He indulged in the luxury of self-justification, persuading himself that his Arctic winters had not been a waste: it was all a preparation for his planned dash to the Pole. “I have always held the opinion that whoever would lead the way there should first have years of experience among the wild natives of the North: and this is one of my reasons for submitting to searching so long for the lost ones of Franklin’s Expedition.”
In the crowded pantheon of Arctic explorers, Hall is an original. There is nobody else remotely like him. A few others put up with the native way of life, but they can scarcely be said to have enjoyed it. Hall revelled in it. Always the loner, he preferred the squalid and cheerless snow houses to a comfortable berth aboard ship. He was the only one who genuinely delighted in native food, who wrote on his return of enjoying “a grand good feast” of the kind of meat he had been longing for – “the deer killed last fall, rotten, strong, and stinking, and for these qualities excellent for Innuit, and for the writer.”
Few men could have endured five years living under the conditions that Hall suffered without wanting a change of scene. But Hall was obsessed by the Arctic. That obsession had sustained him – that and his own iron will and unbounded enthusiasm. When, on August 13, 1869, he and his faithful Innuit friends, Joe and Hannah, boarded the whaler Ansell Gibbs for New York, he had but one thought in mind – to return as soon as possible, to reach the environs of the Pole by the following fall, to live in a snow house until the spring of 1871, and in that year to “achieve the goal of my ambition” – the North Pole itself.
5 Death by arsenic
By the time Charles Francis Hall emerged from his second Arctic Odyssey, Lady Franklin was seventy-seven years old and as active as ever. As long as she had breath left in her body, she was determined that the search for the records and relics of her husband’s expedition would go on. To the indefatigable widow, and indeed to many Englishmen, they had taken on the same aura as the bones of the saints. For more than two decades she had been preoccupied with her husband’s fate. Other Victorian widows remarried, raised new families, and got on with life. Not she. Was she merely mourning for a lost love, as her Queen was mourning for her lost Albert? Perhaps; yet there is precious little evidence of the kind of ardour that, for instance, distinguished Edward Parry’s correspondence with his Isabella. In fact, the Franklins’ marriage was marked by long separations that do not appear to have bothered either one unduly. Was it then guilt, because she, above all, had insisted that he seize the opportunity for promotion and fame? If so, she kept it to herself. The answer surely lies in her own dominant personality. In life, her pliant husband had been an extension of herself; she controlled his destiny, as it were, from the wings. In death it was the same. Long before he vanished into the Arctic labyrinth and in the bleak but crowded years that followed, all her considerable energies had been channelled towards a single purpose: to make absolutely certain that he should be enshrined for posterity as the greatest of all Arctic explorers.
It was not in her make-up to sit still. No doubt she found, in her restless journeys round the world, some solace for a tragedy that for her had no apparent end. For all of the 1860s, while Hall trudged across the bald northern lands, seeking more clues to her husband’s fate, she and her faithful niece, Sophia Cracroft, were traipsing from continent to continent, accepting the homage that the world felt was their due.
In the fall of 1860, at the invitation of Henry Grinnell, they set off for New York to cement the bonds of a friendship that had been launched by correspondence. They made a side trip to Canada, where Jane Franklin was presented to the touring Prince of Wales. A circuit of South America followed – by way of Brazil, Patagonia, and Chile. They continued on to California and British Columbia, still obsessed by gold fever. Up the turbulent Fraser the two ladies were borne in a canoe paddled by Indians – a faint reminder, perhaps, of Franklin’s overland journeys four decades before.
Back in San Francisco, they embarked on the spur of the moment for Hawaii, where they were not only introduced to royalty but were also treated as royalty. Queen Emma was heard to remark that “with Lady Franklin I would go anywhere – even as a servant.” And when the King, Kamehameha IV, gave a reception, it was noticed that those in the receiving line bowed and curtsied lower to the explorer’s widow than they did to members of the royal family. The voyage took two years and also included stops at Japan, China, Singapore, Penang, and Calcutta.
The winter of 1864-65 found Lady Franklin in Spain. When Hall was still at Repulse Bay, she was crossing India in a bullock cart. She came home by way of the Isthmus of Suez, where huge cranes and dredges were at work on the half-finished canal. She remained in England long enough to see a national memorial to her husband erected at Waterloo Place; then she was off again to France, Switzerland, and Italy, where, in Sophia’s phrase, the Pope “even paid her the striking compliment of advancing a few steps to meet her.” She returned to England by way of Dalmatia and Germany (where a troop of bearers carried the pair up a six-thousand-foot mountain) and then, in the fall of 1867, was in Paris for the Exhibition.
The pace of travel continued. By the end of that year she was off to India again, where, among other feats, she rode in the howdah of a rajah’s elephant, ten feet above the jostling crowd. After that it was Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, and northwest Africa. It is exhausting to study Lady Franklin’s itinerary for those years and equally exhausting to read the whirl of activity in which she involved herself on her return to England in August 1869.
There, on September 29, a paragraph in The Times leaped out at her: “Dr. Hall, the Arctic Explorer, arrived at New Bedford yesterday from Repulse Bay, after an absence of five years. He discovered the skeletons of several of Sir John Franklin’s party at King William’s Land, and he brings numerous relics of the Franklin expedition.” But there was no mention of any journals or papers.
She got in touch with the Grinnells immediately, asking a series of explicit questions that she hoped would illuminate the explorer’s rather vague reports of his expedition. Cornelius Grinnell replied, assuring her that Hall was “able, fearless, trustworthy and conscientious” – just the man to send north once again on an extended survey of King William Island.
But now Hall was more interested in going to the North Pole. Could Grinnell not persuade him to postpone his plans for a summer and join in “the so holy and noble cause as the rescue of those precious documents from eternal sepulture [sic] in oblivion?” In such a case she was sure that Hall would be prepared to forgo the command and serve under a British captain.
Hall was not prepared to serve under anyone. At best he might accept an equal position with somebody of the stature of Leopold M’Clintock, without pay – if he failed to get government or private aid for his expedition to the Pole. Only then would he be prepared to “do whatever I could to favor personally the noble aspirations of Lady Franklin.” After that message she determined to go to the United States herself, to question Hall about his discoveries, and to try to persuade him to join her cause.
She took passage, with Sophia, in January 1870. That same month Hall wrote her a fevered letter promising to forward complete details of his discoveries and pledging that he would return to King William Island once his polar quest was completed. Optimistic as ever, he expected to achieve that goal by 1873.
He felt compelled to ask (and answer) some rhetorical questions: Why wasn’t he immediately following up the search for Franklin? Was it over? Could any further information be gained? To these he said: “… the answer cannot be satisfactory, for I hardly know, myself, why I was led off from that almost holy mission to which I have devoted about twelve years of my life, and well on to eight of these in the icy regions of the North. What burned within my soul like a living fire all the time, was the full faith that I should find some survivors … and that I would be the instrument in the hand of heaven, of their salvation. But when I heard the sad tale from living witnesses in the spring of 1869, how
wickedly [they] … had been abandoned and suffered to die, my faith, till then so strong, was shaken and ultimately has extinguished.…”
Nonetheless, he felt there might still be records, and he would seek them – but only after his polar mission was accomplished.
He was a public figure by this time. Crowds flocked to his lectures, although, he said, “lecturing is a curse to my soul.” He even found time to spend with his wife, whom he had virtually deserted during the previous decade. His son, Charles, was ten years old; Hall had been with him for hardly three months of those years. Mrs. Hall was nearly destitute but not so strapped for funds that she would accept charity. Egged on by Henry Grinnell, Lady Franklin sent her a cheque for fifteen pounds. Mrs. Hall sent it right back.
Her husband, meanwhile, was lobbying Congress for $100,000 to equip two ships to go to Jones Sound west from Baffin Bay – his choice as a jumping-off spot for the Pole. If the government didn’t come through, he was prepared, he said, to have a naval ship drop him off at Ellesmere Island. From there he would proceed on foot, a lunatic scheme that would certainly have ended in disaster.
The lobbying eventually paid off – Hall even wangled an interview with President Grant – but though the House of Representatives voted the money in March, there were snags. Hall’s old enemy, Isaac Hayes, came forward with his own plans, urging that he be given command of the expedition because of his scientific background. But Hayes, save for a brief foray into Baffin Bay with an artist friend, had done no exploring for a decade while Hall was fresh from his five-year stint in the Arctic. Hayes’s scheme was finally rejected, but it delayed matters until July 1870. The Senate Appropriations Committee cut the grant in half, which meant that Hall would have to do with one ship. It was too late by then to mount an expedition. Once again, Charles Francis Hall had lost a year.
Later that same month, Lady Franklin arrived in Cincinnati with Sophia Cracroft “to cross examine him,” as she put it. Hailed by the press as “the most distinguished woman of her time,” she was closeted for several hours with “Captain Hall,” as he was now called, even though he hadn’t a shred of nautical experience. Presumably she tried to persuade him to cancel his polar plans in favour of her own, but if so, she failed; there is no record of their conversation.
Indeed, one is led to the conclusion that Lady Franklin was losing heart. She had certainly not pursued the Hall connection with her usual tenacity or dispatch. Since leaving London in January she had followed a leisurely course, visiting both California and Salt Lake City (where she showed a lively if disapproving curiosity about the Mormon faith) before arriving in Cincinnati in July. She was, perhaps, finally growing weary of her long quest. When Sherard Osborn, among others, had pressed her to support a British expedition to Repulse Bay, she had demurred, confessing to “a dread of future heart-rending revelations whether true or false.” She met Hall once again in August 1870, at Henry Grinnell’s house, where he repeated his desire to help her, but only after he had achieved the Pole.
The ship that would take Hall north again was the USS Periwinkle, a steam vessel of 387 tons. By the time the refitters were done with her in the winter of 1870-71, she was hardly the same craft, having been taken apart and rebuilt with thirteen extra tons of new timbers, bulkheads, spars, and rigging and given a new name – Polaris.
Hall would command the expedition, but Captain Sidney Budington would command the ship. Hall had made up with his old friend and mentor and even managed to hold his temper when Budington, dismayed by governmental delays, begged off and sailed north as captain of a whaler. The ice was so bad in Davis Strait that Budington returned and Hall took him on again. There was a snag, however. In the interim, Hall had offered the captaincy to another polar expert, Captain George Tyson, whom he had known since his Frobisher Bay days. Tyson had been unable to take the post because of whaling commitments, but when those fell through and Tyson suddenly became available, Hall persuaded the Navy to appoint him assistant navigator. In essence, that meant the Polaris had two captains.
Early in 1871, Hall was persuaded to accept Dr. Emil Bessels, a twenty-four-year-old German physician and naturalist, as his chief scientist. Hall was aware of his own deficiencies in the natural sciences, but Bessels was not his first choice. Tyson later noted “a want of mutual respect” between the two and suggested that Bessels was so discourteous that Hall would have been justified in replacing him before the ship left. Bessels was certainly described as “a sensitive man” by Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Scientists, who begged Hall to deal gently with him. Thus were sown the seeds of a later animosity. At the outset Hall made it clear that geographical discovery was to take precedence over scientific investigation. Bessels would be subordinate both to Hall and to Sidney Budington.
Meanwhile, the usual hordes of would-be adventurers were pleading to be part of the forthcoming expedition. These ranged from an aging seadog to a Broad Street broker. Swamped with applications, Hall had asked a reporter for the New York Times to outline some of the problems the tyro explorers would face, which he did with gusto, emphasizing the perils of century-old ice, the dank atmosphere aboard ship, plus “damp blankets, fetid woollens, odoriferous furs, filthy Esquimaux and myriads of unpleasant insects.” He went on to describe the unbearable Arctic night and the explorers’ “unhealthily fattened faces pale and dejected, worn out with long confinement, if not by the dread destroyer, scurvy.” But he reserved his final warnings for what he considered the paramount horror. “Outside,” he wrote, “he will be met by the repulsive features of the Esquimaux, their still more disgusting modes of life and the never ending line of ice and snow.…” What Hannah and Joe thought of this diatribe is not known.
Hall’s first mate would be Hubbard Chester, whom he had known as mate of the whaling ship Monticello. His second mate would be Kane’s former steward and trusted friend William Morton, the man who had been first to spy what he thought was an Open Polar Sea. The engineer was a German, Emil Schumann, and the crew included seven Germans. Two of the three-man scientific party were also Germans, which meant that there were as many Germans aboard as there were native-born Americans, a division that hinted at future trouble. In addition to all these, Joe and Hannah would come along, with their adopted daughter, Punny. Hall also expected to pick up Hans Hendrik, Kane’s and Hayes’s Eskimo companion, when he reached Greenland.
“I have chosen my own men,” Hall told the American Geographical Society, “men who will stand by me through thick and thin. Though we may be surrounded by innumerable icebergs, and though our vessel may be crushed like an eggshell, I believe they will stand by me to the last.”
In the light of the dismaying events that followed, Hall’s view seems naïve in the extreme, though quite in keeping with his own optimism. As in his interrogation of the Repulse Bay Innuit, he believed what he wanted to believe. He had, as Rear Admiral C.H. Davis wrote, “either a lack of discrimination or a wonderful power of ignoring disagreeable facts when their recognition threatened to interfere with the progress of the expedition.” Yet that could be written of almost all those cheerful optimists who plunged boldly into the Unknown, certain that they would capture their particular Grail after the briefest of trials. Admiral Davis, who edited Hall’s journal for the U.S. Navy, also had a propensity for ignoring disagreeable facts (as so many other literary explorers did). He made a tension-filled voyage sound like a holiday romp. But he was right in his assessment of Hall’s obsession to get to the Arctic without delay. “Every feeling and sentiment,” he wrote, “seemed to be swallowed up in the absorbing desire to get north.” That was Hall’s downfall.
Davis likened Hall to an Arthurian knight, a not uncommon simile when describing Arctic explorers. He noted his dreamy expression and his romantic outlook, which was “not always a practical one.” He speculated that a “skilled physiognomist would have descried too much of the poetic temperament in our Polar knight errant to have much faith in him as a successful discriminator
or commander of men.”
But, again, there was something of the romantic in even the most phlegmatic of Arctic knights. Some kept their feelings under a tighter rein than Hall or Kane, but it was scarcely possible to cross those green and dappled seas – the great bergs flashing in the sunlight, the brooding headlands looming from the mist – without feeling a catch in the throat and a tremor in the breast. To gaze on unknown ramparts, to enter mysterious channels, to touch bleak shorelines that no white man had trod before – this was the magic that had bewitched generation after generation of eager amateurs whose only credential was an obsessive desire to go a little farther than their predecessors.
Tyson, too, was a romantic. As a youth, he had worked in a New York iron foundry, but his heart belonged to the sea; he had been gripped by a desire to see something of the frozen world, for his imagination had been fed by accounts of the exploits of Parry, Ross, and Franklin. He longed to follow in their track, “to witness novel scenes, and to share in the dangers of Arctic travel.” He was disgusted with shop labour, but at that time there were no northern expeditions he could join. The best thing to do was to sign on aboard a whaler. At the age of twenty-one, George Tyson did just that. By the time he joined the Hall expedition he’d had twenty years of experience in the Arctic seas.
For him it was a strange feeling to leave the navy yard on June 29, 1871, heading north once more. Since he was not, for once, in command of a ship, he had none of the usual responsibilities and so, for the first time, had the leisure to look about and contemplate the past and the future. His friends had told him he was off on a wild-goose chase. Would it prove to be one? Within a week he was noting a lack of harmony between the men whom Hall had declared would stand by him through thick and thin. The two Germans, Dr. Bessels and his scientific assistant, Frederick Meyer, were already refusing to obey Hall’s orders. As for Captain Budington, he had been caught raiding the food supplies, had been given a dressing-down by Hall, and was already talking about quitting.
The Arctic Grail Page 44