[Illustration:  “THE TREACHEROUS ICE-PACK”]

A most extraordinary record of daring and suffering in Arctic exploration was made by Charles F. Hall, to whom I have already referred.  Beginning life as an engraver in Cincinnati, he became engrossed in the study of Arctic problems, as the result of reading the stories of the early navigators.  Every book bearing on the subject in the library of his native city, was eagerly read, and his enthusiasm infected some of the wealthy citizens, who gathered for his use a very considerable collection of volumes.  Mastering all the literature of the Arctic, he determined to undertake himself the arduous work of the explorer.  Taking passage on a whaler, he spent several years among the Esquimaux, living in their crowded and fetid igloos, devouring the blubber and uncooked fish that form their staple articles of diet, wearing their garb of furs, learning to navigate the treacherous kayak in tossing seas, to direct the yelping, quarreling team of dogs over fields of ice as rugged as the edge of some monstrous saw, studying the geography so far as known of the Arctic regions, perfecting himself in all the arts by which man has contested the supremacy of that land with the ice-king.  In 1870, with the assistance of the American Geographical Society, Hall induced the United States Government to fit him out an expedition to seek the North Pole—­the first exploring party ever sent out with that definite purpose.  The steamer “Polaris,” a converted navy tug, which General Greely says was wholly unfit for Arctic service, was given him, and a scientific staff supplied by the Government, for though Hall had by painstaking endeavor qualified himself to lead an expedition, he had not enjoyed a scientific education.  Neither was he a sailor like DeLong, nor a man trained to the command of men like Greely.  Enthusiasm and natural fitness with him took the place of systematic training.  But with him, as with so many others in this world, the attainment of the threshold of his ambition proved to be but opening the door to death.  By a sledge journey from his ship he reached Cape Brevoort, above latitude 82, at that time the farthest north yet attained, but the exertion proved too much for him, and he had scarcely regained his ship when he died.  His name will live, however, in the annals of the Arctic, for his contributions to geographical knowledge were many and precious.

[Illustration:  THE SHIP WAS CAUGHT IN THE ICE PACK]

The men who survived him determined to continue his work, and the next summer two fought their way northward a few miles beyond the point attained by Hall.  But after this achievement the ship was caught in the ice-pack, and for two months drifted about, helpless in that unrelenting grasp.  Out of this imprisonment the explorers escaped through a disaster, which for a time put all their lives in the gravest jeopardy, and the details of which seem almost incredible.