It has sort of come to my attention that a lot of people in the terror fandom don’t know the extent of the absolute vitriol and hatred that was spewed towards the Inuit at the time contemporary searches were happening, and the serious effect that had on finding anyone alive, and out finding of artifacts even to the present day.
Charles Francis Hall who was one of the first searches to head to the arctic in search of franklins crew in 1859, recorded his anger at the Inuit only supplying the surviving members with seal meat as they walked south, leaving the crews to die and abandoning their please, saying quote “These 4 families could have saved Crozier's life & that of his company had they been so disposed... But no, though noble Crozier pleaded with them, they would not stop even a day to try & catch seals - but early in the morning abandoned what they knew to be a large starving company of white men.”
He failed to mention those four families were on the verge of starving themselves, and had given probably more than they had to share before continuing on.
In 1854 John Rae brought the first reports of cannibalism back to England, it was fiercely rejected and shunned as even being a remote possibility, writers toting that the crewmen would rather starve to death then do such a thing, a thing that we know now occurred as an act of pure desperation, by men who had no other option. This did not stop Charles Dickens from writing this to defame the Inuit, who were the source of the information: “they are covetous, treacherous and cruel.. With a domesticity of blood and blubber'.”
Charles Dickens was world renowned, as was Hall as an explorer, by toting these lies about the Inuit being liars, forging stories to disparage the legacies of the brave white men they had allowed to starve to death, they destroyed the already tenuous trust white searchers had in the indigenous people who only had their best at heart. If they hadn’t done this, and if the men they influenced had taken the Inuit at their word, there is a chance we could have found infinitely more information, remains, and artifacts of the crews during the late nineteenth century.
I cannot possibly understate how the ego of these men destroyed our chances of fully understanding what occurred in the final march south towards backsfish river, but there is a lesson to be learned. There were contemporary reports from Inuit who had gone aboard the still floating terror years after the last of the men died at starvation cove, and they claim that there were multiple men dead aboard the boat. It is worth the effort to believe these accounts and do more dives to the wreck of the terror with the hopes of recovering human remains, rather than leaving them at the bottom of the ocean to be lost along with their stories.
The condition of the Erebus after being sunk since 1848. The terror is equally intact.
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
