Weird and Tragic Shores The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer [Paperback]

Chauncey Loomis was born in New York in 1930 and studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton (A.B., Ph.D.) and Columbia universities (M.A.). He came to exploration through his interest in photography and has been on three expeditions to the Peruvian Andes and five to the Arctic. He recently retired after teaching English at Dartmouth College for thirty-six years. He lives in Massachusetts.

Jon Krakauer is the author ofInto Thin Air, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, andInto the Wild. His work has appeared in many magazines, includingOutside,Smithsonian, andNational Geographic. He chose the books in the Modern Library Exploration series for their literary merit and historical significance--and because he found them such a pleasure to read.CHAPTER ONE

CINCINNATI, NEW LONDON, AND NEW YORK

Charles Francis Hall was twenty-seven years old when he arrived in Cincinnati in 1849 with very little money, few possessions, and a young wife named Mary. Where he had come from and why, whether he intended to remain in Cincinnati or only to pass through it on his way farther west, is now unknown; like many other restless Americans of his time, he left no tracks until he finally paused in one place long enough for his name to appear in community records. What is known about his early life comes mainly from biographical sketches written after his death, and they are at least partly inaccurate: they all agree that he was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, in 1821, but his wife once mentioned in a letter that he was born in Vermont and moved to Rochester with his family when he was still a child.

The sketches all emphasize the rural simplicity of Hall's boyhood. His formal education was slight; after a few years at a local common school, he was apparently apprenticed to a blacksmith. Several of the sketches insist that he read assiduously on his own, and they evoke the image of a young Lincoln, a youth lÓ5