A Woman in the Polar Night

In his introduction to A Woman in the Polar Night, Lawrence Millman notes that is author, Christiane Ritter, had no interest in any of the "Arctic Grails" that drove most northern explorers -- the northwest passage, the pole, or the discovery and naming of some unknown spot. And yet, he notes, she could appreciate the Arctic in ways that those "great explorers," with their "Grail-oriented blinders," could not. Hers was an exploration, not of lands to be named or passages to be navigated, but of the inner nature of life and consciousness in a world in which everything that she -- along with most people of her class and background -- took for granted as much as the air they breathed. It's an exercise in long subtraction: the subtraction, at first, of creature-comforts and little things, then of greater ones, such as predictable food, predictable weather, or the ability to just go get another something when something important breaks or is lost, and at last the subtraction of human company itself.

It's notable that her journey begins in relative luxury, aboard a German cruise-ship with its deck-chairs, its "illuminated coffee lounge," and snug, comfortable beds -- just the sort of cruise ship that presently navigates these regions, though now they are even larger and more luxurious. It's a perfect contrast to the life that awaits her in the little hut with its felt roof, ancient broken stove, and puttied-shut windows. Her sojourn begins in endless day, continues through seemingly endless night, and becomes for her an almost cosmic sort of rebirth, a witnessing of life's great circuit that forever changes her perspective on civilization. Indeed, as Millman notes, not long after her return home, after her family estate catches fire and burns to the ground, Christiane is not perturbed or mournful, but secretly grateful. For the fire had done what ice did: reduced her life to its essentials. 

An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

It's one of the greatest tales of exploration, adventure, and friendship ever written, and yet its author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, was never a member of an "expedition" as such. In some ways, he's closer to Charles Francis Hall, who hitched a ride to the Arctic on a whaler -- and yet, unlike Hall, his dream was of self-exploration rather than the divinely-sanctioned rescue of others. And most unlike Hall, he worked his way north, arriving not as some sort of elevated figure, but as a common man in search of the company of ordinary people, along with the sights of a place he had been dreaming of visiting since he was a boy. An African in Greenland is his story.

Kpomassie begins with an arresting account of his own childhood in Togo, where he lived in a community that still observed many of the traditional customs of its indigenous people; his account of being attacked by a python, which has to be addressed by a purification ceremony performed by a priestess of the Python cult, is harrowing. In a curious way, though, the depth of his own roots in his native culture were part of how and why he was able to relate to the Inuit people of Greenland. Both peoples had an ancient shamanistic tradition, and though both had encountered the western world of beliefs, still had to abide by what one Inuit shaman called "numerous and irksome taboos." Colonialism had touched but not yet despoiled Kopmassie's native land, but in Greenland, the Danes had been at work since the eighteenth century, and Greenlanders lived in a more throughly hybridized culture. Still, the situational awareness is similar: let's call it living on the edge.

What's most refreshing about Kpomassie's narrative, though, is that he writes as a person with complete confidence in his own perspective and culture; for him, Europeans are just another group of people in another place, whose customs are as curious and strange as his own might seem to them. He climbs, as it were, up the tree of these intertwined cultural and colonial histories, finding at the top the coconuts of understanding. He is both self-secure and unassuming, and the spirit of his curiosity is a welcome calling-card in every place in which he lands.

"The Terror"

The intersections of history and modern cultural obsessions are many and fascinating. Most significantly, although Dan Simmons' original novel centered around the "Tuunbaq" (more properly known in Inuktitut as Torngat), the producers of the AMC series, David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, have moved the monster to the margins for a time -- giving other, more human horrors (scurvy, lead poisoning, and cannibalism) time to work their magic. Time is also space, and as the men depart the cocoon of the ships and spread out on the land, the story darkens even as sun floods the scene.

Although I didn't work with the producers directly, they made use of my research, and one scene in Episode 1 -- where Franklin and Crozier attend a "tableau vivant" depicting James Clark Ross's Antarctic voyage (on which Crozier served as his second) -- a depiction drawn from similar shows described in my book Arctic Spectacles. Later episodes take pages -- quite literally -- from the mysterious "Peglar Papers" found on one of the bodies of Franklin's men, and about which I've written extensively; two of the episodes even take their title from phrases in these papers. Two years ago, star Jared Harris (in person) and co-producer Kajganich (virtually) visited RIC, and talked about the show with students in my Arctic Encounters and Victorian Lit courses. Despite the somber nature of the subject matter, the discussion was a lively and jovial one, as you can see!

There are many entry points to the story -- you can check out my reviews, written in collaboration with Stephen Smith, which appeared on the Canadian Geographic website. The FX company responsible for the show's amazing visuals, UPP, has a reel showing how the magic worked.  The show-runners have done several interviews, some with cast members, which you can see here and here and (with even more of the cast) here. It's important to know that this show was many years in the making -- Kajganich told us that he had originally scripted it as a feature film -- and, as so often happens, it was only by indirections that this story found its direction out.

On the Proper Use of Stars

To the long annals of flights of fancy inspired in whole or part by the last, fatal expedition of Sir John Franklin -- a list whose authors include Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Sten Nadolny -- must now be added another name, that of Dominique Fortier. It might be questioned whether, given the continued recourse to the pen over a century and a half by these and numerous other writers, another tale is called for, or even possible -- but considering On The Proper Use of Stars, I can only say this: no matter how crowded the firmament, there shines here a new and startlingly brilliant light, yet one which takes its place in a familar constellation as though it had always been there.

Ms. Fortier's novel -- originally published as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008 -- succeeds by refracting the light of its sources into a series of stellar vignettes, each of which captures a glimpse of one of the many figures who were caught up in the launch of, and search for, the Franklin expedition of 1845. Some glimmer darkly -- Crozier is almost a black hole of stellar suspiration -- while others, such as Lady Jane Franklin, take on the full refulgence of an Arctic sky. Sir John himself is cast deep in the shadows of his own expedition, reduced to a few doubtful-seeming journal entries, but we hardly miss him. His crew, on the other hand, is crammed with a variety of colorful characters, some based on its actual officers, some entirely fictional, such as the delightful "Adam Tuesday," who claims to have read every book in the ships' well-stocked libraries. In-between these leaves are folded, specimen-like, the fragments and documents of daily life: a dinner menu, a page from a manual of magnetism, a snippet of Eleanor Porden's poetry, a scribbled note attached to a button, a recipe.

The central portion of the narrative alternates between Crozier, whose dark matter grows in gravity and depth as the expedition progresses, and the lives of Lady Jane and her niece, Sophia Cracroft. Crozier's ineffectual courtship of Miss Cracroft is the connecting thread; in Fortier's version, their relationship seems far less futile than either of them feared, although (alas) neither will ever be the wiser. Crozier eventually must leave his reveries, and his ships behind, while Sophia comes to the realization -- with the help of Lady Franklin -- that perhaps, after all, the companionship of a conventional-minded man is far inferior to the company of a smart and free-spirited woman.

The social history of tea forms another delicate and finely nuanced strand, figuring both in Crozier's rivalry with Fitzjames and Lady Franklin's carefully choreographed social ensembles. And in the end, it's Lady Franklin who shines the brightest; never, in any of the other novels drawn from these histories, has she been so particularly, vividly alive as she is in Fortier's capable hands. She is here, she is there, she is everywhere -- equipped with little dogs named Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, her color-coded maps, her calling cards, and her formidable recipe for Christmas pudding (given at novel's end should anyone wish to embark upon a two-month's journey from first stir to fiery arrival) -- she proves herself again and again a far more intrepid and tireless explorer than her seeming-heroic husband. One must see her, in this light, as the very first to make a fiction out of Franklin, and although here we witness only the first few opening brush-strokes, the reader can little doubt that, in the end, it is her portrait at which after-comers must ever ponder and pry, however various and disparate their ultimate visions.

Arctic Forensics II: Franklin

In his anthemic "Northwest Passage," the late Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers evokes the sad yet compelling aura of the Franklin expedition perfectly: 

Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie

The sea route to the Orient for which so many died

Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones

And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones ...

Cairns are another matter, but of weathered, broken bones there is no shortage on King William Island. And, over the past two decades, they -- along with their better-preserved comrades in their graves on Beechey Island -- have received increasingly careful and detailed study. What can this work tell us? What enigmas remain. Here, as Sherlock Holmes might have said, is a brief statement of the facts so far known in the case.

The Beechey Island bodies were the first to receive detailed study -- when they were exhumed in 1984 and 1985 by forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie, each received a detailed autopsy, complete with x-rays, pathological exams, and bone and tissue samples. The best introduction to their story is the old NOVA episode "Buried in Ice" -- you can watch it in its entirely here. You can also see the detailed autopsy of John Torrington, or read the article in People Magazine naming him "One of the Most Intriguing People of 1984." 

The big takeaway from these bodies turned out to be their elevated levels of lead, which led Beattie to the hypothesis that lead poisoning -- likely from the lead solder in the tinned food provided to the expedition -- was the main cause of the expedition's failure. This "big" hypothesis, though, has been complicated by later studies that took up its challenge; the first, in 2014, showed that the impact of the lead levels observed was likely less dramatic than earlier assumed. Then, in 2015, a study of English sailors interred at English Harbor in Antigua at nearly the same time as Franklin's men also had elevated lead levels that were quite similar, despite their not having had tinned food or served in the Arctic. Finally, in 2016, a study using an advanced form of x-ray analysis demonstrated the more recent bone growth in Franklin's men -- men who died some years after those at Beechey -- showed no increase in lead intake. Taken together, these studies show that exposure to lead, while possibly severe in some individuals, wasn't too much worse than that of the average bloke in the mid-19th century Royal Navy.

The most recent breakthroughs have come from new work by land archaeologists, prominent among them Dr. Douglas Stenton. Stenton and his associates have revisited a great many known or alleged Franklin sites and re-studied the remains, using DNA analysis in addition to other archaeological tools. Finally, just this year, Stenton's team -- which has been actively soliciting DNA samples from living descendants of Franklin's men -- made a positive match. That same skull you see at the top of this post -- previously thought via facial reconstruction to be that of James Reid -- turns out to belong to John Gregory, the engineer employed to operate the steam engine aboard HMS Erebus!

With any luck, this will just be the first of many such identifications.

Arctic Forensics I: Hall, et. al.

Hall exhumed

The narratives penned by explorers, and the scholars who study them, are by no means the only stories that we can tell about these histories. When physical evidence exists -- whether on the ground or under the sea -- archaeology and forensics can tell a story of their own. It's often a more fragmentary story -- that's its nature -- but it's also a story anchored in material evidence, and can provide either corroboration or refutation of the written narratives of the time, as well as of Inuit oral traditions. And, as scientific methods advance, and additional artifacts analyzed, this kind of forensic evidence can end up shaping the narrative in powerful ways, perhaps altering our understanding of events entirely.

This week, we'll look at several cases where this kind of research has done so. First, of course, in the case of Charles Francis Hall, the fact that his hair and fingernails, examined after his exhumation at the behest of Chauncey Loomis, we obtained confirmation that he had been exposed to potentially toxic levels of arsenic in the weeks before his death. Loomis handled this evidence with care; he knew that arsenic was part of various medical preparations, and simply knowing that it was present didn't make poisoning a certainty. And, while suspicion at the time had turned to the German scientific staff, particularly to Emil Bessels, he had no specific evidence linking the possibility to them. The envelope that I discovered, and the subsequent finding of love letters from Bessels to Vinnie Ream, offered a motive for murder, but even then the case remains less than 100% certain.

A second body, interestingly, connected with Hall has recently invited fresh scrutiny. Hall, having finally reached his desired goal of King William Island, was frustrated that deep snow prevented his seeing the several bodies the Inuit indicated were to be found there. He took one, though -- nearly an entire skeleton -- and brought it back with him. Eventually, with the assistance of the British consul, this skeleton was sent back to England, where it was examined by Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the day. Huxley's identification, though, was based only on very general estimates of the age and height of the individual, as well as a gold tooth filling; he pronounced it to be that of Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte. Le Vesconte's own family, though, had their doubts, and the skeleton was interred under the floor of the old Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich under a plaque simply indicating that he was a member of Franklin's crew.

Fast forward to 2009: the memorial in which the bones were interred was to be moved and renovated, offering an opportunity to give them a fresh examination. The assumption remained that they were Le Vesconte's, but all the same, DNA samples as well as samples of the tooth enamel were taken. Teeth tell a marvelous story; depending on the local mineral content of the water, teeth record their point of origin as they take on specific isotopes of strontium and calcium; even the legendary "Ice Man" Otzi was able to be traced to his home village in Italy. The teeth of Hall's skeleton suddenly told quite a different story; the person whose bones these were almost certainly grew up in the north of England or in Scotland, along the granitic strata of the northeast coast -- whereas Le Vesconte had grown up near the chalky cliffs of Devon, quite a different environment altogether.

1845 photo of Goodsir (left) with reconstructed face

So the bones were not his -- then whose? There were a number of Scots on Franklin's expedition, including three of the four surgeons and assistant surgeons. Since there were photographs or portraits available, these men seemed likely and useful subjects. The next step was a facial reconstruction, where the skull is built up with clay or other materials to the likely average depth for various parts of the head; the resulting 'sculpture' often can help identify the individual. And, in this case, it did: the head was almost a perfect match for Harry Goodsir, the expedition's naturalist and assistant surgeon aboard HMS "Erebus." Even the gold filling turned out to corroborate his identity -- using gold to fill teeth was a relatively new procedure in 1845, and one of its pioneers, Robert Nasmyth, was a close friend of Harry; Harry's brother John even worked as Nasmyth's assistant for a time!

All this is still slightly short of certainty, though. DNA would be the ideal method of making the identification nearly 100% -- but where to get Harry's DNA? There are many ideas out there, including a rather challenging one -- extracting a hair from a locket made from strands from Harry's head -- but that locket also contains hair from 10 other individuals! The quest goes on -- perhaps some of the skeleton's foot bones, which Hall inadvertently left behind, may offer a clue. Still, forensic science has certainly clarified the matter, and I for one am pretty sure these bones are Harry's!

Weird and Tragic Shores

Charles Francis Hall may well be the most singular explorer in the entire history of the western fascination with the Arctic regions. Unlike the vast majority of such men, he never served in the Navy or merchant marine of any nation, nor did he have any family or local connections with whaling, fishing, sail-making or any other nautical trade. Although he published a sort of newspaper in Cincinnati, it would be a bit of a stretch to call him a “journalist,” and while for a time he had a business making engraved seals for business use, he himself was not a particularly accomplished engraver. Never apparently much of a family man, he more or less abandoned his wife and children when he first set off for the Arctic, and they were almost never the subject of his letters and journals. Indeed, if it were not for the singular leap he made out of the ordinary life of commerce and middle-class life, he might very well have never made much of a mark in any of his endeavors. Hall’s destiny was to do one thing, to do it with faith and fury and a determination which bordered on the monomaniacal – and yet, in so doing, he revealed a deeply humane and conflicted character, at once absolutely unique and yet absolutely a man of his time.

One of the most notable aspects of Hall's career was his close reliance on his Inuit guides, "Joe" Ebierbing and "Hannah" Tookoolito. Throughout his career, they were Hall’s most faithful and trusted companions, accompanying him on numerous sledging expeditions, providing food and shelter, and translating and interpreting at hundreds of interviews with Inuit who had stories to tell about the Franklin expedition. No only were they tireless and constant in their support for Hall’s often very demanding Arctic plans, but, between expeditions, they accompanied him throughout the United States, as well as permitting Hall to arrange for their exhibition in New York and Boston to raise funds for further missions, as well as appearing alongside him on his east coast lecture tour (see here for details of his Providence engagement).

Hall in a German graphic novel

And yet, astonishingly, they remained constant despite the death of two of their children while working for Hall, even though in each case the deaths were at least partly due to Hall’s demands – in the first case, for exhibitions and lectures, and in the second, for a difficult sledge-journey to King William Island (their second child, indeed, was named “King William” by Hall). Hall could be an imperious master, especially when his ‘sacred cause’ of finding Franklin’s men was at stake; Ebierbing, in his only surviving letter, recalled that during the attempt to reach King William, “Mr. Hall tease me all time. Make me go their [sic].” Yet not once, during the entire time of their association, did “Hannah” or “Joe” waver in their service to this man who, without their assistance, would likely have never earned the sobriquet he so dearly coveted – “Charles Hall, Arctic Explorer.”

When Chauncey Loomis arrived at "Thank God Harbor" to exhume Hall and conduct tests for arsenic, he -- like Owen Beattie -- felt that establishing the cause of death would be sufficient service to science and history to justify disturbing his bones. As this photo shows, the body was in considerably poorer shape than those uncovered at Beechey Island, although traces of his beard can be seen. Loomis felt the evidence was less than conclusive, but for my part I am personally convinced that Hall was poisoned with arsenic, most likely by Bessels.

Hall's death had many reverberations. One of the documents I found among the Hall papers at the Smithsonian was a printed copy of a petition circulated in Congress by Hall's widow, Mercy Ann Hall. In tones that evoke those of Lady Franklin, Mrs. Hall allowed that her late husband, "in his devotion to duty, was unsparing of his family and himself," asked only for "tender consideration" and some small "pecuniary assistance" (i.e, money) -- the amount was not specified. She was eventually granted a pension of $40 a month (about $750 in today's currency).

Hannah's Grave

"Joe" and "Hannah" returned to Groton where, as Joe wrote with some pride, their daughter Panik "go to school every day." Alas, there were not many more days remaining; her health had never been good, and she died at the age of nine. Hannah herself followed her adopted daughter to the grave on New Year's eve of 1876; Joe returned to the Arctic, serving as a guide for the Schwatka expedition in search of Franklin records from 1878 to 1880, and died some years later under uncertain circumstances. You can visit the graves of Hannah, little "Butterfly," and Panik at the Starr Burying Ground in Groton. A memorial stone for two other Inuit, Cudlargo and Ooseekong, stands nearby; see this article by Kenn Harper for more details.

We'll have many judgments to make about Hall, but love him or hate him, it's hard not to admire his persistence. And, in a field of endeavor crowded with fateful, haunting endings, his may well have been strangest of all. Weird and Tragic shores, indeed.