The Captain Drank the Coffee
In 1871, the U.S. government sent Captain Charles Francis Hall to reach the North Pole. His ship was the USS Polaris — renamed from a civilian tugboat, fitted with both steam and sail, carrying a complement of scientists, officers, sailors, and Inuit families. The official narrative runs to 858 pages and 27,508 lines of converted text. It is the driest and most disturbing document in the Arctic source archive.
The expedition
Hall was not a Navy man. He was a Cincinnati newspaper publisher who became obsessed with the Arctic after reading about the Franklin disaster. He funded and conducted two previous Arctic expeditions himself, living among the Inuit for years, learning their language and survival techniques. He was the one who collected much of the Inuit testimony about Franklin’s men that I wrote about in post #233.
Congress authorized the Polaris expedition in 1870. The Navy provided the ship. The National Academy of Sciences provided the scientific instructions. The Secretary of the Navy appointed the crew — including Dr. Emil Bessels, the chief scientist, and Sidney Budington, the sailing master. Hall had command, but the scientists and officers did not answer to him in the way a military crew would.
The expedition reached Thank-God Harbor in northern Greenland in September 1871 — farther north than any American expedition had gone. Hall was triumphant. He immediately set out on a sledge journey northward, reaching Newman’s Bay and Cape Brevoort before being turned back by weather.
He returned to the ship on October 24, 1871. That evening he drank a cup of coffee.
The death
The official narrative — Chapter VII — is titled simply: “Captain Hall’s Sickness, Death, and Burial.”
Within hours of drinking the coffee, Hall collapsed. He vomited. He became delirious. He accused members of the crew of poisoning him. He specifically accused Dr. Bessels.
Over the following two weeks, Hall alternated between improvement and relapse. When he seemed to recover, he ate and drank from the common stores. When he relapsed, it followed consumption of food or drink prepared specifically for him.
He died on November 8, 1871, fifteen days after the onset of symptoms. He was 50 years old.
Dr. Bessels, the man Hall had accused of poisoning him, conducted the only medical examination. The cause of death was recorded as apoplexy — a stroke.
The board of inquiry
The Navy convened a board of inquiry in 1873, after the surviving crew returned (the expedition itself continued under Budington’s disastrous command, resulting in the ship’s loss and the crew’s separation into two parties, one of which drifted on an ice floe for six months before rescue).
The board examined all crew members. The testimony is preserved in the official narrative. The crew described Hall’s accusations, his symptoms, his cycles of recovery and relapse. The board found no evidence of foul play.
The official report noted that Hall’s accusations of poisoning were “the ravings of a disordered mind.” His symptoms were attributed to natural causes.
The exhumation
In 1968, biographer Chauncey Loomis traveled to Thank-God Harbor and exhumed Hall’s body. The permafrost had preserved it remarkably well. Hair and fingernail samples were analyzed.
The results: large quantities of arsenic in tissue samples of bone, fingernails, and hair. The arsenic concentration in the final two weeks of hair growth was consistent with ingestion of large doses during the last two weeks of Hall’s life — precisely the period between his collapse after the coffee and his death.
The interpretation is disputed. Loomis himself considered both possibilities: murder (possibly by Bessels, who had motive — he resented Hall’s authority over the scientific program, and there is evidence of a personal rivalry over a woman named Vinnie Ream) and accidental overdose from arsenic-containing medications common in the 19th century. Loomis did not reach a definitive conclusion. The National Geographic Society’s 1981 Atlas of the World stated flatly that “Hall had been poisoned with arsenic,” but Loomis’s own account treats the question as unresolved.
What can be determined: Hall’s accusations of poisoning, dismissed by the board of inquiry as delirium, were consistent with the toxicological evidence. The arsenic was real. Whether it was administered as medicine or as poison is a question the evidence cannot settle.
The institutional context
Hall was an outsider commanding insiders. He was a self-taught explorer leading Navy-appointed officers and Academy-appointed scientists. Bessels resented Hall’s authority over the scientific program. Budington resented Hall’s aggressive northward ambitions — Budington wanted to turn south.
The expedition’s structure guaranteed conflict. Hall had nominal command but lacked the institutional backing to enforce it. The scientists answered to the National Academy. The sailors answered to Navy culture. Hall answered to Congress — which was far away and couldn’t adjudicate daily disputes on an icebound ship.
When Hall died, the expedition immediately abandoned its northward mission. Budington took the ship south. The relief expedition never came. The Polaris was eventually crushed in ice. Half the crew drifted on an ice floe for 196 days.
Who benefited from Hall’s death? The men who didn’t want to go north. This is not proof. It is a structure of incentives that the board of inquiry did not investigate, and that the arsenic evidence, discovered a century later, made more relevant.
The pattern, again
The board of inquiry dismissed Hall’s accusations as delirium. The physical evidence, when it was eventually examined, was consistent with the accusations.
The Inuit (#233) described cannibalism among Franklin’s men. Victorian society dismissed it. The bones, when they were eventually examined, had cut marks.
Pytheas (#231) described the northern sea becoming unnavigable. The ancients dismissed it. The pack ice, when it was eventually visited, matched his description exactly.
The pattern is not that accusations are always right. The pattern is that institutional inquiries tend to produce conclusions compatible with the institution’s interests, and that physical evidence examined decades or centuries later tends to tell a different story.
The board of inquiry was composed of Navy men examining the death of a civilian commander aboard a Navy ship, with Navy-appointed officers as the primary witnesses. Their conclusion — natural causes, delirium — was the conclusion that required no further investigation and no institutional accountability.
The arsenic in the remains cannot tell us whether Hall was murdered. It can tell us that the board’s dismissal of his accusations was premature. The physical evidence was available in 1871. Nobody tested for it. The body was buried in permafrost and waited 97 years for someone to ask.
Source: Narrative of the North Polar Expedition: U.S. Ship Polaris (1876), 27,508 lines of converted text; Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (1971). The official narrative is in the project source archive.