My Terror fandom Hot Take is that I think it’s weird how little anyone into the real life history side cares about the Inuit who interacted with the FE. Lots of people dig in to the backgrounds of Tozer’s siblings or Irving’s friends, but nobody seems to have heard of Kokleearngnun or Too-shoo-art-thariu. I’ve observed a real lack of curiosity.
Ok, maybe not that weird, seeing as how I’ve blocked multiple people over the years for saying things like “the Inuit were/are liars”. When you’re saying stuff that was considered racist by some Victorians, it’s time to reconsider your views!
i think this is a fair take/critique that i myself can also learn from! for my part i’m very interested in ada blackjack (though i know she’s not involved with the FE), and have also noticed how non-white figures in polar history (e.g., matthew henson) receive relatively so little attention despite how compelling their lives and the obstacles they overcame are. this is not to say everyone has to let go of their white boy blorbo/interest, but expanding your mind beyond them is both imperative and rewarding!
also yeah, absolutely fuck anyone who discounts the firsthand testimonies of the inuit. i’d block their asses too 💯
In case anyone is interested, and you don’t fancy crawling through Charles Francis Hall’s journals yourself, I’ll give a brief summary of these two men’s most significant interactions.
Kokleearngnun told Hall about seeing a white man’s ship that became overwhelmed with ice and sank. He met a man by the name of Aglooka and a “pee-e-tu” (commonly interpreted to be a steward or non-seaman) who was called “Nar-tar”. Hall believed that that was a way of pronouncing “doctor”. Kokleearngnun was given two spoons with the initials FRMC stamped on them.
He met qallunaat at least twice (IIRC). I think that the most interesting testimony he gave was set aboard a ship. It’s quite controversial account, but I strongly believe that it is of the FE rather than of a different expedition. Hall, April 1866:
The Pelly Bay men described the Esh-emut-ta as an old man with broad shoulders, thick and heavier set than Hall, with gray hair, full face, and bald head. He was always wearing something over his eyes (spectacles, as Too-koo-li-too interpreted it), was quite lame, and appeared sick when they last saw him. He was very kind to the Innuits;—always wanting them to eat something. Ag-loo-ka (Crozier) and another man would go and do everything that Too-loo-ark told them, just like boys; he was a very cheerful man, always laughing; everybody liked him—all the kob-lu-nas and all the Innuits. Kok-lee-arng-nun showed how Too-loo-ark and Ag-loo-ka used to meet him. They would take hold of his hand, giving it a few warm and friendly shakes, and Too-loo-ark would say, “Ma-my-too-mig-tey-ma.” Ag-loo-ka’s hand-shaking was short and jerky, and he would only say, “Man-nig-too-mé.” “After the first summer and first winter, they saw no more of Too-loo-ark; then Ag-loo-ka (Crozier) was the Esh-e-mut-ta.”
Kokleearngnun's wife, Koo-narg, as well as several other women, also took tea aboard the ship with Toolooark, who gave them all ulus and, to Koo-narg, a silver pocket watch. It’s curious, because in the accounts from other expeditions, the British mostly gave the Inuit worthless (and sometimes insulting) gifts in exchange for information and items (e.g. pieces of old barrel).
Meanwhile, Too-shoo-art-thar-u definitely met the men after they abandoned ship. His group hadn’t heard that there were qallunaat on the island, so they sent their two bravest hunters (Ow-wer and Too-shoo-art-thar-u) (to use Hall’s renderings of their names) to go and investigate. They meet them at an ice crack, putting distance between them; one of the white men had a gun pointing at the hunters, but the man who was in front told him to put it down. He showed them an ulu and used it to make a line in the snow. He then pantomimed asking for something to eat. Too-shoo-art-thar-u called this first man “Aglooka”. Aglooka couldn’t speak much Inuktitut, but Too-shoo-art-thar-u eventually understood that he had come from two ships up north that had been crushed in ice. Quoting Hall again:
After this first interview the two men went ashore with the Innuits. While Aglooka was trying to talk with the Innuits (Ow-wer [my note: probably a shortening of Ukuararssuk] & Too-shoo-art-thar-u), the party with the boat and one other sledge passed by going a little lower down to a point or cape of the little bay where they then were. On getting ashore Aglooka wanted everything - every pack opened & opened them himself, the dogs' saddle bag packs, the women's packs and the men's packs, for everything was ready for making a journey across the land. Aglooka wanted meat & for this he wanted every pack opened. The Innuits were all willing he should do as he did.
After each man Innuit had given him some seal meat, it was all put on a (one) dog's back & then by the request of Aglooka all 4 Innuit men with the dog laden with meat went down with Aglooka and the man with him to where the men and the boat where, the men erecting a tent. As they approached the tent, one man came out to meet them. Aglooka spoke to the men when he and the Innuits were near the tent. The men along side the tent and the men alongside of the boat stood in line holding up their arms and open hands above their heads, showing they had nothing (that is no weapons) about them.
The men stayed for a bit. One of them caught a fish and one shot down a bird. In exchange for helping them, Aglooka handed out gifts.
The strange thing is that, several years earlier, in 1864, Hall heard a different story from the one above. That one was given by Too-shoo-art-thariu's cousins, and in it the white men stay for one night. The 1864 testimony was given by Too-shoo-art-thariu's mother and son. In that one, the white men stay all winter. They travel with Too-shoo-art-thariu and his family. They hunted and travelled in an inflatable boat. One of them died of illness, and the others left so that they could go back to their country. In thanks, Aglooka offered Too-shoo-art-thariu his rifle - Too-shoo-art-thariu turned it down because he didn’t know how to use it, so Aglooka gave him a “long knife” instead.
Ten years later, Schwatka met Ahlangyah, his wife, who claimed that the family had met ten qallunaat who stayed for five days. Just like in the previous accounts, two of the men were called Aglooka and Toolooah, but their physical descriptions don’t match Kokleearngnun's descriptions of the men he had dinner with. Furthermore, Rasmussen collected the testimony of a man whose father (Mangaq) had been with the group. It has similar features - the hunters meet the white men at a crack in the ice, the qallunaat (three this time) stay in their own tent (which is peculiar because it is not made of animal skins), they say their ships were crushed by the ice, they exchanged a knife for seal meat, and the white men leave because they want to go home. Rasmussen, as quoted in Unravelling the Franklin Mystery by Dave Woodman:
Father and his people would willingly have helped the white men, but could not understand them; they tried to explain themselves by signs, and in fact learned to know a lot by this means. They had once been many they said; now they were only few, and they had left their ship out in the pack-ice. They pointed to the south, and it was understood that they wanted to go home overland. They were not met again, and no one knows where they went to.
However, there was not a caribou hunt like in the first account, and this time they share a tent with Mangaq and the white men stay at least three days.
I’ll admit, I chose Too-shoo-art-thar-u at sort of random, because he’s a candidate for the man who was given the sword of a great officer , but when I checked my books and notes the story turned out to be more complicated than I remembered! But I decided to relay it to show everyone how difficult it can be to interpret Inuit testimony.
If you want to learn more, the best secondary sources with free pdfs of them floating around tumblr are Unravelling the Franklin Mystery by David Woodman and Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers by Dorothy Harley Eber (slightly problematic in that it uses people’s Christian names instead of their proper names, so please ignore them). For an Inuit perspective, and what a lot of people say is the best book, there is The Land Was Always Used: An Inuit Oral History of the Franklin Expedition (if you have £40 to spare).
although i largely love terror/polar exploration fandom and think it's significantly more sensitive and thoughtful than most historically fixated spaces, there is also an undercurrent of subconscious racism and uncritical buy-in to the great man theory + belief that white men's stories no matter how relatively mundane/unremarkable are the center of everything. but then everyone thinks you're crazy for noticing it
Imagining colonisers as queer doesn't stop them from being colonisers.
Giving cishet white male characters a minority status is not an Uno Reverse card you can play to not feel guilty about society placing white men's stories above everyone else's.
I have found Terror fandom much more willing to talk about race and colonialism than some other fandoms I've been in, but that bar is ankle high, and the least we can do is acknowledge the issues rather than try and divert the conversation to subjects that the fandom's (white) majority is more comfortable with.
although i largely love terror/polar exploration fandom and think it's significantly more sensitive and thoughtful than most historically fixated spaces, there is also an undercurrent of subconscious racism and uncritical buy-in to the great man theory + belief that white men's stories no matter how relatively mundane/unremarkable are the center of everything. but then everyone thinks you're crazy for noticing it
although i largely love terror/polar exploration fandom and think it's significantly more sensitive and thoughtful than most historically fixated spaces, there is also an undercurrent of subconscious racism and uncritical buy-in to the great man theory + belief that white men's stories no matter how relatively mundane/unremarkable are the center of everything. but then everyone thinks you're crazy for noticing it
Guy who has a non-research degree in a field that never studies human subjects: Here are my opinions on what needs to be done for me to respect this field I've decided to become a denier of.
[Extreme breach of scientific ethics]
[Violent abuse of power]
[Method that actually doesn't obtain any information]
[Controlled double-blind studies of phenomena where that is literally impossible]
[Seeking empirical proof that a word has the meaning that it's defined as]
[Study that would have a dropoff rate of 100%]
Additionally, how do we know that [best currently available theory] is true, and not [dominant theory from 100 years ago that repeatedly failed in the face of evidence]? I have found some minor methodological flaws in [studies that were not designed to prove the best available theory, but rather examine edge cases within that theory], so we should really consider [nonsense with no evidence backing it whatsoever].
I don’t know who Armitage is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask
(Hi there! I tried to type out a normal answer to this ask but it accidentally turned into a giant essay so honestly, anon, you should be afraid and I apologize in advance. If this is really Too Much, here’s an Armitage outfit-rating post I made a bit ago that covers a lot of the same content and also has additional screenshots of him for identification purposes.)
I didn’t know who he was either until about seven months ago... Well, that’s not entirely true, but it was around that time that I realized all his different appearances throughout the show were the same person and that person was the infamous Mr. Armitage. You may recognize his name by the fact that he’s being shittalked pretty much every time he’s brought up but he did some shitty things so about 75% of the time, he deserves it.
But who is Armitage? Despite often being seen with a gun and hanging out with the marines, he’s not a marine himself, which is a common fandom misconception. Instead, he’s Terror’s gunroom steward which, despite its name, has nothing to do with guns (although he’s implied on several occasions to have the keys to the armory but whether this is a regular part of his job or a duty he just happened to be assigned, I do not know).
this was the shot that first made me notice him way back in October of last year and I had no clue who he was or why we were looking at him during the lashing
But what is his actual canonical significance? Although he is not a marine, he’s almost always seen by Tozer’s side. I like to think of myself (and the wonderful @rhavewellyarnbag) as the head archaeologists of what has been lovingly dubbed “the secret Armitage/Tozer subplot,” found only by closely studying the hidden depths beneath the surface of the show. I’ve actually been meaning to gather up all of my old meta and rewrite it to suit my current thoughts on the matter but, I’ll give it a somewhat abbreviated try here, under the cut.
The first time we properly see Armitage, he’s standing in armed defense of Tozer, immediately after Heather has been attacked by the Tuunbaq. Right off the bat, it’s a bit strange for a steward, who by any ordinary measure should be a nobody on the ship, to be protecting a Sergeant of the Royal Marines so that alone makes him stand out and I would argue that protecting Tozer becomes the cornerstone of his character.
In ep 6, while doing some of the aforementioned shittalking, Hickey says that Armitage had always wanted to be a marine, but was disqualified due to his disability, implying that he’s now somewhat of a wannabe or a fan but I think it goes deeper than that. In the very same episode, at Carnivale, we see Armitage assisting Tozer in feeding the comatose Heather, something he apparently knows how to do by this point and looks perfectly comfortable doing, which implies to me that he had been assisting in Heather’s care ever since his attack, in a similar fashion to how we see Tozer at his bedside in ep 5. And then, when all goes to shit at the end of ep 6, Armitage not only tries desperately to help Tozer save Heather from the fire but, failing that, drags Tozer out of the tent against his will, saving him from being crushed or burned to death for what was, by that point, a lost cause. Whatever Armitage’s original reasoning was for socializing with the marines, this is more than him playing out a fantasy of becoming one himself; his relationship with them, and with Tozer in particular, is personal.
Enter: The Mutiny. Armitage was already connected to Hickey’s whole situation via participating in Silna’s kidnapping in ep 4 and then not owning up to it (remember how I said he deserves to be shittalked?) but Hickey didn’t even need blackmail to get him involved in the mutiny, all he needed was Tozer. With Tozer on board for his own reasons, Armitage’s eventual participation in the mutiny was a given. Also unhelpful to any hope of staying neutral was Armitage’s involvement in the murder of Koveyook and his family based on Hickey’s lies, as we hear about in ep 8, after which Hickey implies within his earshot that he’d like to see the armory opened. One can interpret this situation in multiple ways depending on whether Armitage had figured by that point that Hickey was the real murderer of Irving and Farr and was now in fear for his own life or whether he was still convinced of the family’s guilt and was acting purely out of racism but, regardless, it’s no surprise that, when Tozer asked him to open the armory without orders, he complied (although he was, tellingly, unable to defend this action to Little when pressed).
And so, ep 8 plays out, Tozer’s nearly hanged (much to Armitage’s dismay if you watch for him in the crowd around the gallows), the Tuunbaq interrupts, and the mutiny is on its way. But wait! Let’s not brush over Armitage saving Tozer’s life for the second time by thwacking Little, who had Tozer held at gunpoint, over the head. RIP Little’s skull but also this is the second time he was bamboozled by Tozer and Armitage within one day so… “Fool me once,” and all that…
(Also, try to tell me that appearing out of the fog in the nick of time to save the life of the person you love isn’t the most romantic thing ever? You can’t.)
But now the mutineers are their own offshoot group and things are getting serious(ly bad). At the end of ep 9 we have the scene where Armitage tries to convince Tozer to leave Hickey, which I think of as an attempt to, once again, save Tozer’s life. Although there was no way for Armitage to know the extent of Hickey’s agenda, he did know that he was being asked to assist in kidnapping Crozier, a reckless move wholly unrelated to their survival, not to mention that Hickey was clearly going nuts overall. So, to me, their conversation rings not only of Armitage grasping at their best chance of survival, but also of him trying to get Tozer out of a potentially dangerous and abusive situation. But, of course, Tozer says no and, despite his fear, Armitage stays as well, and things end how they end.
in case it’s not clear, Armitage is the one who leans forward and reaches his hand out after Tozer is knocked out by Hickey :(
To summarize a bit more succinctly, Armitage’s narrative life is a tragedy marked by repeated failures and unrequited love with no solace or fulfillment and it sounds pretty damn depressing when I say it Like That but also, this is The Terror, so it’s really just par for the course.
His being motivated by something as wonderful as love, and love for someone as worthy of it as Tozer is incredibly appealing to me. Not everything done in the service of love is good but I am naturally more sympathetic to it than I am to the actions of those who I believe were only in it for themselves. Harvey once said (paraphrasing here, apologies!) that Armitage might regret some of the things that happened, but he doesn’t regret why they happened, and I fully agree with that assessment. That is to say, I don’t think he set out to do bad things or was indifferent to the negative effects of the actions he ultimately took, but I also think that he loved Tozer and would have done anything to keep him safe and I really can’t hate him for that.
In fact (if this ridiculously long answer didn’t tell you already) for all his faults, I love him quite a lot! So thank you for asking and, if you made it this far, have a smiling and happy Armitage for your trouble!
one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?
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