#discovering the franklins

[hawkp]

is it just me… am I the last one to realize… or is Hawkeye fucking sobbing while Sidney gives his advice in 3x05??????

[pangeen]

“ Closer “ // © Nathaniel Bayona

Music:  Gibran Alcocer - Solas (Sped Up)

[womenruntheworld]

This plaque marks the scientific achievement of Rosalind Franklin, misspelled as Francis Crick and James Watson.

[catilinas]

the scene where the cooks of erebus and terror argue about whether to add more salt to the [rotting, lead-poisoned] tins is genuinely one of my favourites in the whole show btw

[pranklinfierce]

After seeing the storyboard I sought this episode out, not sure then if it was actually real... I'm so glad it is.

Btw for context, people wanna elect the potato chip because it kinda looks like George Washington. And Millard Fillmore and James Madison are also in this.

[stoportotouch]

my mother is currently On The Island Of Jersey and as we speak she is hunting down the grave marker of edward little's eldest sister, which also commemorates him

[tj-crochets]

Bad news: the coworker I was covering for was supposed to be back today and wasn’t, so I was once again dealing with three times my usual workload*. He’s supposed to be back tomorrow but then I am covering for a different coworker being gone until like mid-next week Good news: I finally figured out what activity my brain has been craving for the last several days! I got stuck in one of those like “cannot start new task until The Task is completed but I do not know what The Task is” loops. It was cleaning! I cleaned a whole bunch and feel a lot better, so I should be able to actually finish something tomorrow Side note, do y’all ever have your brain assign a task Utmost Priority without being able to figure out what task it is? It’s like craving a food but not knowing which food you’re craving.  *it’s difficult to describe why his work is twice as hard for me to do without saying what industry I work in. He’s not doing twice as much work as I am, it’s just transitioning from one person to another makes everyone he works with extra antsy in a way that makes my job harder?

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Jean-Étienne-Franklin Dubois, after Charles Auguste van den Berghe - Aegisthus discovering the body of Clytemnestra, 1823.

[criminalgays]

if watson and crick have no haters im dead

[vhstown]

what pisses me off about scientific research is that it's basically a competition. can we not recreate the gifted and talented class hunger games and work together instead 😭 damn

[pinkrabbitsbythenational]

not historically accurate but still funny

[itmightrain]

I like that the audience not following with the last group of men and instead discovering what was left behind along with Crozier in ep 10 gives the audience a taste of the real horror of what was experienced by the Inuit people that found the Franklin Expedition's remains and the British searchers who listened to those Inuit people's memories or found remains themselves. The feeling of looking at something horrible and inexplicable and not knowing all the details of how it came to that. The show gave us a lot of horror by showing us what the crew experienced through the whole rest of the show and then it pulled back and gave us the horror of not knowing, of not getting to see what happened, of only seeing the aftermath. Of looking at Edward Little and thinking "oh god what happened to you."

[morbidology]

This photograph shows the frozen corpse of sailor John Torrington.

Born in 1815, Torrington was a member of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, which embarked on a perilous voyage in 1845 with the goal of navigating the Northwest Passage—a fabled maritime route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Archipelago.

The Franklin Expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, was one of the most ambitious Arctic explorations of the 19th century. It set out with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and a crew of 129 men, including Torrington, who served as a Royal Marine. The expedition's objective was to chart the Northwest Passage, but it became infamous for its disastrous outcome. The expedition was eventually stranded in the icy waters of the Arctic, and all members of the crew died.

John Torrington's story was brought to light during a search for the missing Franklin Expedition. In 1984, researchers discovered the remains of Torrington, along with those of other crew members, in a grave site on King William Island. The remains were remarkably well-preserved due to the extreme cold and the permafrost conditions of the Arctic.

The examination of Torrington’s body provided significant insights into the conditions faced by the expedition. Torrington was found to have suffered from tuberculosis and malnutrition, which, combined with the harsh Arctic environment, contributed to his death.

[sansculottides]

just thinking about how the limited array of historical materials of the franklin expedition can be defined by its lacunae and what wasnt left behind or what will never be found. so much so that the old conventional western approaches to historical study - through archival written record - are insufficient and we have to approach the expedition in other ways. erebus and terror waded through the arctic for the glory of empire at the expense of the inuit people (and all other victims of british imperialism at that point) - only for its men to come to the same historiographical fate as the histories of many colonized peoples in the past few hundred years. because it's the same story for many of us - either our precolonial histories were burnt and destroyed by colonizers, or they didnt fit in the model of conventional western historiographical standards in the first place, like oral history. the hubris of empire doomed the expedition, and for the longest time the hubris of empire could not comprehend the expedition's ghosts. i mean, it's crazy that they only found the physical shipwrecks in the past ten years because the research efforts finally listened to inuit oral histories who had been saying the same thing for decades. we're still discovering a lot of new things about the expedition because we've been gradually moving a bit away from just western standards of knowledge and research.

[salt-blog]

I saw a Terror AU for a different TV show on AO3 just now. First of all, you want to put your favourite characters on the doomed Franklin Expedition? Like where they die of lead poisoning and eat each other? And attempt to further the colonial goals of the British Empire???

Second of all, there's something hilarious & absurd about putting fictional characters into real, historical situations. Like, what, are you going to write a Supernatural AU where Dean is JFK and gets shot in the head in Dallas? And like, Castiel picks up pieces of his skull & brain?

Anytime I see people posting about The Terror I feel insane. It's like, here are my blorbos, some real people who died brutally in the mid-1800s. Their frozen, mummified corpses were found buried in Nunavut. Do you think any of them kissed?

[noughticalcrossings]

Borealis

In 1845, two Royal Navy ships and two Aerial Corps dragon crews left England in an attempt to finally discover a navigable passage through the Arctic. In 1847, Captain James Fitzjames struggles to shield his dragon from the fallout of a failing Expedition. In 1849, at a meeting of the Admirals of the Air, Captain James Fitzjames of Her Majesty's Dragon Aurora recounts the events of the disastrous Franklin Expedition to determine if he will be court-martialed for the loss of HMD Ulysses with all hands aboard. The truth lies lost on the ice, somewhere in the middle.

A Temeraire Universe Fusion for my first Terror Big Bang written by the incomparable @revolutionarygold who has been a delight to work with

Go read it here and then return for the last image, as it is a spoiler and a tad distressing if you don’t like looking at corpses