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Zusatztext "Fascinating."-- The Boston Globe "Spellbinding."-- Library Journal "One of the best Arctic narratives ever written."--David Roberts Informationen zum Autor Chauncey Loomis Klappentext In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition disappeared in the Arctic, a Cincinnati businessman named Charles Francis Hall set out to locate and rescue the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience, but he was driven by a sense of personal destiny and of religious and patriotic mission. Despite the odds against him, he made three forays into the far North, the final--and fatal--one taking him farther north than any westerner had ever gone before. But Hall was suddenly taken ill on that voyage and died under mysterious circumstances. Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. He exhumed Hall's frozen body and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that the investigators of Hall's death nervously sidestepped the damning evidence. Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery that brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature. With a new Introduction by Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE CINCINNATI, NEW LONDON, AND NEW YORK Charles Francis Hall was twenty-seven years old when he arrived in Cincinnati in 1849 with very little money, few possessions, and a young wife named Mary. Where he had come from and why, whether he intended to remain in Cincinnati or only to pass through it on his way farther west, is now unknown; like many other restless Americans of his time, he left no tracks until he finally paused in one place long enough for his name to appear in community records. What is known about his early life comes mainly from biographical sketches written after his death, and they are at least partly inaccurate: they all agree that he was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, in 1821, but his wife once mentioned in a letter that he was born in Vermont and moved to Rochester with his family when he was still a child. The sketches all emphasize the rural simplicity of Hall's boyhood. His formal education was slight; after a few years at a local common school, he was apparently apprenticed to a blacksmith. Several of the sketches insist that he read assiduously on his own, and they evoke the image of a young Lincoln, a youth in homespun reading by firelight. "And thus he plodded his way along," one sketch elaborates, "like many another dreamy lad whose heart and aim is all beyond, and outside of, his daily occupations." The author of that sketch sees some advantage in Hall's early days as a blacksmith, however: "Though not much to his taste, this heavy work assisted him materially in developing his muscles and hardening his constitution, thus indirectly helping to fit him for the arduous adventures of his later years." At this phase of Hall's life, his early youth, all the sketches become vague. Even the most detailed contains only two sentences covering the next five or six years: "While yet a young man, he left his native place, and with it the blacksmith's trade. Setting his face westward, after some experiments elsewhere, he settled in Cincinnati. What and where were those "experiments elsewhere"? Did Hall go to New York or Boston (a C. F. Hall appeared in the Boston City Directory of 1843 and 1844) to experience city life and learn a new trade, or did he set out west immediately, moving slowly toward Cincinnati, "experimenting" along the way? Whatever he did, he left no evidence behind him; he was an obscure wanderer, one of the thousands of nameless digits in statistics on population shifts. So far as documentary history is concerned, Hall did not exist until his name...
