His ambitions were already taking flight. Hudson Bay was not enough for him; it was, in fact, old ground for any explorer. Once he had solved the Franklin mystery (for he still thought of it as that) he was determined to tackle farther fields. “Give me the means,” he wrote, “and I will not only discover the North Pole, but survey all the land I might find between Kane’s farthest and it, and have my own soul in the work.” It was a subject he returned to more than once in his journal.
Yet the actual writing of that journal – the strain of committing his thoughts to paper in the dark of the igloo – “has been enough to kill many a man, and, has nearly killed me.” He was suffering from agonizing pain in his left breast, brought on by the cramped position he was forced to adopt before he could scrawl on the pages. None of his other work in the North, he said, had done him a hundredth part of the injury of this incessant scribbling.
The morals of the Eskimos and their superstitions began to offend his Christian sensibilities. The angekos – sorcerers or medicine men – caused him many frustrating moments. He could not openly oppose them. One went so far as to persuade Joe to trade wives – an arrangement that Hannah resisted and Hall was able to prevent. But, he said, it required the patience of Job to live with the natives.
On April 13, 1865, with thirteen Eskimo families, he set out at last for his original objective, Repulse Bay. He reached it on June 10. In August a whaling ship arrived with the news that the Civil War had ended and Lincoln had been assassinated. He settled down for the winter on the site of Rae’s camp. All that remained from Rae’s day was a stone oven. Hall used it for a cache. With the whalers gone he faced another winter alone with the natives. He would, he decided, follow Rae’s tracks to the Boothia Peninsula the following spring.
That September, Hannah bore a second child. In spite of her thin veneer of Christianity, she insisted on obeying the taboos of her people. To Hall’s fury, she chose to live as the angeko dictated, in total seclusion, sprinkling herself with cold water and existing on the stewed caribou meat she cooked.
Hall had, in fact, developed an ambivalent relationship with the natives. They were by turns friendly and sullen – and so was he. At one point he could write of “the noble soul” of Ouela, the Repulse Bay Eskimo who was his erstwhile friend, “a man that would command respect, honor & admiration in civilized lands for his truly eminent, genuine & inherent virtues.” A week later, writing of the same Ouela, he declared that “should I live many, many years & should this party show me a thousand favors, he could not wipe out the stain that has been affected by his late wrongful acts.”
All his former affection for the Innuit, all his zesty excitement at the idea of living as a native seemed to have been drained from him. “How terrible is my situation here, the only white man among a savage people!” he wrote; “… never again will I put myself in the power of an uncivilized race.… It is true that at times everything goes along smoothly: but how unstable is the base! A whisper, a tip of the finger is enough to throw all seeming order here into an earthly hell.”
On March 31, 1866, he was ready to set out for King William Island, following Rae’s tracks across the isthmus of the Melville Peninsula toward Committee Bay on the Gulf of Boothia. The party consisted of eight adult natives and six children, including Joe, Hannah, and their new baby, whom Hall had named Little King William. The start was not propitious, for they sledged into the teeth of a howling five-day blizzard. Fortunately, Hall had long since taken to wearing native fur garments exclusively, even discarding his regular undershirt and drawers. At the height of the gale, Hannah was reminded of a stiff-necked woman she’d met at the Brooklyn Fair who had declared that Eskimos ought to dress like ladies in the States. “I’d like to see her take a minute’s walk over the hill,” said Hannah. “She’d be glad to exchange her fine hat and hoop skirts for any of our rough dresses.” The practical Hannah had long since used her own fashionable petticoat to line a snow house.
Hall’s second expedition, 1864-69
It was an ill-conceived and frustrating journey across the peninsula to Cape Weynton. The party, moving at a snail’s pace, took twenty-eight days to cover the distance Rae had managed in five. When Little King William grew ill, Hannah, to Hall’s disgust, again placed herself in the care of an angeko. It did no good; the child grew sicker.
Now Hall encountered a group of Eskimos from Pelly Bay who had more relics of the Franklin expedition, including a spoon with Crozier’s initials, a scissors, and a mahogany barometer case. They talked of ships sinking and dead white men, but they also mentioned a fierce native tribe on King William Island – a tale that so frightened Hall’s people they refused to go farther and forced him to return to Repulse Bay.
In the meantime, Little King William died, and once again Hannah was bereft, clinging to the small corpse until it was taken from her to be wrapped for burial. Once again she reverted to the customs of her people, walking to the graveside with the body of her dead child dangling from a loop round her neck, refusing to dry her socks or repair her shoes, standing in the teeth of the gale, as ritual demanded, without the protection of her double jacket.
At the end of May, 1866, Hall was back where he started, at Repulse Bay. He determined to set out again the following spring, but this time he would take white men, not natives. His view of the Eskimos had continued to sink. Once he had believed them to be the freest people on earth. Now he realized that they were shackled by taboos generations old.
In August 1866, a boat from the whaler Pioneer, out of New London, reached his encampment, and Hall was moved to tears by the sight of the first white men he had seen in a year and a half. Other whalers brought news and letters, including one from Henry Grinnell, who enclosed a message from Lady Franklin urging that his “brave and adventurous protégé” send her all the information he was able to gather about the lost expedition, no matter how painful it might be. “It is our bounden duty,” she wrote, “as it is an impetuous instinct, to rescue them if possible, even though we may feel shocked as at the sight of skeletons rising in their winding sheets from the tombs.…” She had offered a reward for her husband’s journal, though she was certain that Hall himself was not motivated by any pecuniary interest. But if it should be found, then “nothing that reflects on the character of another should be published – nothing that would give sharp pain to any individual living.” As for Hall’s own expedition, she confessed ruefully that “when his first plan of going to Northumberland Inlet was brought before me in 1860, it was represented to me by all the Arctic people as the wildest and most foolhardy of schemes, which must necessarily fail, and with which, for the poor man’s own sake, I ought to have nothing to do.” Now, she apologized for that lack of faith. “I believe Hall is now doing exactly what should have been done from the beginning, but which no government could order to be done.” For she still entertained a hope that some of the members of the expedition might be alive. “It is painful to me that I should appear to have no heart for the rescue of others, because my own dear husband has long been beyond the reach of all rescue.”
Thus encouraged, Hall hoped to recruit some white companions for his proposed expedition from the six whaling ships that were spending the winter of 1866-67 in Repulse Bay. He made a deal with the whaling captains, or thought he did, by which they would supply him with men the following spring while he, in turn, would arrange for Eskimos to hunt for them during the winter. All this time, he himself preferred to live in a snow hut though he might have had warm quarters aboard any of the ships in the harbour. He simply did not feel at ease in civilized surroundings.
For the spring journey he would need dogs. Since none were available at Repulse Bay, he set off in early February, 1867, with Ouela on a “hellish” trip (the adjective is his) to Igloolik to bargain for teams. It was a stormy journey, not only because of the weather. He quarrelled constantly with Ouela and more than once resisted the temptation to use violence on him. “I had great reason at times,” he no
ted, “to shoot the savage down on the spot, and know not how long it may be before I shall have to do so terrible an act to save my own dear life” – a prescient remark, in the light of later events.
On Hall’s return in March he discovered that the whalers had gone back on their word, or had, perhaps, misunderstood him. They could not spare a man to go with him to King William Island. He himself was too weakened by his recent journey to go alone. Once again, Charles Francis Hall faced another winter – his fourth – in the Arctic.
In the fall of 1867, however, he was at last able to persuade the whalers to allow him to contract for five men for a year. His appetite for the Franklin search was being whetted by more Eskimo tales. That same fall a group of natives from Igloolik claimed that some years before they had encountered two white men, one tall, one short, in the vicinity of their village. In January 1868, another group from Pelly Bay claimed they’d come across a stone monument on Simpson Peninsula with a marker pointing east to Igloolik. That was enough for Hall, who promptly assumed that Crozier and another man must be alive and in the vicinity. He switched plans and in March sledged north with Hannah and Joe and one of his newly engaged seamen. At a village on the way, he met an Eskimo who told him of having seen a white man dressed in strange clothes about thirteen years earlier. Again Hall jumped to conclusions: it must be Crozier. It wasn’t, of course. John Rae was convinced that it was he the Eskimos had seen, not in 1855, as they apparently thought, but in 1847. Later researches suggest it may have been James Clark Ross, at an even earlier date. Hall, however, was convinced that some of the missing men had headed east and were perhaps still living in the area of Fury and Hecla Strait.
He returned to Repulse Bay for the summer, without any further evidence. And there, on July 31, 1868, a tragic and inexplicable incident took place that would affect him for the rest of his life. After four years in the Arctic, he was understandably testy and temperamental. His nature was naturally suspicious and mercurial, as when he considered shooting his guide and former friend, Ouela. Now he became enraged because of what he considered unauthorized meddling by two of his contracted seamen, Peter Bayne and Patrick Coleman.
The two had taken it upon themselves to question a group of natives from Boothia Peninsula about a white man whose funeral they claimed to have witnessed some years previously. The white man, the natives said, had died aboard one of two ships buried in the ice near the village of Neitchille. The funeral was conducted with considerable ceremony, they said, and the dead man’s body was covered with a substance that soon turned to stone. Both sailors were convinced that the Eskimos had watched the funeral of Sir John Franklin, whose body had apparently been encased in cement. But Hall was angered when they reported this remarkable story to him. He would do the interrogating – not common seamen! This breach widened when Hall caustically upbraided Coleman and another sailor for taking too long to bring in a cache of caribou meat. After his lecture “a burst of mutinous conduct” – to quote his own version – followed. The leader, Hall claimed, was Coleman. “I felt for my own safety that something must be done to meet so terrible a blow as seemed ready to fall.”
The tension in the camp was indeed rising. At least four of Hall’s followers were in a state of near mutiny, or so he believed. Events moved quickly to a tragic climax. According to Hall, Coleman was “delivering himself of the most rebellious language possible.” Trying to reason with him, Hall put a hand on his shoulder, but Coleman, a powerful, well-muscled man, squared off. Hall ordered Peter Bayne to hand him a rifle, then ran to his own tent where he replaced the rifle with a revolver. Brandishing it at the others, he demanded they end their insolent behaviour. But Coleman, in Hall’s view, became even more threatening. Something in Hall snapped. Impulsively, he pulled the trigger. Coleman staggered and fell. At this Hall was nonplussed, like “a man then suddenly dreaming.” He walked over to a group of frightened natives, handed the pistol to one, then turned back and helped the wounded man to his tent.
Hall’s version of this incident, written months later, is the only account extant. It is transparently self-justificatory, explicable only in the wider context of the explorer’s own paranoia and his four frustrating winters in the Arctic – four years in which he had accomplished virtually nothing. It is very improbable that the sailors were contemplating mutiny. The touchy explorer, goaded by their surliness, simply acted as he often did – on the spur of the moment – and was desperately sorry for what was clearly an instant of ungovernable rage.
Coleman did not die immediately. He lived on for a horrifying fortnight. Hall, remorseful and shaken, struggled vainly to save his life and prepared what became in his own mind a plausible defence. The following year he would write to Henry Grinnell, “… had I not taken this last ‘dread alternative,’ my fate would have been quite as sorrowful as that of Henry Hudson.”
Hall was never brought to account for the death of Patrick Coleman, who died on August 14. No one was able to determine under whose jurisdiction that remote corner of the Arctic lay – and no one was particularly interested in finding out. The real mystery was the strange tale of the funeral and the cement tomb that Coleman’s informants claimed they’d witnessed. Since those days, every corner of King William Island and the surrounding neighbourhood has been meticulously examined for Franklin relics, but no one has ever found that supposed cement coffin. The prevailing opinion – and the most plausible one – is that Franklin was buried at sea. Yet the graphic tale of a man who died aboard one of two ships caught in the ice and was buried after elaborate rites in a tomb made of a substance that turned to stone seems too complicated to be a figment of native imagination. It is one of the several mysteries of the frozen world that have plagued, befuddled, and fascinated Arctic historians.
When the whaling ships returned to Repulse Bay a few days after Patrick Coleman’s death, the four remaining seamen deserted to them, leaving Hall to face a fifth winter in the North alone. He had no intention of returning to civilization until he had made the obsessive trek to King William Island.
The following March, accompanied by Ouela and the ever-faithful Joe and Hannah together with their newly adopted ten-year-old daughter and four other natives, he set off once more. Six weeks later he was on the shores of Rae Strait, directly across from his goal. Here, in an Eskimo village, he came upon another trove of relics: a silver spoon bearing Franklin’s crest, a piece of a mahogany writing-desk, fragments of a handkerchief, a pickle jar, planking, and copper. The natives told him of a ship with a corpse in it, which they had plundered before it sank, and of a tent on the island’s western shore, full of human bones, utensils, weapons, ammunition, and also books and paper. The latter, being of no value to them, they had left to the winds. There were other tales – of an igloo blown up by a youth who had found some gunpowder, and of other bodies, apparently cannibalized. Hall was impatient to spend the summer on the island searching for relics, but the Eskimos would have none of that. They would stay, they said, for one week only.
He did the best he could in the time available. On Todd Island off the coast of Boothia he found a human thigh bone. A day later on King William Island he found a skeleton, later identified as that of Lieutenant Le Vesconte of the Erebus. He learned more details from the Eskimos of the expedition’s last days. Four families had encountered a tall man (Crozier?) and a party of some thirty white men dragging two sledges south. The starving men had pleaded for seal meat, and the natives had given them some. Then they packed up and fled, offering no further aid to the dying men. This story angered Hall, whose affection for the natives was sorely tried by this lack of humanity and by other tales of bodies disinterred and looted. But the Eskimos were nothing if not pragmatic. To feed such a large and hungry party was beyond their abilities and would have endangered their own existence. They themselves were subsisting on a minimum of food, and so they left the white men to their fate.
Now Hall was forced to face the truth – that there were no Franklin survivor
s; that many of the stories the Eskimos had told him did not square with the facts; that he himself had been too naïve and too gullible, a victim of his own wishful thinking. In his journal he no longer portrayed the natives as noble savages. Instead, he adopted the standard European recipe for their future: “CIVILIZE, ENLIGHTEN, & CHRISTIANIZE them & their race,” he wrote, underlining the words in a bitter passage in his journal. “Then we shall have no more such sad history to hear & write.”
He had spent five years in the Arctic with very little to show for his efforts. Vanquished and in despair, he set off for Repulse Bay, travelling through a country rich in game – the same realm that had once seen fivescore men die of scurvy and starvation. “O, that I could have met Crozier and his party twenty-one years ago,” he exclaimed. “I am sure I could have saved the whole company. I say it with no egotistical feeling but with a confidence of what I know of the country.”
Hall was remarkably resilient. By the time he reached Repulse Bay, he had regained his optimism and was ready for yet another Arctic adventure – the one that had been on his mind ever since he left New York. “How my soul longs for the time to come when I can be on my North Pole Expedition! I cannot, if I would, contained my zeal for making Arctic discoveries.… There is no use in man’s saying, it cannot be done – that the North Pole is beyond our reach.…” He had no doubt that he could reach it in less time “and with far less mental anxieties” than had been involved in the journey to King William Island.
The Arctic Grail Page 43