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Arctic Circle Springtime Gothic

Someone looks at your snow pictures. “Must be cold there up North!” You look at the thermometre. Sub-zero frost. “Yeah.” You’re so hot as you stand in the blazing snow field that you feel like the Scottish twitter user, as if ye wrapped yersel up in tinfoil and crawled inty the microwave tae blow yerself up tae fuck.

There is a strange glowing orb in the sky, white and distant. It stays there for over three hours. It hurts your eyes. You no longer know its name, but it does make you see colours you had already forgotten. It follows you.

“Flower!” someone says. “Green leaves and grass!” You stare numbly at the snow. “Running water!” You hesitate to tell them that you haven’t seen even a hint of dry, barren earth in months.

Yesterday you wore three winter coats, leather mittens and a woolly hat. Yes. Today is t-shirt weather. Tomorrow you know you shall need thicker three coats.

HMS Hecla in Baffin Bay, from William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage, 1821. Not pictured: a Marryat character trapped in an iceberg in suspended animation.

The five months had elapsed, according to my calculations, when one morning I heard a grating noise close to me; soon afterwards I perceived the teeth of a saw entering my domicile, and I correctly judged that some ship was cutting her way through the ice. Although I could not make myself heard, I waited in anxious expectation of deliverance. The saw approached very near to where I was sitting, and I was afraid that I should be wounded, if not cut in halves; but just as it was within two inches of my nose, it was withdrawn. The fact was, that I was under the main floe, which had been frozen together, and the firm ice above having been removed and pushed away, I rose to the surface. A current of fresh air immediately poured into the small incision made by the saw, which not only took away my breath from its sharpness, but brought on a spitting of blood. Hearing the sound of voices, I considered my deliverance as certain. Although I understood very little English, I heard the name of Captain Parry frequently mentioned—a name, I presume, that your highness is well acquainted with.

“Pooh! never heard of it,” replied the pacha.

“I am surprised, your highness; I thought every body must have heard of that adventurous navigator. I may here observe that I have since read his voyages, and he mentions, as a curious fact, the steam which was emitted from the ice—which was nothing more than the hot air escaping from my cave when it was cut through."

— Frederick Marryat, The Pacha of Many Tales

Endurance

“a grand nautical drama”

On their illustrious 1841 return from a successful first season in the Antarctic which marked Ross’ discovery of his eponymous 200 foot tall ice shelf (among other finds including an impressive amount of dead bird specimens) Captains Crozier and Ross were treated to a well-meaning, but by all accounts tooth-pullingly painful theatrical production by Hobart’s enthusiastic dramatic society. 

Both Crozier and Ross politely (and wisely) declined to appear. Eleanor Franklin, daughter of Sir John, was not allowed to attend as her father “did not approve of the theatre,” but heard enough to recount to a friend that the most unbelievable exaggeration was that “Sir John had hair!” 

It was so bad that surgeon Robert McCormick who had chosen to make an appearance and no doubt regretted it, gratefully concealed himself in a curtained box seat until it was over. 

The Grand Ball hosted on Erebus and Terror–gorgeously bedecked in mirrors, steel bayonet chandeliers, with Erebus’ deck cleared as a dance floor and Terror groaning to the gunwales with food, claret, champagne, and port–no doubt made up for it. 300 guests and both captains danced until six in the morning. The Hobart Town Advertiser gushed that it was ‘quite impossible for any fete to have been more elegant and tasteful.” It became known throughout Hobart as “The Glorious First of June.” 

The next day they “cleaned up the Wreck” with the worst hangovers of their lives. 

Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic. The ships almost never made it to the arctic. In 1842, three years before sailing into the northwest passage, the ships collided with each other at the opposite end of the earth. James Clark Ross, then at the helm of Erebus, turned sharp to avoid a massive iceberg. Crozier, commanding Terror, was unable to avoid smashing into Erebus. The collision jolted the crew, and the two ships’ rigging became entangled for what must have been a harrowing incident until Terror was able to break free. Form what I’ve read, Crozier recalled that he merely acted and didn’t quite remember what he did to break free.

Aurora Borealis, by Frederic Edwin Church, 1865

The Icebergs (The North), by Frederic Edwin Church, 1861

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OOPS!

LOOK AT THESE ABSOLUTE UNITS AT OSAKA AQUARIUM… round…………

also… plotting jailbreaks between bouts of sleep…