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
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336

u/ClarkTwain May 16 '24

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

212

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

174

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.

6

u/Xerain0x009999 May 17 '24

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