He settled in Cincinnati, Ohio and established a successful engraving business. He published two newspapers as a sideline and lived in a two-story house in Mount Adams with his wife, Mary, and their two children.

But by the late 1850s, Hall had become obsessed with Arctic exploration and the fate of the 1845 Arctic expedition of British explorer John Franklin. Most presumed that the entire Franklin expedition died, but rumors persisted that some may have survived.

1859: he led an Arctic expedition to search for the fate of Artic explorer John Franklin and his crew.

On his third Arctic expedition, Hall tried to become the first explorer to reach the North Pole. But he died on Nov. 8, 1871, in northern Greenland after becoming ill. Medical tests on samples of his hair, fingernail and bone in 1968 revealed that he died of arsenic poisoning, possibly murdered by a member of his crew.

Born in Vermont in 1821, Hall grew up in Rochester, N.H. Although he had only an eighth-grade education, Hall possessed a keen intelligence and an intense curiosity.

1858: Hall began publishing a newspaper "The Cincinnati Occasional." It was a mid-19th century equivalent of a 21st-century blog. Hall used the small newspaper not to report news, but to trumpet his opinions and his idiosyncratic interests.

1859: he replaced the Occasional with the Daily Press. It began as a more serious newspaper but quickly evolved into an outlet for Hall's quirky obsessions.

1860: First Artic expedition. He returned to Cincinnati in late 1863 after living with Eskimos for two years. He learned their language and their customs. He even participated in their habit of gorging themselves on the blubber and the blood of whales.

1864: second Artic Arctic expedition. He was gone for five years.

1869: Congress allocated $50,000 for a third Arctic expedition, which had the goal of reaching the North Pole. HAll was appointed as commander of the ship "Polaris."

"The Arctic Region is my home," he said in a speech before the American Geographical Society in New York just before his fateful expedition toward the North Pole. "I love it dearly, its storms, its winds, its glaciers, its icebergs; and when I am there among them, it seems as if I were in an earthly heaven or a heavenly earth."

Killed by crew?

That fall, the ship settled in for the winter on the shore of northern Greenland that Hall named Thank God Harbor. After drinking a cup of coffee, Hall became violently ill and died two weeks later and was buried a short distance from the ship. While ill, he accused many crew members of poisoning him. A government investigation ruled he had died of apoplexy.

1968: Dartmouth College professor Chauncey C. Loomis received permission from the Danish government to exhume Hall's body to try to discover his true cause of death. Loomis concluded that Hall died from large doses of arsenic poisoning. In his 1971 biography of Hall, "Weird and Tragic Shores," Loomis says Hall could have accidentally given himself too much medicine that contained arsenic.
But if Hall was murdered, Loomis writes, the most likely suspect is German scientist Emil Bessels, who resented being under the command of an uneducated man like Hall and who felt it was too dangerous to proceed north.

Enquirer tribute

The Enquirer paid tribute to Hall in a May 14, 1873, story calling for an investigation into his death and encouraging donations for his widow and two children.
"He was a man whom Cincinnati has reason to be proud," the story said. "No man of any country has written his name higher on the scroll which records Arctic discoveries. He has shown a courage, vigor and resolution seldom surpassed in the annals of human exertion."

Hall's body remains in its grave beneath frozen ground in the desolate but beautiful Arctic land he loved.


Excerpts taken from Cincinnati Enquirer.