On December 7, author Chauncey Loomis, whose book, Weird and Tragic Shores: A Murder in the Arctic, is a recently republished biography of the eccentric nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Charles Francis Hall presented a slide show and talk on Hall, his life and explorations, and his mysterious death while trying to reach the North Pole in 1871. The slides showed nineteenth-century images of the Arctic and photographs taken by Loomis when he retraced Hall's routes on Baffin Island and in northern Greenland.
On his first two expeditions to the North, Hall had hoped to find survivors of the lost Franklin Expedition, fourteen years after it had disappeared in 1845. His last trip, backed by the U.S. government, was a well-equipped naval expedition in quest of the North Pole. After achieving a farthest north between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, Hall became violently ill and died, charging that he was being murdered. In 1968, Loomis traveled to northern Greenland and exhumed Hall's body. He showed slides of this expedition and the autopsy proving that Hall had ingested a fatal quantity of arsenic during the last two weeks of his life.
The expedition scientist, Dr. Emil Bessels, among others, was suspected as possibly having poisoned Hall, but Loomis did not name a perpetrator of the deed. It was also possible that Hall ingested the arsenic purposely for self-medication.
Dr. Loomis also painted a portrait of two of Hall?s Eskimo friends and companions, Ebierging (Joe) and Tookolito (Hanna).
The talk was enjoyed by a large audience at the Union Club.