Obama's Desk
I've been meaning to write about this for a while. I'm currently working on the medical context of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the North West Passage; and the most interesting connection with modern events is the fact that the desk that sits in the Oval Office is made from the timbers of a ship that went out to look for them.
Someone got there before me, and this excellent post brings together pages about the exploration, the human loss, the politics and diplomacy and even the music that surrounds this story. Really, if you read nothing else on the internet this week, read this.
I've got a couple of very minor nitpicks with it - Belcher wasn't the first to go looking for Franklin, and it's likely that most of the crew were finished off by scurvy, hypothermia and pneumonia before the final ones resorted to cannibalism.
Why would you abandon your ship in ice? Well, a lot of reasons, but this is a bloody good one:
(OK, I'm totally cheating, this is the Endurance in 1915, and it's in the Antarctic not the Arctic but any excuse to put up this run of pictures!)
(AKA I has a ship, O noes they be crushing my ship!)
Someone got there before me, and this excellent post brings together pages about the exploration, the human loss, the politics and diplomacy and even the music that surrounds this story. Really, if you read nothing else on the internet this week, read this.
I've got a couple of very minor nitpicks with it - Belcher wasn't the first to go looking for Franklin, and it's likely that most of the crew were finished off by scurvy, hypothermia and pneumonia before the final ones resorted to cannibalism.
Why would you abandon your ship in ice? Well, a lot of reasons, but this is a bloody good one:
(OK, I'm totally cheating, this is the Endurance in 1915, and it's in the Antarctic not the Arctic but any excuse to put up this run of pictures!)
(AKA I has a ship, O noes they be crushing my ship!)