#the inuit were ALSO starving and experiencing hardship

[clove-pinks]

History ask no. 19?

@suffrajetpack asked me the same question:

Favourite historical book?

So I will answer this in two ways: favourite book about history and favourite book from history.

Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony by David C. Woodman is what I'll choose for a favourite book about history. I read this many years ago and it was mind-blowing to me. I had grown up on a steady diet of books about the Franklin Expedition, and while these sometimes included Inuit accounts of Franklin's men, they never correlated different testimonies or tried to make a cohesive narrative out of them. For a long time the Standard Narrative of the Franklin Expedition was that the men abandoned their ships in 1848 and attempted to walk out of the arctic, never to return to the ships, and Owen Beattie's 1980s discoveries only added "plus lead poisoning!" to this story.

While all that lead in the Franklin Expedition tinned foods probably did not help them, the consensus nowadays is that it ultimately had little effect on their fate, and the lead levels found in skeletal remains are actually not out of line for the typical urban Victorian. But Beattie and Geiger made it seem like the ultimate smoking gun in Frozen In Time: literally everything that went wrong was because of lead poisoning, somehow. Three men died the first winter because of lead poisoning! So many officers died because of lead poisoning from more canned food! They made poor decisions to walk south and not east towards the whaling fleet because... yeah you guessed it.

So I really did think that Franklin's men were completely lead-addled. And while this made them more sympathetic, in a way, because it excused their actions, it also stripped them of agency if not humanity. Learning from Woodman's careful reconstruction of events that Franklin's men were fighting for their lives as much as they could, actually making rational decisions despite all the odds stacked against them (which included being beset for two years in an isolated area with no game that was avoided by Inuit, who were also experiencing famine in the late 1840s); that turned all my assumptions upside-down. Pierre Berton sneered in The Arctic Grail that Franklin's men died while dragging useless junk because they were too stupid to live; in Woodman's book this was presented as a tactical decision to lighten the ships by dumping useless items on the shores on King William Island. Many such cases!

And for my favourite book from history: here's where I should put some celebrated classic like Les Misérables but SURPRISE!! It's The Naval Officer (Frank Mildmay) by Frederick Marryat. Love me an overwrought vindictive S.O.B. from 1829!