Post by mister frau blucher on Sept 12, 2014 21:49:45 GMT -5
Hey all,
I might be the only person on the boards bitten by the Franklin bug, so no one else might care. But the fact that the Erebus or Terror (my money is on the Terror) has been found is the holy grail of explorer mysteries. You can check out the background on Wikipedia, which has a great, detailed summation. A lot of the scholarly specifics you can read about on Visions of the North blog by Russell Potter. The news is all over the CBC.
There have been Inuit oral trditions about what happenned to the ships, most notably recounted in David Woodman's first book (The Franklin Search, iirc). These were discounted by European and American searchers (including Charles Hall who chronicled the bulk of Inuit testimony, but had an odd relationship with them despit over a decade in their company - his story is in Weird and Tragic Shores). The ending of both ships is recorded, with the first foundering near where the Victory Point message indicates they were abandoned - this was believed to be Toolooah's, or Franklin's, ship by the Inuit. The second was seen another winter or two (depending how you interprtet testimony) later far south of there, in Queen Maud Gulf, and off the O'Reilly Islands. This is where the ship has been found, supposedly near Hat Island specifically.
The theory has been, taking Inuit testimony of the second ship's resting place as true, that some of the crew came back to the ship post-abandonment and sailed her south after the thaw, before being frozen in again and abandoning her a final time. [There is some latter day testimony (from Dorothy Eber's book Encounters in teh Passage) of Inuit interaction with them the Winter before this as well, at the Royal Geographic Islands.]
That the ship was found here (off Hat Island) lends credence to this theory as well as the Inuit testimony.
OK, been geeking out a few days over this and had to share. No links, this is a quest worth pursuing on your own! Google is your friend.
As a side note, I had developed the expedition a little ways as a solo adventure, with an initial excursion at Beechy Island (where graves were found in 1850/51 and exhumed in the 1980's) before the trip south and being frozen in NW of King William Island, and the subsequent fight for survival. This being DCG, I added a bit of a supernatural enemy, since slowly descending into starvation and cannibalism is not an exciting play by itself (outside of the Misery Tourism genre). The discovery has me looking back over my notes...
Bret
I might be the only person on the boards bitten by the Franklin bug, so no one else might care. But the fact that the Erebus or Terror (my money is on the Terror) has been found is the holy grail of explorer mysteries. You can check out the background on Wikipedia, which has a great, detailed summation. A lot of the scholarly specifics you can read about on Visions of the North blog by Russell Potter. The news is all over the CBC.
There have been Inuit oral trditions about what happenned to the ships, most notably recounted in David Woodman's first book (The Franklin Search, iirc). These were discounted by European and American searchers (including Charles Hall who chronicled the bulk of Inuit testimony, but had an odd relationship with them despit over a decade in their company - his story is in Weird and Tragic Shores). The ending of both ships is recorded, with the first foundering near where the Victory Point message indicates they were abandoned - this was believed to be Toolooah's, or Franklin's, ship by the Inuit. The second was seen another winter or two (depending how you interprtet testimony) later far south of there, in Queen Maud Gulf, and off the O'Reilly Islands. This is where the ship has been found, supposedly near Hat Island specifically.
The theory has been, taking Inuit testimony of the second ship's resting place as true, that some of the crew came back to the ship post-abandonment and sailed her south after the thaw, before being frozen in again and abandoning her a final time. [There is some latter day testimony (from Dorothy Eber's book Encounters in teh Passage) of Inuit interaction with them the Winter before this as well, at the Royal Geographic Islands.]
That the ship was found here (off Hat Island) lends credence to this theory as well as the Inuit testimony.
OK, been geeking out a few days over this and had to share. No links, this is a quest worth pursuing on your own! Google is your friend.
As a side note, I had developed the expedition a little ways as a solo adventure, with an initial excursion at Beechy Island (where graves were found in 1850/51 and exhumed in the 1980's) before the trip south and being frozen in NW of King William Island, and the subsequent fight for survival. This being DCG, I added a bit of a supernatural enemy, since slowly descending into starvation and cannibalism is not an exciting play by itself (outside of the Misery Tourism genre). The discovery has me looking back over my notes...
Bret
