Later Life
In the 1870s, Bessels stayed several years at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he worked preparing the publication of the expedition's scientific results. The most important of these results was the proof that Greenland was an island, deduced from tidal observations and the discovery of walnut drift wood, indicating a connection between the Greenland Sea and the Bering Sea. The publication was planned for a total of three volumes, the first two of which were written by Bessels. However, only Volume 1, Physical Observations, was ever published, and this was later suppressed for errors and apparently never reissued. He planned a work on the Eskimo, but all his manuscripts were destroyed by fire in 1885.
Bessels later considered mounting his own Arctic expedition, but eventually decided against it. He took part in another expedition to the northwest coast of America on the USS Saranac, but the voyage had to be interrupted after the ship was wrecked in Seymour Narrows, British Columbia. In 1878 Bessels published a book in German, Die amerikanische Nordpolexpedition, about the Polaris expedition.
Bessels died of a stroke in the German city of Stuttgart at the age of 41.
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