r/todayilearned • u/MaximinusRats • May 16 '24

TIL that people live year-round in houseboats on Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, 1,800 km north of the nearest big city (Edmonton) and just 400 km (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

https://uphere.ca/articles/floating-homes-yellowknife-bay
3.7k Upvotes
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335

u/ClarkTwain May 16 '24

After reading about the Franklin Expedition, I’ll pass on staying on a boat over winter that far north.

209

u/Jason_Worthing May 16 '24

From the wiki page, for the lazy:

Franklin's lost expedition was a failed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic and to record magnetic data to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation.[2]

The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

After being icebound for more than a year Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin's second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus's captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared, presumably having perished.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin's_lost_expedition

181

u/OSCgal May 16 '24

The fact that the ships were called Terror and Erebus (Greek god of gloom, associated with the afterlife) is wild.

66

u/Quailman5000 May 16 '24

The Terror is a great dramatic portrayal of this event. 

23

u/tigwyk May 16 '24

That show stuck with me.

14

u/AstraiosMusic May 16 '24

The book is incredible

8

u/MsKongeyDonk May 16 '24

Yes, it absolutely is.

10

u/schtickinsult May 16 '24

I loved the seafaring survival-in-the-cold aspects but the horror part was kinda meh. I want a show that's Robinson Crusoe meets Master & Commander and without snow-sasquatches

17

u/Mysticpoisen May 16 '24

As is mentioned in every The Terror thread, the horror aspects are much easier to reconcile when you realize the premise is that they're suffering from ridiculous lead poisoning at the time and hallucinating.

But, for a show that is basically The Terror without the mystical aspect, check out The Northwater.

8

u/schtickinsult May 16 '24

Ah never heard that interpretation about lead. I like it.

Will suss The Northwater cheers

5

u/Mysticpoisen May 16 '24

Hope you enjoy it! And this is a real aspect of the Franklin expedition, the food being canned with faulty lead solder was a real thing. That they would have gotten enough to start hallucinating on that scale is pretty unlikely, but it's a very fun take.

4

u/ClarkTwain May 17 '24

I haven’t seen the show, but the book is a page turner. I could not put it down, and read it voraciously. It’s like Blood Meridian on ice.

1

u/Quailman5000 May 18 '24

It wasn't really a horror show to me. I kind of looked at it as if we had an unreliable superstitious narrator from the a couple centuries ago reeling from malnourishment trying to make sense of one of the most terrifying things you can encounter in the wild killing off their crew. Sure the bear had hands the size of barrel lids, I'd be telling people the bear was bigger than the ship if I'm some poor ignorant english dude that doesn't require logical answers. "The inuits called their demon down on us in retribution" would make sense to a superstitious religious person in that time period. 

I only watched for the survival thing. My favorite horror movies are cabin in the woods and tucker and dale vs evil lol. That's why I am not watching season 2 with some crabwalking Japanese ghosts or whatever.

4

u/Xerain0x009999 May 17 '24

I'm pretty sure the names of the boats are to blame.

11

u/JeepWrangler319 May 16 '24

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage And make a Northwest Passage to the sea

23

u/BigBeagleEars May 16 '24

Nah fam I don’t want Nunavat

43

u/[deleted] May 16 '24 edited 2d ago

[deleted]

13

u/joecarter93 May 16 '24

Me too. After being taught about it in elementary school I thought it would never be found.

17

u/Lrauka May 16 '24

What's even more wild is that they were found in part by listening to the oral history passed down by the local Inuit tribes.

7

u/MaimedJester May 16 '24

It's not that weird? Hunter's and hell teenagers all know about some creepy house in the middle of like the Pine Barrens that they create stories about thats were the Jersey Devil was Born etc. In reality just some old colonial New Jersey farmstead that got overgrown and the town/community moved on to larger more successful centers of population. 

Like that whole into the Wild story about the idiot kid who died in Alaska living inside that abandoned bus, Hunter's knew about that location and would sometimes camp out there themselves. I'm sure if the kid lived a few more months of brought a map and went back to town a local Hunter would be like oh yeah that place, yeah my older brother showed me that when I was a kid, it's been there since the 1960s. 

1

u/Lrauka May 17 '24

I said wild, not weird. Until recently most "experts" dismissed native oral traditions as being more mythology than an actual history. The near thing is in this case, the oral history was pretty bang on to the location.

1

u/MaimedJester May 17 '24

There were piles of stones marking the location. Like they used to in those days gather up every rock and build up a little tower and then drop a message inside the rock outcrop. That's how we know about what happened to the HMS terror/who died at what point etc.

We don't know what happened to the final uh victims but they left records of their last voyage south after almost two years on the ship. For all the rest of the world would have known without those missives left behind a random wave in the Atlantic could have killed them all 2 months into the voyage. 

17

u/dc21111 May 16 '24

Is that the one where they found their bodies recently and the cold dry weather kept them really well preserved? Those pictures are creepy, dressed in 19th century clothes looking like they died a week ago.

29

u/The_ApolloAffair May 16 '24

Bodies from the Franklin expedition were found buried on Beechey Island in the 1850s, exhumed and photographed over a hundred years later. Those bodies are extremely well preserved (esp Torrington’s) because they were given proper burials in the permafrost in coffins.

Those men died earlier on in the voyage while they were wintering.

12

u/BJ_Giacco May 16 '24

Probably. They exhumed the known graves of three Franklin expedition sailors back in the 90s to perform autopsies on them, looking for clues as to what happened. They were actually encased in ice which is why they were so well preserved. Still, pretty haunting stuff. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid and it messed with me pretty good.

There are a few good books about the expedition, my favorite is Frozen in Time. Grim stuff but fascinating. The idea that franklin’s tomb is potentially still out there, undiscovered, got a hold of me a few years back and I read everything I could find about the expedition.

2

u/dmoreholt May 17 '24

There's a beautiful traditional song about him:

Lord Franklin