Fatal North Read online

  Fatal North

  OTHER BOOKS BY BRUCE HENDERSON

  LEAP OF FAITH:

  An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown (with Gordon Cooper)

  TRACE EVIDENCE:

  The Hunt For An Elusive Serial Killer

  AND THE SEA WILL TELL:

  Murder on a South Seas Island (with Vincent Bugliosi)

  TAKING BACK OUR STREETS:

  Fighting Crime in America (with Willie L. Williams)

  ERNEST & JULIO: OUR STORY

  (with Ernest and Julio Gallo)

  EMPIRE OF DECEIT:

  Inside the Biggest Sports and Bank Scandal in U.S. History

  (with Dean Allison)

  Fatal North

  Adventure and Survival Aboard

  USS Polaris, the First U.S. Expedition

  to the North Pole

  Bruce Henderson

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  80 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1101

  New York, New York 10011

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Bruce Henderson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected].

  First Diversion Books edition September 2011.

  ISBN: 978-0-9838395-9-0 (ebook)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I. The Expedition

  1. “North Star!”

  2. A Ship and Her Crew

  3. “Icebergs Dead Ahead!”

  4. Destination: The Pole

  II. Thank God Harbor

  5. Providence Berg

  6. “How Do You Spell Murder?”

  7. A Change of Command

  8. Stirring an Ice-Cold Grave

  9. Land of Desolation

  10. Journeys North

  III. Ice Hell

  11. Adrift in a Nightmare

  12. Encampment on the Ice

  13. Cry with Hunger

  14. The Sun Rises

  15. Terror and Beauty

  16. Abandoning the Floe

  17. In God’s Hands

  18. Hope of Rescue

  IV. Inquiry and the Search

  19. The Board Convenes

  20. Return to the Arctic

  21. Unanswered Questions

  22. Cause of Death

  Epilogue

  Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Break, break, break

  On these cold ice blocks, O seal

  And I would that my tongue could utter

  The thoughts that arise in me.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  The Members of the North Polar Expedition

  Aboard USS Polaris

  THE AMERICANS

  * * *

  THE GERMANS

  * * *

  OTHER IMMIGRANTS

  * * *

  THE ESKIMOS

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  AUGUST 1968

  NORTHWESTERN GREENLAND

  Four men packing shovels, picks, and other digging tools walked across the Arctic tundra toward a lone grave.

  The adventurers included a prominent internist from Massachusetts, an English professor from Dartmouth, a veteran out-doorsman, and an ex-Marine recently back from a combat tour in Vietnam. Flying in from Resolute Bay in Canada’s Northern Territories the previous afternoon, they had been dropped off by a high-wing, seven-passenger Single Otter flown by an experienced bush pilot. In a hurry to fulfill other flying commitments, the pilot had taken off as soon as the men and their gear were unloaded, with the promise to be back in two weeks to return them to civilization.

  The small party had been deposited on the vast, treeless plain known, since its discovery the previous century, as Polaris Promontory. It extended for some forty miles, and before the visitors left, they agreed that the expanse was disturbing in its lifelessness. Surrounded in the distance by a fringe of low hills—some smooth, others jagged with cliffs, all equally barren—the terrain was empty and altogether inhospitable as far as the eye could see. There was no snow on the ground, and chunks of ice, some quite large, were floating in the nearby sound, christened Thank God Harbor long ago by its grateful discoverer. The passing icebergs helped maintain a perennial chill in the air.

  Under the clear blue skies and surprising brightness of the unsetting Arctic summer sun, their first order of business was to establish camp. They knew the weather in this high latitude could turn suddenly, and they didn’t want to be caught in the open without shelter. They set up their tents, secured the gear, prepared a spartan meal on a camp stove, and, with great excitement of what the next day might bring, settled down for the night in their thermal sleeping bags.

  The morning after arriving at one of the most isolated spots on Earth, they crossed the stony flats toward the old grave and the grim task that had brought them here: to conduct an autopsy on the remains of its longtime occupant. The weather had changed during the night. The sky was covered with a low, dull overcast, suitably bleak, the men agreed, for the task at hand.

  Spotting the grave was easy enough. The only manmade object in the desolate landscape, it was marked by a stone cairn in the shape of a burial mound, an old wooden headboard and, mounted atop two thick wooden beams, an impressive brass tablet, preserved by the dry air and burnished by the winds, with this inscription:

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

  CAPTAIN C. F. HALL

  OF THE U.S. SHIP POLARIS,

  WHO SACRIFICED HIS LIFE IN THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

  ON NOVr 8th 1871

  * * *

  THIS TABLET HAS BEEN ERECTED

  BY THE BRITISH POLAR EXPEDITION OF 1875

  WHO FOLLOWING IN HIS FOOTSTEPS HAVE PROFITED BY HIS

  EXPERIENCE

  Dartmouth professor Chauncey Loomis, a lean six-footer in his late thirties with an unruly shock of black hair that fell over his forehead, knew that the British North Polar Expedition had brought the brass tablet from London in anticipation of passing the grave. From his research, Loomis had learned that not long after the ensuing ceremony at the grave—complete with the hoisting of an American flag—the British expedition came limping back, defeated by the most unwelcoming weather on the planet, having fallen short of its goal of reaching the North Pole and with two of its own, victims of scurvy, dead and buried in Arctic tundra.

  The grave, which came to serve not as a warning beacon but as a beckoning signal to those who followed, had since been visited by other hardy souls. Those paying homage included, in 1881, the Greely Expedition; twenty-five American soldiers under the command of Augustus Greely, another failed Arctic effort, which cost the lives of nineteen and ended with the survivors telling tales of starvation, mutiny, shipwreck, execution, and cannibalism. American explorer Robert E. Peary passed several times aboard his support vessel, USS Roosevelt, between 1898 and 1909.

  The final resting place of Charles Francis Hall, the commander of the U.S. expedition to discover the North Pole, had long been sacred ground to Arctic explorers of every nationality. It had to do with the remote location of the lone grave and the mysterious death of the man, as well as the nature of the mission itself. In a race against other nations—foremost among them England—America’s first attempt to reach the North Pole had garnered the enthusiastic support of President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress, and captured the imagination of the press and public in the same way a future generation would follow the space race and man’s efforts to reach the Moon.

  The college professor came to understand just how sacred the old grave remained when he had sought perm
ission from Denmark’s Ministry for Greenland to travel to Polaris Promontory and disinter Hall’s remains for an autopsy in the hope of solving the mystery that had long surrounded the captain’s untimely demise. After months of official inquiry by the U.S. government, many troublesome questions had remained unanswered, including the biggest one of all. Had Captain Hall died a natural death, or had he been murdered most foully, poisoned to death by one or more members of the small, handpicked crew?

  After a letter-writing campaign to officials brought no results, Loomis traveled to Copenhagen, where he met with Count Eigel Knuth, an adviser to the ministry on proposed projects in Greenland, a territory of Denmark. An archaeologist, anthropologist and experienced Arctic explorer in his own right, Knuth had been one of the last men to see Hall’s final resting place a decade earlier—only the second visit to the Polaris Promontory since Peary had passed there fifty years before. Knuth, who had himself discovered the remains of an ancient civilization in northern Greenland, made it clear he was not disposed to approving a visit by a team of American grave diggers. In fact, the whole idea seemed repugnant to him. Loomis took the position that history deserved the truth.

  “Given the high latitude of Hall’s burial,” the professor went on, “there is a good chance that the body will be well preserved.”

  “But, sir,” Knuth replied, “this is hallowed ground.”

  Only when Loomis guaranteed that his team would leave the grave in the exact condition in which it was found did Knuth begin to relent. Finally, to the professor’s surprise and delight, Knuth gave his approval.

  Standing at the graveside, Loomis and his colleagues saw evidence that foxes had pawed at its surface. Also lemmings, a mouselike Arctic rodent, had at one time burrowed into the mound, no doubt for protection from the harsh elements.

  The weather-beaten epitaph on the headboard, erected by one of Hall’s crewmen within days of his death, was carved into a pine plank taken from USS Polaris. At the time, the ship was stuck in an impenetrable ice pack nearby. In addition to name, rank, age of the deceased, and date of his death were these words: “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

  Shovel in hand, the strapping ex-Marine, Tom Gignoux, who had been added to the expedition for his physical strength and youthful stamina, began to dig through the shaly surface, which resembled crushed rock more than earthen soil.

  It was a shallow grave.

  Less than two feet under, the shovel blade struck a solid object. After more digging and clearing, a pine coffin was revealed. The wood was surprisingly pale and fresh-looking, testament to the power of Arctic preservation.

  During the spade work the men had cracked nervous, even morbid, jokes.

  Looking down at the unusually long coffin, the internist, Frank Paddock, who had been the professor’s longtime family doctor from his hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, offered a bit too cheerfully: “They didn’t build it for the short Hall, did they?”

  All joking ceased when they caught the first whiff of human decay.

  The plan had been to lift the coffin from its grave so that Paddock would have easier access to the remains. It soon became apparent that would not be practical, because the coffin was partly embedded in permafrost, a thick layer of ice a foot beneath the Arctic surface that never melts and radiates upward a constant bone-deep coldness, regardless of the ambient air temperature.

  For ten minutes, as Gignoux carefully pried at the lid of the coffin with a crowbar, the three other men stood by silently. When a piece of the lid snapped off, they saw inside part of the field of blue stars of an American flag.

  Once the nails were loosened, Loomis moved in to remove the lid.

  The professor had already made several trips to the Far North. In his readings on the Arctic, he had encountered Hall’s name and become fascinated by the questions surrounding his death. For three years Loomis had been digging through the records of the expedition, until he was convinced that it was “circumstantially possible,” at least, that Hall had been murdered.

  Loomis lifted the coffin lid and received help pulling it to one side.

  The body was enshrouded by the flag except at the base of the coffin, where a pair of stockinged feet stuck out. From the waist down, the body was encased in a sheet of clear ice. The front of the upper torso was free of ice, but the corpse’s back was frozen solid into the coffin.

  Loomis stepped back, giving way to the physician, with whom he had done plenty of exploring, including digging for archaeological ruins high in the Peruvian Andes. What lay before them now was not clay pottery or gold statuary, and Loomis was well aware that he was far out of his field of expertise.

  Frank Paddock, a compact, energetic man nearing sixty, was the kind of person, friends and colleagues agreed, who preferred running around the world on one of his “crazy adventures” to hanging around the local hospital tending to sick people. Leaning over the coffin, the doctor peeled the flag back from the corpse’s face gingerly, as if uncovering a sleeping person without wishing to startle him.

  The face had only partially decayed to a skull. Other than the nose, which was shrunken and nearly gone, the face was still well fleshed—a dark, leathery covering that stretched tautly over underlying bone. A carpet of stringy hair lay atop the head, and a full beard was so neat it appeared to have been recently combed. The eye sockets were empty holes of eternal darkness. The mouth was drawn into a kind of sly smile that would one day turn into a death’s-head grin as the body continued its long journey from dust to dust.

  Loomis was struck by the strange beauty of the slow decaying process at work on Hall’s remains. The skin, tanned by time, was stained red and blue by the American flag that had pressed against it for a century, giving the corpse an abstract quality; not unlike an icon, Loomis thought.

  Paddock had brought an autopsy kit, including scalpels, formalin, scissors, and glycerol. The only way he could reach the corpse was to stand in the grave and straddle the open coffin. As he did so, his companions handed him what he needed.

  When he picked up by forceps a sample of head hairs, a piece of the attached scalp broke off with the hair roots. When Paddock took a fingernail, lifting a rather long nail, the whole fingertip broke off from the dried and shrunken hand.

  On peeling back the jacket, vest, and underwear as far as possible, Paddock found the skin of the chest to be white except in the center, where it showed additional blue stains from the suit dye.

  From a point above each breast, Paddock made the traditional Y-shaped incision, which met at the sternum and sliced downward into the lower abdomen. He found it difficult to remove the skin from the underlying rib cage. Where he succeeded in doing so, the muscle tissue underneath was found to be metamorphosed—doubtless by a combination of freezing and drying—to a slightly off-white, brittle material that he was able to shred off the bone.

  Once he gained entry to the chest cavity, he observed that the area normally taken up by the lungs was empty. In fact, only the center part of the chest cavity contained any tissue, and this appeared to be of the same friable consistency as the chest muscle. The thoracic tissues were amorphous, offering only a suggestion of the whorls of heart muscle. Paddock found intact the structures of the trachea and the start of the bronchial tree—both were stained a moderate dark brown.

  No other traces of organs or structures in the chest were identifiable.

  Due to the rigid, folded arms of the corpse, Paddock could open only the upper portion of the abdomen. Like the chest cavity, this area was largely empty. The intestines presented themselves as a thin, yellowish, parchment-like ribbon. The spaces normally occupied by the liver and pancreas were filled by a small amount of the same whitish, structureless material present elsewhere.

  Paddock stood for a minute to relieve his aching back and cramped arms from his awkward position working over the coffin. When he was ready, he turned to his friend and said dispassionatel
y, “Chauncey. Handsaw.”

  With the razor-sharp tool in hand, the doctor positioned himself over the skull and began sawing. He found the bone to be of a normal, hard consistency, but extra difficult to cut through because the frozen pillow on which the head lay had curled up over the temporal areas, requiring him to cut through solid ice as well as bone.

  Finally, Paddock removed a roughly triangular section of the forehead, giving him unimpeded access to the cranium. When he looked inside, he saw a dark void.

  Loomis knew that with so many vital organs missing, pinning down the cause of death would not be easy. While certain parts of the corpse had been well preserved by the freezing temperatures, the decades had taken their toll. It would be a matter of turning over what they had found to a pathology laboratory and waiting for the results of a series of scientific and microscopic tests that might or might not prove a thing.

  Samples of tissues were put into plastic bottles containing formalin, acetone, glycerol, and glyceraldehyde. The samples of hair, nail, and fingertip went into dry plastic bottles. The triangular skull section was encased in plastic wrapping. The entire collection was placed in a heavy metal toolbox for safekeeping.

  Paddock, exhausted, was at last done. The autopsy had lasted three hours.

  They did their best to redress the corpse, then put the lid back on the coffin.

  The ex-Marine shoveled earth back into the grave, and re-created the mound exactly as they had found it, complete with some rocks that had been placed on top.

  Charles Francis Hall was again at rest, less a few minor parts.

  The men whiled away the rest of the two weeks by taking hikes along the beach, which they found more interesting and lively—with sanderlings, sandpipers, and plovers picking at the waterline and fulmars flying offshore—than the vast inland plain.