十八世纪北极探险沉船重见天日_BEC初级作文

十八世纪北极探险沉船重见天日

Part of the mythology of the Franklin expedition—the Donner Party bit—involves their apparent descent into cannibalism. “From the mutilated state of many of the corpses, and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence,” John Rae reported—a conclusion which for some reason infuriated the great Charles Dickens, who collaborated with his friend Wilkie Collins on a Franklin-themed play, “The Frozen Deep,” and fixed some of the responsibility on the guiltless Inuit themselves. “We have yet to learn what knowledge the white man—lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying—has of the gentleness of the Esquimaux nature,” Dickens wrote.

“I think the cannibalism stories are irrefutable,” Balsillie said. “The way they hacked up fingers, and the marks on the different bones [among the discovered remains], and how the bones were scattered. So, using Rae’s testimony and the forensics, one can’t mount a credible case that there was not cannibalism.” Another famous Franklin-inspired image of the Victorian period was Edwin Henry Landseer’s astonishing painting “Man Proposes, God Disposes,” which shows man proposing in the form of a shipwreck, and God, or Nature, disposing in the form of two rather vulpine polar bears feasting on a human rib cage and the remains of a mast. “It always had to be someone else doing the eating,” Balsillie said. “British gentlemen in service to Queen and country don’t eat each other. Eskimos and polar bears do.”