Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Modern Library Exploration)
by Chauncey Loomis, Andrea Barrett

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Book Reviews of Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Modern Library Exploration)

Book Review: Crazy american and his three trips to the arctic
Summary: 4 Stars

The first half of the book, based mainly on Hall's personal journals, recount his early life as a Cincinnati newspaper magnate who has the divine urge to mount an arctic expedition to find the survivors of the Franklin expedition. He travels to the Arctic an amateur, learns to live with the Eskimeauxs, tries to find the survivors but to no avail. To finance the next expedition he returns to the US and lectures about his experiences, bringing with him two esquimos as exhibts at his lectures but ultimalety they serve as money raising carny sideshows. He returns to the Arctic. He fails again. He returns to the US and manages to raise money from the post Civil War government of President Grant to mount an expedition to the North Pole. At this point this book changes style - for the good reason that the Franklin "rescue" expeditions are based on Hall's journals; for the Arctic expedition Hall journals are lost and references are drawn from journals of the surviving members of the exploaration's ship 'Polaris' and the subsequent navy inquiry in to the expedition's failure.

The journey to the Arctic, although at the time it reached the furthest north any westerner had ever traveled, soon disintegrated into a mutinous survival of the fittest which witnessed Hall's death, (by natural means?), the separation of half of the Polaris' crew to its fate on the ice flows and the other half to thier fate aboard the sinking Polaris.

This book discusses the historical evidence of Hall's three voyages, the subsequent Naval investigation of the fate of his final expedition on the Polaris and the circumstances surrounding his death. A fascinating epilogue, however, is Loomis' journey, 97 years after Hall's death, to perform an autopsy on Hall's body to answer the question the Victorian naval inquiry could not answer - how exactly did Hall meet his demise.

This book is well written and ultimatly engaging.

All in all an engaging read about an American fundamentalist God fearing man whose love of the Arctic drove him to his death. Oh and Mrs Hall? Yes there was one but in many ways she is the unsung and very silent hero of this book - she barely saw her husband and never had the money to try and discover his ultimate fate - unlike Lady Franklin.

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