Franklin Expedition - Tumblr Posts

sorry boss i can't come in today. yeah they positively identified james fitzjames's remains and his bones have cut marks consistent with cannibalism

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

Mentally I am not here, I am contemplating cannibalism on a failed Arctic Expedition.

yes babe we can have sex . but can i please get back to explaining franklin’s lost expedition?

not to joke about a serious tragedy but. fitzjames quite literally served them face

Smithsonian Magazine

Tales of the Doomed Franklin Expedition Long Ignored the Inuit Side, But "The Terror" Flips the Script

The new AMC television show succeeds in being inclusive of indigenous culture

Interesting article from 2018 abt the Inuit involvement with the show

it's you and me, there's nothing like this

the HMS Terror and the Erebus (okay!)

personal blurb ahead 

this may not be very coherent bc I'm exhausted but honestly opening myself up to this interest (clusterfuck arctic expeditions, and arctic stuff in general) being something I rlly genuinely want to get more into has felt so so wonderful, like coming home in a way, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. I've lived in a lush desert all my life, I've never been there. and it certainly wasn't the cannibalism aspect, ya know? even tho historical horror is fascinating. so I puzzled over it and it hit me like a tidal wave today as to why. 

when I was little (like. very little. maybe six) I fell in love with Balto, the movie, and through that, the arctic. like I saw it in planet earth and stuff later but it was mainly balto. I remember trying to beg my parents to take me to alaska, which they didn't bc (their words) it was too cold in the winter and too many mosquitoes in the summer, and rhey were afraid I wouldn't like it. but it stuck in my mind and my heart for years. and then it didn't.

I've been through a lot of nonsense, and as a result of trauma and other stuff I often feel this void where it feels like connection should be, and not just in regard to not remembering (tho that is also a thing). I remember some stuff about my childhood, but sometimes it just feels flat or absent or only scary and I feel like my child self was killed and I was what came after, like some kind of ghost haunting my own life. 

that lil kid who wanted to prance around in snowboots and a big coat and hat and look at all the snow and ice and animals and arctic culture and stuff didn't die. when it clicked I just burst into tears and thought 'she isn't dead, I didn't kill her'. there's some part of me that is the same, is sharing, and yearns for similar things. 

so thank you all for talking abt this show and topic so much. You made me feel less wierd about reading about it which made me feel something so lovely. (and I am enjoying it in general! lol. like regardless)

I may not be around much, bc of my disability it's astronomically hard to type right now and I can look at very little, but yeah. very thankful for the space y'all have created ❤️

my therapist had to listen to me talk about the franklin expedition for most of the session yesterday what have y'all done to me

they didn't know any of it and so we started at the very beginning. and then I went on abt fitzjames for ages (they let me tell them some pretty graphic things text wise which was lovely bc I have too many feelings I cannot tell most ppl in my life rn) and sent them articles. THEY LOOKED THINGS UP while we were talking lol and said the show looked good but kind of scary. they were very nice abt it and said they understand why I find it so interesting and feelsy and that they were looking into how they could learn more about it bc it's so fascinating

but yeah they were not wierded out and I'm thankful for that bc it would definitely come up again. lol. lmao. what have y'all done to me

my therapist had to listen to me talk about the franklin expedition for most of the session yesterday what have y'all done to me

idk if this is gonna make sense but. I am someone who makes dark jokes and references and I don't have anything against that, but I feel like a lot of people tend to either forget or disregard that people in historical disasters and tragedies are more than the worst thing that ever happened to them, even if it's why they're famous. Even if it's why you know about them. They were a thousand other things and you know them for the one, often the way they died. That's something that should be handled like the heavy, fragile thing it is, even as we meet it in various ways. Do not flatten them into that alone.

so. I grew up California a few hours drive away from where the Donner Party got stuck and I've driven through Donner Pass multiple times (beautiful area! highly recommend even if u don't wanna go see the surviving cabins or stuff) so it was very much mentioned throughout my childhood, and one of the things that has been turning over in my head since Fitzjames's id'ing brought the Franklin Expedition back into my thoughts more is like... the survivors and the reaction. It was varied (though the news latched onto it very quickly) with some sympathy and horror but even over 150 years later with time as distance, as a kid I know people who, when I asked about the story, cockily asserted they personally would never, and seemed offended by what the survivors had done (not referring to the few actual murders that happened but the others who ate the many already dead to survive). One of my aunt's childhood friends' mother was a survivor of the Donner Party as a child and my dad always made a point to differentiate her and her family, who are some of the few who never ate anyone, and the ones who had, saying she wasn't decended from ~cannibals~ so essentially not to worry, like the others. and this is years and years and years later, the way things followed the survivors at the time I am told was nightmarish. 

and while I know a lot of the initial reaction to the knowledge and whatnot of The Eating stemmed from racism and denial, in the FE's case? I keep wondering what would have happened if some of them had been found, and resscued, AFTER they had started resorting to eating the dead. the sheer vitriol towards even the suggestion they may have eaten each other, even out of necessity, makes me think it wouldn't have been pretty. and there's something so painful about that, that even if some of them had survived and managed to get home, traumatised but alive, their countrymen may have rejected them as if there HAD been murder. as if it had been anything other than desperation. and obvs we will never know what exactly happened but there's something so tragic abt that to me, that even had some of them survived, they would have been othered for the way they survived. Even if they had no other choice.  

‘‘𐌕Ƕ𐌉𐌔 𐌓𐌋𐌀𐌂𐌄 Ꮤ𐌀𐌍𐌕𐌔 𐌵𐌔 𐌃𐌄𐌀𐌃’’ - ⓣⓗⓔ ⓣⓔⓡⓡⓞⓡ [⑳⑱]

guys it’s in the physical NYT