Fatal North (2 page)

The final resting place of Charles Francis Hall, the commander of the U.S. expedition to discover the North Pole, had long been sacred ground to Arctic explorers of every nationality. It had to do with the remote location of the lone grave and the mysterious death of the man, as well as the nature of the mission itself. In a race against other nations—foremost among them England—America's first attempt to reach the North Pole had garnered the enthusiastic support of President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress, and captured the imagination of the press and public in the same way a future generation would follow the space race and man's efforts to reach the Moon.

The college professor came to understand just how sacred the old grave remained when he had sought permission from Denmark's Ministry for Greenland to travel to Polaris Promontory and disinter Hall's remains for an autopsy in the hope of
solving the mystery that had long surrounded the captain's untimely demise. After months of official inquiry by the U.S. government, many troublesome questions had remained unanswered, including the biggest one of all. Had Captain Hall died a natural death, or had he been murdered most foully, poisoned to death by one or more members of the small, handpicked crew?

After a letter-writing campaign to officials brought no results, Loomis traveled to Copenhagen, where he met with Count Eigel Knuth, an adviser to the ministry on proposed projects in Greenland, a territory of Denmark. An archaeologist, anthropologist and experienced Arctic explorer in his own right, Knuth had been one of the last men to see Hall's final resting place a decade earlier—only the second visit to the Polaris Promontory since Peary had passed there fifty years before. Knuth, who had himself discovered the remains of an ancient civilization in northern Greenland, made it clear he was not disposed to approving a visit by a team of American grave diggers. In fact, the whole idea seemed repugnant to him. Loomis took the position that history deserved the truth.

“Given the high latitude of Hall's burial,” the professor went on, “there is a good chance that the body will be well preserved.”

“But, sir,” Knuth replied, “this is
hallowed
ground.”

Only when Loomis guaranteed that his team would leave the grave in the exact condition in which it was found did Knuth begin to relent. Finally, to the professor's surprise and delight, Knuth gave his approval.

Standing at the graveside, Loomis and his colleagues saw evidence that foxes had pawed at its surface. Also lemmings, a mouselike Arctic rodent, had at one time burrowed into the mound, no doubt for protection from the harsh elements.

The weather-beaten epitaph on the headboard, erected by one of Hall's crewmen within days of his death, was carved into a pine plank taken from USS
Polaris.
At the time, the ship was stuck in an impenetrable ice pack nearby. In addition to name, rank, age of the deceased, and date of his death were these
words: “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

Shovel in hand, the strapping ex-Marine, Tom Gignoux, who had been added to the expedition for his physical strength and youthful stamina, began to dig through the shaly surface, which resembled crushed rock more than earthen soil.

It was a shallow grave.

Less than two feet under, the shovel blade struck a solid object. After more digging and clearing, a pine coffin was revealed. The wood was surprisingly pale and fresh-looking, testament to the power of Arctic preservation.

During the spade work the men had cracked nervous, even morbid, jokes.

Looking down at the unusually long coffin, the internist, Frank Paddock, who had been the professor's longtime family doctor from his hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, offered a bit too cheerfully: “They didn't build it for the short Hall, did they?”

All joking ceased when they caught the first whiff of human decay.

The plan had been to lift the coffin from its grave so that Paddock would have easier access to the remains. It soon became apparent that would not be practical, because the coffin was partly embedded in permafrost, a thick layer of ice a foot beneath the Arctic surface that never melts and radiates upward a constant bone-deep coldness, regardless of the ambient air temperature.

For ten minutes, as Gignoux carefully pried at the lid of the coffin with a crowbar, the three other men stood by silently. When a piece of the lid snapped off, they saw inside part of the field of blue stars of an American flag.

Once the nails were loosened, Loomis moved in to remove the lid.

The professor had already made several trips to the Far North. In his readings on the Arctic, he had encountered Hall's
name and become fascinated by the questions surrounding his death. For three years Loomis had been digging through the records of the expedition, until he was convinced that it was “circumstantially possible,” at least, that Hall had been murdered.

Loomis lifted the coffin lid and received help pulling it to one side.

The body was enshrouded by the flag except at the base of the coffin, where a pair of stockinged feet stuck out. From the waist down, the body was encased in a sheet of clear ice. The front of the upper torso was free of ice, but the corpse's back was frozen solid into the coffin.

Loomis stepped back, giving way to the physician, with whom he had done plenty of exploring, including digging for archaeological ruins high in the Peruvian Andes. What lay before them now was not clay pottery or gold statuary, and Loomis was well aware that he was far out of his field of expertise.

Frank Paddock, a compact, energetic man nearing sixty, was the kind of person, friends and colleagues agreed, who preferred running around the world on one of his “crazy adventures” to hanging around the local hospital tending to sick people. Leaning over the coffin, the doctor peeled the flag back from the corpse's face gingerly, as if uncovering a sleeping person without wishing to startle him.

The face had only partially decayed to a skull. Other than the nose, which was shrunken and nearly gone, the face was still well fleshed—a dark, leathery covering that stretched tautly over underlying bone. A carpet of stringy hair lay atop the head, and a full beard was so neat it appeared to have been recently combed. The eye sockets were empty holes of eternal darkness. The mouth was drawn into a kind of sly smile that would one day turn into a death's-head grin as the body continued its long journey from dust to dust.

Loomis was struck by the strange beauty of the slow decaying process at work on Hall's remains. The skin, tanned by time, was stained red and blue by the American flag that had pressed
against it for a century, giving the corpse an abstract quality; not unlike an icon, Loomis thought.

Paddock had brought an autopsy kit, including scalpels, formalin, scissors, and glycerol. The only way he could reach the corpse was to stand in the grave and straddle the open coffin. As he did so, his companions handed him what he needed.

When he picked up by forceps a sample of head hairs, a piece of the attached scalp broke off with the hair roots. When Paddock took a fingernail, lifting a rather long nail, the whole fingertip broke off from the dried and shrunken hand.

On peeling back the jacket, vest, and underwear as far as possible, Paddock found the skin of the chest to be white except in the center, where it showed additional blue stains from the suit dye.

From a point above each breast, Paddock made the traditional Y-shaped incision, which met at the sternum and sliced downward into the lower abdomen. He found it difficult to remove the skin from the underlying rib cage. Where he succeeded in doing so, the muscle tissue underneath was found to be metamorphosed—doubtless by a combination of freezing and drying—to a slightly off-white, brittle material that he was able to shred off the bone.

Once he gained entry to the chest cavity, he observed that the area normally taken up by the lungs was empty. In fact, only the center part of the chest cavity contained any tissue, and this appeared to be of the same friable consistency as the chest muscle. The thoracic tissues were amorphous, offering only a suggestion of the whorls of heart muscle. Paddock found intact the structures of the trachea and the start of the bronchial tree—both were stained a moderate dark brown.

No other traces of organs or structures in the chest were identifiable.

Due to the rigid, folded arms of the corpse, Paddock could open only the upper portion of the abdomen. Like the chest cavity, this area was largely empty. The intestines presented themselves as a thin, yellowish, parchment-like ribbon. The spaces
normally occupied by the liver and pancreas were filled by a small amount of the same whitish, structureless material present elsewhere.

Paddock stood for a minute to relieve his aching back and cramped arms from his awkward position working over the coffin. When he was ready, he turned to his friend and said dispassionately, “Chauncey. Handsaw.”

With the razor-sharp tool in hand, the doctor positioned himself over the skull and began sawing. He found the bone to be of a normal, hard consistency, but extra difficult to cut through because the frozen pillow on which the head lay had curled up over the temporal areas, requiring him to cut through solid ice as well as bone.

Finally, Paddock removed a roughly triangular section of the forehead, giving him unimpeded access to the cranium. When he looked inside, he saw a dark void.

Loomis knew that with so many vital organs missing, pinning down the cause of death would not be easy. While certain parts of the corpse had been well preserved by the freezing temperatures, the decades had taken their toll. It would be a matter of turning over what they had found to a pathology laboratory and waiting for the results of a series of scientific and microscopic tests that might or might not prove a thing.

Samples of tissues were put into plastic bottles containing formalin, acetone, glycerol, and glyceraldehyde. The samples of hair, nail, and fingertip went into dry plastic bottles. The triangular skull section was encased in plastic wrapping. The entire collection was placed in a heavy metal toolbox for safekeeping.

Paddock, exhausted, was at last done. The autopsy had lasted three hours.

They did their best to redress the corpse, then put the lid back on the coffin.

The ex-Marine shoveled earth back into the grave, and re-created the mound exactly as they had found it, complete with some rocks that had been placed on top.

Charles Francis Hall was again at rest, less a few minor parts.

The men whiled away the rest of the two weeks by taking hikes along the beach, which they found more interesting and lively—with sanderlings, sandpipers, and plovers picking at the waterline and fulmars flying offshore—than the vast inland plain.

The sounds they would remember best were of water steadily dripping from thawing icebergs in the unending summer sun, and the occasional cracking and rumbles of mammoth ice breaking out in the bay. And this, they knew, was the Arctic in the summertime. What must it have been like here, ice-bound with no place to go, in the dead of winter?

When the plane returned for them, they loaded their gear and precious cargo and were off. As they circled Polaris Promontory one final time, all eyes looked down.

Chauncey Loomis believed he better understood now the man who lay in the shallow, frozen grave below, as well as the others like him, men who had been impelled to travel to the Arctic, yearning for its cold beauty and seeking Earth's most northern spot.

He realized now the truth of what he'd been told.

This
was
hallowed ground.

I

The Expedition

1

“North Star!”

J
ULY
2, 1870
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

A
solitary figure had been pacing the corridors in the Capitol all day, the heels of his boots clicking on the marble floors and his black coat flapping behind him. He looked to anyone who didn't know him as if he had nothing to do and no place to go. Nothing was further from the truth.

Charles Francis Hall did have somewhere to go: back to the Far North, which he had come to consider more his true spiritual home than any place he had ever lived.

He stood about five feet eight inches tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds. His was a firmly knit, muscular frame that suggested power in the broad shoulders, and beyond—an inward strength. His head was large, with a profusion of coarse brown hair and heavy beard, both graying and inclining to curl at the ends. The effect was bearlike. His forehead was ample, and his small but expressive blue eyes often reflected the bemused twinkle of a dreamer. As he strode back and forth, the expression of his countenance was firm but not unpleasant. His
erect posture and robust movements suggested a man of boundless vigor who knew his course in life.

For the past ten years the Arctic had been his life. Back home in Cincinnati he had a wife, Mary, and a ten-year-old son, Charley, who hardly knew his father, since he had spent only a few months of the past decade at home. The rest of the time he was either on long trips to the north or traveling the country on speaking circuits, telling folks about his experiences and raising money for new expeditions. When he had first left for the Arctic ten years earlier, he had been ill-equipped and virtually alone. A small-time, only half-educated Midwest businessman who had been no farther north than New Hampshire, he had prepared himself for the Arctic by camping in a pup tent on Cincinnati's Mt. Adams and reading everything he could find on celestial navigation and astronomy. During his earlier Arctic trips—beginning with his first, in 1860, which he had undertaken in search of survivors of the ill-fated 1845 British expedition (two ships and 129 men lost) led by Sir John Franklin—Hall had learned the hardy ways of the Eskimos and adapted to the severe conditions found in the Arctic region. Partly, he had done so out of necessity, as his total budget for his first trip had been just $980. His second expedition—lasting five years—cost only about twice as much, and he embarked upon it during the middle of the Civil War when most of the country had more pressing matters at hand. His meager bankroll had served him well, however. During his stay on Baffin Island and, in the area of Repulse Bay, Isloolik, and King William Island on his second trip, he lived as few white men before him. He had traveled more than three thousand miles by dog sledge, hunted with Eskimos, learned to build an igloo, and developed a taste for seal blubber—believed by the Arctic natives to provide strength and recuperative powers in subzero temperatures. He came to genuinely like Eskimos as well, which could not be said of many Arctic explorers of his time; British, German, or American.