The Top of the World
On August 30, 1871, an American ship on expedition to the North Pole nimbly dodged icebergs and reached a latitude of 82 degrees, farther north than any waterborne explorer had ever recorded.
The USS Polaris was more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle and less than 500 miles from the pole. The leader of the expedition, a single-minded New Englander named Charles Francis Hall, was certain that it was a matter of time before he would be the first man to reach the top of the world, where he hoped to plant the American flag.
“Neither glory nor money has caused me to devote my very life and soul to Arctic exploration,” Hall wrote. “My desire is to promote the welfare of mankind in general under this glorious ensign — the stars and stripes.”
As the brief Arctic summer ended, the Polaris became icebound, as everyone aboard had expected, at the far northern end of Baffin Bay between Greenland and the huge, uninhabited Ellesmere Island.
The crew of 27 men, two Eskimo women and their four children hunkered down for a long, sunless winter aboard the Polaris, a 140-foot steamer powered by a coal-fired boiler and specially outfitted with iron and heavy oak beams to survive the punishing ice.
They looked out on a craggy seascape. The sea ice was heaved up into irregular hummocks, and in every direction the crew could see mammoth frozen mountains, icebergs that had calved off the vast glacial icefields on Greenland and Ellesmere.
The crew had ample provisions — canned hams, bread, sailor’s biscuits, dried fruit and countless cans of pemmican, a staple food made from meat that is dried and ground, then mixed with fat and raisins. The food was supplemented by the occasional seal, musk ox, polar bear or walrus shot by the two Eskimo men hired as hunters.
Once the ice thickened, the expedition’s 60 sled dogs were put out beside the ship. They were fed once every three days — a mix of pemmican, dried fish, dried seal meat and whatever scraps and bones were at hand.
The temperature would be dangerously cold, often reaching 50 degrees below zero, but the Polaris was prepared.
The boiler kept the ship’s quarters at a cozy 65 degrees. And Capt. Hall had insisted that the crew be outfitted with native-style cold weather gear, including sealskin parkas and mukluk boots — clothing that had helped Eskimos survive the teeth-chattering cold for centuries.
With his ship iced in, Hall embarked on a series of journeys by heavy, dog-drawn sledges to plot a route north across the polar ice cap. Hall hoped to move the ship farther north once the ice broke up the following spring, then make a dash to the pole by dogsled.
But his dream would go unrealized due to an event destined to become the greatest mystery from the era of northern exploration.
Capt. Hall returned from a two-week reconnaissance mission on October 24. He was in high spirits, telling subordinates he believed he could make it to the pole via a coastal route he had just explored.
Hall seemed to summon energy from these rough outings — shambling up icy hummocks behind baying dogs, sleeping in ice huts, and, in general, outsmarting the frigid Arctic.
On his return, Hall warmly greeted crew members, then retired to his cabin, where he drank a mug of hot coffee. He complained that it was lousy coffee — too sweet and foul-tasting. Not an hour later, Hall suddenly felt sharp pain in his stomach and legs. He summoned the ship’s doctor, a stern young German named Emil Bessels.
After speaking with Bessels about his symptoms, Hall lapsed into unconsciousness. His pulse rate varied wildly, surging up, then plunging. Dr. Bessels declared the captain comatose.
The doctor applied a mustard poultice, and after 30 minutes, Hall awoke to find his left side paralyzed.
Bessels administered a laxative of castor and croton oil and made a diagnosis: Hall had suffered a stroke.
The captain awoke the next day with a mild fever, but his paralysis had waned. He told other officers he suspected his coffee had been spiked, perhaps with poison. That evening, when Hall again began feeling ill, Bessels administered a shot of quinine, a standard fever treatment in those days.
Over the next few days Hall complained of numbness in his mouth. He was likely hallucinating, as well. At one point, he said he saw “blue vapor” emanating from the mouths of visitors.
Capt. Hall gradually became convinced that he was being poisoned by Dr. Bessels. On October 29, Hall refused Bessels’ treatments and banned the doctor from his cabin. Over the following week, his condition fluctuated from near-normal to near-death.
On November 4, he agreed to once again accept Bessels’ doctoring. The German sat beside his bed for the most of the next two days and nights.
Two days later, Hall managed to spend several hours dictating to a scribe or writing in his journal. At one point, he asked the men gathered in his cabin, “How do you spell murder?”
Some 12 hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on November 7, 1871, Capt Hall drew a final, shallow breath.
Four men spent two days chiseling a 2-foot-deep grave in the permafrost on the northwest shore of Greenland, not far from the Polaris. The ship’s carpenter built a coffin. Hall’s body was placed inside and covered with an American flag. The casket was solemnly toted to the gravesite, where Richard Bryan, the expedition’s astronomer and chaplain, led the crew in prayers.
The flag that Hall hoped to plant on the North Pole was lowered to half-mast on his ship.
Charles Hall was an unlikely explorer. He had more moxie than credentials.
Hall was born in Vermont in 1821 and grew up in Rochester, N. H. He worked as a blacksmith as a young man, but that ancient occupation was an uncomfortable fit for Hall, who always had an eye toward science, invention and discovery.
He moved to Cincinnati, on America’s western frontier, in 1849 and went into the printing business. He owned and edited two Cincinnati newspapers, the Occasional and the Daily Press, during the 1850s. He got married and fathered a daughter.
But Hall began to develop an obsession with the Arctic, apparently touched off in 1845 by the fateful attempt by the British navy to forge a northwest passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Capt. John Franklin’s two ships, carrying 128 men, were last seen in July 1845. Beginning in 1847, a long series of rescue expeditions were sent after Franklin. Hall’s newspapers frequently carried accounts of these efforts, which continued for more than a decade.
In the late 1850s, Hall decided to mount his own search party. It was a quixotic plan — not least because by the time he departed there was ample evidence that Franklin and his men had all starved to death when their ships became terminally locked in ice at Victoria Strait, about halfway between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Hall would not be deterred. He sold his newspapers and abandoned his daughter and pregnant wife to become an explorer. He had no money, no equipment and no experience. But Charles Hall would prove to be a convincing salesman. He wheedled $1,000 out of investors, including Henry Grinnell, a whaling magnate who had founded the American Geographical Society. Hall bought and outfitted a small sailboat, then paid for a berth aboard a whaling bark out of New London, Conn. His “New Franklin Research Expedition,” an exalted title for his one-man show, sailed in May 1860.
Four months later, a fierce storm wrecked his boat and drove him ashore in Greenland. Hall located an Eskimo colony, where he lived for three years. He went native — learning to dress, hunt, fish and survive like the Eskimos.
Hall resurfaced in civilization in 1863, but he stayed just long enough to mount another expedition. Then he disappeared for another five years in the north. Returning from his second Arctic adventure, Hall found that he had become a minor celebrity with the 1865 publication of “Life With the Eskimeaux,” his journal of his years with the Greenland natives. He also discovered that the great naval nations of the world were engaged in a spirited contest to reach the North Pole first.
Hall embarked on a lecture tour about his explorations. His primary message was that America, which had fallen behind ambitious English explorers, should have its flag planted at the top of the world.
No hellfire preacher ever proselytized more effectively. Soon, he was invited to Washington, where he drummed up political support for a North Pole expedition.
Later, Hall delivered speeches to congressmen, senators and then-President U. S. Grant himself. He asked the government to fund his expedition with a special $100,000 allocation. And for stingy politicians, he dangled the economic bounty of whaling, where a single huge specimen could reap a $25,000 profit for the oil alone — and even more for baleen, teeth and other byproducts.
With religious fervor, Hall testified that he was born to the mission.
“I believe firmly that I was born to discover the North Pole,” he said. “That is my purpose. Once I have set my right foot on the pole, I shall be perfectly willing to die.”
Not every politician was convinced. But by a close vote, Congress agreed to pay $50,000 to fund Hall’s polar expedition.
President Grant authorized a naval vessel for Hall’s use, and he chose a 387-ton steamer, the Periwinkle, that had done Civil War duty as a gunboat. The ship, renamed the USS Polaris — after the North Star — was refitted for ice duty at the Washington Navy Yard as Hall began assembling a crew.
For all his patriotic bluster, Hall ended up with a crew that was more than half foreign-born, including 10 Germans, four adult and four juvenile Greenland Eskimos, two Englishmen, a Dane and a Swede.
He hired 10 Americans, ranging in rank from the cook to two of the top officers, sailing master Sidney Buddington, a veteran whaling captain from Groton, Conn., and George Tyson, another experienced sea captain from New York brought on as assistant navigator.
Although Congress named Hall captain of the ship and commander of the expedition, he was not much of a sailor. He relied heavily upon Buddington and Tyson to steer the ship through Baffin Bay’s treacherous icebergs, many of which dwarfed the Polaris and could send her to the bottom of the sea.
After a year of preparation, the fully loaded Polaris steamed out of New London, Conn., on July 3, 1871. The ship made excellent time sailing north to the west coast of Greenland, where it made two stops to pick up Eskimos, dogs and a few final provisions.
As part of his contract, Capt. Hall was required to keep a detailed daily journal and to make frequent reports on his whereabouts and progress through letters to George Robeson, secretary of the Navy — some of which were simply tossed overboard in sealed copper cylinders for retrieval by passing ships.
On August 22, the Polaris prepared to set out for the Arctic after its final Greenland stop.
Hall left behind a letter for Robeson:
“The prospects for the expedition are fine; the weather beautiful, clear, and exceptionally warm… The Polaris bids adieu to civilization. God be with us.”
Others on board did not share Capt. Hall’s rosy optimism. Tyson, the navigator, made a foreboding entry in his own journal on August 10.
“There are two parties already, if not three, aboard. All foreigners hang together, and expressions are freely made that Hall should not get any credit out of this expedition. Already some have made up their minds how far they will go, and when they will get home again — queer sort of explorers these!”
Even before Greenland, Hall had encountered serious conflict with the Germans.
The meteorologist, Frederick Meyer, had been designated by his employment contract to keep the captain’s journal — a time-consuming but essential task, because it would become the official record of the excursion. But once the expedition was under way, Meyer announced that he was too busy with his scientific work to be bothered with dictation.
Hall threatened to put Meyer ashore as insubordinate, and the German briefly acquiesced.
But after about five weeks at sea, Meyer turned up in Hall’s quarters with fellow German Emil Bessel, the ship’s doctor. Bessel, director of the small scientific corps aboard the Polaris, informed Hall that he could not spare Meyer for clerical duty. The incredulous captain listened as Bessel explained that his authority trumped that of the commander when it came to scientific issues.
When Hall again threatened to put Meyer off the ship, Bessel said he and all other Germans would resign if their countryman was sacked. Hall had no choice.
If the German contingent walked, the mission would have to be scrapped until the following year because the weather window for sailing above the Arctic Circle was certain to close by September 1. It would be an embarrassment not only to Hall, but to President Grant and the members of Congress who had supported the expedition.
He reluctantly agreed to liberate Meyer from his secretarial duties.
The Polaris steamed on, but word quickly spread among the crew that Capt. Hall had caved in to the Germans’ threats.
The captain’s decision to placate the Germans was a foreboding incident.
Throughout history, most successful explorations have been commanded by feared, imperious leaders or by inspirational figures who gained the devotion of subordinates, even at great personal sacrifice.
The Polaris crew was more scornful than fearful of Capt. Hall. Any sense of his authority was lost in the journal challenge by the Germans.
And. as noted in navigator Tyson’s journal entry, much of the crew lacked the commitment needed to overcome the elements of the Arctic.
The sailors were mercenaries, not patriots or adventurers. They were being paid double or triple what they might have earned on a whaling boat, and by contract they would earn the same pay whether the excursion lasted one year or three.
They were in it for the money, and they certainly were not willing to give their lives — not for Hall, not for America, and not for the North Pole. Early in the expedition, as the ship dodged icebergs heading north through Baffin Bay toward the northwestern tip of Greenland, Dr. Bessel and other crew members were urging Hall to turn back south to find safe harbor for the winter.
Hall pressed north beyond the 82nd parallel, then agreed to retreat about 50 miles south. There, after the sledge journey, he met his end.
Hall’s mysterious death need not have ended the North Pole mission. There was ample manpower and abundant provisions for multiple attempts to reach the target. But there was no will and precious little leadership aboard the Polaris. The mission fell apart after the commander’s death.
The sailing master, Capt. Buddington, proved to be an inveterate drunk. He polished off not only all the alcohol that was to have been parsed out over time to crew members, but he raided the scientific supplies and guzzled the grain alcohol that was reserved for preservation of collected specimens.
Food and coal rations were also disregarded that fall and winter. In six months, the crew went through a year’s worth of provisions.
This caused no concern. The boat had stores to last at least two years. After Hall died, everyone on board resolved to turn south the moment the ice released its grip. They expected to be home after just one year at sea.
After a harsh winter, the thick ice that encased the Polaris persisted through the spring and summer of 1872, and it became clear that the Polaris would spend another winter locked in the same spot — the fate of the doomed British Northwest Passage expedition that drew Charles Hall into Arctic exploration.
But on the night of October 15, a fierce blizzard began cracking the ice around the Polaris. The crew feared a nearby iceberg would break free and ram the ship, so they began throwing overboard boats and various provisions for an emergency evacuation.
When some of the precious foodstuffs began slipping through cracks in the ice, about half the crew climbed off the ship to try to save them. Navigator Tyson wrote in his journal:
“I decided I had better get overboard, calling some of the men to help me and try to carry whatever I could away from the ship so that it would not get crushed and lost… Very shortly afterward, the ice exploded under our feet and broke in many places, and the ship broke away in the darkness and we lost sight of her in a moment.”
The next morning Tyson took stock.
His contingent was stranded on a huge ice floe about 4 miles in circumference. The Polaris was nowhere in sight.
There were 18 people in all on the ice, including all eight Eskimos — four adults and four children. They had a small scow, two sealskin kayaks and two whaleboats. Their supplies amounted to 14 45-pound cans of pemmican, 11 bags of bread, one can of dried apples and 14 canned hams.
Later that day, they spotted the Polaris well across the bay, perhaps 10 miles away. The marooned group fired guns and signaled the boat in every manner possible, but the ship plodded on, finally disappearing behind an island hill near the distant shore.
The castaways piled into a whaling boat and tried to row to the ship, but they were pushed back by the wind, waves and ice. They retreated to their floe.
Tyson concluded, “Either, I thought, the Polaris is disabled and cannot come for us or else… Captain Buddington does not mean to help us.”
The group built igloos and hunkered down in the 24-hour Arctic darkness. Tyson worked out a food ration that allotted 11 ounces of bread and meat per day per adult. He planned for the food to last a couple of months, by which time they surely would be rescued by a passing ship. But October, November and December came and went without sight of one.
As supplies dwindled and finally expired, the castaways avoided starvation only through the hunting skills of the two Eskimo men, known as Hans and Joe. Each time it appeared that death was at head, the Eskimos would miraculously return from a hunting excursion with a freshly killed seal.
Eventually, the ravenous castaways began eating the meat raw. Soon, even the skin and fur were devoured.
Tyson wrote in his journal, “No doubt many of my friends who read this will exclaim, `I would rather die than eat such stuff!’ You think so, no doubt. But people can’t die when they want to, and when one is in full life and vigor and only suffering from hunger he doesn’t want to die. Neither would you.”
Yet he didn’t pretend to enjoy the diet. He recorded the details of his New Year’s Day meal: “I have dined today on about two feet of frozen seal’s entrails and a small piece of congealed blubber.”
On January 20, the sun returned for the first time since late October, and as the floe continued ever southward, the Eskimos began to find more abundant game, including sea lions, dolphin-like narwhals, migratory birds and even the occasional polar bear.
On March 12, the floe shattered during a storm, and the group took refuge on a much smaller piece of ice, roughly 100 yards square. They ice-hopped for the next seven weeks and finally found themselves, in late April, in commercial shipping lanes off Labrador.
Two ships passed without noticing the group. Finally, on April 30, they were rescued by a Canadian seal-hunting vessel. The seal hunters were flabbergasted; in seven months, this remnant of the Hall polar expedition had traveled 1,800 miles on a cake of ice.
Public interest about the heralded mission had been high, and gossip quickly began to circulate about conflicts aboard the ship. The U. S. consul from the Canadian Maritimes intercepted the castaways and demanded to know the particulars of Hall’s death. He also quizzed the survivors about why they had not attempted to reach the pole.
A few days later, the controversy spilled onto the front page of the New York Herald. Among other things, the story raised the possibility that Hall had been poisoned.
Under political pressure to account for the expensive failed mission, Navy Secretary Robeson promised President Grant that he would mount an inquiry, including interrogation of crew members and a review of all correspondence and journals that could be located.
The Navy sent a ship to Newfoundland to carry the castaways to Washington, where they arrived on June 5, 1873. That same afternoon, navigator Tyson was called as the first witness before a four-man board of inquiry aboard the USS Tallapoosa, docked at the Washington Navy Yard.
For two days, Tyson gave blunt testimony about conflicts between Dr. Bessels, Capt. Buddington and Commander Hall.
Tyson characterized Buddington as an insubordinate drunkard who had “rejoiced” at Hall’s death. Unlike a good officer, he gossiped about Hall with the crew, and his grumbling helped set the tone of defeat even as the mission was just beginning.
Tyson also alleged that Buddington or some other officer had ordered Hall’s journals burned after the commander died. The implication was that Hall had left a written account of his conflicts, illness and suspicions about poisoning.
Some of the survivors corroborated Tyson’s account. One seaman said that after Hall died, he heard Buddington say, “There is a stone off my heart.”
After six days, the questioning of the castaways was complete. The board of inquiry judged that it had insufficient evidence to draw conclusions, because the Polaris, Capt. Buddington and Dr. Bessels were still missing. But Secretary Robeson damned Buddington with faint praise:
“The facts show that though he was perhaps wanting in enthusiasm for the grand objects of the expedition, and at times grossly lax in discipline, and though he differed in judgment from others as to the possibility, safety, and propriety of taking the ship farther north, yet he is an experienced and careful navigator, and, when not affected by liquor, of which there remained none on board at the time of the separation (from the castaways), a competent and safe commander.”
On June 23, just days after Robeson’s report, Buddington turned up alive and well, along with Dr. Bessels and the other men who had stayed aboard the Polaris. They were found in two small boats working their way south along the coast of Greenland.
Buddington was surprised to learn that the castaways had survived. He swore he did not see nor hear the marooned group on the day they spotted the Polaris. Buddington explained that he had abandoned the ship as it sank due to ice damage, then rowed a whaleboat to the coast, where Eskimos saw to their survival over the winter. Remarkably, Capt. Charles Hall was the only member of the North Pole expedition to perish.
The Polaris survivors landed in Dundee, Scotland, home port of the whaling ship that rescued them. The U. S. government paid their ship passage to Washington, where they, too, were questioned by Robeson’s naval board of inquiry.
Buddington, ruddy, bearded and balding, was the first witness. Contesting Tyson’s account on nearly every detail, Buddington insisted the expedition had gone smoothly until Hall’s death.
He acknowledged that the captain suspected Dr. Bessels of poisoning him. But Buddington added, “At times he thought everybody was at it.”
Robeson asked, “Have you any reason to believe that Capt. Hall died of anything but a natural death?”
Buddington said, “I really have not.” But he added, “I thought there was something very strange about it.”
The captain confirmed that Hall’s personal journals had been lost, but he could not explain when, how or why. He denied that he had ordered them burned, as Tyson had alleged.
Buddington denied any joy over Hall’s death and denied seeing the castaways on the day after the ice floe broke away from the Polaris.
By the date of his testimony, in mid-October, Buddington was well aware that Tyson had been highly critical of the sailing master during his own inquiry testimony.
Buddington responded in kind. He called Tyson a “rather useless” sailor who “complained bitterly” about everything.
“He did not appear to be satisfied with anything that was done,” Buddington said.
The final witness was Dr. Bessels, and Robeson invited the surgeons general of the Army and Navy to question the German about medical and scientific evidence.
Bessels was a slight man, short and slim, with a stern nose, piercing ice-blue eyes, a muttonchop beard and a thick head of hair the color of wet sand.
Robeson asked the doctor about reports of conflicts on the ship, but Bessels was dismissive.
“Some kind friends wanted to make out that we had a mutiny on the ship,” he said sarcastically. Bessels insisted that the misunderstanding about journal-keeping was a minor disagreement — nothing more.
Curiously, he presented the signed agreement between Hall, Bessels and meteorologist Frederick Meyer that resolved the issue. The document had come from Hall’s lost personal papers.
Bessels explained that he found the single document “on the ice” on the day that the castaways’ floe broke away from the Polaris. The German gave a detailed account of his treatments of Hall, and he speculated that the rapid change from cold to warm when he returned to the ship after two weeks on the sledge journey may have caused apoplexy, or a stroke.
The surgeons general were collegial in their questioning of Dr. Bessels. He was not asked to explain why Hall would have suspected him of murder.
Robeson, taking his cue from the medical doctors, was equally circumspect.
He politely asked, “Did you have any difficulty with Capt. Hall?”
Bessels’ two-word reply –“None whatever” — went unchallenged.
In December, the board of inquiry made a formal report to President Grant. It concluded, “We reach the unanimous opinion that the death of Captain Hall resulted naturally, from disease, without fault on the part of anyone.”
The surgeons general added their own addendum regarding Bessels:
“From the circumstances and symptoms detailed by him, and comparing them with the medical testimony of all the witnesses, we are conclusively of the opinion that Captain Hall died from natural causes, viz., apoplexy; and that the treatment of the case by Dr. Bessels was the best practicable under the circumstances.”
The United States government was eager for the embarrassing controversy of the failed polar mission to go away.
Robert E. Peary finally planted the American flag on the North Pole–or close to it — in 1909, 38 years after Capt. Hall died trying. Hall and his peculiar expedition were relegated to a historical footnote for nearly a century.
But in 1968, a young Dartmouth University professor named Chauncey Loomis mounted his own Arctic expedition — not to the North Pole, but to the icy grave of Charles Hall on the Greenland tundra at a point that had become known as the Polaris Promontory.
After delicate international negotiations, Loomis had gained permission to exhume Hall’s body for scientific tests that the professor hoped would determine, once and for all, the cause of his death.
The gravesite, mounded with stones, was not difficult to find. It is marked with a brass plaque that pays homage to Hall. Loomis and his colleagues chipped at the frozen earth, just as Hall’s crew had done when burying him.
Peeling back the coffin lid, the men found Hall’s corpse still enshrouded in an American flag. The skin and skeleton of the body were virtually intact, having spent 97 years in a deep freeze.
Loomis had hoped for a thorough postmortem, but he and the medical doctor accompanying him found the internal organs and brain had been freeze-dried to virtually nothing. He did manage to collect good samples of hair and fingernails, as well as several pieces of tissue, and he hurried to the Toronto Centre for Forensic Sciences to conduct tests.
There, a researcher reached a startling conclusion based upon tests of the hair and nails: “These results are fully consistent with the theory of arsenic poisoning being the immediate cause of Hall’s demise almost a century ago.”
Dr. Auseklis Perkons went on to declare that Hall’s symptoms — numbness of the mouth, feeble pulse, delirium and coma — were “quite in keeping with acute arsenic poisoning.”
Aficionados of English crime mysteries know that arsenic leaves a sweet, metallic taste in one’s mouth. Hall had complained of just such an aftertaste after drinking the cup of coffee upon returning to the ship from his sledge journey.
Chauncey Loomis published the results of his investigation in 1971 in a book, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer.
A careful academic, he did not flatly conclude that Hall had been murdered, despite the arsenic evidence.
But Loomis wrote, “If Hall was murdered, Emil Bessels is the prime suspect.”
Two more recent books have gone much further in indicting Dr. Bessels, who had access to the Polaris’ large cache of arsenic, which was then commonly administered for a variety of medical maladies, including headaches.
In Trial by Ice, author Richard Parry raises the possibility that Bessels and other Germans conspired against Capt. Hall to keep the American from reaching the pole — perhaps under orders by Otto von Bismarck, the tyrannical German chancellor, although he offers no real evidence to support that theory.
A subtitle of Parry’s book declares Hall’s death a murder. He wrote, “Given the presence of motive, opportunity, and in all likelihood access to the substance that killed Hall, Bessels is the most logical choice.”
In Fatal North, author Bruce Henderson makes the case that the exhumation evidence clearly indicates murder. He wrote:
“As Charles Francis Hall had feared those last two frightening weeks of life, he was being poisoned to death… It hadn’t been done with one massive dose of poison in the cup of coffee, administered perhaps in a fit of anger, bitterness or envy. Rather, it was done systematically. Hall had been killed a little bit at a time over the course of two weeks. The nature of the act strongly suggested cold-blooded, calculating, premeditated murder by a diabolical killer who had gotten away with his crime.”
Like Loomis and Parry, Henderson fingered Dr. Bessels, whom he said was motivated by a lust for personal glory. At one point after Hall died, Henderson notes, Bessels considered making his own sledge run for the North Pole.
Henderson provides one titillating new piece of evidence.
He tracked down a book about the Hall expedition written by Bessels and published in his native language in Germany in 1879. In the book, Bessels quotes extensively from Capt. Charles Hall’s journals — the same ones that he and Buddington claimed were lost.
The German apparently had concealed this crucial potential evidence from the naval board of inquiry. Did he do so because Hall’s journal implicated him as a murderer?
If Bessels had a secret, he went to his grave in 1888 without revealing it.
He died young, at age 42. The cause of death: a stroke.
Books
Life Among the Esquimaux, Charles Francis Hall, Harpers, 1865.
Arctic Experiences, George Tyson, Harpers, 1874.
The Polar Passion, Farley Mowat, Gibbs Smith, 1967.
Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer, Chauncey Loomis, Knopf, 1971.
The Arctic Grail, Pierre Berton, Viking, 1988.
Farthest North: The Quest for the North Pole, Clive Holland, Robinson, 1994.
Fatal North: Adventure and Survival Aboard USS Polaris, the First U. S. Expedition to the North Pole, Bruce Henderson, Signet, 2001.
Trial by Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition, Richard Parry, Ballantine, 2001.
Midnight to the North: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Saved the Polaris Expedition, Sheila Nickerson, Tarcher, 2002.
Periodical
Charles Francis Hall, by Jonathan M. Karpoff, Encyclopedia of the Arctic, Oct. 28, 2001
Worldwide Web
www.canadiana.org, an archive of Canadian history, contains photocopied pages from many of Charles Francis Halls early journals.