#antarctica posting

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this meme going around made me think of them

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great news: the team who restored the Belgica’s coelophone (hand-cranked reed organ) for last year’s MAS Antwerp exhibit digitized their recordings! that means that you can listen to the actual music they had on the Belgica played on their actual device like you can listen to it right now

photographs from the same source, Pauliphonic, where you will also find a video of the restorers operating the piece and almost 100 photos of the object itself :) it’s a really thorough demonstration of this instrument; I actually saw it in person at last year’s exhibit & feel this is a much, much more effective way to showcase how the “books” are shaped and stored and how much manipulation is required to play music on this thing.

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hello do yoj ever think about de gerlache wanting to keep danco's corpse around like shauna with jackie in yellowjackets s2 so they could bury him in belgium where adg would be able to visit his grave and lecointe and raco having to be like no we're not doing that. "leave it on the pack ice in a coffin" they'd already been drifting for months if fred had agreed to do the embalming adg would've been like ohhh well we can't leave him out there actually we'll lose track of him. better keep him on the ship i'll definitely act normal about that

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a brief note on my ongoing research into the belgica and the belgian congo

i often forget to post when i update my belgica website, but now feels like as good time as any to mention that i have been trying to keep my "bibliography & recommendations" pages updated, including the section on what the men themselves were reading. i want to point out the ship's library page specifically because it is where i have written the most about the expedition's ties to belgium's brutal colonization of the congo.

the 'recommendations' part of my bibliography page covers the sections of some places to get started on learning about the Selk'nam people the belgica guys met and sources in the history of the congo. as much as i adore madhouse, its focus did not allow for much elaboration on the intricacies of how someone like AdG could have refused to lead belgium's colonization efforts but still used the belgica expedition as a way to suck up to the men who did go to the congo to burn down villages and mutilate exploited laborers. i don't really mean this as a critique — sancton already had a great deal of imperialist behavior to cover between amundsen and cook alone, not to mention having to fit all the drama of the expedition! this angle was simply outside of his purview.

on a more personal note, both of my undergraduate mentors specialized in modern imperialism in africa and its visible presence in non-african countries (i'd rather not get more specific to avoid identifying either of them). i often find it difficult to gauge how familiar other people are with these difficult-to-read-about histories, so i'd appreciate feedback if anyone feels like the recommendations i've selected aren't as easy a place to start as i thought.

(i'm kind of assuming anyone clicking on the bibliography section of my text-dominated website has the power to at least google 'belgian congo' and read the wikipedia page, though.)

anyways. deploying fannish behaviors around historical subjects is an incredibly fraught tightrope to walk. one of my "bare minimums" for myself is never posting any decontextualized propaganda about the 'congo free state' (the legal title of the area which was king leopold ii's personal property and the site of the most grievous belgian atrocities). another bare minimum of mine is 'continue to learn more.'

but we can all always do better. we can all always remind each other to do better. i'm just some white person with a few assistantships under my belt and enough time on my hands to keep learning. i'm not trying to present myself as any sort of expert on anything and i encourage everyone getting into the belgica, especially my fellow non-europeans, to read up on belgium's colonial activities to understand how they differed from other imperialist endeavors at the time. not because there's some sort of grand scale of 'least bad' to 'most bad' imperialism, but because understanding these distinctions gives one a better footing for resisting apologetics and repeats of history.

every imperialist power tells the stories of their own imperialism in certain ways, and each of them point fingers at the other imperialist powers as a way to shift the guilt off of the shoulders of their citizens. many europeans speak of the transatlantic slave trade as if it were an american invention; many americans speak of the rape of africa as if our government never participated in similar carve-and-grab imperialist decisions (the middle east, south america, the arctic, for some examples) or assisted in keeping african countries destablized. canada's international reputation is one of niceness despite the ongoing despicable treatment of the first nations within its borders. but if you are getting into history as a hobby, and especially if you are engaging in fannish behaviors around it, you have the duty to educate yourself beyond these narratives.

the internet is overflowing with resources. use them.

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pov: you are on the belgica in spring 1898 and the drunk captain just slapped the national anthem on upside down because he got so excited about ranking hot girls

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Adrien de Gerlache aged 4, 12, and 18 :)

unfortunately it seems i forgot to take a photo of the cover of this book, but i'm 90% sure it was Les Gerlache: Trois générations d'explorateurs polaires (The Gerlaches: Three Generations of Polar Explorers) by CE Schelfhout, which I was able to view at The Frederick A. Cook Society in the Sullivan County Museum.

it also featured this darling portrait of AdG at 21 or 22 in his snazzy new facial hair lieutenant's uniform:

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I've added a few more of Raco's caricatures to my Belgica website, with the goal of finishing up my translations by the 2-year anniversary of the site's birthday (April 29) (yes, that's Lecointe's birthday. I'm corny!) Hopefully, the increased context and reorganization make the page a bit easier to read. If anyone has a specific caricature they'd particularly like to read more about, please let me know, and I'll look into it!

image credit: National Library of Norway

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they should make a movie about Roald Amundsen no not that one they should make a new, better movie. One where he’s bisexual