#post expedition

[dusk82]

Geocaching in the cold, snow and the far flung Arctic Circle of the north. Little Tromsø is such a geocaching haven!

[3liza]

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.

[crustaceousfaggot]

Was anyone gonna tell me that there's a Creature in The Terror. I thought it was just about 20 men named John sucking and fucking and eating each other in the Arctic.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like ���climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[angelcake10023]

Being Normal…. (Part 3)

Part 2 / Part 4

[cashmere-caveman]

this is what really happened to the franklin expedition btw

[the-golden-vanity]

I think the thing I like most about The Sea, as, like... a setting or a concept, is that in its vastness, its untameable nature, its unknown secrets, you have a lot of historically documented events that sound more like tales out of mythology and folklore.

Take, for instance, the fate of the Victory Expedition of 1829.

The Victory expedition was a private polar expedition led by veteran British explorer Captain John Ross. Twenty-three men set sail for the Canadian Arctic on the steamship Victory, but when the ship became trapped in the polar ice, there was no way to free it. The crew spent four years in the frozen north, surviving on rations from the wreck of a previous polar exploration ship.

Eventually, twenty survivors packed their belongings into small boats and hauled them over ice towards open water. And in that open water, there was a ship, the whaler Isabella of Hull.*

The Isabella's crew couldn't believe their eyes, because, as they told the Victory's survivors, "Captain Ross has been dead these two years."

And if that wasn't strange enough, the (very much alive) Captain Ross of the Victory had, on a previous Arctic expedition, been captain of the Isabella.

*Side note: the more I read about the Age of Sail, the more I realize that wherever official Explorers™ from a given Western nation go, their whalers have already beaten them there. Sometimes that's even the reason the explorers were sent.

[philtrashnumberunus]

tweets gotten from @mostly-funnytwittertweets

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I started reading Dungeon Meshi last week, became instantly charmed and captivated, and blitzed through the entire manga in 4 days (and changed my profile picture about it). With that in mind, I would just like to say...

I love your dungeon meshi art so so much

CHILCHUCK!!!!!!!!

Thank you kindly! I love Dungeon Meshi a lot, so I'm happy to see so many people get into it for the first time.

CHILCHUCK!!!

[chiropteracupola]

'The Polar bear at Blair Atholl,' 2024.

[erythriina]

I thought I could not get more excited for Absolution but I was wrong, I cannot wait to find out what the FUCK this means

[anne-is-confused]

sleepytime tea bear lookin idiot

[amundsenxcook]

from frederick cooks "through the first antarctic night"

[transsexualism]

[fleshbeetle]

i cant stop thinking about the franklin expedition and how the wreck of the hms terror is still there at the bottom of the arctic ocean. and in it the captains office more or less just as he left it. with chairs and cups and that desk still intact. just sitting there in the cold and the dark underwater for over 170 years. it's haunting me

[markscherz]

I am thrilled to announce Version 1.1 of my poster showing (some of) the frogs of Madagascar, to scale!

It features 136 species, incorporating the latest taxonomic work.

>>>You can buy it here<<< I recommend 'Poster' in size 'Large' to get the best resolution and legibility of the text.

Proceeds go towards supporting my research!

Here's Version 1.0 at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München: