Charles Francis Hall (1821-November 8, 1871) was an 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 other 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. On the first expedition, Hall heard from the Inuit of relics from Martin Frobisher's mining venture at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island, and travelled there to see them first-hand. From the Inuit, Hall also heard what he interpreted as evidence that some members of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition might still be alive; this formed the basis of his second expedition to King William Island, where he found remains and artifacts from the Franklin expedition and made more inquiries about their fate from the natives living there. Hall eventually realized that the stories of survivors had been exaggerated either by the Inuit or his own imagination or both. He also became disillusioned at the discovery that the Inuit had deliberately left the remnants of Franklin's expedition to starve, without considering that it would have been impossible for the local population to support such a large group of supernumeraries.

Hall's third expedition was of a different character entirely. Hall 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 doomed from the start as the party split into rival factions, Hall's authority was resented, and discipline broke down.

Polaris sailed into what is now called Hall Basin in the summer of 1871 and settled down to winter on the shore of northern Greenland. Returning to the ship from a sledging expedition that fall, Hall suddenly fell ill in a fit after drinking a cup of coffee; for the next week he suffered from vomiting and delirium, then seemed to improve for a few days, and finally had a relapse and died.

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; they drifted on an ice floe for the next six months before being rescued off the coast of Newfoundland, and probably would all have perished had the group not included several Inuit who were able to hunt for the party. The other survivors from the abandoned Polaris were also picked up in 1873 by a ship from the United States Navy, Tigress .

The official investigation that followed ruled that Hall had died from apoplexy. However, in 1968, Hall's biographer Chauncey C. Loomis made an expedition to Greenland to exhume Hall's body from the permafrost. Tests on Hall's fingernails and hair showed that he died of poisoning from large doses of arsenic in the last two weeks of his life, which is consistent with the symptoms he reportedly suffered. It is possible that Hall dosed himself with the poison -- arsenic was a common ingredient of quack medicines of the time -- but more probable that he was murdered by one of the other members of the expedition, possibly Dr. Bessels. The truth will never be known.

References

• Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail
• Chauncey C. Loomis , Weird and Tragic Shores