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Product details

• Format Paperback | 224 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229 x 13mm | 349.27g
• Publication date 30 Jun 2006
• Publisher Career Press
• Publication City/Country New Jersey, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 1564148793
• ISBN13 9781564148797
• Bestsellers rank 23,684

Rough Weather All Day: An Account of the “Jeannette” Search Expedition

by Patrick Cahill, edited by David Hirzel

Pacifica, CA: Terra Nova Press.  173 pp., $20.00 USD.

Reviewed by: P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc12@psu.edu


James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who had dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, was equally fascinated with the Arctic. In 1873, Bennett dispatched two reporters to search for the survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s doomed North Pole expedition.  Five years later, he assigned a reporter to an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin sponsored by the American Geographic Society and led by a U.S. Army lieutenant named Frederick Schwatka.

Bennett sponsored his greatest Arctic venture in 1879.   A U.S. Navy captain, George Washington DeLong, was ordered to locate the ‘lost’ expedition of the Swede Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld—and then attempt to reach the North Pole itself.  DeLong sailed from San Francisco in the Pandora, a former Royal Navy vessel which Bennett had purchased and renamed Jeannette after his sister.  The navy agreed to man the ship if Bennett paid all the expenses of the expedition.

Even before the Jeannette reached the Arctic, Nordenskiöld and his ship Vega broke through the ice north of Russia and emerged into the Bering Sea.  With no dramatic rescue to report, DeLong continued with his secondary mission and turned north towards Elisha Kent Kane’s chimerical open sea and the North Pole beyond.  The Jeannette was soon beset in the ice north of the New Siberian Islands and, after two grueling years drifting about in the ice, crushed.  DeLong and his men made a desperate retreat in the ship’s small boats to the Lena River delta on the Siberian coast.  Only one of the three boats reached safety, another vanished with all hands, and DeLong’s own small boat made it to shore where he and all but two of his men starved to death as they waited in vain for relief.  To intensify the disaster, a newly-commissioned U.S. Navy vessel sent to find DeLong, the U.S.S. Rodgers, was itself burned to the waterline and blown to pieces.

This interesting volume presents an edited version of the diary of a sailor on board the Rodgers, a thirty-two-year-old Irish-American mechanic named Patrick Cahill.  Cahill was brought to the U.S. as a boy and by his mid-twenties had found work as on a railway in Panama.  In 1880, Cahill joined the U.S. Navy as a Machinist’s Mate and the following year volunteered for service on the Rodgers as the navy sought to learn the fate of DeLong and his ship and crew.

Cahill must have possessed some literary ability in addition to his skills with machinery, as he was contracted by the San Francisco Chronicle to act as a correspondent during the Rodgers search for DeLong.  Cahill’s notes from the cruise never seem to have made it to the Chronicle, but a typescript was later made of them and, combined with interviews he gave in his seventies to the Oakland Tribune, form the source material for this edited volume.

Cahill’s observations make for terrific reading.  He describes his mates as “some pretty rough sailors” (p. 26), many of whom had been north previously and knew to carry a stash of trade goods with which to barter for furs and ivory in the far north.  As Cahill wrote: “We expect to have all kinds of curios when we return” (p. 30).  While the carpenter and cook suffered grievously from sea-sickness, Cahill loves being under sail: “it is grand to look at a big sea just as it comes aboard and dashes all over everything” (p. 31).  When the Rodgers arrived in ‘Port Petropaulovski’ (now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) in late July, the officers on board the Russian cruiser Strelok (Cahill called it the 'Straylok') toasted the men of the Rodgers and the Russian Emperor, at which point the Americans who exactly was the emperor since the assassination of the last one.  This quickly ended the celebrations, as the Russians, on the far side of the empire, had not yet learned of the assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg more than four months earlier.

By late August, the Rodgers had cleared the Bering Strait and searched at Wrangel Island and along the north coast of Siberian for any trace of the Jeannette.  Finding none, the ship returned southwards and November anchored for the winter in St. Lawrence Bay on the eastern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula on the far eastern tip of Siberia.  There, on November 30th, after the fire pumps had been disconnected to keep them from freezing, a fire in the fore hold broke out.  The crew battled the fire as long as possible while the ship was run aground in about three fathoms.  The ship burned to the waterline, and these are some of Cahill’s most vivid descriptions, as the crew scurried supplies ashore in the small boats before the ship was a total loss.

The entire crew escaped, to face a forced winter amidst four small villages of Inuit who nevertheless shared out what limited stocks of walrus and seal they possessed.  Despite the near-starvation diet that nearly killed him, Cahill maintained his daily observations throughout the winter until a whaler arrived in the spring and took the men off to San Francisco.  There Cahill recovered from his fascinating ordeal, left the navy, and made a career for himself in the city’s cable cars.

The volume is the product of Terra Nova Press, described as a ‘small POD publishing enterprise [that] seeks to bring into print the smaller, less-well-known true stories of polar exploration in the days of the sailing ship.’  The press is the result of editor David Hirzel’s longtime interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration and, in  particular, the Irish contribution to same, as previous works have covered the life and travels of the ‘Irish Giant’ of the Royal Navy, Tom Crean.

The lack of proper editing does show at times, with errors in punctuation and especially with inconsistencies in the use of italics and/or underlining for the names of ships and the titles of newspapers.  In spite of these, the volume contains fascinating insights into a little-known sideshow of the vast saga of the Jeannette expedition and its aftermath.

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Product details

• Format Hardback | 312 pages
• Dimensions 162.05 x 234.7 x 27.43mm | 653.17g
• Publication date 14 May 2013
• Publisher University Press of New England
• Imprint Northeastern University Press
• Publication City/Country Massachusetts, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 1555537928
• ISBN13 9781555537920
• Bestsellers rank 1,185,909

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure

by Arthur Conan Doyle; Edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower

University of Chicago Press, $35

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "came of age in the Arctic," celebrating his 21st birthday at nearly 80 degrees north, is one of those little diamonds of fact in whose facets all kinds of unexpected light is prismed. For, although the editors don't mention it, Doyle was born in May of 1859, the very month that Sir Leopold McClintock came upon the last note left by Sir John Franklin's men on King William Island, and although Doyle describes his shipboard service as a bit of a "lark," the future creator of Sherlock Holmes was surely drawn to the Arctic partly for its air of unsolved mysteries,  implacable ice, and uncharted hazards. It featured in two of his stories -- "The Captain of the Pole Star" (based on the same experiences this diary recounts) and, somewhat less directly, in "Black Peter," from the Holmes canon, both included in the present volume.

Lellenberg and Stashower have done an admirable job in presenting this material, and the volume encompasses both a complete facsimile of the actual diary -- filled with Doyle's illustrations, some of them full-page or folding -- and a transcription of the same with copious notes.  These, however, are directed mostly at readers who will know Doyle from his Holmes stories, and don't -- alas -- provide much in the way of Arctic context.  For instance, although Doyle's ship, the "Hope," sails in the company of the Peterhead whalers "Erik" and "Windward," one will not learn from these notes that both vessels later played key roles in the relief of the Peary Arctic Expedition in 1899-1900 (though  the Windward's bringing home of Nansen is mentioned). In fact, there's not much about any earlier Arctic expeditions, with the exception of the fictionalized one of Mary Shelley's "Captain Walton" in Frankenstein.

Doyle's journal, like that of Walton, is framed at first with a series of letters home, then quickly moves on to the daily business of the ship. Comic relief is offered with a boxing match between Doyle and the ship's steward, which -- since the seaman was short and unacquainted with sparring -- ended with Doyle landing most of the blows, and later overhearing the steward's admiration: "He's the best surrr-geon we've had! He's blackened my e'e!"

Doyle seems to have made a similarly favorable impression on the rest of the crew, finding the Captain, John Gray, an especially congenial comrade.  The ship's first stop was at the edge of the pack ice, where there were baby seals to be clubbed, an activity in which Doyle endeavored to do his best, though remarking "it is bloody work dashing out the poor little beggars brains while they look up with their big dark eyes into your face." He fell into the water several times, once -- not being noticed -- nearly fatally, but was no worse the wear for it, enduring the well-meant gibes of crew and Captain, who dubbed him "the great northern diver."

The journal itself, aside from a few amusing anecdotes such as these, continues on a fairly pedestrian manner; there are accounts of various hunts, of the chasing and securing of two (disappointingly small) whales, and a fair number of days with "nothing to do but grouse, and so we did." Doyle's handwriting is fairly readable once one gets used to it, and his drawings -- as good of ships and animals as any nautical amateur, though dismal at people -- provide numerous delightful illustrations of the account. The tale of one "John Thomas"-- a pet sea-snail Doyle kept in a jar -- is told with high drollery, concluding with an obituary in which the dear departed is praised for "never looking down upon his smaller associates because they were protozoa while he could fairly lay claim to the high family of Echinodermata." It is charming, but were it not the work of Doyle, it would scarcely be distinguished among ship-board narratives.

But of course, it was written by Doyle. And it offers many enticing details to the very early part of his career: that while on ship he devoured Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship; that in his first medical practice, his consulting room was adorned with Esquimaux sealskin pants, along with the bones of a bladdernose seal he shot himself; that he launched his public speaking career with a lecture on the Arctic in December of 1883, mentioning Davis, Baffin, Hudson, and Parry; and that two early publications on the Frozen Regions -- "The Captain of the Pole Star" as well as an essay, "Glamor in the Arctic," which ran in the Idler -- were among his very first published works. Reading the essay and the fictional tales, one can't help but see in Doyle a wily brain at work, a brain more clever by far than the somewhat conventional skull in which it found itself encased. Such a mind could spin the merest straws of an uneventful polar voyage into gripping tale of dark moods leading to Arctic madness amidst the frosty Sirens of snow and ice.

This visually very pleasing volume is sturdily bound, beautifully printed, and very reasonably priced. And although, in terms of life on the Arctic seas, its contribution is quite modest, it gives us a truly singular and delightful insight into the mind and habits of a man who would, not long after, bring to life two of the most enduring characters in the history of literature.

Eric Ames

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

When the name of Carl Hagenbeck comes up these days, it's most often in reference to his innovations in the design of zoos -- and justly so, as he was certainly the first to place animals in realistic-seeming environments. His other accomplishments, however, were far more varied -- and in certain aspects troubling -- than that. He was an early, and persistent exhibitor of humans from exotic lands; his built environments were modelled not on the actual places the animals lived, but on massive panoramas and cycloramas in which a daub of paint was as good as an iceberg; he was a pioneering maker of wildlife films, but the animals in them were most often shot and killed on camera; and perhaps most significantly, he is the only one of many such exhibitors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose establishment -- the Hamburg Tierpark -- still stands.

Eric Ames' remarkable new study is the first full-length account of Hagenbeck's career in English. It's also the first study in any language to consider his life's work in the context of our modern understandings of zoology, anthropology, and visual culture. It's lucidly written, in a manner that will delight both the specialist and the casual reader, and it's amply illustrated and beautifully designed. It also reveals some very troubling chapters in the history of zoos and exhibitions, including unexpected connections -- between zoos, panoramas, and early film -- and uncomfortable juxtapositions, such as Hagenbeck's placing human and animal exhibits side-by-side, or his "safari" films. And yet we must not be too quick to condemn such entertainments, for as Ames makes increasingly clear as the book progresses, this is also our history -- the history of our curiosity, our demand to see the wonders of the natural world, and of our own long-held yet half-articulated assumptions about the function of cultural spectatorship.

Ames begins by laying out the territory, carefully articulating the history of 'themed spaces,' and of their rise in the age of industrial expansion and world population growth. His account is clear and fluid, drawing effectively on Foucault and Baudrillard without ever, even for a moment, descending into theoretical gobbledegook. He makes fascinating connections and contrasts between the cultural "museum" -- at which, by its very nature, the actual living subjects of its displays are absent -- and the ethnographical show, in which the presence of those very subjects -- however we may regard the ethics of such displays today -- guaranteed their authenticity. Hagenbeck's genius, as Ames describes it, was in realizing that the authenticity of his themed spaces depended on the seamless linkage between the scenic evocation of place and the presence of its animal and human "inhabitants."

The centerpiece of this progression lies in the history of Hagenbeck's "Eismeer" or 'Sea of Ice' panorama. Originally, much like the managers of other travelling menageries, Hagenbeck made do with simple flat painted backdrops to add whatever scenic elements might emphasize an animal's exotic origins. These were as generic as in any circus or carnival, and as a result added little to the perception of authenticity. Hagenbeck made his first innovation by employing moving panoramas, which added a narrative element missing in such flat panels, and grouping animals together by their region of origin. But with the enormous living panorama he designed for his Tierpark, he outdid himself and by old craft created new art -- new enough that, like Robert Barker's original panorama design in 1796, Hagenbeck had it patented.

The patent diagram is reproduced in Ames's book, and a colored detail serves as its frontispiece. Here we see the spectator -- a man with a bowler hat and a cane -- actually thrust in among the environment upon which he gazes. Just beyond him, past a low barrier of ice and stone, seals frolic in an artificial lagoon. Nearby, a flock of penguins wanders about, and an "Eskimo" stands beside his wooden hut. On the next tier, behind a trench hidden from view, polar bears stroll about a second lagoon, while at the highest point, mountains of ice and snow loom over the entire scene. Combining stage ideas such as false perspective with the blending of painted and built environments common in cycloramas of the era, Hagenbeck's exhibition used animals, humans, and a built environment to amplify each others' authenticity. Of course, we all know that there are no Eskimos in Antarctica, nor any penguins in the Arctic -- but nevertheless the presence of one increases the felt authenticity of the other.

There were, of course, trade-offs in Hagenbeck's system. The deep trenches and barriers needed to separate the seals from their natural predators had themselves to be obscured, so that their artifice would not undercut the scene. The "Eskimos" in this arrangement were actually the animals' trainers and keepers in northern costume (their seal-skin coats had to be replaced with cloth replicas after it became clear that the polar bears regarded anything in a seal's skin as a sort of seal). Actual Eskimos were also a part of Hagenbeck's exhibitions, but he could not risk putting them in the midst of his specially-built enclosure. Instead, along with various groups of African tribespeople, they were placed on opposite sides of a nearby lagoon, where the notion of the 'meeting of extremes' was the dominant trope, and geographical difference rather than similarity drove the spectacle.

The arrangements necessary to secure both animals and humans for display are also detailed by Ames, and here the story is a far grimmer one. Like many other zoo and circus managers, Hagenbeck relied upon a number of agents and intermediaries to secure living creatures for his exhibits, keeping his own hands clean, metaphorically speaking. And yet of course it was the knowledge that Hagenbeck would pay handsomely that created this secondary market. In Labrador, there was a roaring trade in Inuit, with several different entities competing for this human market. The pressure on the indigenous population was so great that, early in 1911, the legislature of Newfoundland and Labrador explicitly banned the taking of Inuit for human exhibition. The ban did not, however, much deter Hagenbeck, who found other means to secure "Eskimo" performers. In November of 1911, he hired the troupe led by John C. Smith and Esther Enutseak for his "Nordland" exhibition, happily taking on a group with nearly twenty years experience on the "show" circuit, many of whose younger members had been born on the road and had been no closer to the North Pole than London.

Ames does a capable and thorough job of documenting Hagenbeck's activities both in acquiring new 'specimens' and designing new exhibits, no mean feat considering the variety of his shows and the length of his career. Remarkably, his business emerges as one of the key links between older pre-cinema technologies such as the panorama, and the emerging world of film. Hagenbeck realized early on that his menagerie could serve more than one purpose; like his contemporary, American zoo and studio owner William Selig, he knew that film audiences would pay good money to see authentically-staged dramas featuring "wild" animals alongside humans. And yet, unlike most of Selig's animal films, Hagenbeck's great theme was not simply a journey through the perils of the jungle but the "hunt" -- and a hunt to the death was the biggest draw of all. To this end, he chose animals from his park that were old, or infirm, and thus could be considered expendable. The directors then staged elaborate scenes, whether in the Arctic or the "African" jungle, in which, just as in his park, some natural barrier -- a river, say -- would keep his human actors safe until the final, decisive moment. And then, while the cameras rolled, the great animals would be shot and killed, demonstrating once more the dominance of Man over Animal.

Hagenbeck's films -- among which was one"Eisbärjagd," which featured the death of a polar bear, along with sea lions, seals, and walruses, have mostly, unfortunately, been lost; only one, Løvejagten -- a Danish film made with two lions purchased from Hagenbeck -- survives, but it is difficult to see. Nevertheless, the connection between the kind of authenticity conveyed by a zoo with a "natural" setting and that conferred by a film, is clear enough. Hagenbeck's business, in this sense, forms a vital evolutionary link between both the old panoramas and menageries,through early zoos, to modern entertainments such as the iMAX film, The Serengheti.

Remarkably, Hagenbeck's zoo is currently undertaking a revival and reconceptualization of its original "Eismeer" panorama, dubbed the neue Eismeer, which is presently under construction. Once again combining old and new technologies, it will, when complete, be the first new outdoor display of its kind in more than a century.

Ames's book recounts all these histories with verve and detail, and his text is richly annotated with images, and supported with copious notes. Few of these images have been reproduced outside of Germany, and many have only recently been discovered. Ames has worked closely with the current archivist of the Hamburg Tierpark, and his research in other world archives brings unparalleled depth to a history which was, in the past, very poorly documented and ill-understood. Ames's book casts a rich and provocative light into this previously unrecounted history, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the human fascination with the exotic, the history of zoos, the history of film, or of cultural spectacles of all kinds.

by William Battersby

Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, £20

ISBN 978-0752455129

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

With the publication of this book, we now have full biographies of all of the chief officers of Sir John Franklin's final Arctic expedition of 1845. Franklin himself, of course, is a man of evidently endless fascination; Francis Crozier, his second-in-command, makes up in fortitude what he apparently lacked in charm, and has been seen by some as the "Last Man Standing." And yet it's Fitzjames, the third in line, who has had, in death as he had in life, the most charmed of reputations, despite the fact that so little was known about him. His lively letters sent home via the last port-of-call in Greenland, his gallant good looks (available in two different daguerreotype images), and his boundless enthusiasm ("I hope that we are forced to stay at least one winter in the ice," as memorably voiced by Thom Fell in 2005's Search for the Northwest Passage), are all part of his attraction. Indeed, he is the only figure from the expedition other than Franklin himself to have inspired a novel (John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, 1999).

But who was this man? By all accounts, a spirited young fellow, with a heroic rescue and a dogged expedition in the Middle East to his credit, but no Arctic experience at all. His service and promotion? Well, there are a few blanks here and there. His parents? Ahem, may we have another question, please? And yet, as William Battersby shows us in this engaging and well-researched volume, his life up until the moment of his departure for the North is recoverable in a remarkable degree of detail.

Except, as it happens, with the matter of his parentage. Not wanting to disclose any trade secrets here, I will simply say that Battersby's solution to this longstanding mystery is, I believe, the correct one, although it is (in part) a very close conjecture. "Fitzjames," after all, means merely "son of James," and had known use before as a patronymic vague enough to both hint at and gently pass over any questions of legitimacy. And yet, though deprived of the privileges he might have had as a legitimate heir, Fitzjames in fact enjoyed in his relations precisely the kind of deep and satisfying intimacies which were so often lacking from natural parents in this era. His foster parents, Robert and Louisa Coningham, raised him with the same kindness and affection with which they did their own son, William, whom Fitzjames referred to as "Willie." The two of them had a brotherly bond which endured throughout Fitzjames's life, and it was to Elizabeth "the wife of him I love best," that he addressed the charming letters sent from Greenland.

And yet, despite their closeness, the destinies of William Coningham and James Fitzjames could hardy have been more different. Coningham, through inheritance, became by degrees a wealthier and wealthier man, while Fitzjames, who first volunteered for the Royal Navy at the age of twelve, had always to seek new assignments, and promotion, by the skin of his teeth. For although his upbringing was a very good one, he lacked the sort of "friends" that were usually required for Naval advancement, particularly in times of peace. The most difficult step of his rise through the ranks was his ascent to Midshipman, and here Fitzjames's determination motivated him to permit an untruth to go unremarked -- that he had not, in fact, served the requisite full year as a first-class volunteer. This was later discovered, but glossed over, as much to avoid embarrassment to the more senior officers involved as to spare Fitzjames, and he soon distinguished himself sufficiently that there was no reason to revisit the lapse.

And his career was in every respect a brilliant one. He cut his explorer's teeth on an expedition down the Eurphrates in 1835-36, a struggle of man, machine, and water of almost mythological proportions. He participated in the naval blockade in Syria in 1839, and then went on to serve in Britain's Chinese conflict, which involved both naval bombardment and hand-to-hand street fighting. It was here that Fitzjames met many of the men whom he would later select for "Erebus" and "Terror," among them Edward Couch and George Hodgson. But perhaps his most important new friend was John Barrow, the son of Sir John Barrow, whose advocacy for Arctic exploration was so powerful and influential that it had already shaped an era.

Still, as Battersby notes, this connection alone would scarcely be sufficient to cause Fitzjames to rise above hundreds of men with similar records to attain a coveted senior post on a vaunted Arctic expedition. In this case, his detective work cannot, ultimately, solve the problem, but it appears to have been some service that Fitzjames performed for John Barrow's brother George, something which caused his friend to feel he was very much in his debt, and to intercede with his father. The results were impressive, and fateful: a promotion to Commander, and a ship which, as Battersby notes, brought him to London "at exactly the right (or wrong) time to be appointed to the Franklin Expedition."

It also goes some way to explain why it was Fitzjames, and not Crozier, who selected the junior officers for that expedition. In his biography of Crozier, Michael Smith makes much of this, seeing it as almost a direct insult to an officer of Crozier's seniority to deny him the privilege traditionally accorded to seconds. Authorities seem divided as to whether this was really so severe a breach of protocol as Smith claims, but there has also, as Battersby notes, been criticism of Fitzjames's choices. And yet, as he demonstrates, his selection was not so anomalous as is often claimed; the small number of men with specific Arctic experience (Ross's Antarctic expedition had been sent with many fewer), the supposed regional prejudices (they were in fact quite a diverse and representative batch), or the preference for former messmates (which would have been expected no matter who was doing the choosing).

And, in any case, they sailed into an oblivion that would have been difficult to avoid, even had every man aboard been a hardened Polar veteran. As Glyn Williams has noted, it was precisely the Franklin expedition's success in reaching an area assumed by those who searched for it to be impassible that delayed -- fatally -- any chance of rescue. Battersby, unlike Smith and other biographers, avoids any speculation about the fate of Fitzjames or any other individual men after the abandonment of "Erebus" and "Terror" in 1848. It's a judicious and understandable caution, although given the remarkable detail he has given us of Fitzjames's earlier life and career, it feels somewhat like jumping off a cliff into the void (and perhaps that is his intent). He instead traces the sense of loss via Fitzjames's foster-brother William Coningham, and thus gives a fresh sense of the admixture of grief and admiration felt by those who knew Franklin and his officers personally. It's a fitting conclusion.

There are some additional thoughts and appendices, including a poignant poem, "A Sailor's Life," penned by Fitzjames, and several excellent maps. The illustrative material is rich and well-reproduced, though I hope I will be forgiven for saying that my favorite plate is that giving both of Fitzjames's photographic poses side by side. For some years, it frustrated me to see one or the other of these images reproduced, without any indication that two existed: here we finally have Fitzjames, with and without telescope, and without and with wry smile. Like this plate, Battersby's book is the first really full depiction that we have had, and it ably fills our previously incomplete portrait of Franklin and his senior officers. It's a book that no one with an interest in this expedition, or this period, will want to miss.

Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73

Translated and Edited by William Barr

U. Calgary Press $44.95 (ebook free)


Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


Since it's already been the subject of quite a number of books -- Chauncey Loomis's Weird and Tragic Shores, not to mention dueling exposés by Bruce Henderson (Fatal North) and Richard Parry (Trial by Ice), one might be forgiven for thinking that there's not much new to be learned about the ill-fated Polaris expedition to the North Pole commanded by Charles Francis Hall in 1871. One would be wrong, of course.

The expedition's doctor, Emil Bessels, published his own account of the voyage in Germany in 1879 under the title Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition, but until now, there has been no English translation of his memoir. Thankfully, William Barr has undertaken this invaluable project, as he did earlier with Heinrich Klutschak's account of the Schwatka expedition, and this edition has all the customary hallmarks of his care and erudition. And, as Barr notes in an Epilogue, there's a new reason to take an interest in Bessels' version of events, since evidence has recently emerged giving him a powerful motive to have murdered his commander.

Those expecting such a book to have a lurid element will, however, be disappointed. Bessels, whatever his human failings, turns out to have been quite a good writer, seasoning his account with humor, relating events dispassionately, and demonstrating substantial knowledge of previous polar exploration. Early on, in giving his account of Isaac Israel Hayes's claim of a new furthest north, along with the sighting of an "open polar sea," Bessels offers an acute analysis, showing that Hayes's observations are completely inconsistent with both claims. Of course, it helped that the Polaris had just sailed through, and beyond, this purported open sea, but the clarity of his assessment is still impressive.

A few pages later, we're treated to one of the more wryly delightful accounts of the frustrations of shipboard dining in the frozen north that I know:

The food that was served up hot suffered a more significant cooling on its trip from the platter to the plate, and from the latter to the mouth, than the crust of the earth did at the start of the Ice Age; and food that came cold to the table became even colder there, before it could be eaten. Mayonnaise attained the consistency that properly prepared arrowroot ought to possess; English mustard reached the degree of hardness that a sculptor gives his modelling clay, and butter acquired the consistency of air-dried Swiss cheese.  Anyone who had a feeling heart beating in his breast would be moved to deep sadness by the sight of the sour pickled cucumbers. Half a dozen cycles of thawing and freezing which they had experienced in succession had etched massive wrinkles in their youthfully green skins which covered the wrinkled, shrunken flesh in folds. Surrounded by plump onions, slender beans and crisp heads of cauliflower that swam in crisping vinegar, they formed the saddest component that any still-life ever incorporated. 

Through passages such as these, the reader, quite naturally, begins to trust Bessels' account, and so of course wonders how he will treat of the death of his commander -- but here he or she will be disappointed. Hall's sickness and death are dealt with in very plain and prosaic manner, a bit surprising for someone who as the ship's doctor might feel that his readers would expect a greater degree of medical detail. There is, however, a telling moment after Bessels describes Hall's burial; he offers as his elegy a stanza from Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno.  The passage, which he may have chosen for its evocative imagery of sinners buried up to their necks in ice, has another significance: it's from that particular circle of Hell where those who have been treacherous to kin and country are punished.

Tookoolito at Hall's Grave (from a sketch by Bessels)

For there can be little doubt that Bessels possessed not only the means, but the motive for murdering Hall. As Barr notes, letters written by him to the young sculptress Vinnie Ream, with whom both he and Hall dined on several occasions before sailing, show that he was infatuated with her; my own research revealed that Hall, too, had special feelings for Ream (though his may have well been merely platonic). Bessels couldn't have helped but have noticed the gifts for Hall, including a miniature copy of her famous bust of Abraham Lincoln, that arrived by steamer at the Polaris's last stop at Upernavik, which were prominently displayed in his cabin. Jealousy, it seems, got the best of him, and augmented by the general resentment against Hall felt by others of the German scientific staff, led him to poison the captain's coffee with arsenic, with additional injections as "treatment" (Bessels claimed these were quinine), leading to the slow painful death of the one man who might, had he lived, have managed a sledge-trip to the pole.

Yet despite our knowledge of his crime, Bessels remains an observant and even charming narrator, and as Hall's death recedes into the background, the tale takes on, once again, the general descriptive tones of exploration narrative. As Barr notes, there's considerable information about climate, flora, and fauna, not to mention early Inuit settlements, that is elsewhere unavailable. Among these passages, though, there are some which raise still another concern.  According to the testimony given at the board of inquiry, the logbooks and journals from the Polaris were lost -- and yet Bessels, oblivious to this (or perhaps thinking his German readers would be unacquainted with the circumstances), seems at places to be drawing from them. It raises suspicions as to whether Bessels might have absconded with some of the missing logbooks, which might well have contained material he thought could incriminate him.

One gets the impression that Bessels was a methodial, efficient man who took pride in his scientific work, and hoped that his association with the disastrous expedition would not impede his overall career. If so, his hopes were largely unfulfilled; although a participant in some minor expeditions in the years after Polaris, the more ambitious ones he sought were postponed or cancelled due to difficulties with funding and other support. Along the way, he lost his office at the Smithsonian, and a fire destroyed his home near Washington D.C. (and with it, one supposes, any evidence for malfeasance there might have been among his papers); his last few years were marked by illness and instability, and he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one.

William Barr, as ever, has produced a well-translated and throughly annotated edition. Extensive footnotes clarify many of Bessels' more obscure references, and the end-matter of the book includes a note on the new evidence as to his motive for murdering Hall, an account of the finding of the Board of Inquiry in his case, brief biographies of the senior members of the Polaris expedition, and a thorough bibliography. The University of Calgary Press has done the scholarly world a favor by making the book available as a free .pdf, but the printed version is well worth it; the quality of its production is high, and it's a book that deserves to be on the shelf beside any other accounts of the Polaris affair. It balances them, both with what it adds -- and what we know it withholds -- from that tragic story.

Product details

• Format Hardback | 448 pages
• Dimensions 254 x 314.96 x 38.1mm | 2,948.35g
• Publication date 01 Nov 2016
• Publisher OMNIBUS PRESS
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note colour photos
• ISBN10 178038016X
• ISBN13 9781780380162
• Bestsellers rank 141,262

Product details

• Format Hardback | 336 pages
• Dimensions 163 x 241 x 29mm | 576g
• Publication date 24 Feb 2013
• Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
• Publication City/Country New York, United States
• Language English
• Edition Statement New
• ISBN10 0199765693
• ISBN13 9780199765690
• Bestsellers rank 106,207

Flight to the Top of the World: the Adventures of Walter Wellman

By David L. Bristow

University of Nebraska Press, $29.95 (hc); $28.45 (kindle)

Reviewed by P.J. Capelotti


Walter Wellman is a unique figure in American journalism and exploration, comparable in some respects with Henry Morton Stanley.  However, since Wellman straddled many different fields: journalism, politics, exploration, aviation, technology, and the Polar Regions, he has been a particularly difficult individual to pin down in any one account of his life of writing and adventure.  His five expeditions in search of the North Pole from 1894-1909, along with an attempted stunt flight across the Atlantic in 1910, have long defined his life.  The present volume moves a bit closer to the goal of a full accounting but, in the end, as did Wellman himself so many times, it comes up short by failing to reach its stated goal.

The strengths of this biography are also its weaknesses.  First, the revelation of new details of Wellman’s youth and the beginnings and mid-career of his journalism, especially with regard to the prevailing management and labor turbulence and endemic corruption of the turn of the last century, are excellent.  Unfortunately, these make up a small fraction of the narrative.  Even here there are notable flaws.  Wellman’s coverage of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago is almost completely overlooked, and covered in barely a sentence.  This critical event in early middle age brought together and put on vivid display all of his eventual obsessions: technology (specifically aeronautics), the Arctic (specifically Franz Josef Land and the North Pole), and Norway (specifically its Arctic sea hunters).

The additions to the Wellman story are offset, as well, by the short shrift given to the final two and a half decades of Wellman’s life.  A full account of what he was doing in those years has been particularly lacking, especially so since Wellman’s expeditions have been covered in varying amounts of detail and accuracy in numerous prior accounts.  Wellman’s deep and complex secret life, beginning also in middle age and involving mistresses and illegitimate children in the U.S. and Europe, may never be known to a satisfying certainty.  It is possible if not probable that he was a bigamist, married simultaneously to Laura McCann, with whom he had five children, in the U.S., and Bergljot Bergersen, with whom he had three, in Norway.  Wellman likely met Bergersen during his final attempt to reach the North Pole from Spitsbergen in 1909, when Wellman was 51 and Bergersen 27.

Wellman died of cancer in 1934 at the age 74 and was cremated, his ashes scattered no one knows where.  Laura McCann died in April, 1938, at the age of 76, and was buried in a solitary grave in Waterford, Virginia, under the name Laura Wellman.  Bergersen died exactly a month later, at the age of 56, and was buried in her father’s plot in Vestre Gravlund in Oslo under the name Bergljot Wellman.  To the last, Wellman’s first wife despised him, while Bergersen’s story is wholly dark.  The stories of both relationships, along with at least one other that produced a child, remain largely hidden behind Wellman’s conspicuously public persona of the adventuring writer.

The second strength of the work is in the author’s overall thesis that Wellman was not so much a journalist or explorer as he was the packager of media events and, in this sense, one of the creators of our modern media environment, which sometimes can feel like our entire environment.  That Wellman was an augury, or even the progenitor, of the 24-hour media cycle, is an area ripe for exploration.  Unfortunately this theme is not reinforced enough to form a continuous thread throughout the work.

As this reviewer wrote more than two decades ago, there was a definite “hype effect” revealed by the confluence of Wellman’s journalism and his expeditions.  Ever since his first expedition, a lark to the Bahamas in 1891 to discover the precise landing spot of Columbus in the New World, Wellman continuously over-promised and under-delivered.  This worked so long as editors, sponsors, and the public, could be convinced that Wellman had an actual chance to reach the North Pole, or cross the Atlantic.

In these large and complicated quests, Wellman’s journalism always served not to inform but to entertain and, more critically, to mask his innate incompetence as either a qualified technologist or a properly prepared expedition leader.  In places, the author himself falls for this.  Describing the 1894 slaughter off the north coast of Svalbard of Wellman’s cohort of Belgian draft dogs, the author asserts: “Other expeditions planned on a high mortality rate for their dogs…” (p. 33).  This is a grotesque oversimplification of Wellman’s inexcusable shooting of all of his dogs just days into his first polar expedition.  Other expeditions did occasionally shoot their dogs, but these sad events came near the end of long and grueling treks or when the explorers were either in extremis or as part of a planned usage of dog meat to save men from scurvy.  For Wellman to make no attempt to bring home his dogs and instead shoot them before he had traveled anywhere, was disgraceful.

Such incompetence allowed professional explorers to quickly size up Wellman and agree that there was no chance of him ever reaching the North Pole, with or without an airship.  Robert Peary knew before 1900 that he would have no competition from Wellman.  Fridtjof Nansen in 1899 had been appalled at Wellman’s casual attitude to planning an escape route from Franz Josef Land.  A decade later, staring at the pillaged ruins of Wellman’s airship base on Danskøya, Nansen scathingly described Wellman as an advertising fraud.

By the time of his aborted 1909 polar airship flight, Wellman was all but ignored even by his own newspaper.  This chronic under-delivery of hard geographic results, more than anything, signaled the end of the explorer’s road for Wellman, and renders the 1910 transatlantic attempt more of a true ‘stunt,’ whereas the polar airship expeditions can be seen, at least in their early iterations, as serious attempts at pioneering fraught new technologies in a most extreme environment.

A more fitting title for the self-described hustling newspaperman would have been: WELLMAN! The Meteoric Rise and Stunning Crash of America’s Most Adventurous Journalist.  The chosen title, with its ironic claim of a Flight to the Top of the World that never came close to happening, copies Wellman’s optimistic hopes but masks his ultimate grinding unhappiness.  This is reflected nowhere so much as in an image of Wellman in 1926 (p. 292), looking utterly worn and vastly older than his 68 years.  It is a portrait of a beaten, forgotten man, one without a single legitimate public success to his credit and with his private life a hopeless shambles.  Wellman would never admit it but he had always been more Barnum than Nansen, yet without a fraction of Barnum’s success, fame, or legacy.  That Wellman is yet to receive his due.

Product details

• Format Paperback | 395 pages
• Dimensions 150 x 226 x 30mm | 567g
• Publication date 06 Feb 2007
• Publisher St. Martins Press-3pl
• Publication City/Country New York
• Language English
• Edition Statement Reprint
• ISBN10 0312340028
• ISBN13 9780312340025
• Bestsellers rank 2,295,755

Product details

• Format Paperback | 260 pages
• Dimensions 138 x 217 x 12mm | 370g
• Publication date 08 Jun 2012
• Publisher CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
• Publication City/Country Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note 2 Maps
• ISBN10 0521708869
• ISBN13 9780521708869
• Bestsellers rank 477,308