March 11, 2024 • 34 mins
Charles Francis Hall was inspired by expeditions like Sir John Franklin’s push to find the Northwest Passage, but he repeated the pattern of doom when he made a try for the North Pole – though he was the only one from his expedition to die.
Research:
- Besselss, Emil, and William Barr. “Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73.” University of Calgary Press. 2016.
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Charles Francis Hall". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Francis-Hall
- Dodge, Ernest S. and C.C. Loomis. “HALL, CHARLES FRANCIS.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/hall_charles_francis_10E.html
- Harper, Ken. “Murder at Repulse Bay Part 1.” Nunatsiaq News. Sept. 7, 2007. https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/Murder_at_Repulse_Bay_Part_1/
- Harper, Ken. “Murder at Repulse Bay Part 2.” Nunatsiaq News. September 14, 2007. https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/Murder_at_Repulse_Bay_Part_2/
- Loomis, Chauncey C. “Weird and tragic shores; the story of Charles Francis Hall, explorer.” New York. Knopf. 1971. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/weirdtragicshore0000loom/page/388/mode/2up
- MOSELEY, H. Besselss' Account of the “Polaris” Expedition1 . Nature 24, 194–197 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/024194a0
- Niekrasz, Emily. “Wait. Did That Really Happen? Potential Poison on the Polaris.” Smithsonian Institution Archives. August 13, 2020. https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/wait-did-really-happen-potential-poison-polaris
- Page, Jake. “Arctic Arsenic.” Smithsonian. Feb. 1, 2001. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/arctic-arsenic-71724451/
- Phillips, Braden. “This Arctic murder mystery remains unsolved after 150 years.” National Geographic. Nov. 22, 2022. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2022/11/this-arctic-murder-mystery-remains-unsolved-after-150-years
- “The Story of the Ice.” The New York Herald. Sept. 21, 1873. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1873-09-21/ed-1/seq-5/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I love a little
unsolved historical murder. They're fun, they are there's always fun speculation.
(00:24):
That's how I got drawn into Charles Francis Hall's story.
But it turns out his story is just so much
more than that one because we don't actually even know
if he was murdered, but also because he was a
character with differing opinions of what he was like. He
was definitely driven and determined, very independent, and without any
(00:47):
real experience, he started mounting expeditions to the Arctic. He
was inspired by expeditions like Sir John Franklin's push to
find the Northwest Passage. But unfortunately he repeated the pattern
of doom when he made a try for the North Pole.
Although it wasn't a case or the entire expedition was lost,
he was the only one from that expedition to die,
(01:10):
and that has left historians with a mystery for the
last one hundred and fifty years. And we're going to
talk about all of that today. Charles Francis Hall was
born in eighteen twenty one, either in Vermont or in Rochester,
New Hampshire. Most accounts put Rochester as his birthplace, but
his wife once mentioned in writing that he had really
(01:31):
been born in Vermont, but the family moved to New
Hampshire when he was still a baby. This kind of
uncertainty is something that really dogs Hall's life story and
ultimately his death. He didn't get a lot of formal
education and became a blacksmith's apprentice at a young age,
but he didn't stay with the blacksmith trade. He moved
(01:53):
around a lot on his own from a fairly young age,
but we don't know a lot about his early life history.
It's a little bit clearer in eighteen forty nine when
he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and by that point he
was already married to a woman named Mary Anne, although
we don't know a whole lot about her either. In Cincinnati,
Hall started his own business making seals and engraving plates,
(02:16):
and then in the eighteen fifties, Hall became a newspaper publisher,
running the Cincinnati Occasional and the Daily Press. Because of
his paper, Charles Francis Hall found a passion in reading
about stories of exploration when they went to press. He
became especially interested in the reports of Arctic exploration and
efforts to find the Northwest Passage. Became especially interested in
(02:40):
the stories of the eighteen forty five Franklin expedition, in
which the entire team was lost. By eighteen fifty seven,
Hall was collecting all the information he could about Arctic
exploration and John Franklin's expedition, as well as others, basically
anything that could be connected to any of these subjects,
(03:01):
and he was lucky that there was a lot of
news coverage of all this. The media ran a lot
of stories around the one hundred and twenty nine people
who had died on Franklin's quest, and all of this
reading inspired Hall to start exploring for himself. This was
a very bold move. He didn't have any experience in
such things. Everything he knew regarding the Arctic and exploring
(03:25):
it he had learned from reading about it. Listen. Reading
is fundamental and it's a great way to learn things,
but there was no practical experience involved. But in all
of his readings he had come across rumors that there
were survivors of the Franklin Expedition, and he was determined
that he was the guy who was going to find them.
Bodies from the Franklin Expedition, discovered in eighteen fifty nine
(03:48):
on King William Island did not convince him. Hall believed
there were still survivors and that he could find them.
In eighteen sixty, Hall met with Henry Grinnell, the found
of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, who had given
funds to previous Arctic expeditions. Grinnell helped Hall connect with
(04:09):
various whaling companies so that he could arrange for the
ships to take him as a passenger. On these whaling vessels,
Hall traveled to Baffin Island and started a two year
exploration expedition of his own. Baffin Island is a nine
hundred and fifty mile or fifteen hundred kilometer long island
(04:29):
in northern Canada which sits across Baffin Bay from Greenland.
It's massive and Hall was hoping to find survivors of
the Franklin expedition there. Although that did not happen, he
did find various artifacts from the much earlier travels through
the area led by Martin Frobischer in the fifteen seventies. Specifically,
(04:52):
he found some evidence that Frobisher had tried to mine gold,
and for clarity, because I didn't put this in the outline,
he was just like wandering in the wilderness looking. He
was following up on clues and meeting with indigenous peoples
and stopping at forts and stuff and being like do
you think and going on that information. But he really
was being incredibly brazen in all of this. Hall returned
(05:14):
home in eighteen sixty two and wrote a book titled
Arctic Researches and Life among the Eskimo, being the narrative
of an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin in
the years eighteen sixty, eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty
two that was published in eighteen sixty five, and he
explains in the opening of the book that the day
that he finished writing it, like literally as it's going
(05:37):
to press, he was leaving for another expedition, having prepared
by learning to live among the indigenous population of the
area to get a fuller understanding than most explorers could.
He wrote, quote, I enter upon this undertaking with lively
hopes of success. I shall not like previous explorers, set
my foot on shore for a few days or weeks,
(05:59):
or like others, journey among men whose language is to
me unintelligible. I shall live for two or three years
among the Eskimo and gain their confidence, and I have
the advantage of understanding the language and of making all
my wishes known to them. Obviously, the word Eskimo is
outdated language, but were including it in direct quotes rather
(06:19):
than subbing it out. Yeah, it's also spelled in a
way it looks very French. Ho. Those wishes were the
same as on his earlier trip. He wanted to find
survivors of the Franklin expedition, and this journey was more
than twice as long as the first. It took five years.
(06:43):
He started at Hudson Bay's north during his year's long
expedition of the area, making his base in Nauyat, which
was referred to as Repulse Bay. He did learn a
lot about Franklin's expedition and even found some of their belongings.
Up to this point, he had believed rumors that some
of the party had survived, but it appears that his
(07:06):
finding of these relics, as well as listening to the
accounts from the indigenous people of the area who had
seen the Franklin group. This all led him to conclude
that there had been no survivors after all. With Hall
on that second trip, we're two interpreters that are usually
described as into it. They are called Joe and Hannah.
So their real names are a little bit tricky because
(07:26):
they are written in different ways at different times, and
they're transliterated by English speakers. The most common ones look
like and I'm not even going to claim that I
have this pronunciation, Pervic and Tukulito. Tukalito is the wife
who was like the interpreter and really kind of helped
(07:48):
facilitate with people that were not speakers of their language,
and she has been listed by a lot of other names,
so it's very unclear how she got this particular name.
But I think all of this comes down to why
people started calling them Joe and Hannah, or why they
started asking people to They had been on other expeditions
and had helped other people, but they lived with Hall
(08:10):
in the US after he returned from his first expedition,
so they had spent two years with him, and they
were surely part of why he felt so confident in
his preface to his book, stating that he understood indigenous
culture and that he knew that he could live among
the people of the Arctic, and all of the white
people who were exploring into this territory were doing so
(08:34):
through the labor of indigenous people who were acting as
their like, their guides and their interpreters and all of that.
So like, regardless of his own feeling about this like,
they were the ones that were doing a lot of
the work. He could not could not have lived among
the indigenous people had they not been with him. And
(08:55):
he just showed up and said, I'm gonna live with
you and learn all your stuff. Now work. There was
a troubling incidence on Hall's second expedition, which gives some
insight into his personality and behavior. He had not been
able to get funds to finance his own ship for
the voyage, so he had hitched rides with whaling vessels.
(09:17):
He also sometimes made contracts with whaling vessels to borrow
men from their crews. Several years into the second expedition,
in the autumn of eighteen sixty seven, he did just that.
By March, he and the borrowed crew as well as
his guides, were back at Repulse Bay for the summer.
During the spring, Hall became convinced that some of the
(09:40):
whalers were undermining him and even verging on mutiny. He
shot one of the men, Patrick Coleman, who then died
a very slow death over the course of two weeks.
Hall's journal from this period does not mention this, there's
just a gap of several weeks in the journal, but
his out of the Expedition, which was published after his death,
(10:02):
does mention it. It is unclear where the information in
this published account, which is quite detailed, came from. Yeah,
there has even been some speculation that an editor pieced
things together and that it's not actually Hall's account, but
we don't know. When Hall returned to the US, he
(10:23):
had to answer for the shooting theoretically, but it actually
got tangled up in red tape. So at that time,
the area that Hall had been exploring was not part
of Canada, So the British and Canadian governments did not
want to get involved with the incident, and the US
didn't seem to think that it had any reason to
get involved in something so far away from its jurisdiction,
(10:45):
so Hall was never charged, although it doesn't appear that
there was also ever any mutiny afoot, So it seems
like he really had this irrational thought that he acted
on and killed a man, and nothing was ever done
in terms of consequences. We don't know if Patrick Coleman
ever actually did anything to provoke Hall, or if Hall
(11:06):
just perceived that he had. But this whole incident really
evidences a dark side of Charles Hall, who was described
by some people as volatile and obsessed with the Franklin expedition.
He had called finding the survivors or evidence of what
had happened to them his mission. We'll talk about Hall's
next plan after his second expedition after we pause for
(11:29):
a quick sponsor break. After returning home and accepting that
everyone from the Franklin expedition had died, Hall's explorer impulse
was not diminished in the least. He had merely shifted
(11:50):
focus to reaching the North Pole himself. This is something
that some accounts suggest he started really thinking seriously about
during that second expedition. Charles Francis Hall's earlier efforts had
gained him a little bit of attention and notoriety, and
he managed to get President Ulysses S Grant and a
number of Congressmen interested in his North Pole plan. He
(12:13):
wanted to run a full expedition himself with his own
ship and not have to depend on making deals with
whaling ships to travel, and in eighteen seventy Hall got
his financing. The US Congress granted him fifty thousand dollars,
which was quite a lot of money to mount an
expedition to the North Pole. The undertaking was under the
(12:34):
jurisdiction of the US Navy and the National Academy of Sciences,
and this was the first Arctic expedition that the US
government fully funded. Hull was given command of a ship
named the Polaris for the journey. This had been a
steamer used by the Union in the US Civil War.
It was given a makeover and reinforced so that it
(12:55):
could withstand the cold of the Arctic. Although he may
not have wanted to work through the whaling industry for
travel anymore, Charles Hall hired a captain from the whaling
industry who he had sailed with on his two prior
expeditions to captain the Polaris. That was Sydney Buddington. On
June twenty ninth, eighteen seventy one, the Polaris left New
(13:16):
York City for Connecticut and then set sail from New London,
Connecticut on July third, eighteen seventy one. The Polaris next
stopped in Greenland to pick up supplies, sled dogs, and guides,
and once it was fully outfitted with its crew, the
USS Polaris had thirty three people aboard. Eight of these
are once again described as Eskimo in accounts of the day.
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Two were the Inuit couple that he had already been
friends with and had been using his guides, and also
their son. There was also another Indigenous couple in their kids.
There were four children in total on this expedition, three
little girls ages ten, eight and three, and the boy
was six years old. Later there was a fifth child
because one of the couples had a baby during the expedition,
(14:00):
which was a boy who they named Polaris. In addition
to Buddington, the ship had a doctor Emil Bessels and
an astronomer named rd. W. Bryan. Where was also a
meteorologist named Friedrich Meyer. Emal Bessels in particular is important
to the story. He was only twenty four when the
Polaris expedition began, but he was already very accomplished. He
(14:24):
had graduated from medical school at eighteen in Heidelberg, Germany,
where he was born in eighteen forty seven, and the
Polaris was not his first Arctic expedition. He had visited
the island of Spitzbergen on a previous undertaking. As kind
of a fun side note, the archipelago, which was called Spitzbergen,
(14:45):
is now Svalbard where the global seed Vault is. The
island itself is still called Spitzbergen. Back to Bessels, he
had also served as a field surgeon in the Franco
Prussian War, so he had a lot of life under
his belt before he ever stepped onto the Polaris. The
leader of his prior Arctic expedition, a doctor Peterman, gave
(15:08):
Bessels the highest praise and endorsement. Initially, this trip seemed
to go very well. Haul and his party got farther
north than any non indigenous people had, reaching eighty two
degrees twenty nine minutes north latitude. That was the farthest
a ship had gone that was recorded in Western history.
But the situation on the ship was not as great
(15:30):
as those auspicious beginnings might have suggested. It appears that
Charles Hall was in conflict with two key members of
the team, Buddington, who many people said he was friends with,
and a Meal Bessels. In October, the Polaris and its
crew prepared for a long winter stuck in the ice.
They had come up against ice as they approached the
(15:52):
Lincoln Sea, and they found a harbor on the northern
shore of Greenland that Haul dubbed Thank God Harbor. In
early October, Hall set out from the ship on a
sledge to do some exploring. When Hall returned from his
scouting trip after two weeks on October twenty fourth, he
sought the comfort of a warm cup of coffee, and
(16:13):
after he drank it, he became sick, very sick. He
experienced painful symptoms, including partial paralysis and dementia, and Bezels
initially took care of him, believing he had a stroke.
Bezels recorded in his notes that Hall got slowly better
the next day and that they gave him quote warm
mustard foot baths and cold compresses placed on his head
(16:36):
and neck, and as he started to recover, Hall also
started talking about going on another sledge trip, and he
also wanted to know if the crew had been following
his instructions to prepare the ship for winter. But Hall
fell into what Beseel said was delirium and then became
suspicious that someone on the ship was trying to kill him.
He thought that he had been poisoned, and he said
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so many times. Actually he didn't want anyone to help him.
He died on November eighth, eighteen seventy one, and he
was buried in a shallow grave on Greenland Shore. Beseels
wrote in his notes his account of the final days
of Charles Hall, noting his diagnosis that he had a
stroke and then probably a second stroke after he had
(17:18):
over exerted himself. In a moment of feeling better. Beseels
described how very difficult it was for the men to
dig a grave in the hard ground, and that it
had taken all night for several men to dig a
hole just two feet deep. Hall's death left Buddington in
charge initially. Once the ice had cleared, efforts were made
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to go on with the mission, but the ship was
having leakage issues and the weather wasn't cooperating. Once again,
the Polaris was stuck in the ice in August of
eighteen seventy two, and it stayed there, drifting along with
the ice field with no power to steer. In October,
as things grew uncertain as to whether the ship could
(18:01):
survive the shifting ice and the pressure on it, Buddington
told the crew that they needed to move everything overboard
along with the smaller boats. Many members of the crew
and the guides and their families were off the ship
on the ice when a gap suddenly formed and the
Polaris and the people outside of it who were on
an ice floe were separated. The Polaris was at the
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mercy of the wind and currents when it pulled away
from the spot where it had lodged in the ice,
and it vanished, leaving the crew on the ice flow
with really little hope. Yeah, they thought the Polaris was lost.
The nineteen people who were on the ice stayed on
that ice floe with no means of controlling it as
it floated around for more than six months. Finally, on
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April thirtieth, eighteen seventy three, after almost two harrowing years
at sea and one hundred and ninety six days, of
that were spent on an ice flow. The floating were
rescued when a ceiling ship known as the Tigris happened
upon them. All of them survived, which seems miraculous, but
we really have to note that it's truly because their
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Inuit guides had taken care of everyone. They were fishing
and hunting from the FLOE's edge to keep everyone fed,
and according to the account of doctor Bessel's, who was
on the Polaris when the ship and the ice floe
were separated when the ice flow, survivors later saw the
Polaris at shore as they had been rescued and were
brought to land. Some of them had initially wondered why
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the rest of the crew had not come to their rescue,
because from that vantage point it looked like the ship
was okay, but it actually was not. It had several
structural issues. Parts of it at that point were missing,
and it just could not have done so. Although the
group on the ice floe had believed the Polaris to
be lost again, it was not. Buddington had run it
aground close to Etta Greenlands after he and the crew
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had furiously worked to keep it together just long enough
to get to land. Buddington and the remaining crew wintered
near Cairn Point. When spring arrived, a whaling vessel from
Scotland named the ravenscregg rescued the Polaris crew in Melville Bay,
where they had traveled in small rudmentary boats that they
(20:17):
made from pieces of the Polaris. Buddington made it to Washington,
d c. With the remaining crew. That's another instance where
we need to note that they also survived because in
it who were living in that area where they went
aground took care of them. They did not serve on
their own. There was a Navy Board of Inquiry mounted
(20:39):
in June eighteen seventy three to investigate what had happened
to Charles Francis Hall. Although some of the people from
the ice flow testified that Hall was adamant that he
had been poisoned and that there was no accounting for
who had touched Hall's coffee before it reached him. Hall's
death was ruled as the result of an apoplectic seizure,
which is another name for as. The official report stated
(21:02):
that quote from personal examination of all the witnesses and
from their testimony is given we reached the unanimous conclusion
that the death of Captain Hall resulted naturally from disease
without fault on the part of anyone. Not everyone shared
that opinion, and we'll talk about one of the people
who gave his opinion on the matter to the press
in eighteen seventy three, after we pause or a sponsor break.
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There were in eighteen seventy three some suspicions about what
had actually happened to Hall and whether he had met
with foul play. On Sunday, September twenty third, eighteen seventy three,
the New York Herald ran the headline the Story of
the Ice, and featured a very lengthy writeup of everything
that had happened to the Polaris team, and it opened
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with a statement from doctor Bessel's that reads quote, we
are much to find from the American papers that several
rumors of mischievous tendency, which I must characterize as silly
and absurd, have been put into circulation concerning the expedition,
and particularly concerning the death of Captain Hall. It is
just possible that the government at Washington would prefer that
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we reserve what we have to say for a graver occasion.
But we must emphatically contradict the statement that Captain Hall
died any other than a natural death. He died of apoplexy.
He was ill about a fortnight. He appeared in perfect
health when entering the voyage. I noticed nothing unusual in
his health up to the period of his illness. The
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rumors that he was poisoned are too absurd to be
seriously entertained. The rumor may have been founded on the
hallucinations of the raving patient. So doctor Bessel's thought that
the deceased Charles Hall started a rumor that he was poisoned,
and that rumor was definitely swirling. And in that same
article there was a damning statement from Inspector H. Kerrit Smith.
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He was the man in charge of the government's storehouse
at Greenland, where the Polaris stocked up, and he had
some thoughts about the vibe of the group. He told
the Harold's reporter his concerns about what might have happened
to Hall. According to the write up, Smith was not
surprised when he heard that Hall had died. He told
the Harold quote, I pitied him from the bottom of
(23:26):
my heart. To me, he imparted the source of all
his troubles, and a more distracted man I have seldom seen.
My house was open to all the officers of the expedition,
and I had, of course every opportunity to learn both
sides of the story. When Smith was questioned about the
group dynamics in play among the officers on the voyage,
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he told the reporter quote, Buddington was only an instrument
in the hands of a third party. It was not
long before I discovered a very bitter feeling existed on
the polaris. And although Buddington was a stone the cause
of the quarrel, that there was in the background a
far more dangerous element who contend against. As Smith's statement continues,
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it sounds like conflict began over whether scientific work should
take precedence over the objective of reaching the pole. He said, quote,
as far as I could learn, no trouble manifested itself
until the coast of Greenland was reached. Now it was
pretty well understood that Captain Hall was not a scientific
or highly educated man, though perfectly competent to command such
(24:30):
an expedition that was entrusted to him. Doctor Emil Bessel's
was chief of the scientific Corps and mister Frederick Meyers,
the meteorologist, and to these gentlemen Captain Hall looked for
assistance in carrying out the great object of the expedition.
From what I heard, however, he was disappointed in the direction.
And although Captain Hall, fully realizing the importance of all
(24:53):
scientific discoveries, was anxious to afford them every facility, he
was nevertheless bound to maintain his own as commander of
the expedition. Captain Hall told me in a despondent tone,
that both Bessels and Meyer carried on their operations without
regard to his authority. For instance, when Hall requested Meyer
to take an observation, he refused to do so on
(25:16):
the ground that he was responsible only to the government
for his actions. Smith also stated that he thought Bessels
was using Meyer as his mouthpiece. Smith's concerns about Bessels
did not stop there. He also told the reporter that
Bessels knew that as doctor he was indispensable to the crew,
and that if he left the expedition at any time
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it was at port, many of the men would have
joined him. He also noted that, in writing letters about
the expedition to German journals. Bessels called it the Hall
Bessel's expedition, and he noted that while Hall wanted absolutely
no alcohol on board, Bessels got a stock of it
under the auspices of medical supplies, and that he believed Buddington,
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who had been reported as having been drunk on a
number of occasions on the trip, must have gotten it
from the doctor. According to Smith, the meteorologist Myers was
openly and subordinate, so much so that another Navy captain,
Captain Davenport, got involved while they were docked in Greenland
to settle the matter, but that after that there were
(26:20):
a lot of bad feelings toward Hall. Yeah, Hall had
wanted to put Myers in shackles and keep him on board,
apparently to do the meteorological work. But like sort of
in a captive state. So naturally not a lot of
loving feelings towards that. But we should note this is
all the account of a third party. But then Smith
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recounted an argument that he had witnessed between Hall and
Bessel's in his own house, and after that argument, Hall
gave Smith and his wife four boxes of papers for safekeeping,
which he said involved information about the Franklin expedition, which
he was not comfortable taking on the trip. He had
packed it initially, but then offloaded it in Greenland. These
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papers involved information about members of the Franklin expedition resorting
to cannibalism, and he did not want them made public
while Franklin's widow was alive, and Hall seemed to think
that if he brought those papers on the expedition they
would be lost forever because something might happen to them.
Then the really damning statement from Smith came out quote.
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I cannot help thinking that, despite the testimony taking at Washington,
his death was not the result of natural causes. Everything
induces to that opinion, for undue influence had been exercised
over the crew to lessen their respect for her commander,
and the jealousy of some of Hall's subordinates taking in
connection with the whole affair, leads me to the conclusion
(27:47):
that there was bowel play. I think the body of
Captain Hall, which I have no doubt is still in
a state of preservations, should be sought after and exhumed.
Bessel's never fully outran these accusations in the court of
public opinion. Kind of any time something happened where he
was written up in the paper it was like and
(28:08):
suspect of the murder of Captain Hall, but nothing further
was done regarding the death of Hall. Once the Navy
Board had made its decision, Bessels went on to work
at the Smithsonian Institution and he published scientific results of
the United States Arctic Expedition and other papers about the
work that he had done on the journey. He died
at the age of forty after a stroke. It wasn't
(28:31):
until almost one hundred years after the expedition that questions
arose once again about what exactly happened to Charles Francis Hall.
In the nineteen sixties, Dartmouth professor and Arctic historian Chauncey C.
Loomis started researching the expedition for his book Weird and
Tragic Shores, The Story of Charles Francis Hall, and Loomis
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wanted the body exhumed. That happened in nineteen sixty eight.
Loomis himself went to Greenland for the exenbit and an
autopsy was performed on the well preserved body. Toronto's Center
of Forensic Sciences ran neutron activation tests on samples of
hair and fingernails that were collected. This revealed some very
(29:15):
interesting information and was even the basis for a paper
that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine
in nineteen seventy titled an Inquest on the Death of
Charles Francis Hall. Charles Francis Hall had been given arsenic
in the last two weeks of his life, and a
lot of it. Suddenly, Emil Brussels was once again looking
(29:35):
suspicious as there was arsenic in his medical kit. Remember,
at this time in history, it was used to treat
all kinds of things like joint problems in syphilis and
dry skin. But the doses Hall was given were far
beyond what would have ever been administered for any medical reason.
But even though there had been conflict between the two men,
(29:55):
it just didn't seem enough to drive someone to murder,
especially in a scenario where a limited number of people
are depending on each other for survival. Additionally, Hall had
his own medical kits, so it is possible that he
may have overdosed accidentally when he was refusing medical help
from Brussels, and he may have been self medicating. So
(30:16):
this mystery percolated on for another four decades until another
piece of circumstantial evidence was found, and that was an envelope.
That envelope was from Charles Hall to a young woman
named Vinnie Reim, was postmarked October eighteen seventy one. That
envelope was discovered by Rhode Island College professor Russell Potter,
(30:39):
and Venni Riem was connected to Bessel's romantically, and maybe
also to Charles Hall. Reem was a well known sculptor,
and Hall kept a small bust of Abraham Lincoln she
had given him in his quarters on the Polaris. She
could potentially be an upcoming episode. Are good, It's what
(31:00):
I'm gonna say, because she's very interesting on her own
outside of any connection to these two men. So the
idea that perhaps there was a jealousy between these two
men might lend more gravity to the idea that Bessel's
was angry enough at Hall to kill him. For example,
if he suddenly saw a work of art by his
sweetheart in the Captain's quarters, that may have prompted a
(31:22):
jealous rage. But that is pure speculation. We will never
ever know what really happened and how Hall came to
have so much arsenic in his system. But on the
official record, Emil Bessel's remains clear of any wrongdoing the
mystery forever. Uh, do you have listener mail for us? Yes?
(31:46):
This listener mail comes with a note as to how
to ensure that I obsess over your email and possibly
read it on the air. This is the key ingredient
you can include to make sure that I lose my mind. Okay,
this is from our listener, Kelsey, who writes hi Ally
(32:06):
and Tracy. I was just listening to your recent episode
about Harrison Dyer while eating breakfast and enjoying learning about
his drama and his tunnels. When Tracy described the truck
falling into the street near fifteen twelve twenty third Street Northwest,
and I almost dropped my spoon. That's about three blocks
from my apartment in the DuPont Circle neighborhood in DC.
(32:27):
It's kitty corner from my local coffee shop, and I
have passed by there dozens of times. I had no
idea there were tunnels under my neighborhood. Proof that history
is all around, well, perhaps obviously in DC. Thank you
for continuing to fill my days with fascinating history that
I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Best wishes Kelsey. And then
Kelsey includes not her own cats, but her friend astroids
(32:50):
cats Crumble and Waffle, who she considers her nephews. And
here's what you can do if you want to ensure
that I lose my mind over your email. These two
cats look like Devin, which is my very very favorite
flavor of kitty and was the breed of my beloved
mister Burns, who has left this earth and is no
longer pulling people's pants down or turning on stoves. But
(33:14):
they are absolutely gorgeous. I'm obsessed and I want to
kiss their faces. So Kelsey and Astrid and Crumble and Waffle,
thank you for making me smile, because this is some
cute business. Those giant eyes and those giant ears. I
love a little crazy rexy baby. If you would like
(33:36):
to write to us and send us really any cat
pictures are good. As I've said before, any animals or
pictures are good. Send me your tarantulas, your snakes, and
your corvid. Send me your I don't know worms. Do
people keep earth worms as pets? Probably ants ant farm.
I'm into it. I love all of it. Send me
all of it if you would like to do so
(33:58):
and talk about maybe place ways that our stories have
intersected with your neighborhood. You can do so at History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us
on social media as mist in History, and you can
subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
(34:21):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I love a little
unsolved historical murder. They're fun, they are there's always fun speculation.
(00:24):
That's how I got drawn into Charles Francis Hall's story.
But it turns out his story is just so much
more than that one because we don't actually even know
if he was murdered, but also because he was a
character with differing opinions of what he was like. He
was definitely driven and determined, very independent, and without any
(00:47):
real experience, he started mounting expeditions to the Arctic. He
was inspired by expeditions like Sir John Franklin's push to
find the Northwest Passage. But unfortunately he repeated the pattern
of doom when he made a try for the North Pole.
Although it wasn't a case or the entire expedition was lost,
he was the only one from that expedition to die,
(01:10):
and that has left historians with a mystery for the
last one hundred and fifty years. And we're going to
talk about all of that today. Charles Francis Hall was
born in eighteen twenty one, either in Vermont or in Rochester,
New Hampshire. Most accounts put Rochester as his birthplace, but
his wife once mentioned in writing that he had really
(01:31):
been born in Vermont, but the family moved to New
Hampshire when he was still a baby. This kind of
uncertainty is something that really dogs Hall's life story and
ultimately his death. He didn't get a lot of formal
education and became a blacksmith's apprentice at a young age,
but he didn't stay with the blacksmith trade. He moved
(01:53):
around a lot on his own from a fairly young age,
but we don't know a lot about his early life history.
It's a little bit clearer in eighteen forty nine when
he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and by that point he
was already married to a woman named Mary Anne, although
we don't know a whole lot about her either. In Cincinnati,
Hall started his own business making seals and engraving plates,
(02:16):
and then in the eighteen fifties, Hall became a newspaper publisher,
running the Cincinnati Occasional and the Daily Press. Because of
his paper, Charles Francis Hall found a passion in reading
about stories of exploration when they went to press. He
became especially interested in the reports of Arctic exploration and
efforts to find the Northwest Passage. Became especially interested in
(02:40):
the stories of the eighteen forty five Franklin expedition, in
which the entire team was lost. By eighteen fifty seven,
Hall was collecting all the information he could about Arctic
exploration and John Franklin's expedition, as well as others, basically
anything that could be connected to any of these subjects,
(03:01):
and he was lucky that there was a lot of
news coverage of all this. The media ran a lot
of stories around the one hundred and twenty nine people
who had died on Franklin's quest, and all of this
reading inspired Hall to start exploring for himself. This was
a very bold move. He didn't have any experience in
such things. Everything he knew regarding the Arctic and exploring
(03:25):
it he had learned from reading about it. Listen. Reading
is fundamental and it's a great way to learn things,
but there was no practical experience involved. But in all
of his readings he had come across rumors that there
were survivors of the Franklin Expedition, and he was determined
that he was the guy who was going to find them.
Bodies from the Franklin Expedition, discovered in eighteen fifty nine
(03:48):
on King William Island did not convince him. Hall believed
there were still survivors and that he could find them.
In eighteen sixty, Hall met with Henry Grinnell, the found
of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, who had given
funds to previous Arctic expeditions. Grinnell helped Hall connect with
(04:09):
various whaling companies so that he could arrange for the
ships to take him as a passenger. On these whaling vessels,
Hall traveled to Baffin Island and started a two year
exploration expedition of his own. Baffin Island is a nine
hundred and fifty mile or fifteen hundred kilometer long island
(04:29):
in northern Canada which sits across Baffin Bay from Greenland.
It's massive and Hall was hoping to find survivors of
the Franklin expedition there. Although that did not happen, he
did find various artifacts from the much earlier travels through
the area led by Martin Frobischer in the fifteen seventies. Specifically,
(04:52):
he found some evidence that Frobisher had tried to mine gold,
and for clarity, because I didn't put this in the outline,
he was just like wandering in the wilderness looking. He
was following up on clues and meeting with indigenous peoples
and stopping at forts and stuff and being like do
you think and going on that information. But he really
was being incredibly brazen in all of this. Hall returned
(05:14):
home in eighteen sixty two and wrote a book titled
Arctic Researches and Life among the Eskimo, being the narrative
of an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin in
the years eighteen sixty, eighteen sixty one and eighteen sixty
two that was published in eighteen sixty five, and he
explains in the opening of the book that the day
that he finished writing it, like literally as it's going
(05:37):
to press, he was leaving for another expedition, having prepared
by learning to live among the indigenous population of the
area to get a fuller understanding than most explorers could.
He wrote, quote, I enter upon this undertaking with lively
hopes of success. I shall not like previous explorers, set
my foot on shore for a few days or weeks,
(05:59):
or like others, journey among men whose language is to
me unintelligible. I shall live for two or three years
among the Eskimo and gain their confidence, and I have
the advantage of understanding the language and of making all
my wishes known to them. Obviously, the word Eskimo is
outdated language, but were including it in direct quotes rather
(06:19):
than subbing it out. Yeah, it's also spelled in a
way it looks very French. Ho. Those wishes were the
same as on his earlier trip. He wanted to find
survivors of the Franklin expedition, and this journey was more
than twice as long as the first. It took five years.
(06:43):
He started at Hudson Bay's north during his year's long
expedition of the area, making his base in Nauyat, which
was referred to as Repulse Bay. He did learn a
lot about Franklin's expedition and even found some of their belongings.
Up to this point, he had believed rumors that some
of the party had survived, but it appears that his
(07:06):
finding of these relics, as well as listening to the
accounts from the indigenous people of the area who had
seen the Franklin group. This all led him to conclude
that there had been no survivors after all. With Hall
on that second trip, we're two interpreters that are usually
described as into it. They are called Joe and Hannah.
So their real names are a little bit tricky because
(07:26):
they are written in different ways at different times, and
they're transliterated by English speakers. The most common ones look
like and I'm not even going to claim that I
have this pronunciation, Pervic and Tukulito. Tukalito is the wife
who was like the interpreter and really kind of helped
(07:48):
facilitate with people that were not speakers of their language,
and she has been listed by a lot of other names,
so it's very unclear how she got this particular name.
But I think all of this comes down to why
people started calling them Joe and Hannah, or why they
started asking people to They had been on other expeditions
and had helped other people, but they lived with Hall
(08:10):
in the US after he returned from his first expedition,
so they had spent two years with him, and they
were surely part of why he felt so confident in
his preface to his book, stating that he understood indigenous
culture and that he knew that he could live among
the people of the Arctic, and all of the white
people who were exploring into this territory were doing so
(08:34):
through the labor of indigenous people who were acting as
their like, their guides and their interpreters and all of that.
So like, regardless of his own feeling about this like,
they were the ones that were doing a lot of
the work. He could not could not have lived among
the indigenous people had they not been with him. And
(08:55):
he just showed up and said, I'm gonna live with
you and learn all your stuff. Now work. There was
a troubling incidence on Hall's second expedition, which gives some
insight into his personality and behavior. He had not been
able to get funds to finance his own ship for
the voyage, so he had hitched rides with whaling vessels.
(09:17):
He also sometimes made contracts with whaling vessels to borrow
men from their crews. Several years into the second expedition,
in the autumn of eighteen sixty seven, he did just that.
By March, he and the borrowed crew as well as
his guides, were back at Repulse Bay for the summer.
During the spring, Hall became convinced that some of the
(09:40):
whalers were undermining him and even verging on mutiny. He
shot one of the men, Patrick Coleman, who then died
a very slow death over the course of two weeks.
Hall's journal from this period does not mention this, there's
just a gap of several weeks in the journal, but
his out of the Expedition, which was published after his death,
(10:02):
does mention it. It is unclear where the information in
this published account, which is quite detailed, came from. Yeah,
there has even been some speculation that an editor pieced
things together and that it's not actually Hall's account, but
we don't know. When Hall returned to the US, he
(10:23):
had to answer for the shooting theoretically, but it actually
got tangled up in red tape. So at that time,
the area that Hall had been exploring was not part
of Canada, So the British and Canadian governments did not
want to get involved with the incident, and the US
didn't seem to think that it had any reason to
get involved in something so far away from its jurisdiction,
(10:45):
so Hall was never charged, although it doesn't appear that
there was also ever any mutiny afoot, So it seems
like he really had this irrational thought that he acted
on and killed a man, and nothing was ever done
in terms of consequences. We don't know if Patrick Coleman
ever actually did anything to provoke Hall, or if Hall
(11:06):
just perceived that he had. But this whole incident really
evidences a dark side of Charles Hall, who was described
by some people as volatile and obsessed with the Franklin expedition.
He had called finding the survivors or evidence of what
had happened to them his mission. We'll talk about Hall's
next plan after his second expedition after we pause for
(11:29):
a quick sponsor break. After returning home and accepting that
everyone from the Franklin expedition had died, Hall's explorer impulse
was not diminished in the least. He had merely shifted
(11:50):
focus to reaching the North Pole himself. This is something
that some accounts suggest he started really thinking seriously about
during that second expedition. Charles Francis Hall's earlier efforts had
gained him a little bit of attention and notoriety, and
he managed to get President Ulysses S Grant and a
number of Congressmen interested in his North Pole plan. He
(12:13):
wanted to run a full expedition himself with his own
ship and not have to depend on making deals with
whaling ships to travel, and in eighteen seventy Hall got
his financing. The US Congress granted him fifty thousand dollars,
which was quite a lot of money to mount an
expedition to the North Pole. The undertaking was under the
(12:34):
jurisdiction of the US Navy and the National Academy of Sciences,
and this was the first Arctic expedition that the US
government fully funded. Hull was given command of a ship
named the Polaris for the journey. This had been a
steamer used by the Union in the US Civil War.
It was given a makeover and reinforced so that it
(12:55):
could withstand the cold of the Arctic. Although he may
not have wanted to work through the whaling industry for
travel anymore, Charles Hall hired a captain from the whaling
industry who he had sailed with on his two prior
expeditions to captain the Polaris. That was Sydney Buddington. On
June twenty ninth, eighteen seventy one, the Polaris left New
(13:16):
York City for Connecticut and then set sail from New London,
Connecticut on July third, eighteen seventy one. The Polaris next
stopped in Greenland to pick up supplies, sled dogs, and guides,
and once it was fully outfitted with its crew, the
USS Polaris had thirty three people aboard. Eight of these
are once again described as Eskimo in accounts of the day.
(13:38):
Two were the Inuit couple that he had already been
friends with and had been using his guides, and also
their son. There was also another Indigenous couple in their kids.
There were four children in total on this expedition, three
little girls ages ten, eight and three, and the boy
was six years old. Later there was a fifth child
because one of the couples had a baby during the expedition,
(14:00):
which was a boy who they named Polaris. In addition
to Buddington, the ship had a doctor Emil Bessels and
an astronomer named rd. W. Bryan. Where was also a
meteorologist named Friedrich Meyer. Emal Bessels in particular is important
to the story. He was only twenty four when the
Polaris expedition began, but he was already very accomplished. He
(14:24):
had graduated from medical school at eighteen in Heidelberg, Germany,
where he was born in eighteen forty seven, and the
Polaris was not his first Arctic expedition. He had visited
the island of Spitzbergen on a previous undertaking. As kind
of a fun side note, the archipelago, which was called Spitzbergen,
(14:45):
is now Svalbard where the global seed Vault is. The
island itself is still called Spitzbergen. Back to Bessels, he
had also served as a field surgeon in the Franco
Prussian War, so he had a lot of life under
his belt before he ever stepped onto the Polaris. The
leader of his prior Arctic expedition, a doctor Peterman, gave
(15:08):
Bessels the highest praise and endorsement. Initially, this trip seemed
to go very well. Haul and his party got farther
north than any non indigenous people had, reaching eighty two
degrees twenty nine minutes north latitude. That was the farthest
a ship had gone that was recorded in Western history.
But the situation on the ship was not as great
(15:30):
as those auspicious beginnings might have suggested. It appears that
Charles Hall was in conflict with two key members of
the team, Buddington, who many people said he was friends with,
and a Meal Bessels. In October, the Polaris and its
crew prepared for a long winter stuck in the ice.
They had come up against ice as they approached the
(15:52):
Lincoln Sea, and they found a harbor on the northern
shore of Greenland that Haul dubbed Thank God Harbor. In
early October, Hall set out from the ship on a
sledge to do some exploring. When Hall returned from his
scouting trip after two weeks on October twenty fourth, he
sought the comfort of a warm cup of coffee, and
(16:13):
after he drank it, he became sick, very sick. He
experienced painful symptoms, including partial paralysis and dementia, and Bezels
initially took care of him, believing he had a stroke.
Bezels recorded in his notes that Hall got slowly better
the next day and that they gave him quote warm
mustard foot baths and cold compresses placed on his head
(16:36):
and neck, and as he started to recover, Hall also
started talking about going on another sledge trip, and he
also wanted to know if the crew had been following
his instructions to prepare the ship for winter. But Hall
fell into what Beseel said was delirium and then became
suspicious that someone on the ship was trying to kill him.
He thought that he had been poisoned, and he said
(16:58):
so many times. Actually he didn't want anyone to help him.
He died on November eighth, eighteen seventy one, and he
was buried in a shallow grave on Greenland Shore. Beseels
wrote in his notes his account of the final days
of Charles Hall, noting his diagnosis that he had a
stroke and then probably a second stroke after he had
(17:18):
over exerted himself. In a moment of feeling better. Beseels
described how very difficult it was for the men to
dig a grave in the hard ground, and that it
had taken all night for several men to dig a
hole just two feet deep. Hall's death left Buddington in
charge initially. Once the ice had cleared, efforts were made
(17:39):
to go on with the mission, but the ship was
having leakage issues and the weather wasn't cooperating. Once again,
the Polaris was stuck in the ice in August of
eighteen seventy two, and it stayed there, drifting along with
the ice field with no power to steer. In October,
as things grew uncertain as to whether the ship could
(18:01):
survive the shifting ice and the pressure on it, Buddington
told the crew that they needed to move everything overboard
along with the smaller boats. Many members of the crew
and the guides and their families were off the ship
on the ice when a gap suddenly formed and the
Polaris and the people outside of it who were on
an ice floe were separated. The Polaris was at the
(18:25):
mercy of the wind and currents when it pulled away
from the spot where it had lodged in the ice,
and it vanished, leaving the crew on the ice flow
with really little hope. Yeah, they thought the Polaris was lost.
The nineteen people who were on the ice stayed on
that ice floe with no means of controlling it as
it floated around for more than six months. Finally, on
(18:50):
April thirtieth, eighteen seventy three, after almost two harrowing years
at sea and one hundred and ninety six days, of
that were spent on an ice flow. The floating were
rescued when a ceiling ship known as the Tigris happened
upon them. All of them survived, which seems miraculous, but
we really have to note that it's truly because their
(19:11):
Inuit guides had taken care of everyone. They were fishing
and hunting from the FLOE's edge to keep everyone fed,
and according to the account of doctor Bessel's, who was
on the Polaris when the ship and the ice floe
were separated when the ice flow, survivors later saw the
Polaris at shore as they had been rescued and were
brought to land. Some of them had initially wondered why
(19:31):
the rest of the crew had not come to their rescue,
because from that vantage point it looked like the ship
was okay, but it actually was not. It had several
structural issues. Parts of it at that point were missing,
and it just could not have done so. Although the
group on the ice floe had believed the Polaris to
be lost again, it was not. Buddington had run it
aground close to Etta Greenlands after he and the crew
(19:56):
had furiously worked to keep it together just long enough
to get to land. Buddington and the remaining crew wintered
near Cairn Point. When spring arrived, a whaling vessel from
Scotland named the ravenscregg rescued the Polaris crew in Melville Bay,
where they had traveled in small rudmentary boats that they
(20:17):
made from pieces of the Polaris. Buddington made it to Washington,
d c. With the remaining crew. That's another instance where
we need to note that they also survived because in
it who were living in that area where they went
aground took care of them. They did not serve on
their own. There was a Navy Board of Inquiry mounted
(20:39):
in June eighteen seventy three to investigate what had happened
to Charles Francis Hall. Although some of the people from
the ice flow testified that Hall was adamant that he
had been poisoned and that there was no accounting for
who had touched Hall's coffee before it reached him. Hall's
death was ruled as the result of an apoplectic seizure,
which is another name for as. The official report stated
(21:02):
that quote from personal examination of all the witnesses and
from their testimony is given we reached the unanimous conclusion
that the death of Captain Hall resulted naturally from disease
without fault on the part of anyone. Not everyone shared
that opinion, and we'll talk about one of the people
who gave his opinion on the matter to the press
in eighteen seventy three, after we pause or a sponsor break.
(21:34):
There were in eighteen seventy three some suspicions about what
had actually happened to Hall and whether he had met
with foul play. On Sunday, September twenty third, eighteen seventy three,
the New York Herald ran the headline the Story of
the Ice, and featured a very lengthy writeup of everything
that had happened to the Polaris team, and it opened
(21:56):
with a statement from doctor Bessel's that reads quote, we
are much to find from the American papers that several
rumors of mischievous tendency, which I must characterize as silly
and absurd, have been put into circulation concerning the expedition,
and particularly concerning the death of Captain Hall. It is
just possible that the government at Washington would prefer that
(22:18):
we reserve what we have to say for a graver occasion.
But we must emphatically contradict the statement that Captain Hall
died any other than a natural death. He died of apoplexy.
He was ill about a fortnight. He appeared in perfect
health when entering the voyage. I noticed nothing unusual in
his health up to the period of his illness. The
(22:40):
rumors that he was poisoned are too absurd to be
seriously entertained. The rumor may have been founded on the
hallucinations of the raving patient. So doctor Bessel's thought that
the deceased Charles Hall started a rumor that he was poisoned,
and that rumor was definitely swirling. And in that same
article there was a damning statement from Inspector H. Kerrit Smith.
(23:04):
He was the man in charge of the government's storehouse
at Greenland, where the Polaris stocked up, and he had
some thoughts about the vibe of the group. He told
the Harold's reporter his concerns about what might have happened
to Hall. According to the write up, Smith was not
surprised when he heard that Hall had died. He told
the Harold quote, I pitied him from the bottom of
(23:26):
my heart. To me, he imparted the source of all
his troubles, and a more distracted man I have seldom seen.
My house was open to all the officers of the expedition,
and I had, of course every opportunity to learn both
sides of the story. When Smith was questioned about the
group dynamics in play among the officers on the voyage,
(23:48):
he told the reporter quote, Buddington was only an instrument
in the hands of a third party. It was not
long before I discovered a very bitter feeling existed on
the polaris. And although Buddington was a stone the cause
of the quarrel, that there was in the background a
far more dangerous element who contend against. As Smith's statement continues,
(24:10):
it sounds like conflict began over whether scientific work should
take precedence over the objective of reaching the pole. He said, quote,
as far as I could learn, no trouble manifested itself
until the coast of Greenland was reached. Now it was
pretty well understood that Captain Hall was not a scientific
or highly educated man, though perfectly competent to command such
(24:30):
an expedition that was entrusted to him. Doctor Emil Bessel's
was chief of the scientific Corps and mister Frederick Meyers,
the meteorologist, and to these gentlemen Captain Hall looked for
assistance in carrying out the great object of the expedition.
From what I heard, however, he was disappointed in the direction.
And although Captain Hall, fully realizing the importance of all
(24:53):
scientific discoveries, was anxious to afford them every facility, he
was nevertheless bound to maintain his own as commander of
the expedition. Captain Hall told me in a despondent tone,
that both Bessels and Meyer carried on their operations without
regard to his authority. For instance, when Hall requested Meyer
to take an observation, he refused to do so on
(25:16):
the ground that he was responsible only to the government
for his actions. Smith also stated that he thought Bessels
was using Meyer as his mouthpiece. Smith's concerns about Bessels
did not stop there. He also told the reporter that
Bessels knew that as doctor he was indispensable to the crew,
and that if he left the expedition at any time
(25:37):
it was at port, many of the men would have
joined him. He also noted that, in writing letters about
the expedition to German journals. Bessels called it the Hall
Bessel's expedition, and he noted that while Hall wanted absolutely
no alcohol on board, Bessels got a stock of it
under the auspices of medical supplies, and that he believed Buddington,
(25:58):
who had been reported as having been drunk on a
number of occasions on the trip, must have gotten it
from the doctor. According to Smith, the meteorologist Myers was
openly and subordinate, so much so that another Navy captain,
Captain Davenport, got involved while they were docked in Greenland
to settle the matter, but that after that there were
(26:20):
a lot of bad feelings toward Hall. Yeah, Hall had
wanted to put Myers in shackles and keep him on board,
apparently to do the meteorological work. But like sort of
in a captive state. So naturally not a lot of
loving feelings towards that. But we should note this is
all the account of a third party. But then Smith
(26:42):
recounted an argument that he had witnessed between Hall and
Bessel's in his own house, and after that argument, Hall
gave Smith and his wife four boxes of papers for safekeeping,
which he said involved information about the Franklin expedition, which
he was not comfortable taking on the trip. He had
packed it initially, but then offloaded it in Greenland. These
(27:04):
papers involved information about members of the Franklin expedition resorting
to cannibalism, and he did not want them made public
while Franklin's widow was alive, and Hall seemed to think
that if he brought those papers on the expedition they
would be lost forever because something might happen to them.
Then the really damning statement from Smith came out quote.
(27:25):
I cannot help thinking that, despite the testimony taking at Washington,
his death was not the result of natural causes. Everything
induces to that opinion, for undue influence had been exercised
over the crew to lessen their respect for her commander,
and the jealousy of some of Hall's subordinates taking in
connection with the whole affair, leads me to the conclusion
(27:47):
that there was bowel play. I think the body of
Captain Hall, which I have no doubt is still in
a state of preservations, should be sought after and exhumed.
Bessel's never fully outran these accusations in the court of
public opinion. Kind of any time something happened where he
was written up in the paper it was like and
(28:08):
suspect of the murder of Captain Hall, but nothing further
was done regarding the death of Hall. Once the Navy
Board had made its decision, Bessels went on to work
at the Smithsonian Institution and he published scientific results of
the United States Arctic Expedition and other papers about the
work that he had done on the journey. He died
at the age of forty after a stroke. It wasn't
(28:31):
until almost one hundred years after the expedition that questions
arose once again about what exactly happened to Charles Francis Hall.
In the nineteen sixties, Dartmouth professor and Arctic historian Chauncey C.
Loomis started researching the expedition for his book Weird and
Tragic Shores, The Story of Charles Francis Hall, and Loomis
(28:53):
wanted the body exhumed. That happened in nineteen sixty eight.
Loomis himself went to Greenland for the exenbit and an
autopsy was performed on the well preserved body. Toronto's Center
of Forensic Sciences ran neutron activation tests on samples of
hair and fingernails that were collected. This revealed some very
(29:15):
interesting information and was even the basis for a paper
that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine
in nineteen seventy titled an Inquest on the Death of
Charles Francis Hall. Charles Francis Hall had been given arsenic
in the last two weeks of his life, and a
lot of it. Suddenly, Emil Brussels was once again looking
(29:35):
suspicious as there was arsenic in his medical kit. Remember,
at this time in history, it was used to treat
all kinds of things like joint problems in syphilis and
dry skin. But the doses Hall was given were far
beyond what would have ever been administered for any medical reason.
But even though there had been conflict between the two men,
(29:55):
it just didn't seem enough to drive someone to murder,
especially in a scenario where a limited number of people
are depending on each other for survival. Additionally, Hall had
his own medical kits, so it is possible that he
may have overdosed accidentally when he was refusing medical help
from Brussels, and he may have been self medicating. So
(30:16):
this mystery percolated on for another four decades until another
piece of circumstantial evidence was found, and that was an envelope.
That envelope was from Charles Hall to a young woman
named Vinnie Reim, was postmarked October eighteen seventy one. That
envelope was discovered by Rhode Island College professor Russell Potter,
(30:39):
and Venni Riem was connected to Bessel's romantically, and maybe
also to Charles Hall. Reem was a well known sculptor,
and Hall kept a small bust of Abraham Lincoln she
had given him in his quarters on the Polaris. She
could potentially be an upcoming episode. Are good, It's what
(31:00):
I'm gonna say, because she's very interesting on her own
outside of any connection to these two men. So the
idea that perhaps there was a jealousy between these two
men might lend more gravity to the idea that Bessel's
was angry enough at Hall to kill him. For example,
if he suddenly saw a work of art by his
sweetheart in the Captain's quarters, that may have prompted a
(31:22):
jealous rage. But that is pure speculation. We will never
ever know what really happened and how Hall came to
have so much arsenic in his system. But on the
official record, Emil Bessel's remains clear of any wrongdoing the
mystery forever. Uh, do you have listener mail for us? Yes?
(31:46):
This listener mail comes with a note as to how
to ensure that I obsess over your email and possibly
read it on the air. This is the key ingredient
you can include to make sure that I lose my mind. Okay,
this is from our listener, Kelsey, who writes hi Ally
(32:06):
and Tracy. I was just listening to your recent episode
about Harrison Dyer while eating breakfast and enjoying learning about
his drama and his tunnels. When Tracy described the truck
falling into the street near fifteen twelve twenty third Street Northwest,
and I almost dropped my spoon. That's about three blocks
from my apartment in the DuPont Circle neighborhood in DC.
(32:27):
It's kitty corner from my local coffee shop, and I
have passed by there dozens of times. I had no
idea there were tunnels under my neighborhood. Proof that history
is all around, well, perhaps obviously in DC. Thank you
for continuing to fill my days with fascinating history that
I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Best wishes Kelsey. And then
Kelsey includes not her own cats, but her friend astroids
(32:50):
cats Crumble and Waffle, who she considers her nephews. And
here's what you can do if you want to ensure
that I lose my mind over your email. These two
cats look like Devin, which is my very very favorite
flavor of kitty and was the breed of my beloved
mister Burns, who has left this earth and is no
longer pulling people's pants down or turning on stoves. But
(33:14):
they are absolutely gorgeous. I'm obsessed and I want to
kiss their faces. So Kelsey and Astrid and Crumble and Waffle,
thank you for making me smile, because this is some
cute business. Those giant eyes and those giant ears. I
love a little crazy rexy baby. If you would like
(33:36):
to write to us and send us really any cat
pictures are good. As I've said before, any animals or
pictures are good. Send me your tarantulas, your snakes, and
your corvid. Send me your I don't know worms. Do
people keep earth worms as pets? Probably ants ant farm.
I'm into it. I love all of it. Send me
all of it if you would like to do so
(33:58):
and talk about maybe place ways that our stories have
intersected with your neighborhood. You can do so at History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us
on social media as mist in History, and you can
subscribe to the podcast on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in
(34:21):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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