THE LAST POLAR EXPEDITION.

Evening Star, Issue 3276, 20 August 1873, Page 3

THE LAST POLAR EXPEDITION.

(From the New York Weekly Tribune, May 14.)

The fate of the North Polar Expedition, under Captain C. F. Hall, which sailed from New York on the 29th of June, 1871, supplies the most startling chapter in all the long history of Arctic adventure. The first voyages in the frozen regions of this hemisphere were undertaken in the interests of commerce, to find a short passage between the Western and the Eastern world. Next came the searching expeditions dispatched in the cause of humanity, to look for the lost. Captain-Hall was the representative of a third era of Arctic adventure, prompted by a simple enthusiasm for science. The problem of the North-West Passage was solved long ago. The fate of Franklin anil his companions was no longer a mystery. But the geography of the polar regions was still a secret. The open sea reported by Kane to lie beyond the icy barriers of Grinnell Land was yet unvisited. It was to complete our knowledge of these forbidding regions and throw light upon certain phenomena thus far imperfectly understood that Captain Hall, aided by the United States Government, sailed from this port with the Polaris two years ago. It was his purpose to penetrate to the North Pole itself, hither with his ship, of if that proved impossible ivith pledges and boats. He was last heard from in August, 1872, when a letter reached the Navy Department, written by him a full year before, as he was about leaving Tossac, in Greenland, “the most northern civilized settlement of the world,” on the adventure in which ho expected to consume several years, “Never,” he wrote, “was an Arctic expedition more completely fitted out than this. There is every reason to rejoice that everything pertaining to the expedition, under the rulings of high Heaven, is in a far more prosperous and substantially successful condition than even I had hoped or prayed for. God be with us.” We now leam that long before this letter reached the United States, Capt. Hall was dead. He never accomplished the main purpose of the voyage, though he succeeded in getting a little further north than any man had gone before. The Polaris followed Kane’s route into Smith Sound and Kennedy Channel, passed beyond Kane’s winter quarters, and in September was laid up for the season at Polaris Bay, in lat. 81deg. 88min,, long. Gldeg. 44min. There is some discrepancy in the telegraphic accounts of this portion of the voyage ; but it would seem that the ship had gone as far north as lat. 82deg. 16min., or more than four degrees further than Kane carried his vessel in 1853 — further than any ship had ever been before. After the Polaris was moored in her winter quarters, Capt. Hall made a sledge journeyJjof two weeks, and crossed the supposed Polar Sea, which was found to be a strait about fifteen miles wide, with an appearance of open water, however, to the north. Kane’s companion, William Morton, reached this strait twenty years ago in latitude 82deg. 27min., and as Capt. Hall crossed it he must have passed this 1 point by several minutes at least— thus going

nearer to the pole than any previous explorer from the American side—possibly nearer even than Captain Parry, who readied the latitude of 82Jeg. 45min., north of Spitzhergen. It was soon after Ids return from this expedition that Captain Hall died on board the ship. One account says that he was struck down suddenly with apoplexy in the act of encouraging his men, and while apparently in his usual health. Another represents that he had been sick for two weeks.

One more effort was made to reach the Polar Sea. When that failed the Polaris started for home. A few days later (in August, 1872) she was beset with ice and drifted to lat. 77deg. 85min. Here a portion of the crew left her. There seems to he a suspicion that they deserted, but according to their own story they were employed getting provisions out upon the ice, in the expectation that the ship must go to pieces in a gale; when the ice broke up and the Polaris was driven from her moorings and disappeared in the darkness. It is the wonderful story of the nineteen persons left on the ice which the telegraph brought us on Saturday. Por more than six months they drifted southward through the Arctic night. Occasionally they launched the boats they had with them and tried to pull toward the Greenland coast, hut they were driven back to the fioe. A portion of their provisions had been saved, and they eked them out by killing occasionally a seal or a few birds. Snow huts gave them a little shelter. The fat of the seals fed the fires and lights. The ice upon which they floated was five miles in circumference when they were parted from the ship on the 15th of October. It was reduced in April to a little fragment of twenty yards diameter, when they were picked up by the Tigress, forty miles from the coast of Labrador. How terrible this icy voyage had been we may imagine by a glance at the map. They were driven from the ship far up Baffin’s Bay, somewhere near the entrance to Lancaster Sound. They were rescued well out in the open ocean, about the latitude of Liverpool. _ Of the fate of the Polaris, in which were Captain Buddington, chief navigating officer, and thirteen others, nothing is yet known. Her bow was somewhat damaged, and she was making water, hut her condition was by no means desperate, and there is good reason to hope that she may get clear of the ice during the coming summer. She had no boats left; but her stock of provisions was abundant.

The records of the expedition, the scientific collections, and the journals of the officers are doubtless in the Polaris, and until she is found we shall not know how much this latest Arctic voyage has added to the world’s store of information. It does not scorn probable that the results will prove commensurate with the expenditure of life, suffering, and money. We cannot believe that any Arctic voyage by the same route will ever justify the risk. But whatever may be the practical value of this memorable expedition, Capt. Hall will be held in honorable remembrance as a true martyr of science. He was not a man of scientific education ; but he was one of those sturdy, strongwilled, persistent men of action to whom the science of geography owes so many of its most brilliant achievements. It was a noble ambition which led him into the dreary wastes where he met his death, and we may take some satisfaction iu remembering that although his chief purpose was not accomplished, he succeeded in adding a little to our knowledge of the Polar coasts, and extending by a few miles our maps of a region which no human creature ever can inhabit.