Description: In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition had gone missing in the Arctic, an obscure Cincinnati businessman named Chades Francis Hall set out to do what governments and navies had thus far failed to do -- locate and rescue any of the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience in the Arctic, but he epitomized the way in which Arctic exploration dominated the 19th Century imagination. He was driven by a sense of personal destiny and of religious and patriotic mission and, despite dramatic odds against him, he made three forays into the Far North, the final -- and fatal -- one taking him farther north than any Westerner had ever gone before. But Hall was suddenly taken ill on that voyage and died under mysterious circumstances.

Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. There he exhumed the frozen remains and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that a naval board of inquiry long ago had nervously sidestepped the rumors and suspicious evidence that surrounded Hall's death. Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery which brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature.

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