An excellent account of the life of the most eccentric of Arctic explorers who essentially abandoned his family in Cincinnati to pursue his Arctic dreams. Unprepared and inexperienced in Arctic ways, he adopted to and adapted Eskimo ways of living and survival by living with them for long periods and learning from them their secrets of survival. Both his origins and demise are clouded in mystery.
p. 41-42, Hall kept notebooks describing his reading, quite random until 1857 when he began to focus on the Arctic.
p. 62, re Hall’s reading of Arctic books in preparation for his first expedition.
p. 74, reads from “Masonic Manual” in funeral rites for Kudlago aboard George Henry.
p. 87: He immediately began to give Tookoolito reading and writing lessons, and when Christmas came he gave her the Bible that had been presented to him by the Young Men’s Christian Union of Cincinnati…..