Charles Francis Hall – Wikipedia

Posted on by
before-content-x4

Charles Francis Hall

Charles Francis Hall (Rochester, 1821 – Greenland, 8 November 1871) was an American explorer of the artis.

after-content-x4

Little is known about Hall’s youth. He was born in the state of Vermont, but when he was a child his family moved to Rochester (New Hampshire), where as a boy he became an apprentice of a blacksmith. In the years 1840 he married and moved to the west, reaching Cincinnati in 1849. Here he entered the market by building seals and engraved plates, before publishing small newspapers such as The Cincinnati Occasional It is The Daily Press . [first]

Inuit village near the Bay of Frobisher , adapted from Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux Di Hall, 1865

Around 1857 Hall began to take an interest in the artis, he passed the years immediately following the reports of the previous explorers and trying to raise the money to organize an expedition with the intention of discovering the fate of the lost expedition of John Franklin.

In 1860 Hall began his first shipment (1860–1863) obtaining a ride out of New Bedford aboard the whale George Henry With Captain Sidney O. Budington, whose uncle James Budington had recovered the exploratory ship of Edward Belcher, the HMS Resolute always aboard the George Henry . He came to the island of Baffin where the George Henry It was forced to stop for the winter. [first] The Inuit spoke to the Halls of the remains of Martin Frobisher’s adventure in the Frobisher bay on the island of Baffin. Hall went there immediately to see him with his eyes, getting help from the guides Inuit Ebierbing (“Joe”) and Tookolyt (“Hannah”).

Hall also discovered what I will consider a proof of the fact that some members of the Franklin expedition may have still been alive. On his return to New York, Hall convinced Harper Brothers to publish his story about the expedition, Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux . It had been written by a British sailor and writer, William Parker Snow, also obsessed with Franklin’s fate. The two argued (especially because Parker Snow was very slow in writing the manuscript), and among other things Parker Snow accused Hall of using his ideas for the search for Franklin without giving him due credit.

In 1863 Hall organized a second expedition to look for other clues relating to Franklin’s fate, including the search for any survivors or their diaries. The first attempt was made with the scuna Active 95 tons and was abandoned, probably due to the lack of funding because of the American Secession War, and for the now worn out relationship with the second in Parker Snow command. In July 1864 a very small expedition left on board the whale Monticello .

During the second shipment (1864–1869) to the island of King Guglielmo he found remains and artifacts of the Franklin expedition, carrying out other research among the natives of the area. Hall understood that the stories that spoke of survivors were incomprehensible and unreliable. He was disillusioned by the Inuit discovering that the remains of Franklin’s expedition had been deliberately abandoned for hunger. I will not consider that it would have been impossible for the local population to support such a large group. [2]

Polaris (Right) and Congress in Godhaven, island of Disko, off the coast of Greenland , engraving on wood from Harper’s Weekly , May 1873
The tomb of Captain Hall

The third Hall expedition was totally different. He received 50 000 dollars from the United States of America to drive an expedition to the North Pole on the ship Polaris . The group of 25 people also included the old friend of Hall, Budington, as a sailing teacher, George Tyson as a navigator and Emil Bessels, German doctor and naturalist as head of the scientific group. The expedition had problems from the start when the crew divided into factions. The Hall authority on the expedition was not well seen by most of the crew, and the discipline is lost.

after-content-x4

The Polaris He entered Thank God Harbor (today Hall Bay) on September 10, 1871 remaining for the winter on the northern coast of Greenland. That autumn, returning to the ship from an expedition to the sled with an inuit guide, Hall suddenly fought after drinking a cup of coffee, and collapsed. The following week he suffered from vomiting and delusion, before starting to improve. He accused many of the crew men, including Bessels, of poisoning him. Shortly afterwards Hall began to suffer the same symptoms, and finally died on November 8th. Hall was brought to the ground where he was buried with a formal ceremony.

The command of the shipment passed to Budington, who led an expedition in search of the pole in June 1872. It was not successful and the Polaris Virmed to the south. On October 12, the ship was trapped by ice in Smith Sound and was on the point of being crushed. Nineteen crew members and the Eskimo guides abandoned the ship by moving to the ice, while in fourteen they remained on board. Polaris took over near Etah and broke on October 24th. After passing the winter on the ground, the crew sailed to the south with two boats and was saved by a whale, thus managing to reach the house by passing from Scotland.

The following year the remains of the group attempted to free the Polaris from the Banchisa to direct it to the south. A group, including Tyson, divided from the others when the ice broke violently threatening to break the ship in the autumn of 1872. The group of 19 people drifted on the pack for the following six months and for over 2300 km before be saved off the coast of Terranova by Tigress April 30, 1873.

The official investigation that followed was deduced that Hall had died of an apopletic blow. In 1968 Hall’s biographer, Chauncey Chester Loomis, professor of Dartmouth College, made an expedition to Greenland to re -humble Hall’s body. Due to the permafrost, the body of Hall, the southwater flag, the clothes and the coffin had been very well preserved. The exams on the samples of bone fabric, nails and hair showed that Hall died poisoned by great doses of arsenic administered in his last two weeks of life. This diagnosis is consistent with the symptoms described by the group members. It is possible that Hall administered the poison by itself, given that the arsenic was a common ingredient of the charlather of the time.

  • Biography on Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online . are biography.ca .
  • Robinson, Michael, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago, 2006)
  • Berton, Pierre. “” The Arctic Grail. ”
  • Old News article from Old News Publishing . are Oldnewspublishing.com . URL consulted on 25 October 2005 (archived by URL Original on October 25, 2005) .
  • Henderson, Bruce. ” Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition. ” Diversion Books, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0-9838395-9-0 (e-book).
  • Kind, Stuart e Overman, Michael. ” Science Against Crime “. Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York, 1972. ISBN 0-385-09249-0.
  • Loomis, Chauncey C. ” Weird and Tragic Shores. ”
  • E. C. Coleman, The Royal Navy in Polar Exploration from Franklin to Scott , 2006 (Tempus Publishing)
  • Charles Frances Hall, Arctic Researches, And Life Among The Esquimaux: Being A Narrative Of An Expedition In Search Of Sir John Franklin In The Years 1860, 1861 and 1862 , New York, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1865. URL consulted on August 15, 2009 .
  • Hall, Thomas F. (1917). Has the North Pole Been Discovered? Boston: R.G. Badger
  • David Woodman, Strangers among Us , Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-7735-1348-5.

after-content-x4