In honor of the recent DNA identification of Henry Peglar I thought I'd polish up and re-issue my Henry Peglar playlist. Each song now corresponds to a document catalogued within the Peglar Papers; see the lyrics below for explanation!
No. 1 — Letter to Mr. John Couper, Commercial Road, London: “Paid.” (AGC/36/1/1)
1. “Limbo” | Eliza Carthy
I am a brisk lad and my fortune is bad
And if e’er I get rich it’s a wonder
I’ve spent all my money on girls and strong beer
What riches I had are all plundered
No. 2 — Record of Peglar’s Service (AGC/36/1/2)
2. [went?/now?] in the [Terror?] — “The bonny ship the Diamond”
Well don’t you weep, my bonny lass
Though you’ll be left behind
For the rose will bloom on Greenland’s ice
Before we change our mind
No. 3 — Fragment of Envelope with Illegible Address (AGC/36/1/3)
3. “I Am Mine” | Beta Radio
Apples and pears rotten lie
The eulogy itself can write
No. 4 — Apr. 21 1847 — The C the C the open C (AGC/36/1/4)
4. It was too [whide? which?] — “The Water is Wide” | Karla Bonof
A ship there is and she sails the sea
She’s loaded deep as deep can be
But not so deep as the love I’m in
5. I love dear a young and Hopen C — “Love We Are We Love” | The Sea The Sea
Love we are young too old too soon
Love we are wise too late to know
No. 5a — Fragment — Lines on the Party wot happened in Trinidad (AGC/36/1/5/1)
6. “Song That I Heard” | The Barr Brothers
I came to scatter ashes
Of the bridges I had burned
And to know the name
Of the song that I heard
No. 5b — Badly Decayed Fragment Written Backwards (AGC/36/1/5/2)
7. “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still” | The Teacups
At the first sweet dawn of light
When I gaze upon the deep
Her form still greets my sight
While the stars their vigil keep
No. 5b — Fragment — Has my littel bark was drifting down (AGC/36/1/5/3)
8. My crew they went to sleep / While .[I?]. keep a Lookout — “Fires” | Allman Brown
Voices tell me a truth I nearly know
This will all soon be memory
No. 6 — Fragment — Sir in colonne in the [north?] (AGC/36/1/6)
9. “Sitting Room” | Beta Radio
In the living room, in the sitting room
I will wait for you in the hollow I have hewn
No. 7 — Fragment — O death [where is] thy sting (AGC/36/1/7)
10. “Where O Death Is Now Thy Sting?” | Mise
[instrumental]
11. The Harmonic I have wander[ed] — “Odyssey” | Talos
It’s hard to leave
I hold at the breach
I’ve got my reasons
I’m cast out in the cold
12. You [are?] peglar — “Bury Me Smiling” | The Ballroom Thieves
A heart like a wild sea
No man could own me
Won’t be the words
Upon my stone
No. 8 — Fragment with Writing Resembling an Address (AGC/36/1/8)
13. “The God of Loss” | Darlingside
Yes, we will leave here without a trace
Take a new name and an old shape
No. 9 — Fragment Labelled Only “Sentimental Song” (AGC/36/1/9)
14. “Nothing Arrived” | Villagers
I waited for something, and something died
So I waited for nothing, and nothing arrived
No. 10 — Leather Wallet (AGC/36/1/10 — AAA2114)
15. “My Arms Were Always Around You” | Peter Bradley Adams
Let’s go back to the days beneath the northern lights
When we danced so free like a little child
16. “The Fear” | Ben Howard
My, my cold hearted child, tell me where it’s all gone
All the luster of your bones, those arms that held you strong
No. 11 — Fragments from Leather Wallet (AGC/36/1/11)
17. “Anchors” | The Ballroom Thieves
This nest of bones reveals my parchment heart
Inkwell eyes have tried and failed to pull it all apart
18. “John My Beloved” | Sufjan Stevens
Beloved of John, I get it all wrong
I read you for some kind of poem
Covered in lines, the fossils I find
Have they no life of their own?
No. 13 — Various Transcripts of the Peglar Papers, 1850s-1950s (AGC/36/1/13)
19. “We Are” | Peter Bradley Adams
We are blind in the darkness
Crawling on our hands
We are born in the sunlight
We love the ones we can
[No. 14] — Stenton et al. 2026
20. “The Ancestor” | Darlingside
But I will find my way
Out of the dark someday
Into a crimson yellow sun
one really really really funny thing you realize when you are studying history is that people pretty much always desperately wanted to post online and would have been soooooo fucking crazy on here. i wish hildegard of bingen was oomf
“Sometimes i think you love your people more than god loves them, Kathryn.”
bringing together all my kathryn janeway terror/voyager crossover sketches into one place because @fate-motif keeps torturing me with this idea (originally based on this post)
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
hey so "erebus" is the name of the greek god of darkness and gloom and he's the son of chaos. so what exactly did these dudes think was going to happen when they headed for the arctic in ships named "terror" and "darkness"?
This is correct! Erebus (Greek Ἔρεβος) is a mythological figure whose name (like Hades) was also used as a stand-in to refer to the Greek underworld. The name would have been chosen for our HMS Erebus (1826) to strike fear into the hearts of Britain's enemies.
The Royal Navy loved scary grimdark warship names and never renamed ships just because those ships happened to be used for (ostensibly) peaceful polar exploration. Two other unfortunately named polar vessels that I personally love:
HMS Carcass (1759) of the 1773 Phipps Expedition to the Arctic — likely named not after the synonym for "corpse," but after the class of bomb-like projectile weapon; still creepy and weird.
HMS Hecla (1815) of three different Arctic expeditions led by Sir William Edward Parry in the late 1810s and 1820s — named after the Icelandic volcano Hekla (innocent enough, right?) but during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Mt. Hekla came to be seen as a gateway into Hell (for more on this, check out Kristen Poole's article "When Hell Freezes Over: Mount Hecla and Hamlet's Infernal Geography," in Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011): 152-187).
My favorite poem by William Blake uses this motif of Hecla-as-Hell, also; in "To Winter," Blake writes of the titular season:
He [Winter] takes his seat upon the cliffs, the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch! that deal’st
With storms; till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driven yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.
This is really interesting! Thank you for a fabulous addition to my post! I'm sure that the TV show The Terror did mention this at some point or another, but I'll admit - when I watch shows for the very first time, information goes in one ear and out the other. I think I'm so focused on trying to remember faces and names that exposition, background, and even plot are lost to me.
I'm also still wrapping my head around the fact that the people and ships involved were real, and while the show dramatized many of the things that happened, it's still based on more or less real events. In my mind, it's still just a fictional account of fictional characters, rather than a fictional account of real people!
This added context helps me understand the characters/people and situation a lot better, and it gave me a bit of a history lesson! (-: Thanks so much for taking the time to explain it to me!
Happy to be of help, and I don't think this is ever explained in the show, no! There are a lot of small historical details that The Terror basically leaves for its viewers to discover for themselves, and that's one of my favorite things about it as a show.
I've honestly forgotten a bit what it's like to see these characters as purely fictional, since I've spent so much time working on the historical end (for context, after seeing The Terror I pivoted my main academic research such that I'm now writing a dissertation on polar exploration) so it's lovely to be reminded of what it's like to watch the show with fresh eyes!
I hope you enjoy your re-watch(es) and have fun seeing JFJ from a new angle! (He's one of my absolute favorites.)
Also, a fun historical connection, since you mentioned that you're more familiar with the history of the American West: the same storm system that froze Erebus and Terror into the pack ice for good in 1846 was also the storm that trapped the Donner Party in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And even worse—during the spring of 1846, Lady Franklin had been visiting the east coast of America, keeping an eye out for news about her husband and saying that, if she heard good news about Sir John's progress, she'd join a wagon train heading west so that she could meet him in California. So "Lady Franklin Joins the Donner Party" was almost a historical reality!
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