From : Questal
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John Cleeves
He did make a few converts, however-among whom the most significant were an Ohio newspaper editor named Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who began giving his own lectures in support of Symmes's theories, and a wealthy Ohioan named James McBride. It may well have been McBride who requested Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson-who later served as vice president in the administration of Martin Van Buren-to introduce in Congress a petition for funding the proposed expedition. It was tabled.
...a subterranean utopia ...
In fact, Congress authorized such a voyage in 1828, the year before Symmes died. This was impart the result of vigorous lobbying by Jeremiah Reynolds, who instead of appealing to scientific curiosity stressed the trade to be opened and territory to be claimed. The idea gained support of president John Quincy Adams but not of Andrew Jackson, who succeeded Adams as president in 1829. The expedition would not sail for another decade.
In an 1836 speech given in the U.S. Capitol's Hall of Representatives, Reynold's conjured a stirring vision of American ships casting anchor at the South Pole-"that point where all the meridians terminate where our eagle and star spangled banner may be unfurled and planted, and left to wave our axis of the earth itself!" If he still believed in Symmes held that point, Reynolds kept it to himself.
Swayed by such patriotic fervor appeals to the whalers and other commercial interests. Congress then approved the expedition and provided $300,000.00 for it. However, two years dragged by before it actually departed. By that time, the impassioned Reynolds had so roundly denounced the Secretary of Navy for dawdling that Reynolds's be immediately struck from the expedition roster when the ship finally sailed in 1838.
Named for its commander, Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, the four-year Wilkes expedition-the first to team civil engineers and scientists with naval crews-did make important discoveries, but not those that Symmes had so fondly hoped, no charting of a polar opening, the voyagers returned maps of thousands of miles of antarctic coastline, having that this little known landmass is in fact big enough to be the earth's seventh continent.
(In Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle," a whirlwind drags a ship into the earth through the South Pole)
And Reynolds apparently wielded considerable influence over the fevered mind of one of America's greatest authors, Edger Allan Poe. In the short story "MS Found in a Bottle" and his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gorden Pym of Nantucket, Poe describes doomed voyages that end with ships being sucked into a watery abyss at the South Pole-ideas founded on the hollow-earth writings of Reynolds. Although the two probably never met, Poe was calling Reynold's name when he died in a Baltimore hospital in 1849.
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In the mid-1800s, a number of countries raced to be the first to reach the North Pole.
During the first U.S. attempt to reach the North Pole, the doomed 1871 Polaris expedition's team leader, Charles Francis Hall, mysteriously died. Congress refitted a sail-and-steam-powered ship for Artic service and supplied it for two years. Hall named it Polaris. Hall set out with a sinister young scientific officer (whose agenda remains a mystery). Polaris got further north than any previous expedition. Then ice closed in, and discipline collapsed. Back from a two-week scouting trip, Hall fell ill and was soon accusing the scientific officer of poisoning him. Two weeks later he died. History cannot reveal all the dark corners of this tale of conflict.
But, did German "Secret Agents" stop this exploration to find "the Hole at the North Pole" ?
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Although Denmark, England, France, and Norway had already tried and failed, in 1871 the United States decided to finance an expedition to find the North Pole and the Northwest Passage.
Charles Francis Hall of Ohio, convinced President Grant and Congress to send out a vessel and was given a ship, the Polaris, and a crew of 25. The ship was not suitable for ice navigation, and the crew, a mixture of Germans and Americans, was selected by politicians and did not include the men Hall wanted. The expedition was doomed from the start. Beset by jealousies, intrigues, and weak leadership, the crew suffered from exposure, hunger, and the bleak Arctic. Captain Hall was poisoned (it was probably murder), and the ship was lost. The crew split into two parties, one surviving nine months on an ice floe until it was finally rescued by a whaler. Despite an exhaustive inquiry by the U.S. Navy and Congress, no conclusion was reached.
Arctic Arsenic : http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues01/feb01/arctica.html
Charles Francis Hall was murdered during an expedition that might have taken him to the North Pole decades before Peary.
In 1870 Congress authorized $50,000 for an expedition to reach the North Pole under the command of Charles Francis Hall, a veteran of the north who knew more about living in the Arctic than any non-Eskimo in Europe or America. The expedition's ship, Polaris, left New London, Connecticut, on July 3, 1871, and headed for the Arctic, stopping off in Greenland to pick up an Eskimo guide, dogs and equipment.
Weather and ice conditions permitted the party to reach the northernmost point attained by any white men up to that time (somewhere around 82 degrees north latitude). Discipline, however, was breaking down. Hall and sailing master Sidney Budington fell out, and Hall did not get along at all with doctor and natural scientist Emil Bessels.
In October Polaris found a safe haven where the ship and its crew were to overwinter, locked in the ice. On November 8, Hall was dead. On returning to Polaris from a two-week scouting expedition, Hall had asked for a cup of coffee and, upon drinking it, was violently sick. He was in great pain and many times accused some of the officers of poisoning him. Bessels ministered to him until Hall refused all help. He was buried in a shallow grave.
The next fall, raging gales set the ship adrift and then drove her into an iceberg, damaging her hull. Budington, now in command, ordered everything thrown overboard. Some of the crew and the Eskimos jumped onto an ice floe. In the confusion and darkness, Polaris again broke free and was driven away by currents and wind.
Would Hall have reached the North Pole? Anybody's guess, but many who had seen his single-minded drive would not have bet against him. Was he poisoned before he had the opportunity to fulfill this dream?
In 1968 Chauncey C. Loomis was writing a biography of Hall. Loomis traveled to Hall's grave and took samples of hair and fingernails from the still largely intact corpse. Analysis showed "an intake of considerable amounts of arsenic by C.F. Hall in the last two weeks of his life."
Arsenious acid was a common medicine aboard ships in those days, and Loomis concluded that "If Hall was murdered, Emil Bessels is the prime suspect."
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NARRATIVE OF THE NORTH POLAR EXPEDITION. U.S. SHIP POLARIS, CAPTAIN CHARLES FRANCIS HALL COMMANDING. Author: Hall, Charles Francis. Published by U.S. Naval Observatory
http://www.tomfolio.com/bookdetailssu.asp?b=s041167w&m=14
Price: US$70.00. Quantity available: 1.
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Charles Francis Hall (1821 – November 8, 1871) was an American Arctic explorer. Little is known of Hall's early life. He grew up in Rochester, New Hampshire where he was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a boy. Eventually, he turned up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he went into business making seals and engraving plates, and later began to publish a newspaper.
Around 1857, Hall became interested in the Arctic and spent the next few years studying the reports of previous explorers and trying to raise money for an expedition. Hall's first two expeditions, in 1860-1863 and 1864-1869, were essentially lengthy solo travels among the Inuit.
Polaris expedition
Hall's third expedition was of an entirely different character. He received a grant of $50,000 from the US Congress to command an expedition to the North Pole in the ship Polaris. The party of 25 also included Sidney Budington as sailing master, George Tyson as navigator, and Dr. Emil Bessels, a German physician and naturalist, as chief of the scientific staff. The expedition was troubled from the start as the party split into rival factions. Hall's authority over the expedition was resented by a large portion of the party, and discipline broke down. A North Pole is the northernmost point on any planet. ...
Polaris sailed into Thank God Harbor (now called Hall Bay) in the summer of 1871 and settled in for the winter on the shore of northern Greenland. That fall, upon returning to the ship from a sledging expedition with an Inuit guide, Hall suddenly fell ill after drinking a cup of coffee. He collapsed in what was described as a fit. For the next week he suffered from vomiting and delirium, then seemed to improve for a few days. At that time, he accused several of the ship's company, including Dr. Bessels, of having poisoned him. Shortly after, Hall began suffering the same symptoms, and finally died. Hall was taken ashore and given a formal burial.
The following year, the remainder of the party attempted to extricate Polaris from the pack and head south. A group, including Tyson, became separated as the pack broke up violently and threatened to crush the ship in the fall of 1872. The group drifted on an ice floe for the next six months before being rescued off the coast of Newfoundland, and probably would have all perished had the group not included several Inuit who were able to hunt for the party. Other survivors from the abandoned Polaris were picked up in 1873 by the ship Tigress from the United States Navy. 1872 was a leap year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... Newfoundland (French: Terre-Neuve; Irish: Talamh an Éisc; Latin: Terra Nova) is a large island off the north-east coast of North America, and the most populous part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. ... 1873 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... The United States Navy (USN) is the branch of the United States armed forces responsible for naval operations. ...
Investigation
The official investigation that followed ruled that Hall had died from apoplexy. However, in 1968, Hall's biographer Chauncey C. Loomis, a professor at Dartmouth College, made an expedition to Greenland to exhume Hall's body. Due to the permafrost, Hall's body, flag shroud, clothing and coffin were remarkably well preserved. Tests on tissue samples of bone, fingernails and hair showed that Hall died of poisoning from large doses of arsenic in the last two weeks of his life. This diagnosis is consistent with the symptoms party members reported. It is possible that Hall dosed himself with the poison, as arsenic was a common ingredient of quack medicine of the time. But it is considered more probable that he was murdered by one of the other members of the expedition, possibly Dr. Bessels. No charges were ever filed.
Apoplexy is an old-fashioned medical term, generally used interchangeably with cerebrovascular accident (CVA or stroke) but having other meanings as well. ...
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Trial by Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition
AUTHOR: Richard Parry
http://www.powerbooksearch.com/booksearch0345439260.html
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Two books on Hall's voyage were published in 2001. They were Henderson, B., Fatal North: Adventure and Survival Aboard the USS Polaris: The First U.S. Expedition to the North Pole. New York: Signet, 2001; and Parry, R.,
The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.
For a Smithsonian Magazine page on Hall, see
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues01/feb01/arctica.html
Here is an excellent chronology of Arctic exploration:
http://www.quarkexpeditions.com/arctic/exploration.shtml
These sites include images of the Inuits who accompanied Hall:
http://www.ric.edu/rpotter/eskimoes.html
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Subject : Notes about the HISTORY of the search for the entrance to the HOLLOW EARTH
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Notes about the HISTORY of the search for the entrance to the HOLLOW EARTH :
SEE : http://www.hollow-earth.org/news899_1.html
ISBN: 0345439260
SHORT DESCRIPTION: In 1871, the Polaris sailed from New York and began a historic journey to one of the earth's final frontiers: the North Pole. Seven months later, a handful of half-starved survivors returned with a story that shocked the nation
