Abstract
The only attempt to reach the North Pole financed by the United States government set off an extraordinary chain of events in which half the expedition was stranded on floating pack ice, the other half shipwrecked on Greenland’s north-western coast, yet only its commander, Charles Francis Hall, lost his life. And he is generally believed today to have been murdered by the author of this book, its chief scientist.
The expedition’s official narrative, edited by Rear-Admiral C.H. Davis from participants’ diaries and recollections, appeared in 1876. A popular account of the ice flow party’s experiences, edited by E. V. Blake, had come out in 1874. These two volumes and proceedings of the official Board of Inquiry have constituted the published record in English until now. Here we are given a translation of Bessels’s book by William Barr, a glacial geomorphologist by training, who has published extensively on Arctic history, and who adds editorial comments throughout. Sometimes the individual voice of the original author is one of the things lost in translation, but, at least in the fluent and readable English translation here, the reader feels the presence of a consistent outlook and character.
Barr’s assertions of the value of Bessels’s book seem overstated. He claims it contains the only first-hand account of certain aspects of the expedition, yet the Davis and Blake books contain eyewitness accounts of all aspects of the actual expedition. In fact, Barr resorts to them repeatedly in his notes to add dates, places, names and details Bessels’s book left out. But it is in its scientific content, where Barr says Bessels’s book ‘differs so conspicuously (and so valuably) from the other published accounts’ (p.xxxiii), that his editing falls short.
Bessels stuffs his account with scientific detail and data, observations and hypotheses. But beyond bringing phylogenetic names of birds mentioned up to date and a few other biological details, Barr fails to comment on any of Bessels’s speculations, even those concerning Northumberland Island’s glacial system, Barr’s own specialty. Certainly, the reader should have been alerted to at least the most glaring examples of outdated science. One such occurs on p. 335.
There Bessels claims to have discovered the progenitor of Bathybius haeckelii, a notorious example of theory driving ‘discovery’ instead of the other way round. Creationists are still using Bathybius to attack the Theory of Evolution and question the objectivity of scientists, so it is still relevant today. Yet it passes without any comment here. Because republication of questionable or erroneous scientific information is only of historical value, Bessels’s book’s real worth probably lies outside of its outdated science.
While there is little technical in Bessels’s descriptions of Polaris or any of the other ships involved in the expedition and its rescue, there is much that evokes the flavour of the steam-and-sail era that comes through. We also get a detailed, even if, as Barr notes, sometimes inaccurate, account of the Newfoundland sealers’ trade and methods and also of the Right Whale fishery before that species diminished to the point of economic unviability. Anyone having read Moby Dick will readily note why the ‘Right’ whale got its name, its capture being child’s play beside the hazards of pursuing the Sperm.
Bessels’s ‘ethnographic sketch’ of the Inuit is just that, though throughout the book Bessels supplies interesting observations of Inuit culture. Bessels had an attitude of European superiority toward the Inuit typical of the time and often brings up incidents that are meant to be humor at Inuit expense, but he is not without sympathy for the culture he observed and often gives full credit for their indispensable role in saving the expedition from starvation and death by other means.
Bessels’s book can be read with interest just for its narrative of a set of exotic experiences without worrying over its priority or scientific accuracy, but many readers will read it hoping to find clues to the mystery of Captain Hall’s demise. On that point, Bessels’s account of the events surrounding it is of little help. He devotes exactly two pages to them and hardly refers to Hall’s death again. Many might find such scant comment by the expedition’s medical officer suspicious in itself. Perhaps more helpful are the insights gained of Bessels’s temperament and character by reading between his lines.
Bessels comes across, at least in this translation, as a person who feels his intellectual superiority acutely. His often technical and detailed descriptions of scientific instruments and natural phenomenon in the body of a book that originally contained a 120-page scientific appendix (not reproduced here), seem primarily intended to impress. He also indulges in many caustic and cynical observations about others, and he makes little secret of his contempt for religiosity whenever given a pretext. And no reader of the book could fail to miss the many examples of Bessels’s often sarcastic humour.
He also demeans perceived competition. For instance, he disparages Davis’s book as ‘the most vacuous and worthless of all narratives’, notwithstanding Barr’s constant resort to it in his clarifying notes. Bessels comes across, in two words, as the ‘sensitive man’ he was contemporaneously described to be by the official who recommended him to Hall.
Bessels was not Hall’s first choice; he took him on as a favour to the government that had so generously provided $50,000 to finance his expedition, exclusive of refitting Polaris. Contentious from the start, Bessels apparently saw Hall as unworthy of commanding such as him. Unfortunately, we will probably never know for sure if Bessels’s obvious animosity for Hall led to homicide.
Hall’s carefully kept diaries were lost during the expedition, though exactly how was a matter of dispute at the Board of Inquiry. Likewise, though initially saved, the ‘greater part’ of Bessels’s journals, which would certainly have revealed the two men’s relationship as much as Hall’s, conveniently went missing on a railway journey through Scotland; conveniently, because the Board of Inquiry demanded all expedition diaries be handed over, no matter how personal their content. Apparently, by his account’s content, Bessels’s scientific notes escaped completely the fate of his personal diary, however.
Likewise, Captain Tyson’s diary was lost in the chaotic events surrounding the separation of the ice flow party and the ship. Tyson’s account, retold by Blake, is therefore no more than recollections of events prior to its loss. This leaves us with nothing truly contemporary or intimate from the principle witnesses to Hall’s possible murder.
As Chauncey Loomis concluded in his excellent biography of Hall, Weird and Tragic Shores, although an autopsy performed 97 years after Hall’s death proved he ingested a large quantity of arsenic in the last weeks of his life, Loomis prudently concluded that it could not definitely be established who administered it (it might have been Hall himself, for instance; many patent medicines contained arsenic at the time). Two recent authors on Hall, Bruce Henderson and Richard Parry, however, had no qualms identifying Bessels as the murderer. Indeed, the entire point of their books seemed to be to lay evidence for this conclusion.
Both these authors ‘fictionalised’ their books, including invented dialogue; neither book documented a single source nor contained any evidence of original research. Yet Barr cites them occasionally in his notes as if they contain unique facts, and even refers to Henderson’s fictional dialogue as evidence a time or two (see Appendices note 3). Parry’s, on no authority, suggests that Bessels murdered Hall at the behest of Bismark because he feared Hall would thwart Germany’s polar ambitions.
It’s a far-fetched motive, but that’s the trouble; no one has ever come up with a plausible reason why Bessels would resort to the extreme of murdering Hall. As Tyson put it at the official inquiry, only ‘a monster’ could do such a thing. That brings us to Barr’s Epilogue, which proposes a different ‘motive for murder’. Unfortunately, Barr’s falls as flat as a conspiracy between Bessels and The Iron Chancellor.
The idea was originally proposed in a blog post by a college professor. On the strength of a letter Hall wrote to Vinnie Ream, a Washington-based sculptor, thanking her for a copy of her bust of Abraham Lincoln given him to decorate Polaris’s cabin and the fact that Hall had had dinner with her shortly before sailing, apparently in the company of Emil Bessels, who also wrote to Ream, addressing her as ‘dear Vinnie’, there is a gigantic leap to the conclusion of a love triangle being responsible for Bessels’s crime. Although accepted effusively by blog readers as ‘solving’ the mystery, in an unknowable set of circumstances, where one person’s guess is quite as good as another, one should emulate the prudence of Chauncey Loomis.
According to her biographer, Vinnie Ream was an ambitious young lady with a knack of at least infatuating many powerful men in Washington. That is probably what attracted her to Hall. He, after all, was the National Hero of the hour, and anyone who could wrangle $50,000 out of the tight-fisted Congress might have been seen by her as more than that. She herself had struggled to wrangle $10,000 in the form of a commission for the full-sized statue of Lincoln that still stands in the Capitol’s Rotunda to this day.
Apparently, Bessels only met Ream shortly before he departed on the expedition, and although he may have fallen for her as hard as many others did, it’s hard to believe he considered Hall, among all the powerful men Vinnie knew, as his chief or only rival for her affections. Besides, Hall was a devout Christian at a time when that was not considered either a social or political liability.
Hall’s Christian zeal caused him to try to impose Christian ideals on the Inuit when their cultural practices conflicted with his idea of them, often at risk to his own life and theirs. He was especially repulsed by their sexual mores. In fact, Loomis concluded that Hall, based on his relationship to his own wife and two children, who he all but abandoned, was a true loner and that there was ‘something incorrigibly asexual in his personality and his mind as they are revealed in his writing’, which was completely absorbed in his ambitious dreams of accomplishments in the Far North.
Rather than Vinnie Ream, more probably that other common sin of Ambition was the motive that drove Bessels to murder Hall, if he actually did and was not a monster who didn’t need one. To Bessels, Hall epitomised all he loathed: the unwashed, the uneducated, the scientifically ignorant, yet one rewarded nonetheless by an unprecedented grant from Congress. He might have felt he needed to correct such a perverse injustice and prove his superiority by taking Hall’s place. There is even some evidence of this.
In Bessels’s book he says he ‘secretly’ hatched a scheme he shared with only one other (pp. 388–391). Bessels planned to return to the expedition’s first winter anchorage and use the supplies left there to go farther north, possibly to the North Pole itself, as Hall had planned.
On his attempt he threatened to shoot one of his Inuit companions when he insisted on returning when the going got rough. In this instance, at least, Bessels showed a willingness to resort to murder to satisfy his ambitions. This is far more compelling ‘evidence’ than a couple of inconsequential letters to Vinnie Ream. The Inuit thought so. As a result of his murderous threat, Bessels was shunned by the entire tribe for the rest of the expedition as ‘a dangerous man’.
Barr attaches several appendices to his translation, all of which are convenient, but already available in more detail elsewhere. The new maps provided are excellent. However, it should be noted that only 46 of the 103 illustrations that appeared in the original book are reproduced. The bibliography and topical index seem thorough.
The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with Bessels’s personal experiences, but does nothing to settle the mysteries that continue to fascinate readers of Weird and Tragic Shores.