Trial by Ice (18 page)

In the 1870s quinine was used for a variety of ills, fever being just one. By dilating the small blood vessels in the skin, quinine will lower an elevated temperature. Other than its primary use in combating malaria, the drug also produced pain relief by depressing areas of the central nervous system. It can also produce digestive upsets, visual disturbances, and a skin rash. Bessel gave Hall an injection, which he described as “a hypodermic injection of one and a half grains of quinine, to see the effect.”

The doctor's choice of quinine is open to question. Certainly Hall did not suffer from malaria, the drug's primary usage, nor did he complain of pain, another indication for quinine during that time. With the captain's temperature all over the map, quinine probably should not have been used, and it could be expected to further upset an already disturbed stomach.

According to Bessel's notes, the effect was beneficial, and the captain's appetite and mental acuity improved over the next day. Not wanting to let well enough alone, Bessel injected Hall again, even though the man's temperature was no longer elevated. During this time Morton and Chester stayed at the sick man's bedside and clearly remembered the injections. Both men recalled Bessel's mixing a white powder into the solution before injecting it.

The fact that the treatment improved the captain's appetite and mental conditionjust the opposite of what might have been expectedraises the question of whether the white powder was quinine or something else.

Trouble began the next day. Hall leaped from his bed suddenly and shouted that Chester, Tyson, and Buddington planned to shoot him and that Bessel and the cook were poisoning him. For the next four days, Hall ranted and raved about his cabin.

When Jackson, the cook, entered the cabin to fetch his pipe, Hall mistook the pipe for a pistol and cried out that Jackson meant to shoot him. The frightened man fled when Hall ordered Budding-ton to strip the cook's bunk and search it for weapons. Hall also refused a change of stockings from Chester, fearing they might be laced with poison.

Focusing primarily on Bessel as the ringleader of a plot to kill him, Hall finally refused to let the doctor treat him. Pointing directly at Bessel, Hall told Jackson, “That man is trying to poison me!”

Bessel abandoned his previously haughty demeanor and now suddenly adopted the patience of Job, affecting an air of extreme kindness toward his ranting leader. That appears to have been out of character for the brusque man. When Captain Buddington offered to drink a glass of medicine first to prove to Hall that it was safe, Bessel strangely would not allow it. Why was that? A sip of any medicine would have allayed Hall's fears and would not have hurt Buddington. Were the contents of the glass harmful instead of helpful? If it did contain poison, Bessel certainly would not wish to kill Buddington, a man whom he could readily control and who was needed to ensure their safe return.

To the men around him, Hall appeared to accuse everyone, especially Bessel and Buddington, but he never laid any blame on his Inuit friends.

Hoping to cure himself by tried-and-true methods, Hall asked for raw seal meat. Bessel refused to allow it, and Hall accused the doctor of starving him. To avoid the poison he feared, Hall refused all food unless it was proved safe. Like the Roman emperors with their food testers, the explorer ate only after Chester, Morton, or Herron had first sampled his meals. Tookoolito assumed the task of preparing his soups and teas. Hall even suspected that the water used to wash him might have been harmful.

During this time Noah Hayes and Herman Sieman asked to visit the captain. Sieman wished to pray over a fellow Christian and Hayes to comfort his idol. Buddington and Bessel refused their requests. Why is unclear. The disturbed Hall might have garnered comfort from friendly faces. Was this a kind of psychological warfare being practiced on Hall? Or was it meant to prevent Hall from poisoning the crew with innuendo and accusation? No matter the reason, the skipper and doctor managed to isolate Hall from the crew during this time, allowing only the Inuit and officers access to the sick man.

In the close confines of the ship, engulfed in darkness and hundreds of miles from help, the captain's raving unnerved the crew.

One day Joseph Mauch took Henry Hobby aside and whispered darkly that “there was poisoning around there.” Mauch had studied some pharmacology in Germany and recognized the odor of a certain poison within the captain's cabin. Unfortunately Mauch could not recall the English word for the poison he smelled.

Concurrent with the captain's illness, a strange affliction struck a litter of newborn sled dogs. One by one the previously healthy pups developed prolapsed intestines. With their protruding entrails dragging behind, the unfortunate creatures fell victim to the other dogs, which attacked and pulled on the exposed organs. To end their suffering, the animals were killed. Death and dying permeated the atmosphere of the entrapped ship and further unnerved the sailors. To the superstitious seamen, what befell the puppies was just another sign that their ship was unlucky. No one stopped to consider that someone might have been testing poisonous mixes on the unfortunate creatures.

Meanwhile, Captain Hall teetered between the brink of madness and guilt for his outbursts. To Emil Schuman he apologized repeatedlyup to ten times, according to the engineer. “Mr. Schuman,” he lamented, “if I ever did wrong to you, I beg your pardon. I'm extremely sorry.” With Schuman's limited English, most of Hall's invectives went unnoticed; Hall's profuse apologies did not.

Hall's hallucinations peaked one night. Awaking suddenly, he jumped up and seized Buddington by his collar. The startled whaler shouted to Tyson and Chester for help. But Hall barred their way. With his left hand (the one that was supposedly paralyzed), the captain held the door closed, grasping the doorknob so tightly that the men outside could not turn it. Showing remarkably good strength for a “paralyzed” and weakened person, Hall kept the two men at bay while he questioned Buddington.

“There are blue vapors surrounding the cabin lantern,” he insisted to his captive audience while the other officers hammered at the door. “Do you not see it?”

“Sir!” Buddington stammered.

Hall's wild eyes rolled toward his captive. His already waxen face tightened, and his mouth gaped in horror. “What's this? Blue flames shooting from your mouth, sir!”

Hall's grip on the handle relaxed, and Tyson forced the door
ajar. Chester and he rushed inside and pried Hall's fingers from Buddington's throat. Gently they forced Hall back into his bunk. The stricken man wiped futilely at Chester's coat, brushing away the cloud of blue vapor that drifted around the first mate and clung to his coat. After anxious moments the men quieted Hall and covered him with his blankets. Tyson sat beside him.

Weakly Hall raised on his elbow and ran his fingers around Tyson's mouth. “What's that coming out of your mouth?” Hall whispered. “It's something blue …”

Bryan hurried to the cabin. Seeing him, Hall pointed to the bunk Bessel used. “Doctor Bessel had an infernal machine in his berth that emits blue vapor. Don't you see it? It is there. Can't you see the vapor coiling around in the air? I know the machine is in there because I can see blue vapor hanging along the edge of the berth. Don't you see it, Mr. Bryan?”

The distraught chaplain looked about. Only smoke from the kerosene lamp circled inside the small cabin.

Hall inclined his head toward the other bunks. A look of madness crept into his eyes. “Bessel has put his machine somewhere inside here. He is pumping his blue vapor into my berth.” Fear filled Hall's stricken face. “It is killing me,” he said slowly. Then a conspiratorial look replaced the terror. “That little German dancing master doesn't think I know that he is at the center of this, but I do.”

During this time the “thin-skinned” and “sensitive” Bessel demonstrated remarkable equanimity. Before, he took offense at the smallest slight; now he seemed inured to the poison charges. The chief scientist wandered around the ship casting dire prognoses about Hall's chances of survival. Before Hall dismissed his services, Bessel had remained close by his patient, often sleeping in a chair by the captain's bed. On one occasion the doctor tied a string to Hall and then to his own arm to awaken him if his patient needed care. The men assumed that this was to spare the others sleeping in the cabin from loss of their rest, but the string arrangement conveniently enabled Bessel to treat the befuddled Hall without arousing possible witnesses.

In lucid moments the explorer fed himself from tins of food stored under his bunk, which he opened himself.

After treating all other foods as poisoned, drinking only water or tea directly from Tookoolito's hand, and not letting Bessel near him, C. F. Hall began to improve. From November 1 through November 3, he steadily regained his strength. His mind cleared, and he resumed his plans for another trip northward. If Bessel was poisoning the captain, this improvement when out of the good doctor's hands is damning evidence.

On November 4 Hall kept his secretary, Joseph Mauch, busy revising the ship's logs and bringing his journal up to date. Throughout the day he chatted with anyone who passed about his plans for reaching the North Pole. His appetite was strong, and all signs of the mysterious stomach pains had vanished.

At this time Dr. Bessel prevailed upon Mr. Bryan to intercede with the captain on the doctor's behalf. Bryan, acting mostly in his role of ship's chaplain and conciliator, implored Hall to let Bessel resume treatments. It was Dr. Bessel's highly skilled talents, learned in Heidelberg, that had brought about Hall's miraculous cure, Bryan argued.

No one could doubt that Hall had improved remarkably. But was this due to Bessel's injections and solutions or to Hall's paranoid actions? Bryan's arguments must have been convincing, for the captain relented and allowed the doctor he had accused of poisoning him to resume his care. Years later Bryan would express doubts about whether he had done the right thing.

By that evening Bessel once more injected his medicines into the captain's thigh. In his journal Bessel wrote that Hall had difficulty speaking, appeared slow, and had numbness of his tongue that day, and that is why he restarted his treatments.

The next two days Hall walked about on deck and continued amending the ship's journals with Mauch. As a seaman passed his porthole with a freshly killed seal, Hall laughed and pointed to the man. He seemed well on the road to complete recovery.

He ate a full meal before turning in. He told Buddington he would have breakfast with him in the morning and added, “Mr. Chester and Mr. Morton need not sit up with me at night. I'm as well as I ever was.”

Near midnight Hall developed labored breathing. Alarmed at this sudden change, Chester awoke Bessel and relayed his findings.

Strangely, the doctor who had tied himself to his patient now appeared unimpressed with Chester's report. In the words of the startled first mate: “I asked the doctor about it. He said it was all right and started out quick as he could to the observatory.”

What was so important for Bessel to do in the observatory in the middle of the night? Whatever scientific observation he needed could not have been that crucial, for Bessel would have slept through the night if Chester had not aroused him. Was he just trying to get in a few observations while awake? Was the good doctor trying to establish an alibi, one that put him in the science hut when Hall died? Most important, why would he ignore Chester's report when respiratory depression is frequently a terminal sign?

When Chester returned to his charge, he found Hall muttering incoherently around a dangerously swollen tongue. The captain's condition so unnerved Chester that he ran on deck to dispatch the first man he saw to retrieve the errant Bessel from his observatory. The first mate then rushed to find Captain Buddington. “Captain Hall is dying,” he blurted to the ship's master.

Both men reached Hall to find him sitting upright, legs dangling, and his head wobbling from one side to the other. The man's glassy-eyed stare and cadaveric appearance were “frightful to look at,” according to Buddington.

“How do you spell … murder?” Hall rasped. He kept spelling the word over and over, using different and incorrect spellings. Buddington and Chester could only look at each other in confusion. As Bessel returned and entered the cabin, Hall straightened up. “Doctor, I know everything that's going on,” he whispered. “You can't fool me.”

Calling for water, Hall choked on the drink, then vomited before collapsing back onto his cot. Bessel immediately diagnosed a second attack of apoplexy.

Hall remained unconscious. They rolled him onto his stomach to keep him from swallowing his tongue. Then he lay, facedown in his blankets, drooling and breathing heavily. Chester and Morton continued their bedside vigil. Hall's breathing grew heavier.

For the first time Chester noticed blisters and sores developing around Captain Hall's nose and mouth. Soon blisters encircled his
entire mouth. Blisters such as these would not be the skin rashes possible from quinine; however, certain types of poison do produce circumoral blistering.

All that night and throughout the next day, the stricken explorer lay on his stomach, his face almost buried in his blankets. No words issued from his mouth until evening. Then he raised his head as Dr. Bessel straightened his blankets.

Recognizing the doctor, Hall murmured, “Doctor, you have been very kind to me, and I'm obliged to you.” He then sank back into his coma. Around midnight the faithful Morton took his turn on the dreadful watch.

Chester looked up at his relief. “He's asleep, and I don't think he's any better,” the first mate responded to Morton's unspoken query. He shook his head sadly. “He's very bad.”

Morton slipped into the chair. He watched the sweaty tangle of dark hair and unkempt beard half buried in the pillow. Heavy gurgling sounds came from the body. The shoulders rose and fell as the captain fought for each labored breath. The air inside the cabin tasted stale and reeked with the odors of unwashed bodies. The gurgling grew more pronounced.