Learning about the Franklin Expedition in class this past week was probably one of my favorite units in class thus far. It was so interesting to me to learn about a group of men that just sailed off into the abyss and more or less were never seen again. After watching Buried in Ice, I without a doubt believed that lead poisoning was the reason for the expedition’s demise.  In my mind it made total sense. These men would have had no way of knowing that they were being poisoned by a silent killer. Additionally, it fit in very well with what we know about their very strange actions following the abandonment of their ship.

However, as we learned in class on Tuesday, lead poisoning was not the definitive cause of death nor demise for the expedition. At first I was slightly disappointed because what made this unit so interesting to me is the uniqueness of the material, we haven’t had a unit where the individuals we discuss literally went crazy. But my disappointment was soon redeemed when we learned that the men reached a point where they became so starved, they resorted to eating each other, this really perked my interests. Never would I have thought something like this was possible nor realistic amongst a group of educated, adventurous and fearless men. At this point, I started to think about the logistics of this theory. At what point did the men resort to this? Who was the first person to do it? Did the others immediately follow suit and think this was socially acceptable amongst the group so they should join in? Were there individuals that opted out of this and chose to die more quickly? Although we will never know the answer to many of these questions, it is still incredibly mind boggling to think about.

At the end of class we were told that there are always more things to discover about the world we live in. New discoveries are being made every day, week, month. This was even the case with the Franklin Expedition. Buried in Ice was filmed in the 1980s and they learned a great deal of information from those excavations. But just this past year we learned even more about the expedition than the one done in the 80s taught us. This makes me think, if were still learning more about the Franklin Expedition, might I one day get the answers to some, if not all, of my questions?