call-me-moby-dick - Tumblr blog

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(up to your own interpretation of the vibe)

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On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale was first published in the United States.

Enjoy an illustration from the 1892 edition! (x)

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Ok i have to know

Reblog for sample size!

(Other can also include porpoises and i guess dolphins but yanno)

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Queer as in gay, yes, but most importantly, queer as in unusual, strange, creepy, odd..

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I think Ishmael Mobydick would really flip out if he learned how sperm whales sleep

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your life is not meaningless, you just haven't seen the sea in a while

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the best way i can think to describe the experience of reading moby dick is you’re in line at the dmv and this guy behind you very loudly says “well who HASN’T had a gay experience” and then proceeds to tell you every detail about his life in between anecdotes about how great sperm is and how ropes work and sometimes he’ll say the most poetic shit you’ve ever heard in your life and them jump RIGHT back into explaining how a whale is a fish because 1) it swims in water and you’re still only like halfway through the dmv line

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Giving me a bag of sea pottery and glass was a bad idea. I'm OBSESSED. So here's a tea clipper on a teacup shard, will make it in a necklace. Now I'm thinking of stories in fragments, tales about ships on sea-rounded porcelain and glass

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whats your fav historical boat and why ??:)

Hello 🙂 I'm so glad you've asked this question and I promise to be extremely normal about it 🙂

I can find something to love in almost every polar and/or nautical expedition, but nothing has captured my attention and my heart like the Karluk, the flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition.

The ship herself was a disaster. Built in 1884 as a fishing vessel, she was repurposed as a whaler in 1892, then acquired by Stefansson in 1913 for the bargain bin price of $10,000. The Karluk was uniquely unsuited for polar exploration-- she was old, rickety, and had what chief engineer John Munro described as a "coffee pot of an engine" that was so ineffective that icebreaking was out of the question. Captain Bartlett almost refused to take her north, but in the end, he acceded to Stefansson's demands. He would come to regret this decision.

In the least surprising turn of events ever, the Karluk became trapped in the pack only a month into the voyage, hundreds of miles from her destination. She remained there until she succumbed to the pressure of the ice and sank five months later, setting the stage for one of the most unbelievable survival stories in the history of polar exploration.

Why the Karluk? For me, it's that the ship was such a perfect metaphor for the expedition itself, which is not always the case! For example-- Terra Nova was overloaded and leaked like a sieve, but the expedition she supported was meticulously planned. Endurance could not withstand the pressure of the pack, but even so, her entire crew survived. The Karluk, though? A nightmare ship with a nightmare (derogatory) leader and a nightmare (affectionate) crew for a nightmare expedition. No part of this should have worked, and it's a miracle that anyone made it home. If not for the selfless actions and basic human decency of a select few crew members and the kindness and generosity of the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, no one would ever know what happened to them.

Stefansson was simply the worst leader imaginable for a venture like this. He was smug, aloof, selfish, willing to play games with the lives of his men, and hopelessly out of his depth. He failed to adequately provision the expedition, a decision that would prove fatal. The crew he hired were a mix of polar veterans with substance abuse and/or ego problems, Indigenous people (including a family with 2 small children), untested men recruited off the docks, and inexperienced scientists not coping well with the rigors of exploration, among others. I need you to understand that these are my boys and I love them, but they were a MESS. The atmosphere on the Karluk and in the subsequent camps was a toxic sludge of fear and anger and paranoia and egos. No one here was elevated by their suffering, there was no code of honor keeping the men in line, and there were painfully few moral leaders setting examples for the others. With apologies to The Terror, survival was a nasty piece of business. To top it all off, Stefansson abandoned the Karluk and her crew after the ship became frozen in. He went on a "hunting trip" but conveniently failed to return. Leadership!

Hopefully this helps to explain why the Karluk is a perfect metaphor for this part of the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Only an old, crumbling whaler with a tiny, ineffective engine could have shepherded this disaster team to the shores of Wrangel Island. The Karluk was not the ship they needed, but she was the ship they had, and even Captain Bartlett grieved as she sank.

For more information, I highly recommend checking out The Ice Master by Jennifer Niven and Empire of Ice and Stone by Buddy Levy. I also Karlukpost regularly, and you can find my screeching in the Karluk tag.

I hope this answered your question, thanks for a fun ask! ❤️

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