WaywardWoodwose posted:

Listen, your brain is a lazy rear end in a top hat, and will make up poo poo at the drop of a hat if it is unsure or bored.

WaywardWoodwose posted:

I hate it when people scoff at the bloody Mary thing, because while I don't believe in ghosts, it is based on a real optical illusion, so people do see "something". Just not a ghost.
It's something like this

Zesty Mordant posted:

Whenever Brad or Jim shows up it kinda looks like one of those "shrank their face" pictures for me.

Accordion Man posted:

I don't know how widespread it was but I remember a more morbid offshoot of Bloody Mary back in the 90's, Blue Baby. It had a similar setup, going into a dark room, look into a mirror, and say its name three times and then you summoned it and it killed you, though you also had to rock your arms back and forth in a cradling motion. Blue Baby was supposed to be some baby that died or was killed.

WaywardWoodwose posted:

I hate it when people scoff at the bloody Mary thing, because while I don't believe in ghosts, it is based on a real optical illusion, so people do see "something". Just not a ghost.
It's something like this

WaywardWoodwose posted:

moller posted:

Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Tried fullscreening it. Tried turning off the desk lamp. Uh. Do I have the prosopagnosia?

monny posted:

It's even worse when you keep your eyes on the cross.

quote:

For some it is the wind; for some, the terrible cold. For others, it is the endless, howling blankness of the landscape that drains resolve, or the blinding glare of sun on fresh-laid snow, or the week-long blizzards that pin intruders inside tents that groan under the weight of drifts of snow. Not even the strongest, fittest, hardiest groups– intensively trained, exhaustively equipped and painstakingly acclimatized–can be certain of escaping with their lives from a journey through the hostile wilderness of Antarctica.

Even today, with advanced foods, and radios, and insulated clothing, a journey on foot across these freezing wastes is the harshest of all tests that a human being can be asked to endure. A hundred years ago, it was far, far worse. Then, wool clothing absorbed snow and damp. High energy food came in an unappetizing mix of rendered fats called pemmican. Worst of all, extremes of cold pervaded everything; Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who sailed with Captain Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition of 1910-13, recalled that all his teeth, “the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces” in temperatures that plunged as low as -77 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cherry-Garrard survived to write an account of his adventures, a book he called The Worst Journey in the World. But even his appalling Antarctic trek–made in total darkness in the depths of the Southern winter–was not quite so horrifying as the desperate journey faced one year later by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson, an epic that has gone down in the annals of polar exploration as perhaps the most terrible ever undertaken in Antarctica.

In 1912, when he set sail across the Southern Ocean, Mawson was 30 years old and already acclaimed as one of the best geologists of his generation. Born in Yorkshire England, but happily settled in Australia, he had turned down the chance to join Scott’s doomed expedition in favor of leading the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, whose chief purpose was to explore and map some of the most remote fastnesses of the white continent. In almost every respect, Mawson was the ideal leader of a polar expedition. Tall, lean, balding, earnest and determined, he was an Antarctic veteran, a supreme organizer, and also physically tough. If any man was capable of achieving the expedition’s ambitious goals, it was him.

The Australasian party anchored in Commonwealth Bay, an especially remote part of the Antarctic coast, in January 1912. Over the next few months this desolate region, hitherto unexplored, proved to be almost entirely unwelcoming. Wind speeds on the coast averaged 50mph and sometimes topped 200, and the area was swept by constant blizzards.

Mawson’s plan was to split his expedition into four groups – one to man base camp and the other three to head into the interior to do scientific work. He nominated himself to lead what was known as the Far Eastern Shore Party–a three-man team assigned to survey a vast frozen sea where the conditions were particularly dangerous. It was an especially risky assignment. Not only would Mawson and his men have the furthest to travel, and hence the heaviest loads to carry; they would also have to cross an area pitted with deep crevasses, each concealed by a thin layer of snow. Put too much weight on too small an area of any of those flimsy bridges and it would collapse, plunging an explorer, dogs and sled into an apparently bottomless void.

Dawson selected two companions to join him on his trek. The first was Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis, a British army officer selected as the expedition’s dog handler. The other was Ninnis’s close friend, Xavier Mertz. Mertz was a 28-year-old Swiss lawyer whose chief qualifications for the trek were his idiosyncratic English–a source of great amusement to the other two – his constant high spirits and, not least, his standing as a champion cross-country skier.

The explorers took with them three sledges, pulled by a total of sixteen huskies and loaded with a combined 1,720lbs of food, survival gear and scientific instruments. Mawson limited each man to a minimum of personal possessions. Nennis chose a volume of Thackeray, Mertz a collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Mawson’s own choice fell on his diary and a photograph of his fiancée–an upper class Australian girl named Francisca Delprait, but known to all as Paquita.

At first Dawson’s party made good time. The three men rested for the first night at Aladdin’s Cave, a supply depot that established in a large snow-hole hacked out of the ice five miles from base. From there, they headed east into a rising wind. Just 25 miles from base, however, the onrushing blizzard enveloped them, and Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz spent the next five days crammed together in their only tent, half-buried in snow and unable to move in the face of the gale. The dogs remained outside, huddled together in the lee of the shelter, visible only as small, furry mounds amidst the drifts of snow.

As the gale died down, the party set out again. They crossed a pair of vast glaciers, crumpled into a series of vast waves with peaks 250 feet high, and Mawson named them for his two companions. By December 13, the party was 300 miles out from Commonwealth Bay. Almost everything was going according to plan; the three men reduced their load as they ate their way through their supplies, and only a couple of sick dogs had hindered their progress. The distressed huskies were unharnessed and allowed to run alongside their companions until they recovered or died, but any animal that became too weak to pull again had to be killed.

Even so, Mawson felt troubled by a series of peculiar incidents which–he would write later–might have suggested to a superstitious man that something was badly amiss with the Far Eastern Sledge Party. First he experienced a strange dream one night, a vision of his father. Mawson had left his parents in good health, but the strange dream occurred, he would later realize, shortly after his father had unexpectedly sickened and died. Then the explorers found one husky bitch, which had been pregnant, hungrily devouring her own litter of puppies. This was normal behavior for dogs in such extreme conditions, but it unsettled them–doubly so when, far inland and out of nowhere, a petrel suddenly appeared and smashed into the side of Ninnis’s sledge. ‘Where could it have come from?’ a baffled Mertz scribbled in his notebook.

Then there were the crevasses–hidden, treacherous, and all too easy to blunder into. A whole series of near-disasters made the party begin to feel that their luck must be running out; three times Ninnis broke through the thin crust that concealed a dangerous crack in the ice and only just managed to grab at the runners of his sled as he plunged into the abyss. To make matters worse, all three men were beginning to feel the effects of privation. Mawson was suffering from a split lip that sent shafts of pain shooting across the left side of his face. Ninnis experienced a bout of snow-blindness and then developed an agonising abcess at the tip of one finger. When the pain became too much for him to bear, Mawson was forced to lance it with a pocket knife but without benefit of anesthetic.

On the evening of December 13, 1912, the three men pitched camp in the middle of yet another glacier. Mawson abandoned one of their three sledges their and redistributed the load on the two others. Then the men slept fitfully, disturbed by the distant sounds of booms and cracking deep below them. Mawson and Ninnis did not know what to make of the noise, but it frightened Mertz, the Swiss, whose long experience of snowfields taught him that warmer air had made the ground ahead of them unstable. “The snow masses must have been collapsing their arches,” he wrote. “The sound was like the distant thunder of cannon.”

Next day dawned sunny and warm by Antarctic standards, just 11 degrees below freezing. The party continued to make good time and at noon Mawson halted briefly to shoot the sun in order to determine their position. He was standing on the runners of his sledge, letting the dogs do the work while he completed his calculations, when he became aware that Mertz, who was ski-ing ahead of the sledges, had stopped singing his Swiss student songs and was raising one ski stick in the air. This was the signal that he had encountered a crevisse, and Mawson called back a warning to Ninnis. Then, considering that the crevisse “had no specially dangerous features,” he returned to his workings. It was only several minutes later that he noticed that Mertz had halted again and was looking back in alarm. Turning, Mawson saw only an empty landscape. Ninnis and his sledge and dogs had vanished.

Mawson and Mertz hurried back a quarter of a mile to the spot where they had crossed the crevasse, praying that their companion had been lost to view behind a rise in the ground. It was a forlorn hope; when they reached the spot where Mertz had raised his ski-stick, they discovered a yawning chasm had opened in the snow, leaving a gap 11 feet across. Crawling forward on his stomach and peering into the void, Mawson dimly made out a narrow ledge more than a hundred feet below him. Two dogs could be seen lying on it: one dead, the other lying writhing with a broken back. Below the ledge, the sheer ice walls of the crevasse plunged down into impenetrable darkness.

Frantically, Mawson called Ninnis’s name, again and again. Nothing came back but the echo. Using a knotted fishing line, he sounded the depth to the ice ledge, and found it to be 150 feet, much too far to climb down to. For more than five hours, he and Mertz took turns to call for their companion, hoping against hope that he had merely been stunned. “He must have struck [the ledge] & been killed instantly, then gone on down,” Mawson would write in his diary. That still left the mystery of why Ninnis had plunged into a crevasse that he and Mertz had crossed safely. Mawson concluded that the dead man’s fatal error had been to run alongside his sledge rather than stand astride its runners as he had done. With his whole weight pressing down on just a few square inches of snow, Ninnis had exceeded the load that the flimsy crevasse lid would bear, with fatal results. The fault, though, was Mawson’s; as leader, he could have insisted on skis, or at least snowshoes, for his men.

Mawson and Mertz read the burial service at the lip of the void and paused to take stock of their situation. It was clearly desperate. The party had taken care to split their supplies between the two remaining sledges, but Mawson had assumed that the lead sled was far more likely to encounter difficulties than the one at the rear. For that reason, Ninnis’s sledge had been loaded with most of their food supplies and their tent. “Reviewed our situation,” Mawson wrote.

"Practically all the food had gone–spade, pick, tent. Mertz’s Burberry trousers & helmet, cups, spoons, mast, sail etc. We had our sleeping bags, a week and a half food, the spare tent without poles, & our private bags & cooker and kerosene. The dogs in my team were very poorly and the worst [of the 16], & no feed for them–the other team comprised the picked dogs… We considered it a possibility to get through to Winter Quarters [however] by eating dogs, so 9 hours after the accident started back, but terribly handicapped. May God help us."

The first stage of the return journey was a “mad dash,” Mawson noted, to the spot where they had camped the previous night. There, he and Mertz recovered the sledge they had abandoned before it could be covered by fresh falls of snow. Painstakingly, using only a pocket knife, Mawson hacked its runners to pieces to improvise poles for their spare tent. Now they had shelter again, but there was still the matter of deciding how to attempt the return journey. The party had left no food depots on their way out, and his left them with the choice of heading for the sea–a greater distance but a route that offered the chance of seals to eat and the outside chance that they might sight the expedition’s supply ship–or making a fast return over the glaciers the way they had come. Worried about the fast-dwindling supply of food, Mawson selected the latter course. He and Mertz killed the weakest of their remaining dogs, ate what they could of its stringy flesh and liver, and fed what was left of the carcass to the other huskies.

They improvised as they went, crafting spoons out of bits of broken sledge and plates from empty tins, and for the first few days made good time. Soon, though, a bout of snow-blindness slowed Mawson down. The pain was agonizing, and though Mertz bathed his leader’s eyes with a solution of zinc sulphate and cocaine, the pair had to slow down. Then they marched into a whiteout, seeing “nothing but greyness,” Mertz scribbled in his notebook, and the huskies Mary and Ginger collapsed. The men were forced to harness themselves to the sled in order to continue.

Learning by experiment, Mawson found that

"it was worth the while spending some time in boiling the dogs’ meat thoroughly. Thus a tasty soup was prepared as well as a supply of edible meat in which the muscular tissue and the gristle were reduced to the consistency of a jelly. The paws took longest of all to cook, but, treated to lengthy stewing, they became quite digestible… Had a great breakfast off Ginger’s skull–thyroids and brains."

Even so, the two men’s physical condition rapidly deteriorated. By the time they reached the Ninnis Glacier, still 160 miles from base, it was necessary to abandon much of the scientific equipment that Mawson had hoped to save. Mertz was in an especially bad way; the loss of his waterproof Burberry meant his clothing was constantly chill and wet. By January 5, Mawson could write in his diary: “He is generally in a very bad condition… skin coming off legs, etc.” Despite Mawson’s desperation to keep moving, Mertz insisted that a day’s rest might revive him, and the pair spent 24 hours in their sleeping bags.

Mawson became increasingly concerned at his companion’s mental state; Mertz seemed to be losing heart, and would not consent even to resting on the sledge so that they could continue to make progress. “I think he has a fever, he does not assimilate his food,” Mawson wrote on January 6. “Things are in a most serious state for both of us–in he cannot go 8 or 10 m[iles] a day, in a day or two we are doomed. I could pull through myself with the provisions at hand but I cannot leave him. His heart seems to have gone. It is very hard for me–to be within 100 m[iles] of the Hut and in such a position is awful… Both our chances are going now.”

Weakly, Mertz agreed to go on, but next morning Mawson awoke to find his companion delirious; worse, he had developed diarrhea and fouled himself inside his sleeping bag. It took Mawson several hours to clean Mertz up and put him back inside his sleeping bag to warm up. But then, he added, just a few minutes later,

" I find him in a kind of fit & wrap him back up in the back… This is terrible. I don’t mind for myself, but it is for Paquita and for all the others connected with the expedition that I feel so deeply and sinfully. I pray God to help us."

Mertz took some cocoa and beef tea as they traveled, but the fits got worse and he fell into a delirium. Mawson made camp, and took out his diary again. “At 8pm he raves & breaks a tent pole..,. Continues to rave for hours. I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful & I put him quietly in the bag. He dies peacefully at about 2am in the morning of 8th. Death due to exposure finally bringing on a fever, result of weather exposure & want of food. He had lost all skin of legs and private parts. I am in the same condition & sores on fingers won’t heal.”

The expedition’s leader was now utterly alone and badly weakened: “The nose and lips break open also–my scrotum, like Xavier’s, is getting in a painfully raw condition due to reduced condition, dampness and friction in walking. It is well nigh impossible to treat.” Worse, Mawson was still at least 100 miles from the nearest human being, and readily admitted later that he felt “utterly overwhelmed by an urge to give in”–to lie in the warmth of his sleeping bag and consume the remaining supply of food before allowing the white continent to envelop him. In the end, it was determination to survive for Paquita, and to give an account of his two dead friends, that drove him on.

At 9am on January 11 the wind finally died away. Mawson had passed the days since Mertz’s death productively. Using his now blunt knife, he had cut the one remaining sledge in two; he resewed his sail; and, incredibly, even found the strength to drag Mertz’s body out of the tent and entomb it beneath a cairn of ice blocks that he hacked out of the ground. Now he began to trudge towards the endless horizon, man-hauling his half sledge.

Within a few miles, though, Mawson’s physical condition worsened drastically. His feet became so painful that each step was an agony; eventually he was forced to sit on his sledge and remove his socks and boots to investigate the pain. What he found was shocking: inside his socks, the soles of his feet had come completely away, leaving nothing but a raw mass of weeping blisters. Desperate, he smeared the soles with lanolin and bandaged the loose skin back to his feet and staggered on. That night, curled up in his makeshift tent, he wrote:

"My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment–frost-bitten fingertips, festerings, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off the whole body."

Next day, Mawson’s feet were still too raw to walk, and he occupied his time redistributing his remaining supplies. Small things drove him to angry self-recrimination–he was nibbling supplies from several bags instead of consuming them one at a time, and could not make the load balance properly. On January 13 he marched again, dragging himself towards the Mertz Glacier, and by the end of that day he could at last see in the far distance the high uplands of the vast plateau that terminated at base camp. By now he could cover little more than five miles a day.

Mawson’s greatest fear was that he, like Ninnis, would stumble into a crevasse as he crossed the glacier. In an attempt to make his journey slightly safer, he roped himself to the half-sledge, but, on January 17, the worst happened anyway. A snowbridge he was crossing collapsed under his weight, sending him plummeting downwards. Incredibly, however, the fissure that was opened was just a little narrower than the half-sledge. With a jerk that all but snapped his fragile body clean in two, Mawson found himself dangling 14 feet down in an apparently bottomless pit, spinning slowly on a finger thickness of frayed rope. He could sense

"the sledge creeping to the mouth [of the crevasse]. I had time to say to myself, ‘So this is the end,’ expecting every moment the sledge to crash on my head and both of us to go to the bottom unseen below. Then I thought of the food left uneaten on the sledge, and… of Providence again giving me a chance. The chance looked very small as the rope had sawed into the overhanging lid, my finger ends all damaged, myself weak."

Making a “great struggle,” Mawson inched up the rope, hand over hand. Several times he lost his grip, slipped back, and plummeted to the end of the rope again. Each time the rope held. Sensing that he had the strength for one final attempt, he clawed his way to the lip of the crevasse, every muscle spasming, his raw fingers slippery with blood. “At last I just did it,” he recalled, and dragged himself clear, only to collapse, utterly exhausted, and for an hour he lay by the edge of the chasm. It was only in the early afternoon that he recovered sufficiently to drag open his packs, erect the tent, and crawl into his bag to sleep. Again he had to resist the temptation to give in, to eat what was left of his food supplies and enjoy a last few days of life rather than force himself on in agony. Again he resolved to continue.

Mawson recognized how close he had come to death and that night, lying in his tent, he fashioned a rope ladder whiuch he anchored to his sledge. The loose end he attached to his harness. Now, if he was to fall again, getting out of a crevasse ought to be easier. The theory was put to the test the following day, when the ladder saved him from another dark plummet into ice.

Towards the end of January, Mawson found himself reduced to four miles of marching a day; his remaining energies were sapped by the need to endlessly dress and redress his many injuries. His hair began to fall out and he found himself pinned down by another blizzard. Desperate, he forced himself to march eight miles into the teeth of the gale and struggled for two moor to erect his tent.

Next morning, the forced march seemed worth it. Mawson emerged from the tent into bright sunshine–better, to the sight of the coastline of Commonwealth Bay. He was only 40 miles from base, and little more than 30 from Aladdin’s Cave and its cache of supplies.

Not the least staggering of Mawson’s achievements on his solo trip was the pinpoint precision of his navigation. On January 29, marching through another gale, he spotted a low cairn a mere 300 yards off the path of his march. It proved to mark a cache of food and a note left by his worried companions at base camp. Emboldened, he pressed on at a faster pace, and on February 1 reached the entrance to Aladdin’s Cave, where he wept to discover three oranges and a pineapple–overcome, he later said, by the sight of something that was not white.

As he rested that night, the weather closed in again, and for five days Mawson was confined to his snow hole as one of the most vicious blizzards he had ever known raged over him. Leaving as the storm dropped on February 8, he found his way to base just in time to see the expedition ship, Aurora, leaving for Australia. A shore party had been left to wait for him, but it was too late for the ship to turn, and Mawson was forced to spend a second winter in Antarctica. In time, he would come to view this as a blessing; the gentle pace of life, and the solicitude of his companions, was what was needed if he was to recover from the rigours of his trek.

There remains the puzzle of the mysterious illness that claimed Mertz’s life and nearly took Mawson’s. Some polar experts are convinced that it was caused by nothing more remarkable than poor diet and exhaustion, but there is another possibility. Doctors have suggested that the true cause of the malaise was actually husky meat–specifically, the dogs’ vitamin-enriched livers, each of which contains such high concentrations of Vitamin A that it can bring on a condition known as “hypervitaminosis A.” This causes drying and fissuring of the skin, hair loss, nausea and, in high doses, madness–precisely the symptoms displayed by the luckless Xavier Mertz.

Nckdictator posted:

http://mikedashhistory.com/2012/01/27/alone-against-antarctica/

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Goddamn, holy crunchy gently caress, everyone should read this.

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Goddamn, holy crunchy gently caress, everyone should read this.

Filox posted:

loving hell.

This is one thing I've never really been able to understand. What the hell is it about frozen waste lands that make people want to go gently caress around in them?

Josef bugman posted:

The loving matter of fact "the skin has fallen off my dick" part in the story is possibly the most horrifying.

Zesty Mordant posted:

Whenever Brad or Jim shows up it kinda looks like one of those "shrank their face" pictures for me.

Nckdictator posted:

Hell in the Antartic

Apsley Cherry-Garrard posted:

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.

Astrofig posted:

The Troxler Effect! Basically, your brain gets bored repeatedly taking in unchanging visual information so it slacks off and kind of....makes something up to cover the difference. The result, especially in a dark room, can be horrifying.

Ozz81 posted:

I get that "weird disproportionate caricature" vibe, or like the melty face version of that Persistence of Memory painting

Nckdictator posted:

http://mikedashhistory.com/2012/01/27/alone-against-antarctica/

quote:

The expedition leader at first admired Jeffryes's assiduity with earphones and Morse-code key, but grew increasingly guarded in his praise. In Mawson's words, Jeffryes "applied himself to work with enthusiasm and perhaps an over-conscientious spirit."[2] Climate conditions outside the hut made winter outdoor exercise impossible, leading to cabin fever.

In July 1913, as Antarctica neared midwinter, wireless operator Jeffryes began to present symptoms of paranoia to his fellow shore-party winter explorers, none of whom knew how to receive or transmit messages in Morse code.[3] Expedition leader Mawson began to encourage another expedition member, airman Frank Bickerton, to learn Morse code as quickly as possible.[1][3] Jeffryes's condition waxed and waned; for some weeks his comrades believed he was recovering, but in September of the same year the radioman experienced a psychotic break and began transmitting a message, through Macquarie Island, to Australia. Declaring himself to be the only sane man on the expedition, Jeffryes accused all of his comrades of having joined a criminal conspiracy to murder him. Mawson thereupon relieved Jeffryes of his duties.[1][3]

quote:

During the southern winter, at a time when the station is physically cut off from the rest of the world, she developed breast cancer. Nielsen teleconferenced with medical personnel in the United States, and had to operate on herself in order to extract tissue samples for analysis.

quote:

The operation started at 02:00 local time on 1 May with the help of a driver and meteorologist, who were providing instruments and holding a mirror to observe areas not directly visible, while Rogozov was in a semi-reclining position, half-turned to his left side. A solution of 0.5% novocaine was used for local anaesthesia of the abdominal wall. Rogozov made a 10–12 cm incision of the abdominal wall, and while opening the peritoneum he accidentally injured the cecum and had to suture it. Then he proceeded to expose the appendix. According to his report the appendix was found to have a dark stain at its base, and Rogozov estimated it would have burst within a day. The appendix was resected and antibiotics were applied directly into the peritoneal cavity. General weakness and nausea developed about 30–40 minutes after the start of the operation, so that short pauses for rest were repeatedly needed after that. By about 04:00 the operation was complete.

quote:

The adult Inuit soon contracted tuberculosis (TB), a widespread infectious disease in those years, which also occurred among indigenous peoples. Three adults and one child died. (Another young adult, the sixth member of the group, survived and was returned to Greenland.) One of the first to die was Minik's father, and the boy suffered. William Wallace, chief curator and superintendent of buildings, adopted the boy and cared for him. Minik pleaded for a proper burial for his father, with the traditional rites which only he as an Inuit could give. The curatorial staff wanted to preserve Qisuk's body for study, research that would be impossible if his remains were buried. They staged a fake burial for Minik's benefit: filling a coffin with stones for weight, and placing a stuffed "body" covered with a cloth on top. They performed the burial by lantern light, with Minik attending.[1]

The staff sent Qisuk's body to Wallace's estate, which had a workshop for processing the skeletons of specimens. Qisuk's remains were de-fleshed, and the skeleton was mounted on an armature and returned to the museum for display. Wallace did not tell Minik about this nor of his own part in it. But, about 1906, New York papers published a story that stated Qisuk's skeleton was displayed in the museum. Minik learned through classmates' comments as the story circulated.[1]

Wallace supported Minik in requesting that Qisuk's remains be returned to the son for traditional burial. The museum director, Hermon Carey Bumpus, evaded their requests, as well as other questions about the Inuit exhibits.[1] Bumpus refused to admit the museum had Qisuk's skeleton. In the past, he had accused Wallace of financial irregularities and impropriety, and the curator resigned in 1901. Wallace continued to ask the museum for aid in financially supporting Minik, which Bumpus refused. The director tried to avoid investigation of the Inuit case.[1] Minik was never able to reclaim his father's bones.

edrith posted:

Qisuk was eventually reburied with proper rights, but the story is an insight on how hosed up early anthropology/polar exploration could be.

monny posted:

It's even worse when you keep your eyes on the cross.

pookel posted:

I've been staring at it and I don't get it. What am I supposed to be seeing?

quote:

In addition to the extremely cold temperatures, other factors make Vostok one of the most difficult places on Earth for human habitation:

• An almost complete lack of moisture in the air.
• An average windspeed of 5 m/s (18 km/h) (11 mph), sometimes rising to as high as 27 m/s (97 km/h) (60 mph).
• A lack of oxygen because of its high elevation at 3,488 meters (11,444 ft).
• A higher ionization of the air.
• A polar night that lasts approximately 130 days, from late April to late August, including 85 continuous days of civil polar night (i.e. too dark to read, during which the Sun is more than 6 degrees below the horizon.)[19]
• Acclimatization to such conditions can take from a week to two months and is accompanied by headaches, eye twitches, ear pains, nose bleeds, perceived suffocation, sudden rises in blood pressure, loss of sleep, reduced appetite, vomiting, joint and muscle pain, arthritis, and weight loss of 3–5 kg (7–11 lb) (sometimes as high as 12 kg (26 lb)).

quote:

Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 136 F (minus 93.2 C) was set Aug. 10, 2010.

Josef bugman posted:

The loving matter of fact "the skin has fallen off my dick" part in the story is possibly the most horrifying.

The Lone Badger posted:

Douglas Mawson was hardcore.

quote:

To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today. In London, for example, the combination of low wages, appalling housing, a fast-rising population and miserable health care resulted in the sharp division of one city into two. An affluent minority of aristocrats and professionals lived comfortably in the good parts of town, cossetted by servants and conveyed about in carriages, while the great majority struggled desperately for existence in stinking slums where no gentleman or lady ever trod, and which most of the privileged had no idea even existed. It was a situation accurately and memorably skewered by Dickens, who in Oliver Twist introduced his horrified readers to Bill Sikes’s lair in the very real and noisome Jacob’s Island, and who has Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, insist: “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago, describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago, describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

Mayhew called them “sewer hunters” or “toshers,” and the latter term has come to define the breed, though it actually had a rather wider application in Victorian times–the toshers sometimes worked the shoreline of the Thames rather than the sewers, and also waited at rubbish dumps when the contents of damaged houses were being burned and then sifted through the ashes for any items of value. They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today. It was sufficient to rank them among the aristocracy of the working class–and, as the astonished writer noted, “at this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 [today $3.3 million] per annum.”

The toshers’ work was dangerous, however, and–after 1840, when it was made illegal to enter the sewer network without express permission, and a £5 reward was offered to anyone who informed on them–it was also secretive, done mostly at night by lantern light. “They won’t let us in to work the shores,” one sewer-hunter complained, “as there’s a little danger. They fears as how we’ll get suffocated, but they don’t care if we get starved!”

Quite how the members of the profession kept their work a secret is something of a puzzle, for Mayhew makes it clear that their dress was highly distinctive. “These toshers,” he wrote,

" may be seen, especially on the Surrey side of the Thames, habited in long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity, and their nether limbs encased in dirty canvas trousers, and any old slops of shoes… [They] provide themselves, in addition, with a canvas apron, which they tie round them, and a dark lantern similar to a policeman’s; this they strap before them on the right breast, in such a manner that on removing the shade, the bull’s eye throws the light straight forward when they are in an erect position… but when they stoop, it throws the light directly under them so that they can distinctly see any object at their feet. They carry a bag on their back, and in their left hand a pole about seven or eight feet long, one one end of which there is a large iron hoe."

This hoe was the vital tool of the sewer hunters’ trade. On the river, it sometimes saved their lives, for “should they, as often happens, even to the most experienced, sink in some quagmire, they immediately throw out the long pole armed with the hoe, and with it seizing hold of any object within reach, are thereby enabled to draw themselves out.” In the sewers, the hoe was invaluable for digging into the accumulated muck in search of the buried scraps that could be cleaned and sold.

Knowing where to find the most valuable pieces of detritus was vital, and most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by a veteran who was frequently somewhere between 60 and 80 years old. These men knew the secret locations of the cracks that lay submerged beneath the surface of the sewer-waters, and it was there that cash frequently lodged. “Sometimes,” Mayhew wrote, “they dive their arm down to the elbow in the mud and filth and bring up shillings, sixpences, half-crowns, and occasionally half-sovereigns and sovereigns. They always find these the coins standing edge uppermost between the bricks in the bottom, where the mortar has been worn away.”

Life beneath London’s streets might have been surprisingly lucrative for the experienced sewer-hunter, but the city authorities had a point: It was also tough, and survival required detailed knowledge of its many hazards. There were, for example, sluices that were raised at low tide, releasing a tidal wave of effluent-filled water into the lower sewers, enough to drown or dash to pieces the unwary. Conversely, toshers who wandered too far into the endless maze of passages risked being trapped by a rising tide, which poured in through outlets along the shoreline and filled the main sewers to the roof twice daily.

Yet the work was not was unhealthy, or so the sewer-hunters themselves believed. The men that Mayhew met were strong, robust and even florid in complexion, often surprisingly long-lived–thanks, perhaps, to immune systems that grew used to working flat out–and adamantly convinced that the stench that they encountered in the tunnels “contributes in a variety of ways to their general health.” They were more likely, the writer thought, to catch some disease in the slums they lived in, the largest and most overcrowded of which was off Rosemary Lane, on the poorer south side of the river.

"Access is gained to this court through a dark narrow entrance, scarcely wider than a doorway, running beneath the first floor of one of the houses in the adjoining street. The court itself is about 50 yards long, and not more than three yards wide, surrounded by lofty wooden houses, with jutting abutments in many upper storeys that almost exclude the light, and give them the appearance of being about to tumble down upon the heads of the intruder. The court is densely inhabited…. My informant, when the noise had ceased, explained the matter as follows: “You see, sir, there’s more than thirty houses in this here court, and there’s no less than eight rooms in every house; now there’s nine or ten people in some of the rooms, I knows, but just say four in every room and calculate what that there comes to.” I did, and found it, to my surprise, to be 960. “Well,” continued my informant, chuckling and rubbing his hands in evident delight at the result, “you may as well just tack a couple of hundred on to the tail o’ them for makeweight, as we’re not werry pertikler about a hundred or two one way or the other in these here places.”

No trace has yet been found of the sewer-hunters prior to Mayhew’s encounter with them, but there is no reason to suppose that the profession was not an ancient one. London had possessed a sewage system since Roman times, and some chaotic medieval construction work was regulated by Henry VIII’s Bill of Sewers, issued in 1531. The Bill established eight different groups of commissioners and charged them with keeping the tunnels in their district in good repair, though since each remained responsible for only one part of the city, the arrangement guaranteed that the proliferating sewer network would be built to no uniform standard and recorded on no single map.

Thus it was never possible to state with any certainty exactly how extensive the labrynth under London was. Contemporary estimates ran as high as 13,000 miles; most of these tunnels, of course, were far too small for the toshers to entert, but there were at least 360 major sewers, bricked in the 17th century. Mayhew noted that these tunnels averaged a height of 3 feet 9 inches, and since 540 miles of the network was formally surveyed in the 1870s it does not seem too much to suggest that perhaps a thousand miles of tunnel was actually navigable to a determined man. The network was certainly sufficient to ensure that hundreds of miles of uncharted tunnel remained unknown to even the most experienced among the toshers.

t is hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that legends proliferated among the men who made a living in the tunnels. Mayhew recorded one of the most remarkable bits of folklore common among the toshers: that a “race of wild hogs” inhabited the sewers under Hampstead, in the far north of the city. This story­–a precursor of the tales of “alligators in the sewers” heard in New York a century later–suggested that a pregnant sow

by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain; feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continually. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.

Thankfully, the same legend explained, the black swine that proliferated under Hampstead were incapable of traversing the tunnels to emerge by the Thames; the construction of the sewer network obliged them to cross Fleet Ditch–a bricked-over river–“and as it is the obstinate nature of a pig to swim against the stream, the wild hogs of the sewers invariably work their way back to their original quarters, and are thus never to be seen.”

A second myth, far more eagerly believed, told of the existence (Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood record) “of a mysterious, luck-bringing Queen Rat”:

"This was a supernatural creature whose true appearance was that of a rat; she would follow the toshers about, invisibly, as they worked, and when she saw one that she fancied she would turn into a sexy-looking woman and accost him. If he gave her a night to remember, she would give him luck in his work; he would be sure to find plenty of money and valuables. He would not necessarily guess who she was, for though the Queen Rat did have certain peculiarities in her human form (her eyes reflected light like an animal’s, and she had claws on her toes), he probably would not notice them while making love in some dark corner. But if he did suspect, and talked about her, his luck would change at once; he might well drown, or meet with some horrible accident."


One such tradition was handed down in the family of a tosher named Jerry Sweetly, who died in 1890, and finally published more than a century later. According to this family legend, Sweetly had encountered the Queen Rat in a pub. They drank until midnight, went to a dance, “and then the girl led him to a rag warehouse to make love.” Bitten deeply on the neck (the Queen Rat often did this to her lovers, marking them so no other rat would harm them), Sweetly lashed out, causing the girl to vanish and reappear as a gigantic rat up in the rafters. From this vantage point, she told the boy: “You’ll get your luck, tosher, but you haven’t done paying me for it yet!”

Offending the Queen Rat had serious consequences for Sweetly, the same tradition ran. His first wife died in childbirth, his second on the river, crushed between a barge and the wharf. But, as promised by legend, the tosher’s children were all lucky, and once in every generation in the Sweetly family a female child was born with mismatched eyes–one blue, the other grey, the color of the river.

Queen Rats and mythical sewer-pigs were not the only dangers confronting the toshers, of course. Many of the tunnels they worked in were crumbling and dilapidated–“the bricks of the Mayfair sewer,” Peter Ackroyd says, “were said to be as rotten as gingerbread; you could have scooped them out with a spoon”–and they sometimes collapsed, entombing the unwary sewer hunters who disturbed them. Pockets of suffocating and explosive gases such as “sulphurated hydrogen” were also common, and no tosher could avoid frequent contact with all manner of human waste. The endlessly inquisitive Mayhew recorded that the “deposit” found in the sewers

"has been found to comprise all the ingredients from the gas works, and several chemical and mineral manufactories; dead dogs, cats, kittens, and rats; offal from the slaughter houses, sometimes even including the entrails of the animals; street pavement dirt of every variety; vegetable refuse, stable-dung; the refuse of pig-styes; night-soil; ashes; rotten mortar and rubbish of different kinds."

That the sewers of mid-19th-century London were foul is beyond question; it was widely agreed, Michelle Allen says, that the tunnels were “volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they failed to smother.” Yet this, the toshers themselves insisted, did not mean that working conditions under London were entirely intolerable. The sewers, in fact, had worked fairly efficiently for many years–not least because, until 1815, they were required to do little more than carry off the rains that fell in the streets. Before that date, the city’s latrines discharged into cesspits, not the sewer network, and even when the laws were changed, it took some years for the excrement to build up.

By the late 1840s, though, London’s sewers were deteriorating sharply, and the Thames itself, which received their untreated discharges, was effectively dead. By then it was the dumping-ground for 150 million tons of waste each year, and in hot weather the stench became intolerable; the city owes its present sewage network to the “Great Stink of London,” the infamous product of a lengthy summer spell of hot, still weather in 1858 that produced a miasma so oppressive that Parliament had to be evacuated. The need for a solution became so obvious that the engineer Joseph Bazalgette–soon to be Sir Joseph, a grateful nation’s thanks for his ingenious solution to the problem–was employed to modernize the sewers. Bazalgette’s idea was to build a whole new system of super-sewers that ran along the edge of the river, intercepted the existing network before it could discharge its contents, and carried them out past the eastern edge of the city to be processed in new treatment plants.

Even after the tunnels deteriorated and they became increasingly dangerous, though, what a tosher feared more than anything else was not death by suffocation or explosion, but attacks by rats. The bite of a sewer rat was a serious business, as another of Mayhew’s informants, Jack Black–the “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty”–explained.”When the bite is a bad one,” Black said, “it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which throbs very much indeed. This core is as big as a boiled fish’s eye, and as hard as stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet and squeezes…. I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir.”

There were many stories, Henry Mayhew concluded, of toshers’ encounters with such rats, and of them “slaying thousands… in their struggle for life,” but most ended badly. Unless he was in company, so that the rats dared not attack, the sewer-hunter was doomed. He would fight on, using his hoe, “till at last the swarms of the savage things overpowered him.” Then he would go down fighting, his body torn to pieces and the tattered remains submerged in untreated sewage, until, a few days later, it became just another example of the detritus of the tunnels, drifting toward the Thames and its inevitable discovery by another gang of toshers–who would find the remains of their late colleague “picked to the very bones.”

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Reading that Antarctica story made me feel incredibly cozy. The same thing happens any time I'm watching anything involving winter and snow. I've been on a few (small, independent) film sets recording audio, and my worst experience was one time, middle of January (up here in eastern Canada), we shot an outside scene that must have taken us 4 hours to do. Every time I see some winter-related show, I remember that there are a slew of people behind the camera, freezing their asses off. When I read that story, I thought it to myself "poo poo, at least I'm not stuck in the middle of freezing nowhere."

quote:

Had a great breakfast off Ginger’s skull–thyroids and brains.

quote:

Oklahoma cases solved: DNA tests show Foss Lake remains are 6 missing people
A decades-old mystery that captivated Oklahoma has been solved after officials confirmed the identities of two groups of people -- some of them teens -- who went missing in 1969 and 1970.

The first crack in the cold cases came when police in the tiny town of Sayre were testing sonar equipment in September 2013 in murky Foss Lake. They were stunned to discover a green 1952 Chevrolet and a blue 1969 Chevrolet Camaro.

quote:

Human remains found in the Camaro matched the general descriptions of three teenagers -- Jimmy Allen Williams, 16, Leah Gail Johnson, 18, and Thomas Michael Rios, 18, all from Sayre, the state Medical Examiner's Office said.

The other remains matched the genders and ages of three passengers in the green Chevrolet who went missing in 1969, the medical examiner said last year.

John Alva Porter, then 69, was in that car with Cleburn Hammack, 42, and Nora Marie Duncan, 58.

quote:

DNA test results this week prove that the bodies belonged to the missing, the state Medical Examiner's Office said, adding that they all died from drowning and their deaths were accidental.

quote:

Skeleton in Car Solves 32-Year-Old Mystery
The mystery of a woman who disappeared 32 years ago seems to be solved with the discovery of bones inside a Ford sedan hauled from the bottom of Lake Lanier, officials said Saturday.

Gerald Gowitt, the Fulton County medical examiner, said the bones were apparently those of Susie Roberts, who drove off with a friend in 1958 and never returned

quote:

The car had a 1958 license plate, Sheriff Mecum said. And Mrs. Roberts's son James said the plate was registered to his mother.

Hugh Roberts, Mrs. Roberts's 49-year-old son, said it was "a relief to know." Hugh Roberts and his brother, James, 51, both of Gainesville, were teen-agers when their mother disappeared. She was 38.

"We believed she was in the lake," James Roberts said, "but then we heard she might be in Chicago, then in Florida. We wondered if she survived but had amnesia and never knew where to go."

quote:

The Night 5 Teens Vanished

Ten kids, midnight or so, the middle of nowhere. A Saturday night, a few beers, a shiny van and distinctly different agendas: one faction that wanted to hang out at Sebastian Inlet, another that wanted to dash off to California.

It was a time for choices. One coast or the other. The reckless whims of youth or the eternal anxieties of childhood.

"It was dark," said Denise Broyles, who was 17 at the time. "We wanted to go home."

Five got out near Glades Road.

Five kept driving.

They were hardly inconspicuous as they rumbled along rarely traveled roads in a 1976 gold Dodge van, yellow stripes and palm trees painted on the side.

But it was the last anyone would hear from them for almost 18 years.

quote:

On Feb. 22, a rusting Dodge van with Dade County plates, stuffed with mud and algae, was hauled from a canal west of Boca Raton.

Palm Beach County Sheriff's investigators on Sunday said they believe that five skulls and a jumble of bones and teeth recovered from the van this weekend are the remains of the five friends.

William R. Briscoe, 18, of Hollywood; Phillip Joseph Pompi, 19, of North Miami; Matthew G. Henrich, 18, of north Dade County; and Kimberly Marie Barnes, 16, and John Paul Simmons, 18, both of Lake Forrest in unincorporated Broward, disappeared that night in Henrich's van, Sheriff's officials said

quote:

Detectives recovered beer bottles from the van, and do not suspect foul play.

"There is indication that there was drinking going on," said Sheriff's spokesman Paul Miller. "Back in 1979, this was a dark and desolate road near a canal."

Vladimir Poutine posted:

I was Googling an urban legend about a car full of skeletons being found decades after it crashed and a found a few news articles about different cases of this happening.

In Foss Lake in Oklahoma two cars from different incidents in the 60's and 70's were found under the water during a sonar equipment test and when the cars were lifted out the water bones fell out.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/23/us/foss-lake-mystery-solved/




Something similar happened in Georgia
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/05/us/skeleton-in-car-solves-32-year-old-mystery.html



The same thing happened in Florida with some teenagers who disappeared in 1979.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-03-03/news/9703030047_1_dade-county-palm-beach-county-sebastian-inlet