#tom armitage at gladman point

[acheronist]

ok its after 8pm time for my nightly gladman point skeleton posting power hour. welcome to speculation city

june 1845 - sept 1845, henry making idle notes about how the expedition's going because well. yes. of course

1846 - henry gets really into bullet journaling in the first winter wherein the ships are docked in devon harbor/beechey island. also it's cold as fuck and he's starting to realize it's gonna be cold as fuck for a long while yet, and after recently rekindling a relationship Of Some Kind with tom armitage, he starts getting nostalgic about partying in venezuela when he was 23 which is funny because on one hand we have very hard ground to heave on the morrow (gravedigging, hauling to the cairn, etc) but also omgggg do you remember stuart the shipcat he was the best. that party ruled does anyone else remember how fun that nye party was!!!

april 1847 - after months of teaching his good friend tom armitage his letters (finally), tom manages to get a parody flirty smutty version of barry cornwall's 'the sea' written down after henry had recited it aloud from memory and henry is so proud about how quickly tom's taken to writing after 40 something years of adamantly refusing to learn, that he keeps the page in his wallet

june 1847 - sir john dies and henry decides to take some asides about the funeral speech, presumably under the impression that they'd get home again at some point and he could decipher it and make it presentable later. officers do seem to be dropping quite quickly though and the inclination that things might not be working out excellently starts around here.

july thru dec 1847 - the terror camp in cape felix is established and henry overhears calls that camp is clear over and over and over enough times that he thinks its worth writing down while doing his silly spiral doodles to pass the time in the evenings

spring 1848 - the crews abandon the ships for real this time and the fear that he's not getting out of the arctic alive starts to feel more and more real each day, and in a vague attempt to keep himself from being lost and forgotten to history, he writes down a frantic account of his navy career in his cleanest neatest most legible handwriting possible. for future searchers to be able to read. also, messages get passed between erebus camp and terror camp and the men are inventing fake addresses for the letters between camps for...... whimsy? missing london society? i dont know

end of 1848 - the Unwellnesses and the Agonies are really settling in amongst the whole crew but hey. at least he still has the brain power for poems written backwards.

early 1849 - powering thru this dismal ass expedition's survival attempts based on absolutely nothing but the desperate nostalgia of being young and sexy and warm. thank goodness tom armitage is still here to help him remember specific details about the clubs in the caribbean. and we are simply too tired to continue the backwards code, but no one's pawing through his personals anyways, it hardly matters

mid to late 1849 - henry dies from [REDACTED] and tom armitage takes it upon himself to carry henry's wallet and pages forward south with the expedition because it would be impossible to carry his actual physical corpse with them because everyone else, himself included, are too weak and sick for such a thing. theyve been leaving their dead behind since they were at beechey, what makes henry's remains so special and different? the survivors keep heading south along the coastline of king william island

spring 1850 - the expedition, lead by aglooka, camp briefly nearby some inuit families. they stay in one place for quite a while, and tom armitage decides they're so fucking cooked and never getting off this island. he doesn't have the supplies or means to write anything to add to the wallet, so he does his best at identifying himself by getting dressed in his steward uniform, some things that were relevant to being a steward, henry's wallet, henry's shirt with the ink stains on the cuff, and walks off to the ocean shoreline until he drops dead and falls face down with the wallet underneath his chest to keep it safe from the arctic elements

1859 - mcclintock's search party stumbles across his skeleton on accident while looking for a cairn and go WHOAAAAA ITS A SKELETON and lift the steward tools + henry's wallet out from his ribs and take them back to england to be archived

1973 - the 1st battalion rcr goes back to doublecheck mcclintock's notes and go WHOAAAAA ITS A SKELETON and lay what remains of tom out on a plywood board from a hardware store and snap some pics. then they pack him up and mail his bones to the national museum of man & then the museum loses his bones

2018 - amc gives this storyline to a 26 year old from the opposite ship who had no prior history with henry for some reason and also demotes it to a sub-sub-plot. i dont know. smashing my head through a wall.

2022 - doug stenton shows up and says hey ummmm should we be more concerned about the fact that the entire fucking skeleton went missing. let me do some research i guess

2024 - i show up and start connecting the dots while working on the facsimile project of the papers. henry's fate still unknown. tom's bones still missing in action. the actual papers hidden behind an unbearably steep paywall thats gonna take me a decade to afford. facsimile project kind of overshadowed by jfj cannibalism confirmation on the same day. i keep being crazed on my blog anyways.

ok yay

[saints-who-never-existed]

Who do you think was the Gladman Point skeleton? I’ve seen most sources place it as a toss up between Armitage and Gibson since I believe both of them had sailed with Peglar before and The Terror went with Bridgens, though I don’t believe the real life Bridgens was ever considered an option, but which of the them would you think is more likely?

I honestly don't know mate, I really don't!

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Out of those two, my gut says Armitage.

He and Peglar, as you mention, knew one another having sailed together on HMS Gannet and to me, it seems more likely that they could have become and remained friends in some capacity, especially given that they seem to have been relatively close in age. Gibson also sailed with Peglar and did so more recently than Armitage but somehow I just have a harder time picturing Peglar becoming fast, firm friends with a man something like 10+ years his junior?

On other points Armitage and Gibson are on fairly level pegging (or Peglar-ing, as the case may be). Mentioned in the Papers, for example, are two locations that Peglar visited alongside one man but not the other - Venezuela with only Armitage, and the South Atlantic with only Gibson.

Armitage edges ahead by virtue of "All my art, Tom" but Gibson may well hold his own by the fact that he was literate whereas Armitage was still signing papers with an X as of 1845.

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But then that brings me on to my final point: that, unless I'm really out of pocket and missing something glaringly obvious, there are certain assumptions that seem to often be made on this subject that I'm intrigued by and think are always worth interrogating further.

I've seen people confuse and conflate the Gladman Point skeleton with the second writer of the Peglar Papers themselves, for instance, and argue as a result that the skeleton could not be Armitage due to his illiteracy. That assumption - that the man who wrote the papers alongside Peglar is the same man that carried them on his person - doesn't sit entirely right with me...

There's also the matter of the scraps of clothing and other personal effects found with the skeleton - the cloth-covered buttons and neckerchief, comb and clothes brush all pointing to a Steward. I find it really interesting though that so much store has been placed in those artefacts and in the idea that Peglar would never ever have worn/possessed such things. Is it not possible that rather than, say, Armitage, taking Peglar's papers and carrying them forward, it could have been Peglar instead making use of his lost friend's clothing and carrying some of his stewardly paraphernalia as a keepsake?

It's a wild sort of thought to put out there, I realise, but those dudes travelled 3000 miles into the unknown and ended up fuckin' eating each other - who are we to suddenly place limits on what they would or wouldn't do?