Arctic Exploration - Tumblr Posts

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.

Shores of the Polar Sea (1878)

“This is a sketch, from the floes alongside the ship, of an unusually distinct Paraselena that appeared on 11th December, 1875. The haloes and cross round the moon are caused by the passage of her light through a tissue of impalpably minute needle-like crystals of ice slowly falling through the atmosphere. . . . In summer the sun was often surrounded by a similar meteor, but intensely dazzling, and tinted with colors like an outside rainbow.”

Shores of the polar sea : a narrative of the Arctic expedition of 1875-6

“The sketch is from amongst Floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer. . . Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs.”

the five person theory

I was watching the movie The Lighthouse recently and came to the conclusion that the perfect number of people to put in a lighthouse/ space ship/ submarine/ sparsely populated arctic research base/ ect is five.

A single person in isolation is almost guaranteed to go crazy. Two people are likely to end up either hating each other or falling madly in love, probably both. And usually one or both goes a little mad.

Three seems like the perfect number, because you have a tie breaker and there’s usually enough sanity between three people to come to logical decisions. The problem is when the situation inevitably turns into a two vs one and now you’ve got to shoot your buddy Joe out the airlock because you and Fred know he was losing his mind. Then you’re left with the issue of two people.

Four presents similar issues to three, only now you lack a tie breaker, which could lead to a stand off, two vs two, until inevitably one of you betrays another. Then we have a three vs one situation, which is even more unbalanced against poor crazy Joe.

This is why five is the perfect number. You have a tie breaker and enough people to assume reasonably sound decisions and the ability to check one another. If you split into groups, then it most likely ends up as three vs two, which has much more even odds than two vs one or three vs one. Everyone can assume one or two friends, and, well if you all hate one guy, you definitely have the manpower to shoot him out the airlock without too much trouble.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Portrait of Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1886) by Georg von Rosen. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

William Barentsz and his men: *abandon their boat to winter in a wooden house they built*

the polar bears, observing the abandoned boat: 

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 ❤️