Subject: RE: Concerning Franklin and His Gallant Crew - 1845
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 02 Jan 12 - 02:08 PM
In the context of a subsequent post, about science blogging, Andrew Revkin says this:
For example, I greatly value the array of insights prompted by my post yesterday on the misadventures of the Arctic explorer John Franklin and the new version of the 19th-century ballad on his failed final expedition that I created with David Rothenberg. (You can hear me talk about the song sometime soon on NPR's "All Things Considered." A partial transcript is already online.]
In a two-part comment, David Stoney of McClellanville, S.C., offers a fascinating look at how Franklin's disappearance was related to the profound lack of understanding of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding waters at the time. His post includes references to the amazing burst of knowledge that came from Elisha Kent Kane, an American naval officer who set out in search of Franklin's crew, with his own craft trapped in ice for nearly two years near the west coast of Greenland. Observations he made later helped bolster the deeply contested theory of ice ages proposed by Louis Agassiz.
Russell A. Potter, an English professor at Rhode Island College who was able to visit the gravesite of some of Franklin's crew, maintains a fantastic Web site on "The Fate of Franklin". On seeing my post, he offered a deeper look at the 19th-century illustration that I used, and his reflections on how changes in climate alter the course of human affairs.
[T]he illustration of the "Graves of the Companions of Sir John Franklin," of which I have an original print, remains a bit of a puzzler: it appears to show nearly 16 graves, several with heavy stone monuments. It doesn't match with the three known graves on Beechey, with their simple wooden markers, nor with any other known gravesite of Franklin's men; I've always wondered whether it might be a mis-captioned image of some other set of memorials.
The climate changes being visited on the Arctic are indeed tragic, but the loss is large, abstract, and difficult to grasp — one reason that the sad tale of the loss of Franklin and his 128 men has resonated through the ages, up to a point where the very forces which imprisoned them have now turned, topsy-turvy, to threaten us all not with a superabundance of ice, but its disappearance.
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~ Becky in Tucson
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sj
