By the time the Polaris reached Disco Island off the Greenland coast, there were three warring factions aboard: Budington was at odds with both Hall and Tyson while the insubordinate Germans had closed ranks. Hall was forced to appeal to Captain Davenport, commander of the supply ship uss Congress, for help. Davenport threatened to put the German scientist Meyer in irons and send him home on the Congress for insolence. At that all the Germans threatened to quit on the spot. That would mean the end of the expedition.
“Was there ever a commander so beset by embarrassments …?” Tyson wondered. Both Bessels and Meyer felt themselves superior to the half-educated Hall, while Budington felt he knew more about Arctic conditions and certainly more about navigation than his leader.
Davenport made it clear that everyone on the expedition was under naval discipline and that Hall was in charge. Before the ship left Disco he gathered the crew together and lectured them on the need to obey orders. After Davenport’s tough speech, the Reverend Doctor Newman, who had been brought along on the supply ship to confer the Deity’s blessing on the expedition, added a few words of his own to the usual benediction, urging that charity, pure emotions, noble thoughts, and generous sympathies reign during the long Arctic night. Meanwhile, Tyson discovered that Captain Budington was secretly raiding the liquor cabinet.
Hall ignored all this, avoiding any allusion to the troubles aboard. In Tyson’s opinion, he was able to “sink everything else in the one idea of pushing on to the far north.” He dreaded any suggestion of delay, and the idea that he might be forced to return filled him with dismay. Yet he also seemed to have a premonition of coming disaster, for he suddenly left all the papers connected with his second expedition in the care of an official at Godhavn – an extraordinary step, as Tyson noted, because he had intended to while away the long Arctic night preparing them for publication on his return.
When the Polaris reached Upernavik, Hall sent Chester, the first mate, to find Hans Hendrik, who was fifty miles to the north. Chester returned with not only Hans but also his wife, Merkut, their three children, and a horde of puppies that Hans insisted on bringing with him. His boat was jammed with bags, boxes, skins, tents, cooking utensils, tools, and weapons, all of which would have to be accommodated. The grey-bearded William Morton, who remembered Hans from the Kane expedition almost twenty years before, strode forward to greet him. He had aged so greatly that Hans did not recognize him. But Morton pointed to the scars on the Eskimo’s right hand and recalled the explosion on the shores of Smith Sound that had caused them. Then Hans remembered.
At this point Hall abandoned his plans to sail westward through Jones Sound. The news that the waters to the north were free of ice persuaded him to follow in Kane’s wake through Smith Sound. They sailed out of Tesiussuq, the last of the Eskimo settlements, on August 24. “The Polaris bids adieu to the civilized world,” Hall wrote in a dispatch that the governor of Greenland promised to deliver to the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen. Three days later, having entered Smith Sound, and with a growing sense of excitement, they passed Kane’s winter quarters. As Noah Hayes, an enthusiastic young seaman (no relation to Isaac), wrote, “… all are infatuated with the Open Polar Sea.”
Now Budington began to display the want of confidence that widened the breach between him and both Hall and Tyson. He wanted to take the ship into winter quarters near Etah and let the expedition continue toward the Pole by sledge. To Tyson’s relief, Hall refused. Budington, according to later testimony, was now behind Hall’s back ridiculing him as a novice to members of the crew, a breach of both naval ethics and naval discipline. It was becoming clearer each day that he had little interest in reaching the Pole and that, in the words of Hubbard Chester, he thought the enterprise was all “damn nonsense.”
On August 28, Chester reported impassable ice ahead. Budington, “in a fearful state of excitement at the thought of going forward,” slowed the ship. Tyson spotted a dark streak of open water to the west, and Hall ordered the Polaris to proceed, skirting the pack. Tyson could not help sneering at Budington’s timidity. “Out on such cowards, I say!” he wrote in his journal.
The Polaris was steaming through unknown waters, having gone farther north than any other known ship. Hall was lucky. Unlike Kane and Hayes, who had been stopped by the ice farther south, he had the weather on his side. The Polaris crossed Kane Basin and entered Kennedy Channel. But where was the Open Polar Sea that both Morton and Hayes had insisted they had seen years before? There was no sign of it. Instead, the ship entered another narrower basin. This was the water that Morton had spotted. Now they could see that the so-called open sea was landlocked. It would eventually be named for Hall himself.
Leading north beyond the basin was another channel, about eighteen miles wide and heavily obstructed by ice. Hall named it Robeson Channel after the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. The crew grew nervous; who knew what lay ahead? Like mariners of old venturing to the very lip of the known world, they were haunted by nameless terrors. “I believe,” Tyson declared, “some of them think we are going over the edge of the world.” The channel actually led to the Lincoln Sea, permanently frozen, but they were not to encounter that desert of rumpled ice. When they reached a latitude of 82°11′N, the pressure of the current pushed the ship back down the channel and into Hall Basin, where it was moored to a floe.
Hall convened a council of officers. Chester and Tyson were all for going forward. Budington was opposed and signalled his feelings by walking out of the cabin. Tyson, who rarely had a good word for anybody on the expedition, mocked “these puerile fears,” which, he said, reminded him of Sir Edward Belcher during the Franklin search. He urged Hall to return north to add another two or three degrees to his record, but Hall, in Tyson’s view, appeared afraid of offending Budington. In truth, there was little point in continuing. Winter was setting in; it would be foolhardy to risk lives for the sake of a few miles of geography.
Instead, Hall took the Polaris west to the northern tip of what he called Grant Land (now Ellesmere Island) and almost wrecked the ship in the process. Trapped in the pack and driven south, he finally found a small harbour on the Greenland shore. Here, on the most northerly patch of land on which any civilized flag had been planted, Hall raised the Stars and Stripes and named their refuge Thank God Harbor in honour of a deity who had thus far smiled on his expedition. On September 10, 1871, the expedition settled down for the winter.
Hall was determined to reach the Pole by sledge. He took Hubbard Chester, Joe Ebierbing, and Hans Hendrik. But he did not take Tyson, who later claimed that Hall, pointing to Budington, declared, “I cannot trust that man and I want you to go with me but don’t know how to leave him on the ship.” The quartet left on October 10 and returned two weeks later, having plotted a spring route to the Pole.
“Father Hall,” as Hannah and Joe called him, looked fit enough on his return, although Chester later said he wasn’t quite himself and some of the crew thought he seemed tired. Nonetheless, he insisted he’d had a good trip and declared, “I can go to the pole, I think, on this shore.” He entered the ship – now being banked with snow like a gigantic igloo – and felt the interior heat at once, an eighty-degree contrast to the outdoor chill. He asked for a cup of coffee, a pot of which was brewed especially for him, and on drinking it almost immediately complained of nausea and vomited. No one took that too seriously. He had been subject to bilious attacks before, and some others had also drunk the same coffee without ill effects. Dr. Bessels advised against giving him an emetic. But in the morning Hall’s condition was worse; in a few days he was delirious.
For the next week he was out of his head, apparently suffering from paranoia. He said there was poison in the coffee – that it had burned his stomach. He accused almost everybody of trying to murder him. He thought he saw blue smoke – poisonous vapours – emerging from Bessels’s mouth. He refused to take any nourishment or medicine because he thought it might contain poison. He was especially suspicious of the doctor, “
the little German dancing master,” as he called him.
After a week he began to improve. His talk sounded rational. He was careful about his food, however. He insisted that it be prepared by the faithful Hannah and on occasion directed one of the seamen, Joseph Mauch, who was acting as his secretary, to taste both food and drink before he would touch anything. On November 6, he was well enough to go out on deck. “I am as well as I ever was,” he declared. Then, suddenly, he suffered a relapse.
Shortly after midnight, Chester aroused Budington to announce, “Captain Hall is dying.” Budington found the explorer sitting on the edge of his bunk, feet dangling, eyes glassy and shifting furtively, “looking like a corpse – frightful to look at.” He was trying to spell the word “murder.” He died in the early morning of November 8, and was buried on the shore before a gloomy ship’s company and a weeping Hannah.
The Arctic holds many mysteries, but the death of Charles Francis Hall is one of the most tantalizing. Was he murdered, and if so, by whom and for what reason? Certainly he suspected the worst; but then, Hall tended to be paranoiac at the best of times, and who can take seriously the suspicions of a man in a delirium? The board of inquiry set up by the Secretary of the Navy concluded that Hall died of apoplexy – a stroke. That accorded with the testimony of Dr. Bessels and also with many of Hall’s symptoms – brief paralysis, slurred speech, erratic pulse, temporary coma – but not entirely with the high fever that Bessels had managed to control with quinine injections.
But was it only quinine that Bessels injected? In 1968, Chauncey Loomis, who was preparing a biography of Hall and who had read every available document about the expeditions, decided on some original research. He would get permission to exhume the body, go to Hall’s grave on the shores of Thank God Harbor, and have an autopsy performed.
Loomis’s party arrived in August. The dry Arctic cold had kept the corpse in a remarkable state of preservation. The hair, beard, and skin were all more or less intact and so, fortunately, were the fingernails. Dr. Franklin Paddock, the medical man with the Loomis party, sent several slivers back to the Centre for Forensic Medicine in Toronto. After a careful examination, the centre issued a startling report: Hall in the last two weeks of his life had received toxic quantities of arsenic. He may have had a stroke, but it was not that that killed him. He had been poisoned.
Indeed, Hall’s symptoms in those last two weeks were remarkably similar to those typical of arsenic poisoning. Arsenic can have a sweet taste: Hall had complained to Hannah of the sweet taste of the coffee. It also causes burning pains in the stomach – again, the very thing of which Hall had complained. Arsenic causes vomiting and dehydration, bringing on intense thirst: Hall had continually asked for water. It causes feeble pulse, vertigo, and in some cases stupor, even mania. Hall had suffered from all of these.
Three men were heard to express some relief after Hall’s death. Several of the crew were to testify later that Budington had declared, “There’s a stone off my heart.” Budington denied that but didn’t deny telling one seaman, Henry Hobby, “We are all right now … you shan’t be starved to death now, I can tell you” – presumably meaning that all attempts to reach the Pole were over. Frederick Meyer of the scientific staff, who had complained that Hall was friendlier with the men than with the officers, was heard to suggest that the expedition would be better off with the officers back in charge. And Dr. Emil Bessels, according to Noah Hayes, declared that Hall’s death was the best thing that could have happened to the expedition – and even laughed when he said it.
These three men were the ones who had in one way or another opposed Hall from the outset; all the evidence before the naval inquiry made it clear that he was liked and admired by the rest of the ship’s company. But was any of this discordant trio capable of murder? Did any have the opportunity or the motive? The answer here seems to be no. Of the three, only Dr. Bessels was in constant attendance on Hall. The others who spent time with him – Joe, Hannah, Chester, and Morton – were his loyal friends. As Loomis has pointed out, it would have been possible for Bessels to administer arsenic, either in the quinine injections he gave Hall to keep his fever down or orally with some of the medicine. And certainly, when Hall refused all food and drink he did improve.
Yet it is equally possible that Hall in his delirium overdosed himself, either from his own considerable medical kit or from the doctor’s. Arsenic was easily available. If Bessels did kill him – and Loomis rightly places him as the prime suspect – why did he do it? He had nothing to gain by Hall’s death. In fact, unlike Budington, he was one of those who wanted to keep moving north. The naval inquiry cleared him. He was arrogant, certainly, and he was difficult to deal with. He considered himself a superior being and he looked down on Hall. But again, as Loomis has written, these are not rational motives for murder.
The operative word here is “rational.” The history of Arctic exploration is riddled with irrational decisions and events. Hall’s summary execution of Patrick Coleman was merely one in a long series of incidents that went back to the day when a nervous and irrational crew had cast Henry Hudson adrift. Quarrels, fancied slights, broken friendships, acts of mutiny or near mutiny, bitter dissension – these were the concomitants of life aboard a winterized vessel. The greatest hardship of all may not have been scurvy or starvation, cold or boredom, but the suppressed tensions gnawing away at men living too close together in cramped quarters in the gloom and solitude of the long Arctic night. The British managed to conceal much of this from the world. The Americans were more open, but even they tended to edit their journals for publication, as Kane had done, perhaps because on their return to civilization the bitterness and paranoia that marked those nightmare months vanished into the background. Noah Hayes, the least spiteful of all the Polaris crew, on rereading his journal after the voyage, regretted the hatred and selfish recrimination that had marked certain passages. “I am utterly disgusted with writing and with what I have written,” he declared when he returned to the United States. He added, “… I believe that no man can retain the use of his faculties through one long night to such a degree as to be morally responsible … for all that he may say and do.…”
Every Arctic voyage was unique and each one had its secrets that can never be known. Hall’s was no exception. The naval inquiry raised the curtain briefly, giving the audience a quick glimpse at the strengths and failings of the flawed heroes who attempted the impossible. Then the curtain dropped. Was Hall murdered? If so, why and by whom? No one will ever know. Perhaps the only sensible answer, as Chauncey Loomis suggested, is that his own obsession with the Arctic finally did him in.
6 George Tyson’s remarkable drift
After Hall’s death, discipline on the Polaris fell apart. As Joe, Hall’s faithful Eskimo companion, described it some years later, everybody was in charge, nobody was in charge: “No cap’n; nobody cap’n. Cap’n Budington, he cap’n. Captain Tyson, he cap’n. Doctor, he cap’n too. Mr. Chester, cap’n. Mr. Meyer, cap’n; me cap’n; everybody cap’n – no good.”
Nominally, Sidney Budington was in charge, but he exerted only minimal control. Unlike the officers of the British Navy, he didn’t invent jobs to keep his men out of mischief, nor was there any attempt at regular periods of exercise or other forms of recreation. He put a stop to Hall’s practice of daily religious services; once a week would be enough, he felt. Budington was now drinking regularly, raiding the scientific stores for the high-proof alcohol used to preserve specimens. Bessels, on one occasion, concealed himself and caught the captain in the act. A brief, inconclusive struggle followed.
The two despised each other. To Budington, Bessels was an arrogant elitist and a polar amateur. To Bessels, Budington was a half-educated bumpkin. The hypercritical Tyson disdained them both. As the winter dragged on and tensions grew, few of the officers were free of paranoia.
At the end of November, in a raging gale, the ship was almost crushed by the ice, which pushed up under her keel and raised
her stern six feet. At this Hannah and Joe, still heartbroken over Hall’s death, left the Polaris temporarily and built a snow house on the shore. Hans and Merkut followed with their children.
Budington had no interest in going farther north in the spring. All he wanted to do was to get home safely. “Whoever wants to go North, let them go, but I won’t,” he said. Tyson and Chester made an abortive attempt in June; one of their whaleboats was crushed in the ice, another abandoned. On August 12, 1872, the Polaris finally broke free of the ice, and that same morning Hans’s wife, Merkut, gave birth to a baby boy. The incident – seen as a good omen – came as a complete surprise; her loose clothing had concealed her condition during the winter. The crew named the infant Charles Polaris.
Three days later, Budington, who had been drinking heavily, ran the ship into the pack; once again she was beset. For the next two months she drifted slowly south, tied to a floe. On October 12, with a strong wind from the north pushing them forward, they passed Kane’s Rensselaer Harbor, but with the blizzard increasing and the sun failing, they had no real idea where the ship was heading. The pumps were operating day and night, gobbling fuel at a dismaying rate. As long as the ice held, cradling the vessel, she was in no danger. But if it should crumble in the narrow channel leading out of Kane Basin, the Polaris, drifting free, could be smashed against the nearest berg.
That night Tyson had a prophetic dream in which the ship was hurled against a precipice. The following day, his nightmare was realized when the ice broke away and she was threatened by a huge berg. Cracking and groaning under the pressure of millions of tons of surrounding ice, trembling violently, alternately hoisted up and then dropped, she seemed doomed. The engineer, Emil Schumann, came rushing down the port alley screaming that the hull was staved in aft and the pumps couldn’t keep up. According to Tyson’s account, Budington was in a blue funk: “the poor trembling wretch stood there apparently oblivious to everything but his own coward thoughts.”
The Arctic Grail Page 45