what he interpreted as evidence that some members of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition might still be alive. This formed the basis of his second expedition to King William Island, where he found remains and artifacts from the Franklin expedition and made more inquiries about their fate from natives living there. Hall eventually realized that the stories of survivors had been exaggerated either by the Inuit or his own imagination. He also became disillusioned with the Inuit by the discovery that the remnants of Franklin's expedition had deliberately been left to starve. He failed to consider that it would have been impossible for the local population to support such a large group of supernumeraries.

[edit] Polaris expedition

Main article: Polaris expedition

Hall's third expedition was of an entirely different character. He received a grant of $50,000 from the US Congress to command an expedition to the North Pole in the ship Polaris. The party of 25 also included Sidney Budington as sailing master, George Tyson as navigator, and Dr. Emil Bessels, a German physician and naturalist, as chief of the scientific staff. The expedition was troubled from the start as the party split into rival factions. Hall's authority over the expedition was resented by a large portion of the party, and discipline broke down.

Polaris sailed into Thank God Harbor (now called Hall Bay) on September 10, 1871 and settled in for the winter on the shore of northern Greenland. That fall, upon returning to the ship from a sledging expedition with an Inuit guide, Hall suddenly fell ill after drinking a cup of coffee. He collapsed in what was described as a fit. For the next week he suffered from vomiting and delirium, then seemed to improve for a few days. At that time, he accused several of the ship's company, including Dr. Bessels, of having poisoned him. Shortly after, Hall began suffering the same symptoms, and finally died on November 8. Hall was taken ashore and given a formal burial.

Command of the expedition devolved on Sidney O. Budington, who dispatched an expedition to try for the Pole in June 1872. This was unsuccessful and Polaris turned south. On October 12, the ship was beset by ice in Smith Sound and was on the verge of being crushed. Nineteen of the crew and Eskimo guides abandoned ship for the surrounding ice and fourteen crew remained on the ship. Polaris was run aground near Etah and crushed on October 24. After wintering ashore, the crew sailed south in two boats and were rescued by a whaler, returning home via Scotland.

The following year, the remainder of the party attempted to extricate Polaris from the pack and head south. A group, including Tyson, became separated as the pack broke up violently and threatened to crush the ship in the fall of 1872. The group of 19 drifted on an ice floe for the next six months over 1,500 miles before being rescued off the coast of Newfoundland by the whaler Tigress on April 30, 1873, and probably would have all perished had the group not included several Inuit who were able to hunt for the party.

[edit] Investigation

The official investigation that followed ruled that Hall had died from apoplexy. However, in 1968, Hall's biographer Chauncey C. Loomis, a professor at Dartmouth College, made an expedition to Greenland to exhume Hall's body. Due to the permafrost, Hall's body, flag shroud, clothing and coffin were remarkably well preserved. Tests on tissue samples of bone, fingernails and hair showed that Hall died of poisoning from large doses of arsenic in the last two weeks of his life. This diagnosis is consistent with the symptoms party members reported. It is possible that Hall dosed himself with the poison, as arsenic was a common ingredient of quack medicines of the time. But it is considered more probable that he was murdered by one of the other members of the expedition, possibly Dr. Bessels. No charges were ever filed - which is unsurprising since Bessels had died some 80 years before the poisoning was confirmed.

[edit] References

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