Weird
and Tragic Shores
By Chauncey Loomis
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
Tragedy, according to Aristotle, should inspire pathos in its audience. Pathos, he goes on to indicate, is inspired by the fall of a person of middling virtue. He defined a person of middling virtue as being an essentially good and noble person who possesses a hamrtia, or personal vice.
If there was ever a person to invoke Aristotle's approval as a tragic figure it was Charles Francis Hall, the nineteenth century arctic explorer whose life is the subject of Chauncey Loomis' masterful narrative, Weird and Tragic Shores. Hall was a man possessed of a glaring moral blemish, that of moral self riotousness. Whether on the economic, spiritual, legal or arctic fields of action, Hall was certain that God was on his side. Speaking of those who had impounded his expedition goods on charges of a debt owed Hall could write, AMy persecutors shall stumble & they shall not prevail; they shall be greatly ashamed; for they shall not prosper."
Yet the same drive that led Hall to fill his journals with flaming rhetoric, unmeasured diatribes against his enemies, and the copious citation of instances of divine favor exhibited directly towards him, also made Hall exceptional.
It is obviously not true that "all obstacle yield to a resolute man.' Yet the fact that Hall, a moderately successful businessman from Cincinnati with no relevant background, literally willed himself into being a successful and notable arctic explorer, makes it equally clear that more obstacles yield to the resolute than to the irresolute.
Hall's remarkable energy and enterprise lifted him onto the historical stage. Without his drive he never could have been lifted high enough for a tragic fall. At the same time Hall would still fail to be a tragic figure if he had not possessed a counterbalancing element of genuine humanity. Hall was hardly the only man of his time priggish enough to forbid icebound sailors the outlet of gaming on Sunday, but how many of his fellow prigs would have had the insight and determination to voluntarily engage in an Innuit raw seal eating orgy and drink warm seal blood from a communal cup.
It is Hall's genuine affection and friendship with the Innuit, his insight into the value of both their oral historical traditions and their technical expertise, which made him both a successful explorer and a likeable enough person to be a genuine tragic figure. The accomplishment of evoking genuine tragedy from Hall's grisly death in the far northern wastes of Greenland, is but one of the feats accomplished by Loomis in his truly superb account.
Himself an arctic veteran
Loomis retraced Hall's steps, even to the point of exhuming and autopsying
Hall's corpse in the hopes of resolving the mystery surrounding his death. At
all times the author looms behind Hall like an articulate shadow. Deft,
insightful, and exciting, Weird and Tragic Shores is a uniquely absorbing
narrative of human tragedy in the classical sense.
