The Unkown Ships- In Honour Of The Arctic Expeditions, By Capt. Chamier And J. P. Knight 1845

writing my first kinda real academic paper about antarctica and turns out I know things but don’t know how I know them. which is not very convenient for footnotes as you may imagine. source: bro trust me half of my brain is polar exploration

Arctic Explorer

Gotta love how in books about polar exploration, members of other expeditions keep showing up randomly like it's all just a cast of the same 20 white guys going back and forth between the north and south pole.

Historical crossover fanfiction

Taking pictures of penguins during the First Soviet Antarctic Expedition (1955)

in a parasocial relationship with the sea

sientists won't stop texting me asking for my ideas + research

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.

The men (and dogs) of the First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914. Images from the State Library of New South Wales; photographs by the inimitable Frank Hurley (and a few by other expedition members). 

Bonus: expedition leader Douglas Mawson balancing on the rail of the Aurora with a delightfully boyish grin.

rest in peace thomas armitage. died tragically and miserably under mysterious lead-based circumstances in the arctic tundra circa 1848 on a failed expedition only to have your decaying frozen bones get mislabeled, shoddily reburied, have your boyfriends wallet and diary taken away from you to be archived, meanwhile you get gnawed on by various creatures for another hundred years, just to be rediscovered again later and laid out on a piece of plywood from the Home Depot, and then get shoved in a bag which was placed in an acid free box and then shipped to ottawa in the early 1970s just to have some unpaid intern along the line lose your bones. and no one even gives a fuck.