Narrative of the North Polar Expedition. U.S. Ship Polaris. . . . Edited under the direction of the Hon. G.[eorge] M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy. . . .

Washington: U.S. Naval Observatory, Government Printing Office, 1876. Tall thick 4to. 696 pp. With two steel-engraved frontisps., 2 colour photolithographs, 6 maps, numerous woocut-engraved plates, and text woodcut engravings. Pictorial green publisher’s cloth, gilt illustration on front cover, of a dogsled, gilt lettering on spine (minor wear & fraying head & foot of spine, wear and minor bumping to corners, rear hinge starting, ex-lib spine label, and markings on front pastedown), still VG- copy, from the Albert Pike Freemasonry library, Washington, D.C. First edition of this memoir of the first major American attempt to reach the North Pole, which resulted in tragedy, murder, and abandonment both of crew and ship as the expedition continued. Hall had taken two sledges North in September 1871 to best Sir William Parry’s furthest north record, and upon his return October, 1871 fell violently ill, and died in November. Sidney Budington took command and again attempted to reach the Pole in June, 1872, and three lifeboats were crushed by the ice, and the S.S. Polaris turned south, ended up abandoning 19 members of the expedition and all of the Inuit in Oct., 1872, and finally ran it aground near Etah, Greenland. In 1873, the remainder of the crew finally salvaged enough timber to build boats and return home. It was discovered in 1968 after an autopsy of Captain Hall’s body, he had been murdered by arsenic poison, possibly by Emil Bessels, the chief science officer of the expedition. See: Richard Parry, Trial by Ice: The True Story of Murder and Survival on the 1871 Polaris Expedition (2002); William Barr, Polaris: The Chief Scientist’s Recollection of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73 (2016).