Trial by Ice (46 page)

Thus, the vague rumors, and the more positive charges built on them, were swept away, and the people of the country, while sincerely mourning their eminent fellow American and heartily deploring his death, were relieved from the state of excitement that his supposed murder had naturally induced.

The next book out was not so kind.
Arctic Experiences, Containing Capt. George E. Tyson's Wonderful Drift on the Ice-Floe,
edited by E. Vale Blake, was published in 1874 by Harper & Brothers
in New York. The publisher that had caught the first photographic image of the Tyson party saw the need for a more informative treat ment.

Relying heavily on George Tyson's journal, the book widely disseminated the navigator's bitter accusations against Budding-ton, Meyer, and Bessel. Unlike Cunnington's work, Blake included testimony from the hearing, notes, and Tyson's journals. On December 22, 1873, two days before testifying, Chaplain Bryan had answered a letter from Blake requesting his thoughts on the number of people who had climbed the mast to look for Tyson's group. Sadly, Bryan answered with candor: “During the winter I greatly regretted that I did not go up the masthead myself, but I never had an idea that I would have seen them.”

Blake's book fanned the embers of the persistent stories, causing them to burst into flames. The fact that the Geographic Society of Paris awarded the Gold Medal of the Roquette Foundation posthumously to Charles Francis Hall did little to dispel the rumors. Finally the U.S. government moved to quash the whole affair. It comm ssioned Rear Adm. C. H. Davis of the Naval Observatory to write the official version of the event. Published by the Government Printing Office, the
Narrative of the North Polar Expedition, U.S. Ship
Polaris appeared in 1876 and sought to be the definitive work on what had happened. To those alert enough to read the title page, the words “edited under the direction of the Hon. G. M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy” must have proved troubling.

Davis's 686-page book, bound with a gilt cover, amounted to a massive whitewash. Mesmerizing the reader with day-by-day minutiae, the admiral glosses over the conflicts and shortcomings of the expedition. Testimony, journals, and even the official inquiries are edited to present the most favorable picture. Viewed through Davis's rose-colored glasses, the
Polaris
expedition consisted of happy, singing comrades who had suffered bad luck yet went on in the best possible tradition of the navy.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. But the “official report” achieved its desired goal. The disaster of the
Polaris
expedition gradually faded from people's minds.

1968

Beneath a threatening sky, four men stood beside the pile of dirt and willow-laced stones that marked the grave of Charles Francis Hall. The time was August 1968, three years and three months shy of a century since the coffin of the commander of the
Polaris
expedition had been lowered into the frozen ground. Their presence was no mere coincidence. To stand on that desolate strip of rocky scree had taken months of hard work, research, and perseverance. The leader of this tiny group was Charles C. Loomis, professor of English at Dartmouth College and a renowned Arctic scholar with four previous explorations to the frozen North under his belt. His love of photography had led him to the Arctic, prompted by his filming of musk oxen on Alaska's Nunivak Island. Loomis was preparing a biography of Charles Francis Hall under a Smithsonian postdoctoral fellowship.

On their arrival the previous morning, a windless day and clear blue sky had greeted the group. The single-engine Otter leaped over the foothills ringing the plain and descended in widening arcs over the ice-free blue waters of Hall Basin. Following the scalloped shoreline of Thank God Harbor, the aircraft touched down on a relatively level site a mile below the wreckage of Emil Bessel's observatory.
The large tundra tires bounced and scrunched over the rough shale, and the radial engine sputtered to a halt.

Time and clear flying weather are especially precious to every bush pilot. A storm might loom over the horizon at any moment, flipping the plane or forcing an unwanted stay. Hurriedly the passengers unloaded their gear and stepped back. The plane's engine coughed to life, belching a cloud of oily smoke. Revving the engine, rhe pilot, W. W. Phipps, spun the nose into the light wind and took off, trailing a cloud of glacial silt and pebbles. Phipps would return in two weeks, weather permitting. The men were on their own.

As Loomis watched their link to civilization vanish into a silver speck, the utter and terrible isolation of this place struck him. One minute they had been flying bumpily along, encased in a marvel of modern aeronautical engineering, and the next instant the four of them were standing alone on a desolate plain. Stretching as far as their eyes could see was a steely ocean and a brooding umber land that killed humans with total indifference.

Half-dazed, the four men pitched camp and wandered about the plain. They walked to the ruins of BessePs observatory. The four wooden walls built by Chester and Coffin lay shattered and blown down as if ripped apart by a bomb blast. The Arctic winds had flattened the unwanted building, but ice and snow had not destroyed the traces of that fateful party. Instead, the cold had preserved things that would have vanished long ago in warmer climates

Wandering about the wreck of the observatory, the four stepped back a century in time. The same brass nails, ice saw, cast-iron stoves, shards of glass, and scraps of sailcloth abandoned by the original
Polaris
expedition lay at their feet. In their hands they held objects that men long dead had touched. One of Loomis's companions, ex-marine Tom Gignoux, recently back from a tour of duty in Vietnam, uncovered a wooden board on which Sgt. William Cross of the doomed Greely expedition had carved his name before the land killed him. Gignoux recognized the round ice balls scattered about the ruins for what they wereice grenades, balls of ice packed with gunpowder, constructed long ago by the crew of the
Polaris
in their futile attempt to blast the ship free of the ice. The black powder retained its explosive properties in the cold climate.

Upon their arrival, the Arctic looked benign. Overnight its mood changed. Pewter clouds scudded overhead, so low that they appeared touchable. The sea took its cue from the darkened sky and turned leaden.

Unlike the sparse numbers of explorers who had passed Hall's grave, these modern visitors came to open it. After nearly one hundred years of questions, these men sought answers. During his research for Hall's biography, Loomis was troubled by the hasty judgment by the Navy Department's board of inquiry and its disregard of conflicting testimony. Studying the journals and transcripts gave Loomis no strong feeling that Hall had been murdered. He would later write in his book,
Weird and Tragic Shores:

The unanswered questions prompted Loomis to seek an autopsy.

Reaching this point had not been easy. Flying to the remote site aboard a single-engine Otter, they quickly crossed the straits that had baffled so many before them. But surmounting the miles of red tape that had blocked their travel took months of dealing with the Danish Ministry for Greenland. Putting forth the argument that an autopsy would rightly have been ordered if Hall had died under suspicious circumstances in modern times, Loomis requested permission to visit the grave and disinter Hall's body.

The Danes referred Loomis to Count Eigel Knuth, an archaeologist and Arctic explorer who advised Denmark's Ministry for Greenland
on proposed projects in its northern region. Knuth found the idea of digging up Hall's grave, which he had visited and considered “a hallowed place,” totally repugnant. Only after flying to Copenhagen to meet with Knuth could Loomis change the old explorer's mind. Loomis promised to return the grave to exactly the condition in which he found it.

Now he stood beside the grave with William Barrett, Tom Gig-noux, and Dr. Franklin Paddock, a pathologist. Paddock would perform the autopsy.

Things change slowly in the Arctic, and they hoped Captain Hall's body would speak from his grave. The recent studies on lead poisoning of Sir John Franklin's party gave reason to be optimistic. The frozen and well-preserved bodies of Royal Marine W. Braine and seamen John Hartnell and John Torrington, unearthed on Beechey Island in Lancaster Sound, provided useful information as to their deaths. Those men had died in 1846, long before Hall.

With some trepidation Loomis watched as Gignoux unroofed the shallow grave. Encased in ice, the Arctic retained its grip on the dead man. With luck the body would be perfectly preserved. The pine coffin appeared intact, even though the top was almost level with the ground. As the professor watched, he recalled the men of Hall's command laboring in the long night to carve the shallow grave out of frozen soil. Gignoux's task proved just as daunting. The layers of ice forced him to dig and shovel hunched over the coffin.

Suddenly the fetid odor of decay rose from the coffin. Loomis felt his heart sink. The mound of dirt had protected the pine wood, but the summer sun had melted the permafrost above the lid. Would the shallow nature of the grave defeat them? Was their quest in vain? Had Hall rotted in his tomb until only his bones remained? Loomis worried.

Gignoux's shovel caught a corner of the lid, splintering off a portion. Light fell upon white stars sewn on a field of blue. For the first time in almost a century, sunlight played upon an American flag that had flown when Ulysses Grant was president.

Loomis pried off the rest of the lid. The American flag covered Hall's face and the upper half of his body. Milky ice, melted and
refrozen countless times over the century, encased the lower part of the body and held the back in its firm grip. Incongruously two stocking-covered feet poked through the sheet of ice.

Folding back the flag, Loomis studied Hall's face. Exposure to thawing and decay had altered the once-strong features. The robust beard and dark hair were gone, replaced by token wisps of brittle hair. Caught between the processes of mummification and decay, empty eye sockets and a sardonic grin greeted them. Minerals in the water had tanned what skin remained into a rich mahogany. In addition the dye from the flag had stained portions of the explorer's face blue, while the weave of the cloth textured the skin. To Loomis the face reminded him of a “Rouault portrait.”

Performing the autopsy proved next to impossible. Frozen into the land he loved, Hall's coffin and body resisted all inspection. In a way his body had become an inseparable part of the land, as his spirit had. Wisely the men decided not to totally exhume the body. Working bent over the grave, Paddock found the internal organs totally dissolved into a frozen soup of ice. Unlike the bodies examined from Franklin's expedition, no viscera could be studied or tested. No stomach or intestines could be sampled for traces of poison or infection. No lungs could be examined for pneumonia or tuberculosis. And certainly nothing remained of the brain to tell whether it had suffered the stroke that Emil Bessel diagnosed. In despair the pathologist collected scraps of hair and a single fingernail.

With infinite care born of respect, the men restored the grave to its original state. It bothered Loomis that they could not avoid stripping away the ground willow that Hayes and Sieman had planted so long ago. Loomis himself replaced Noah Hayes's crowbar at its crooked angle.

During the two-week wait for their pilot, the specter of Captain Hall seemed to haunt them. In long walks they found themselves avoiding the grave site. The patterned face lingered in their thoughts. During that time the Arctic teased them with its changing weather, just as it had the men of the
Polaris.
The clear Hall Basin abruptly filled with ice and icebergs. Ghostly fogs came and went.

On the group's return home, the fingernail and hair were sent to the Toronto Center of Forensic Sciences for neutron-activation testing. No mention was made of the specifics of the sample, so the
center had no idea who “C. F. Hall” was or the circumstances surrounding his death. Using neutrons to bombard the atoms in a test specimen causes that material's nuclei to become unstable. In the process those unstable nuclei decay, emitting electrons and protons. The half- ife of that decay and the type of particles emitted are specific for different atomic elements. Iron, silver, gold, and arsenic all give off unique patterns.