Fatal North (3 page)

In promoting his latest and most ambitious expedition to the Arctic, Hall had solicited the support of the U.S. government
at the highest levels. A consummate letter writer, he wrote acquaintances and strangers alike, and used introductions from well-connected friends in Washington, New York, and back home in Ohio to wangle meetings with members of Congress and the Administration so as to lobby his cause. Four days after arriving in Washington, he called on President Ulysses S. Grant, the popular Army general who, at the age of forty-six, had won the 1868 election in a landslide as the youngest president in history. Grant showed genuine interest in Hall's bold plan for reaching the North Pole, for he himself had an impressive knowledge of the history of Arctic exploration. A smaller man than Hall, Grant offered the explorer one of his custom-made cigars, and they had both lit up and had a grand talk about the best route for the expedition, the determination that would be needed to reach the Pole, and the physical deprivation that would be faced. These were engrossing topics to Grant, a born fighting general who never lost his tough edge. In Hall, Grant immediately saw someone of vision worth backing, and the President would never waver in his support, publicly or privately, for the man who regaled him that day with stories of the Arctic.

Hall's energetic one-man campaign generated sufficient interest that he was invited to lecture in the nation's capital on his Arctic experiences at Lincoln Hall. Numerous dignitaries were present that night, including President Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Both sat in the first row in front of the podium, smiling and nodding their approval throughout Hall's animated talk. Although at heart a modest man, Hall knew how to captivate an audience with Arctic facts and folklore. At a dramatic moment, he presented a married Eskimo couple, Ebierbing (“Joe”) and Tookoolito (“Hannah”), whom he'd brought back with him from his last trip. Joe and Hannah, sweating profusely in their sealskin outfits, mesmerized the crowd simply by their appearance. The short-of-stature, chestnut-brown people of the Far North who called themselves
Inuits
were a great oddity at the time. For Hall's traveling show they had brought with them authentic bows and arrows, fish spears, dog harnesses, and other
articles of Eskimo paraphernalia. When Hall announced that he was asking Congress for $100,000 to outfit a new expedition to discover the North Pole, the house erupted in applause, led by the President and Vice President.

What he did not tell the audience that night was that if his planned expedition failed to win government backing for a full-scale effort, then he was prepared to try for the North Pole on his own, by foot and by sledge with his trusted Eskimo couple, Joe and Hannah, as his guides. In the worst-case scenario, he told friends, he would ask the navy to transport him by ship and drop him, with whatever supplies he could manage, as far north as they possibly could. It was a plan based more on determination and stubbornness than good sense.

On March 8, 1870, the day after Hall's spellbinding appearance at Lincoln Hall, a joint resolution was introduced in the Senate and House to appropriate $100,000 for a “voyage of exploration and discovery under the authority and for the benefit of the United States.” It authorized the President to provide “a naval or other steamer and, if necessary, a supply tender, for a voyage into the Arctic regions under the control of Captain C. F. Hall.”

Hall, having never served in the Navy or commanded a vessel of any type, had no claim to the title “Captain.” Though honorary at best, the title stuck, and overnight the former Cincinnati print shop owner became known as Captain Hall.

The resolution was assigned to committees in both chambers. In a long, impassioned letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hall struck a dual theme of patriotism cleverly combined with commercialism. “To whom are we indebted for all our Arctic whaling grounds, from which our country is getting millions of dollars worth of whalebone and oil every year? The answer is
to the English!”

In truth, Hall didn't give a whit about the commercial whaling industry, except that it was expedient to his ultimate mission in life: being the discoverer of the North Pole and planting Old Glory at the top of the world. To that end, Hall, with the fiery
righteousness and rhetoric of a Baptist missionary converting heathens, was convinced that he had been ordained by a “call from heaven” for the task by a higher authority than mortal man or mere politicians. Yet to succeed, he understood he needed the support of both.

“Neither glory nor money has caused me to devote my very life and soul to Arctic Exploration,” his letter went on. “My desire is to promote the welfare of mankind in general under this glorious ensign—the stars and stripes.” He bemoaned how few, ill-planned, and under-equipped the previous American ventures (privately financed projects seeking commercial opportunities) in the Arctic region had been, while “time and time again” the English and “other governments of the Old World” had sent out national “expeditions for discovery, for enriching science, and for the promotion of commerce.”

Hall wanted nothing less than for the U.S. government, in a bid for international glory, to finance an expedition to discover the North Pole. This quest had already lured and killed scores of mariners and adventurers, and yet the goal seemed tantalizingly close. The feeling was that with the right ship, the right commander, enough money, and a little luck, man would finally set foot at the top of the Earth. As one newspaper claimed: “The solution of the Northern mystery would be the event of the nineteenth century.” And in a heroic age, the discoverer would be the hero. Hall, of course, believed fervently that he should be that hero—the American who would put an end to more than two hundred years of British polar record setting. Who else, after all, had the vision, determination, and experience to lead such a historic mission?

Unexpectedly, another candidate stepped forward, a man with whom Hall had previously tangled over the Arctic. Dr. Isaac Hayes, a well-known scientist and author who had ten years earlier headed a well-publicized expedition in search of the open polar sea, appeared before the Foreign Relations committee to argue that an expedition he was planning deserved the
government's backing more than Hall's.

It was blasphemy to Hall's ears. This same man, Dr. Hayes, had nearly cost Hall his first expedition to the Arctic region the same ten years earlier by
stealing
his ship's captain. Worse yet, in Hall's eyes, was that Hayes had sat with him and listened to his plans for that expedition, feigning support while conspiring behind his back. Hall had been forced at the last moment to find another ship's master. Not one to forget such “cowardice,” “trickery,” and “deviltry,” Hall was aghast that Hayes would have the temerity to come forward now and try to ruin his hopes once again.

When Hall appeared before the committee, he defended himself as best he could against Hayes' main line of attack: his lack of formal scientific credentials. Hall had, on his earlier trips, made detailed maps and charts that were surprisingly accurate considering his lack of formal training in navigation and cartography. (Although he had found no Franklin survivors on his trips, he added much to the knowledge of what happened to the expedition through stories collected from Eskimos, and he returned with relics of the disastrous English voyage including silver spoons, a fork, a pair of scissors, and a mahogany barometer case.) Hall lacked even what could be called a liberal education. He was self-taught to a considerable extent, having finished with his formal education before graduating from high school. But he knew
Bowditch's Navigator
by heart and was perfectly competent to navigate a vessel. He excelled in the exactness and precision of his field work, in the determining of latitude and longitude, and in his careful, conscientious record of magnetic, astronomical, and geographical observations. For these accomplishments, as well as for his accurate and reliable charting of newly discovered coastlines, Hall had been complimented by the British Admiralty, and his work in the Arctic had stood the severest tests of both the U.S. Coast Survey Office and the Smithsonian Institution. He did not pretend to be a scientific naturalist, but he was thoroughly competent to make and record geographical discoveries, and that was the object of the proposed expedition.

“No, I am not a scientific man,” Hall admitted before the Senate committee. “Discoverers seldom have been. Arctic discoverers—all except Dr. Hayes—have not been scientific men. Neither Sir John Franklin nor Sir Edward Parry were of this class, and yet they loved science and did much to enlarge her fruitful fields. Frobisher, Davis, Baffin, Bylot, Hudson, Fox, James, Kane, Back, McClintock, Osborn, Dease and Simpson, Rae, Ross and a host of other Arctic explorers were not scientific men.”

Nevertheless, Dr. Hayes succeeded in convincing the legislators to strike Hall's name from the resolution, leaving the commander of the U.S. expedition nameless.

Even with such powerful senatorial champions as Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, John Sherman of Ohio (brother of William Tecumseh Sherman), and Reuben Fenton of New York, when the Senate—wrangling over larger issues such as reconstruction of the South—voted on the Arctic resolution it passed only when a tie was dramatically broken by the yea vote of Vice President Colfax.

Assured privately by legislative supporters that he was still the prime candidate for the command, Hall considered the vote a triumph. Then he waited for the bill to wend its way through the House of Representatives. Key to House approval, he was advised, was getting the bill through the influential House Appropriations Committee. Hall understood that even politicians who supported Arctic exploration might not always consider themselves at liberty to vote appropriations of public money for carrying it out. During the wait Hall looked, according to one of his supporters, Senator J. W. Patterson of New Hampshire, like a man “watching with a sick friend who hangs between life and death.”

That was the man who had paced all day outside the Appropriations Committee.

Shortly before five o'clock, Hall spotted the clerk of the committee leaving the conference room. He pounced quickly, hoping for some word. The clerk said nothing, but handed him a folded piece of paper before heading through another doorway.

Hall unfolded the note. It read: “North Pole $50,000.”

The sum was half as much as he had requested, but the $100,000 was to finance a two-ship expedition. He knew it could be done with one good ship, and the right crew.

Of course, there was still the matter of the unnamed commander, but Hall would not let that ruin the day. His fate, as he had been telling friends, was in God's hands.

Having powerful political allies also helped. The appropriation would be affirmed with dispatch by the Senate and House, and within days signed by President Grant, who a week later would send Hall his official appointment as commander of the expedition.

That day in the corridor of the Capitol, Charles Francis Hall trusted his fate.

He stretched to full height, raised an arm straight over his head, index finger pointed skyward, and dramatically announced to no one in particular and to everyone within earshot:

“North Star!”

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A Ship and Her Crew

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harles Francis Hall was holding still another audience spellbound.

This time he wasn't raising money or seeking support, but bidding a fond farewell before the prestigious American Geographical Society at a reception in his honor. He had command of a fully outfitted steamer, moored at nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard, from where he and his crew would depart a few days hence for what was expected to be a nearly three-year expedition to the North Pole and back.

He had been ceremoniously presented with a folded American flag that had been carried not only to the highest northern latitude Old Glory had ever been, but also nearest to the South Pole. Hall cradled the colors in his arms as a minister might hold a cherished Bible or a grateful mother her firstborn. He was struck wordless by the honor as he stood before a capacity crowd that included not only members of the scientific community, but professors, judges, lawyers, Tammany Hall politicians, Wall
Street bankers, and newspaper reporters. Hall surveyed the faces before him. From the beginning of his Arctic journeys a decade earlier, he had received the support of this influential group, and he now considered many of its members, including its president, Judge Charles P. Daly, old friends.

In the silence of the moment, everyone waited expectantly.

“I believe,” Hall's voice finally boomed, “that this flag in 1872 will float over a new world, in which the North Pole star is its crowning jewel!”

His optimism was greeted with loud applause.

Hall was not finished; he seldom was when his subject was the Arctic. Placing the flag on the lectern, he came out on the dais and apologized for not having the time to write a proper speech for the evening.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I would rather be making a sledge journey to the North Pole than talking about it,” he said earnestly, bringing laughter from the audience.

Pointing out on a large Arctic map the route which he proposed to follow, he outlined his plan. He did not expect the first winter to reach above 80 degrees north—ten degrees in latitude and 800 miles short of the Pole. The ship would winter in the ice pack, and they would make exploratory sledge journeys, pushing as far north as possible. “I am not taking any sledges with me,” he interjected. “I will have the Arctic natives make my sledges, since they can do it much better than white men.”

In the spring, with the breakup of the ice, they would attempt to sail farther north, pushing as far as possible. When they were within striking distance of a few hundred miles—he hoped by next summer—they would make a dash by sledge for the Pole. “We will take five or six sledges with fifteen dogs pulling each one,” he said. Each sled would be filled with provisions, he explained, and as fast as a load was exhausted, the empty sled would be sent back to the starting point to reload and bring back more provisions.