Dr. Emil Bessels for several years held a position with the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., at least part of that time compiling the scientific records of the Polaris expedition. Not much is known about his later life and career, but at some point he fell out of favor at the Smithsonian and was evicted from his office following numerous attempts, after being informed that occupancy of his office was needed so as “to make improved toilet arrangements for visitors.” Bessels returned to Germany and authored a book about the North Pole expedition: Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition (Leipzig, W. Engelmann, 1879), published only in his native language.
Bessels presented himself in his book as a scientific observer given to accurate and detailed observations, and had virtually nothing to say about the colorful personalities and dramatic conflicts aboard Polaris. About Hall’s final illness, Bessels wrote of Hall returning from his last sledge journey:
“Hall appearing fully fit, immediately went to his cabin without taking the time to take off his heavy furs and quickly drank a cup of coffee. A few minutes later he had a severe attack of dizziness and headache. Unfortunately, this indisposition was not temporary, as he first thought, but heralded a stroke which paralyzed his left side that same evening. In the next few days he started to recover slowly, hot foot baths with mustard and cold compresses placed against his head and neck gave him some relief. For a while, Hall had mental disturbances that occasionally deteriorated into a light frenzy. He believed somebody wanted to kill him by knifing, poisoning or shooting. On Nov. 4 he seemed a little better, but his mind was still obscured. Against every advice he ate a lot of boiled seal and drank more red wine than was good for him. On the 6th he could not be prevented from leaving his bed, walking around the cabin, and trying to dictate the results of his sledge trip. The following day he had another stroke, which carried him off in the early morning of the 8th. So had this impetuous heart stopped beating before the great plans had been brought to a conclusion, the brazen dice of fate had fallen before the first success had been attained.”
Oddly, his book quotes verbatim three times from Captain Hall’s private journals from the trip—the very same journals that he testified had been left on the ice and lost. One direct quote comes from Hall’s journal, October 19, near Cape Brevoort, during his last sledge journey. “Now and then,” Hall writes in his diary, “I left the hut to look for plants and coal. I am infinitely anxious to find coal here, for that would undoubtedly be significant for our success and enable us to reach a higher latitude with the ship next year.” The quote continues for more than a hundred words, and Bessels goes on to write many small details of the sledge journey that he did not go on. Subsequent to the publication of his book, Bessels’ house burned to the ground, and all his papers and personal possessions were lost. Bessels died in Stuttgart on March 30, 1888, at age forty-two. Ironically, the cause of his death was apoplexy.
Joe “Ebierbing” and Hannah “Tookoolito” returned to New England, where Joe worked as a farmer, carpenter, and fisherman, and Hannah made fur clothing for fishermen in Groton and New London, Connecticut. Punny, who was christened Sylvia, attended school at Groton and proved herself to be a very intelligent student. Joe, unable to adapt, joined another Arctic expedition. While he was gone, Sylvia died in 1875, at age nine. A year later, Hannah, mourning the loss of her child and the long absence of her husband, and weakened further by tuberculosis, died at age thirty-nine. Joe returned to visit the graves of his wife and daughter, and weeded the tall grass. In 1878 he joined another Arctic expedition. Years after the Polaris expedition, Joe was asked why he hadn’t packed up his family and left the ice floe when they had the opportunity to do so. “Cap’n Hall a good man. Good man. If Cap’n Hall alive, he not run away. I not run away either.”
George Tyson returned to the Arctic in 1877 as commander of the schooner Florence. The primary object of the Howgate Expedition was the collection of material and personnel for the establishment of a future colony on the shores of Lady Franklin Bay. Weather and luck went against them, and Florence returned to civilization the following year, badly leaking, and the crew starving, for they had eaten the last morsel of food on board. Terrific gales were encountered their last days of the voyage, threatening them with destruction at almost every moment. Following that trip, Tyson never returned to sea. He occasionally lectured about his Arctic experiences. His book Arctic Experiences: A History of the Polaris Expedition (1874, New York, Harper & Brothers), did not sell well, and he fell on hard times. At the personal intervention of President Rutherford B. Hayes, Tyson was hired at the War Department, first as a laborer, then as a messenger, clerk, and lieutenant of the watch. He divorced his first wife, Emmaline, and married a Washington widow, Mrs. Myers, who had three children. He died in 1906 at seventy-six. His death was the subject of a long article in the Washington Post. “Hero of the Arctic, George E. Tyson’s Career of Adventure Ended.” Three weeks after his passing, his son, George E. Tyson Jr. of Port Hill, Idaho, who had been estranged from his father for many years, wrote to his mother, Emmaline:
Handbill publicizing an Arctic lecture by George Tyson, 1881. (The Tyson Collection, National Archives)
Dear Mother: The article that you sent giving the account of father’s death I did not open until I reached home. In the solitude of my cabin, I read the news of father’s death. And when I saw his picture, I noted his face wrinkled with age through the lapse of all these weary years. Then I thought of all the suffering he must have endured during the long Arctic night, starving and freezing. He caused us many a pang, Mother, he caused us many a pang, but he was my father, and the news of his death saddened my heart. I often think that the awful hardships he endured affected his mind and caused his heart to wither. The love I bore him when a baby boy, awoke again to life. And I wondered if he ever thought of his boy through the last 20 years or did he go down to his grave and never a word of me? Poor father, for you I shed tears both of pity and of love. Seek his grave, Mother dear, and place some flowers therefor me. And let your loving radiance glow around the place. It was noble of you to forgive him. You are a good mother and I love you, and am proud of you. He is gone now, gone forever. He is forgiven. Let us remember him as he was when his smile was long and his voice was soft and tender. Let us ever cherish loving in our hearts his sweet memory. Peace to his ashes. He bore an honored name. May it never perish.
Your loving son, George
The North Pole. On April 6, 1909, nearly four decades after the death of Charles Francis Hall and two years after Ernest Shackleton’s first quest for the South Magnetic Pole, American Robert Peary, his assistant Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos completed their final sprint by dog-driven sledge across 153 miles of shifting ice, pressure ridges, and open leads to conquer one of the last great frontiers of human exploration: the North Pole. Hall and George Tyson were proven wrong. There was no open Polar Sea or land or natives to be found at the Pole—only ice and more ice. Reaching the Pole had been Peary’s obsession since 1886, when he took leave from the U.S. Navy to spend several months exploring the Greenland ice pack. After his initial trip to the Far North, he crossed northern Greenland twice and mounted two unsuccessful polar expeditions, losing all but two of his toes and, on at least one occasion, nearly his life. “My life work is accomplished,” Peary wrote in his diary soon after planting the U.S. flag at the earth’s northernmost point. “The thing which it was intended from the beginning that I should do, the thing which I believed could be done, and that I could do, I have done. I have got the North Pole out of my system.” In 2000, ninety-one years after Peary reached the Pole, polar visitors were shocked to find the North Pole melting. The thick ice that for ages had covered the Pole has turned to water, leaving an ice-free patch of ocean about a mile wide at the very top of the world. “I don’t know if anybody in history ever got to 90 degrees north to be greeted by water, not ice,” said Dr. James McCarthy, an oceanographer, and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and c
o-leader of the expedition that made the discovery. “There was a sense of alarm,” he reported. “Global warming is real, and we were seeing its effects for the first time that far north.”
Many think that I am of an adventurous spirit and of bold heart to attempt to go to the North Pole. Not so. It does not require that heart which they suppose I have. For the Arctic region is my home. I love it dearly—its storms, its winds, its glaciers, its icebergs. When I am among them, it seems as if I were in an earthly heaven. Or perhaps a heavenly earth.
—Charles Francis Hall
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The National Archives, at its two facilities in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland, has met the challenge of its goal to acquire, preserve, and make available to the public records of enduring value. I realized just how much so when, one rainy winter day, I sat in a reading room with the log of Polaris and the nine surviving original journals kept by her crewmen on the North Polar Expedition a hundred and twenty-eight years earlier. I was awed, first, that they had survived the perilous Arctic trip even though the ship had not, and then that they were still around after all these years for an inquiring writer to delve into. It was that day I began to get a feel for the vessel, her crew, and their mission.
My research at the Archives was made much easier (and more fun) with the guidance and friendship of Neil Persinger, who has lived a life there researching his own upcoming book about the service of U.S. patrol frigates in World War II and Korea. Neil not only introduced me to key archivists and the ins and outs of a system for finding archival material, he also ably served as my naval authority on matters small and large. Even in the face of questions such as, “How would a circa-1870 steam boiler work aboard ship?” Neil always seemed to have the answers or be able to tell me where to go to find the information.
In my research on Charles Francis Hall, I was aided by the Hall Collection at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., but mostly by the collegial guidance, hard facts, and keen observations provided by Hall’s biographer, Chauncey Loomis, author of Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Knopf, New York, 1971). Chauncey, in between fishing trips to Peru, Canada, and China, also shared with me his own adventures in trying to solve the mystery of Hall’s death, and his visit to that desolate grave in the Far North.
I realized early on that George Tyson was the hero of the ice floe, and a character I wanted to follow from beginning to end of the story. Somewhere along the line his heirs realized the importance of his contribution, and donated all his personal papers to the U.S. government. The Captain George E. Tyson Papers, consisting of eight boxes, are available to the public today at National Archives, College Park. This collection was an enormous help in my getting to the core of the man—especially the discovery of a never-published 133-page letter, dated April 4, 1874, which Tyson sent to a former shipmate. That said, this book would not have been possible without Tyson’s own journal of the Polaris expedition, originally written in pencil on scraps of paper as he lived the most exciting adventure of his life, and published, in 1874, as his memoirs, Arctic Experiences: Capt. George E. Tyson’s Wonderful Drift on the Ice-Floe, A History of the Polaris Expedition (Harper & Brothers, New York).
Much valuable information was acquired, via the Internet, from individuals I have never met but whose books I had read or who were recommended to me as experts in their fields. These “e-mail buddies” include Kenn Harper, author of the poignant Give Me My Father’s Body (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vermont, 1986.) Kenn has lived in the Arctic for over thirty years in Inuit communities in the Baffin region and in Qaanaasw, Greenland, and speaks Inuktitut, the Eskimo language of the eastern Canadian Arctic. Douglas Foster, retired director of Toronto’s Centre for Forensic Sciences, spent a day going back to his old office and retrieving the original forensic report I so desperately needed and had not been able to find, and then more hours interpreting the results, recalling his own observations, and answering my queries. In Germany, Lars Bergland, a professional translator, provided invaluable assistance in locating the memoirs of Emil Bessels in the closed-stacks section of the Stuttgart library, then spending many afternoons translating key sections for me, and also researching what became of Bessels upon his return to Germany.
Among the books I read while researching the Polaris story, in particular, and the Arctic, in general, several stand out: Pierre Berton’s The Arctic Grail (McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Canada, 1988); Leonard Guttridge’s Ghosts of Cape Sabine (Putnam, New York, 2000); Ann Savours’ The Search for the Northwest Passage (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999), and Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, The Arctic Traveller, published in London in 1878 (Triibner & Co., Ludgate Hill).
I thank my editor, Doug Grad, who shared his brilliant idea and trusted me to carry it out, and his associate, Ron Martirano, for his able work poring over microfilmed, century-old newspaper clips at the New York Public Library. Also, my literary agent, Mike Hamilburg, for his sage advice and brotherly friendship over the years, and his assistant, Joanie Kern, for her attentiveness and devotion.
My Washington, D.C., research efforts, including dealing with the Library of Congress, were assisted greatly by two special individuals who were my “secret weapons” when it came to dealing with the federal bureaucracy: my daughter, Chelsea Henderson Maxwell, a U.S. Senate staffer, and her husband, Carl Maxwell, who works on “the other side of the hill” for a U.S. congressman.
Closer to home, I thank my sons Grant, fourteen, and Evan, twelve, for putting up with me during the writing of this book, and for lowering their music when asked.
INDEX
Alert, 183
Alexander, Cape, 53–54, 248
America, USS, 29
American Academy of Forensic Sciences’ Last Word Society, 286
American flag, covering Hall’s body, 6–7, 21, 92
American Geographical Society, 21, 35
Anacostia River, 228
animals in Arctic/wildlife, 52–53, 241
Arctic foxes, 4, 69, 79
brent geese, 67, 127
dovekies, 127, 193
gulls, 127
lemmings, 4, 79
musk ox, 67, 79, 122–123
owls/hawks, 79
polar bears, 92, 119, 200–201, 214–215
seals, 67, 69,153–222
ugyuk, 195–196, 199
whales, 247
Ansel Gibbs, 183
Antelope, 231
Anthing, Frederick, ice-floe survivor, 146
Arctic
exploration, 19
extended daylight, 114–115
iceberg activity, 185–186
paraselene, 102
permafrost, 5
perpetual darkness/everlasting twilight, 103, 106
preservation of burial remains, 5–8
signs of summertime, 9
Arctic Experiences: A History of the Polaris Expedition (Tyson), 292
arsenic, levels in samples from Hall, 283–286
“Arsenic and Old Ice” (Lucas), 286
aurora borealis, 53
autopsy of Hall’s remains, 3–9
Back, George, 19
Baffin, William, 19
Baffin Bay, 168, 174, 186–187
Baffin Island, 14, 31, 172
Baird, Spencer F., 228
Barnes, W. K., 270–277
Bartlett, Isaac, 220, 240
Beale, Joseph, 270–277
“Bear” the dog, 119, 184
Bering Strait, 27
Bessels, Emil, 24, 26, 39, 44, 288–290
Buddington’s accusation of poisoning Hall, 82–87, 90–91
Buddington’s consumption of alcohol, 74–76, 140
comment on Hall’s death, 93–94
frostbite and snow blindness, 96, 129, 130–131
Hall’s distrust of, 47–51, 71
during Hall’s illness and death, 76–87
orders in the event of Hall’s death,
35–37, 99–100
Polaris winter quarters, 62, 67, 71
scientific studies, 39, 44, 115
separate quarters after rescue, 254–255
sledge trip south, 115–117
statements at expedition inquiry, 232–234, 270–277
supply of “medicinal alcohol,” 116–117, 120
surgeon-generals at expedition inquiry, 270–277
“the little German dance master,” 48, 85
Bismarck, 33
Booth, John, Polaris fireman, ix
Booth, John Wilkes, 228
Borie, Adolf, 230
Bowditch’s Navigator, 18
Brevoort, Cape, 79
Brevoort, J. Carson, 79
British North Polar Expedition of 1875, 2
British Polar Expedition of 1875, 2–3
Brooklyn Navy Yard
outfitting Tigress for Arctic trip, 245–251
preparation of USS Polaris, 21–34
Bryan, Richard W. D., 62, 93, 102
Polaris chaplain and astronomer, 44
sledge trip south with Bessels, 117, 120
statement at expedition inquiry, 278–279
survivor on Polaris, 242, 243
Buddington, Sidney O., 24, 231, 288
abandon of ice-floe survivors, 144–149
accusation of Bessels poisoning Hall, 90–91
alcohol consumption, 98, 116–117, 139, 235, 243, 263, 266, 276
command after Hall’s death, 35–37, 98–112
conduct in front of crew, 40–11, 99, 100
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