28 Replies to “Franklin Expedition Award, 2010”

  2. A dear friend who has spent some time in the far north and has many of the locals as friends. She asked them about their diet and relayed back to us that the different kinds of meat act differently to the Inuit people’s bodies, much like the variations of fruits, vegetables, starches, meats, etc. in our own bodies.
    She had it explained to her that caribou meat to them was much the same as vegetables for us, just as an example.
    The body will adapt to the region in where we live.
    No doubt that the 70,000+ man-made chemicals we now have added to our food have something to do with all the malfunctioning of our bodies these days!
    Love the way PETA is trying to impose their belief systems on those whom they have spent absolutely no time getting to know or understand, much like the Brits did trapped up in the ice in the far North.

  5. Not wanting to make light of their tragedy, but as I understand, much of their provisions were canned goods with the cans being sealed with solder (lead). This would have lead to their going batsh1t crazy and dragging useless items along with them.
    Perhaps many, if not most of the peta whackos ate too much lead based paint in their misspent youth. Just a thought for what it’s worth.

  6. “Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
    To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
    Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
    And make a northwest passage to the sea ”

  7. “There was nothing to fear. They had with them 10 live oxen to be slaughtered for fresh meat, 61,987 Kg of flour, 16,749 L of liquor, 909L of wine, 4,287 Kg of chocolate, 1,069 Kg of tea, 8,000 tins of soup, meat, and vegetables, 3,215 Kg of tobacco, 1,673 Kg of soap, 1,225 Kg of candles, 4,200 Kg of lemon juice”
    It was the tobacco that did them in! And second hand smoke!
    PETA? I can only make a suggestion involving “sex and travel”, as the organization is so loony and SO hypocritical they aren’t worth wasting more words on.

  8. Why link to something mocking brave men who were pushing the boundaries of exploration? And while being ignorant at that of things like the lead poisoning from the solder and getting caught up in a particularly cold period of the Little Ice Age.
    And I suppose it would have been much better to have been like the Chinese and know that you’re the centre of the universe as the Middle Kingdom between heaven and earth and never have left your front door for real like Franklin’s idiots and like those idiots in the Apollo and the Space Shuttle trips who died thinking they could beat space. What losers.
    I also don’t like anti-imperialist snark–I get enough of that from leftist sources that I know are crap, so why should I take it from some blog I’ve never heard of before?

  12. oh Lord Lord Lord that is hilarious.
    I’m going to a sweat tonite with a native friend if a ride can be arranged. I’m going to print copies of this and pass them around.

  14. Olde Spice is right. The Franklin expedition didn’t die of starvation; it died of exposure and lead poisoning. This was discovered years ago after an autopsy of remains on one of the Arctic Islands. The deaths started in the first winter in the Arctic.
    Glacierman, please try not to generalize too much. Otherwise you’re just feeding the eco-freaks. Every combination of two or more atoms is a molecule, colloquially called a chemical. And the difference between man-made H2O and naturally occurring H2O is…..?

  15. Precisely why Roald Amundsen beat Captain Scott to the South Pole and lived to tell the tell while Scott did not. Amundsen spent a couple of years iced in in Northern Canada and spent that time learning from the locals how to make clothing, use dog sleds, and other critical survival techniques. Scott, the typical Brit had nothing to learn from the savages.
    Amundsen took dogs, sleds, Inuit clothing, and skis on his South Pole trip, Scott took motorized sleds and Siberian ponies both of which failed miserably.
    After they shot and kept their dogs for a food source when they became redundant the Norwegians pulled light sleds on skis and beat Scott by a couple of weeks. Scott and his men dragged heavy sleds on foot to the Pole arriving too late and froze to death on the way back.

  16. A good comparison. The Franklin expedition failed because its foods where preserved with arsenic. They poisoned themselves with cheap bought food by the Companies stores.
    Interesting liberals even back than had a fetish for specially laced kool aids.

  18. We can laugh at PETA without using a misinformed hit piece on Franklin. Franklin was knighted because he charted 1200 undiscovered miles of the North American northwest continent on 2 previous overland expeditions. He was well aware of native ways but there is no documented evidence the crew encountered any natives where they were trapped in the ice. This is just a repeat of the old canard that whenever and wherever Europeans landed in North America they were met by natives. Wrong. By the time they struck out on foot they were starving and confused by lead poisoning. They were dead men walking. Their bodies may have been discovered by natives but there is no evidence to suggest there was any encounter between any live member of Franklin’s crew and any natives.

  19. I’m with andycanuck on this. Franklin and his men were heroes and always will be in my book. It is true that they learnt a lot from the Eskimo; like the fact that sleeping together naked and together like spoons would preserve heat, rather than separately. I can understand why the British Navy was opposed to letting a lot of sailors sleep with one another, nonetheless. It is my understanding from arctic historians that the natives were notorious thieves and many believe that the crew were killed by them and probably cannibalized by them.

  20. Inuit went aboard Franklin’s ships and also encountered 40 or 50 of the men walking south. England blamed the Inuit:
    An editorial in The Times called for further investigation:
    to arrive at a more satisfactory conclusion with regard to the fate of poor Franklin and his friends . . . . Is the story told by the Esquimaux the true one? Like all savages they are liars, and certainly would not scruple at the utterance of any falsehood which might, in their opinion, shield them from the vengeance of the white man.”
    This line was energetically taken up by Charles Dickens, who wrote in his weekly magazine:
    It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages from their deferential behavior to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him. There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilization all innate depravity, and for every child born to the woods and wilds all innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man – lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak frozen, helpless, and dying – has of the gentleness of the Esquimaux nature.
    Dr. John Rae rebutted Dickens.. Dr. Rae, who had lived among the Inuit, defended them as “dutiful” and “a bright example to the most civilized people”, comparing them favorably with the undisciplined crew of the Franklin expedition, whom he suggested were ill treated and “would have mutinied under privation”
    That’s all the very interesting past; what I am saying is that much larger Franklin expeditions are planned or are underway; we will be carrying Andy Worhol paintings of soup cans and the “Meat Dress” from the National Gallery and I-pods, Apple Computers and 55 inch TV screens, through some desert somewhere.

  21. Not quite, Uncle. The British Nimrod expeditions of 1907-8 were in fact two expeditions, one led by Scott and the other was Ernest Shackleton’s first of three expeditions to Antarctica. Despite having a much lower profile than Scott’s, Shackleton’s expedition was much more successful in traveling through large parts of Antarctica and in its scientific research work. Shackleton used three methods of transport: motorized tractors, Manchurian ponies and dogs. The British experience with dogs in the Antarctic was that they were not fuel efficient. They consumed too much food for the weight they pulled. What didn’t occur to them was to use them as food.
    In his second expedition to Antarctica in 1912, Scott copied Shackleton’s transport methods. It was based on experience of what had worked before. What killed the expedition was two facts:
    1. no one understood then that liquids will evaporate in below freezing conditions. Thus, they underestimated the amount of fuel they would need to get to the pole and back;
    2. they were brutally unlucky with the weather. Because of the fuel problem, they ran late. And because they ran late, they missed the narrow window to go out and get back and ran into the beginning of the winter storms.
    Scott and Amundsen’s expeditions were entirely different in nature. Amundsen was simply doing a publicity stunt. Its sole purpose was to get to the South Pole and back. Scott’s expedition, like the previous British ones, was also scientific in nature. They were dragging along a large amount of scientific equipment for astronomical and meteorological observations.
    Your sneer at generalized British incompetence is unjustified. Ernest Shackleton led three expeditions to Antarctica. He never lost a man on any of them.
    Revnant, not quite. Franklin’s expedition was the first to use canned food. Always the problem for the British navy had been the problem of food and particularly water going bad. Under most conditions, food in navy ships in the early 19th C rotted after about 3 months in the barrels, and water barrels were usually completely contaminated after about six weeks, less if operating in tropical waters. The canning process had just been invented and was seen as a godsend by the British navy. What they didn’t know but subsequently discovered was that the canning process was done by soldering, which leached lead into the contents. Without canned rations, Franklin who was highly experienced as a navigator and explorer, would never have considered undertaking a mission of this duration.
    This was not “cheap food bought by the Companies stores”. The Franklin expedition was very important to the British Admiralty, and they spared no expense in providing it with the best and most expensive supplies possible.
    Neither Franklin, who was known to be a highly conscientious commander, nor the British Admiralty of the time deserve your sneers. They undertook it with the best equipment available. It was their misfortune that new technology betrayed and poisoned them.

  22. Bits of copper metal were found at Innuit hunting sites presumably from Franklin’s ships. That is the only direct evidence of any contact between the natives and Franklin’s ships. Natives would often tell whites what they wanted to hear, hence an oral history that told of oblivious white men walking in a deranged manner to their sure deaths. Why would Franklin reject the help of natives in this instance when he had already accepted their aid on 2 previous expeditions?

  23. Pam Anderson’s tits; I’d follow them any where.
    Typical Hollyweed stumbling, clueless airhead, and I do mean “head”. In the style of captain pompous arse BONO.

  24. Franklin was unfortunately an incompetent and unworthty leader of men. In a previous arctic expedition he lost 10 men. At great age (for the time) he was awarded another arctic expedition. Clearly he was not competent to lead. The result was that all were lost and it is simplistic to suggest that all men succumbed to lead poisioning or the like. The bottom line is that Frankin was not fit to lead.

  25. “Incompetent” men are not normally knighted, but whatever; it fits with our modern narrative, “stupid white men doing stupid stuff”. By the way, recent studies have suggested that the lead may have come from the drinking water since the lead levels in the exhumed bodies is too high to have come from just the cans.

  26. Thank you for taking the time and thank you Kate for the space. I call upon the Royalists to support their former Governor General and on all Canadians to support the hunters of seals, Inuit, coastal NFLD and Lab.
    PETA helped EU to outlaw all seal product. Unilateral, force of law.
    That’s our Inuit and that’s our coastal fishermen
    Support Harper’s move to sell it to China
    Then publicise the research about cardio disease
    Watch the price go up
    EU – sorry sold out. Now get your trawlers away from our shore

  28. we can call them all kinds of things from our cozy seats in front of computer screens. I for one am always amazed by the stunning accomplishments of these so called”incompetants” considering most folks couldnt start without google maps. I teach survival courses and most people cant make the night without the full compliment of modern accessories. For Alex MacKenzie , or Simon Fraser , or David Thompson to face these sort of hardships every night for 4 or 5 years, or Franklin in a harsher environment yet , my hat is off to them.
    history may judge us more harshly he.

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