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In the end, one must ask, why? Why is the story of Christ's
crucifixion told wrong, from the Christian perspective, in the Koran?
For the most part, the Koran is not a tightly edited book. It is a
compilation of folklore from various sources. The editor and compiler,
Mohammed, did not believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate; and yet
missionaries today will use stories from the Koran, like the 'Clay
Birds,' to prove His deity. How is this possible? Because the people
who made that story up in the first place certainly did believe in the
deity of Jesus Christ, and the story has not been sufficiently modified
so as to disable that inference. Yet in the end, the stories in the
Koran are there because Mohammed liked them. He heard, from someone who
had somewhere encountered one of the docetic 'gospels,' that Jesus did
not die upon the cross. This appealed to him. Why? He must have known,
if only from the ubiquity of the cross as a decoration on Christian
churches, that Christians believe to the contrary that Jesus did die
upon the cross, and rose again.
Wish fulfillment is a powerful motive; the desire for a thing to be
true is half-way there, for some people, to believing it is true. Let
me give an example. The Franklin expedition was sent out by the British
empire in 1845 to nail down the 'missing link' of the Northwest passage. While threading through the Arctic
archipelago, the vessels got stuck in the ice. The next summer's
thaw was not enough to free them; the crew must have wondered if the
open, navigable channel which had first beckoned them down that way was more of a
rarity or a fluke than the normal course of nature. They spent another
winter, but in spring of 1848 resolved to walk out, heading toward the
Great Fish River and the Canadian mainland. The British government knew none of this; they knew only that
the expedition had not been heard from. Realizing that, having only three
years' worth of provisions on board, the men were upon the expiry of that time period likely to
starve in the desolate desert of the frozen North, the Admiralty almost
immediately sent out a rescue fleet, supplemented by private ventures.
On one of these vessels was Inuit translator Adam Beck. After encountering a
travelling band of Inuit, he told a gruesome tale:
"Smith was so startled by what he heard that he took Snow
aside: Beck was reporting a massacre of Royal Navy sailors. That's what
the friendly Inuit had told him earlier in the day, Smith relayed to
Snow. Two ships had wrecked farther up the coast, and the men who made
it ashore, including officers with gold bands on their caps and other
naval insignia, were later killed. . .The survivors, some armed with
guns but without ammunition, camped for a time in white tents or huts,
separate from the Inuit, who eventually killed the exhausted and weak
sailors with darts or arrows." (Paul Watson, Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt
for the Lost Franklin Expedition, Kindle location 1909).
The Inuk translator even went so far as to sign a deposition: "Beck
later swore to his account of the murder in a signed deposition, made
in front of a magistrate at Godhaven, on Greenland's Disko Island."
(Paul Watson, Ice Ghosts, Kindle location 1915). So why is 'Inuit
massacre' not the canonical account of the failure of the Franklin
expedition? Why is this the path not taken? Charles Dickens believed
it, but few others, then or now. Its explanatory sweep and power is
immense; otherwise inexplicable moves on the part of the survivors, who
seem to have broken up into small groups of one or two, become
plausible.
It is not remarkable that the story told to a fellow Inuk was not
repeated to the authorities. Police expect to hear stories prone to
variation; that is after all what attracted their attention to Lizzie
Borden, that she changed her story. Nor is the geographic confusion
remarkable; a map is a high-tech product, a planar projection of the
earth's surface. People do not automatically know how to produce one or
to read one already produced. Certain elements of its appearance may be
conventional, like placing 'North' at the top; but there is nothing
conventional about the thing itself. The Inuit were unable to produce a
map, for the same reason they were unable to fire a rocket to the moon.
Most people unschooled in Euclidean geometry, when asked how to get
there from here, will produce a linear itinerary rather than a planar
map: "Before the rise of Greek scholarship, there was no science of
geography in the ancient world. What maps were made were not
necessarily drawn on two-dimensional planes; some were linear,
consisting of individual roads (later known as itinerae), which
provided information useful to a traveler." (Atlas of Bible History,
Kindle location 697). People should not misinterpret itineraries as if
they were maps.
By all ordinary considerations, the circumstances are suspicious,
and the evidence points in one direction. As all concede, the Inuit
were the last to see Franklin's men alive. The Inuit were subsequently
found to be in possession of loot from the doomed voyage: "[Charles
Francis] Hall itemized Franklin relics found in the possession of the
Inuit, including a mahogany writing desk that 'had been recently in use
as a blubber-tray.'" (Frozen in Time: The Fate of
the Franklin Expedition, Owen Beattie and John Geiger, p. 94).
At a minimum the Inuit are shown to be grave robbers; and they
certainly were that, "A medal with the name of John Irving engraved on
it was found at the site, though the grave had been 'despoiled by the
natives some years before.'" (Frozen in Time: The
Fate of the Franklin Expedition, Owen Beattie and John Geiger, p. 97).
They were grave robbers, as all concede; they carted off the
property of dead men with gleeful abandon, even if they had to disinter
them to get at it. Were they more? Did they
watch the people they planned to pillage and plunder drop one by one,
or did they hasten the process? The Inuit were not entirely convinced at
the time that the 'kobluna,' the white men, were human beings;
the word might mean something like 'blight.'
There is no impermeable cultural barrier that prevents European
stragglers in the New World from committing cannibalism. The California-bound migrants
stranded in the Donner Pass did so. So did at least a few at Jamestown,
during their starving time: "Though Smith's General History is generally
eager to fault Percy's regime, it is the least damning account. The
'poorer sort' of settler, Smith reports, dug up a dead Indian and
'ate him.'. . .The Virginia General Assembly's account, which is the
corporate testimony of survivors of the starving time, insists that
'many' people 'fed on the corpse' of dead men." (Marooned, Joseph Kelly, p. 382).
But those who think that there is an iron-clad guarantee against such
behavior on the part of the Inuit are indulging in wishful thinking;
perhaps they have heard legends of noble savages. It
must rather come down to motive, means and opportunity.
Most of the 105 men who abandoned the ice-bound vessels were
sailors. They knew the ropes of a tall-masted sailing ship, but they
cannot have been more than novices at Arctic survival. Neither would
they have had even basic hunting skills; at that time in Great Britain,
hunting was the preserve of the aristocracy. There were men on board
who could tell you your latitude by looking at the constellations;
others would have got lost going around the block. Sticking together is
only fair to the seamen who need guidance; and it seems at first they
did. In fact they made it down to the mainland, near to the mouth of
the Great Fish River, their intended escape route. But there their
progress stopped. Completing this arduous trek took them from late April to
late May, when the migrating geese come back to the arctic. What happened
at the stopping point, and why did they thereafter split into
small groups?
Any group of men, fleeing from another larger group, will
scatter. The prison escapees whose tight planning and coordination
enabled them to escape from prison, will nonetheless part company when
they hear the bloodhounds. Splitting up increases the odds that some
will make it to safety. Why were the dead, at the killing ground, not buried? The same reason
the Roman dead at Cannae went unburied; the field was in the hands of
the enemy.
Later Inuit travellers, while not implicated in the
massacre, saw the death site not long after the event. Witnesses described
approximately thirty dead bodies, some strewn about at random, some of them partially
cannibalized. "Later that same spring, but before the sea ice broke up,
Inuit discovered the corpses of some thirty dead white men. . .'Some of
the bodies were in a tent or tents; others were under the boat which
had been turned over to form a shelter, and some lay scattered about in
different directions.'. ." (Watson, Paul. Ice Ghosts: The
Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition (Kindle Locations
2484-2485). W. W. Norton & Company.) Of the body of an officer found on
a nearby island, it is said, "'. . .his double barrelled gun lay
underneath him.'" (Watson, Paul. Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt
for the Lost Franklin Expedition (Kindle Location 2486). W. W. Norton &
Company.) Does this death scene look like a massacre, corroborating
Adam Beck's accusation, or is it simply what it looks like when men die
of starvation?
So what does it look like when people die of famine?
Do we know? Of course. After the Russian Bolsheviks, encountering opposition in collectivizing
the countryside, decided to 'liquidate the kulaks as a class,' entire
Russian villages could be entered by the wary traveler, where profound
silence greeted you: they'd long ago slaughtered all the farm animals, and no humans
were left alive either. But did they all gather in the town square and
fall face down, ker-plop, together, dying en masse? Of course not;
people die one by one in a famine. One would not be surprised to find
no more than one dead body 'scattered about,' the second-to-the-last
man to die having been buried by the last man, the third by the second,
etc., in a shallow grave of course. It's a very quiet type of disaster,
and the subsequent scene does not look like a massacre. Why did the
Franklin crew's death scene, or rather that of the thirty to forty men
who fell there, not look like Russia under the Bolsheviks if, as is
affirmed by the canonical version of their deaths, they died of
starvation?
Does anyone camping out where predators, like wolves and
polar bears, might be lurking, ready to nuzzle their way into a tent in
the dead of night, leave food uncovered? So why did the last of the
Franklin men to die camp out in the midst of this gruesome charnel house?
If they didn't have the strength to sequester the raw meat of their
partially butchered companions, to what advantage was the nutritional
boost of cannibalism? Is it not more likely those men who were
butchered were cannibalized by the same who killed them, not by their
friends? Inuit tales report such at item on the menu on other occasions: "Once
numerous, the Ukjulingmiut were nearly wiped out by famine: 'Some froze
to death, others starved, and the bodies of the dead were eaten by the living —
in fact many were killed to provide food, for these poor people were
driven almost mad by their sufferings that winter'. . ." (Ice Ghosts,
Kindle location 2891). If Franklin's men were successful at shooting migratory geese
(this region can be almost devoid of life at some seasons, at others,
large flocks of migratory birds darken the skies), as the
witnesses report, then why did they need to resort to cannibalism? If
they did so resort, then why did they starve?
Nevertheless, they say that the survivors of the
Franklin expedition practiced survival cannibalism. If so, one must
wonder why no one survived. They cannibalized their friends, or
committed cannibalistic gestures, at least, and then immediately
thereafter starved to death? With thirty mostly uneaten bodies in the
fridge? We know what a site looks like where
survival cannibalism was practiced: the site where Uruguayan Flight
571, carrying a rugby team, crashed in the Andes is known. Was it a
charnel house, with half-eaten corpses strewn around? Of course not! If
only to spare their own feelings, no corpses were visible. In fact when
first found, the survivors hoped to get by pretending they had lived
all that time on cheese which had been on board; only later did the
truth come out. (If ever there was a case to be made by the 'slippery
slope' argument, it's survival cannibalism. The rugby team were
scavengers, not predators; they killed nobody, only ate them after they
were in no position to mind. But it's hard not to imagine, in such an
environment, that if you began to droop a bit, people would
start looking at you funny.)
Perhaps the men were sleeping in their encampment when the Inuit
stole in amongst them, and began shooting with bow and arrows. That
would explain why some of the deceased were found lying beside a loaded
gun; they died defending themselves and their friends. Those who could,
scattered and escaped. If they later regrouped, they realized their
original plan, to retreat southward along the Great Fish River, was no
longer viable; all any pursuing Inuit had to do was leap-frog them, taking advantage of their greater familiarity with the terrain,
set a trap and then lie in wait. Pursuing a known and already
advertised course is not the way to evade and escape detection. That
road closed, they had no recourse but to drift back to the ships.
Years ago I saw a TV show about the Franklin expedition. At
that time the popular theory was that the men suffered from
lead poisoning and acted irrationally as a result. It is certainly true
that the canonical version of events requires that you believe a lot of
irrational things; maybe they should have handed out lead pills before
the show: for instance that men died of starvation while in possession
of 40 pounds of chocolate. They were saving it maybe for a special
occasion? While there is evidence of lead exposure, a better procedure would be to ask, under what circumstances
were the men's actions rational?
Cold and starvation are two interlocking problems which aggravate one another; in order to raise
enough body heat to combat the constant heat loss to the frigid environment,
caloric intake must be raised not lowered. While the men's lead levels
were elevated, this is not uncommon in exhumed nineteenth century
corpses; exposure to lead in the solder used in fresh water piping,
lead paint and other things, possibly even the solder used to seal
their tinned food, left elevated levels compared to what is common in
the present day, but not high enough to cause symptoms of psychosis or
hallucinations.
The decision to abandon the ships is often assumed to have been
irrational, but what was their condition after two winters locked in
ice? Ice can act like a nut-cracker on a trapped ship, its compression breaking the
hull into pieces. Unlike their first winter in the Arctic, where they
found a sheltered location, for the second and third they were trapped
by accumulating ice in the middle of the channel, with nothing to block
the howling winds blasting down from the north in the relentless arctic
winter storms. Was there damage to the masts and rigging? Were any of the holds
flooded, were the vessels sea-worthy? If the ships were riding so low
in the water that it was the considered opinion of those knowledgeable
in these matters that the only thing holding them up was the sea ice by
which they were held fast, and that they would soon founder if freed from
it, that is in fact what happened. The vessels did not get far, whether
they were drifting or piloted by a skeleton crew, before they sank,
although at least one may have remained afloat for several seasons, at
least one was reboarded, and at least one was piloted into safe haven
before its loss.
The possibility of extrication by overland march was discussed by
Franklin with his wife even before the expedition boarded their ships.
While this window of opportunity still remained open, the surviving
commanders seized it. If they had waited for the outcome of a summer's
sun, then possibly by late summer the ice holding their vessels in a
vise would have parted; but possibly not. If not, then as the winter
storms moved in, the possibility of travelling overland that season
would close; winter is not an opportune time for travel in the arctic.
But the men, who had three years' worth of provisions on board, could
not have maintained the strength to walk out after a winter of short
rations, if any rations; trusting to the bounty of Mother Nature is not a
smart choice in those environs. The assumption that there was something wrong
with their canned goods arises partly from the real fact that there
were quality control issues with their vendor, but mostly from the
assumption that the men starved to death, in which case there must have
been something wrong with the food. But what if there wasn't? Even if
the food was fine, there was only three years' worth of it; the time
clock would have run out by next spring; the possibility of walking
overland to civilization would have evaporated, untaken. Then what?
Wait for rescue? Wait to die? It's not irrational that they decided to
desert their vessels, while they still retained freedom of action.
The crew's removal and transport, to King William Island, of items
from the ship was one of the mainstays of the 'lead poisoning' theory.
But as far as removing items from the ships: why not? If the venture south
failed, if some as yet unknown geographical barrier prevented the
journey into areas where the Hudson Bay Trading Company was active, what could
be then done but to return and try to scrounge together a hut from wood
and other building materials recovered from the ships? Certainly they
could not survive another arctic winter in their tents. King William
Island would then be their unsinkable aircraft carrier. On the
unwarranted assumption that the men were already starving when they
left the ships, it does look peculiar that they would haul heavy
sledges across the ice, carrying items they cannot have intended to
bring with them on their southward trek. But what if they were not starving? What if
these were vigorous young men eager to get going, to their promised
destination, where they could drink down fresh water in great gulps?
What if they understood the utility of a backup plan?
Caching currently unneeded supplies is standard operating procedure
in the arctic. When personal items were recovered from the Inuit, upon
payment of course, not only did they have in their possession items like the gold
braid and insignia of rank of a British naval officer which one cannot
imagine the rightful owners ever willingly traded for food or anything
else, but they also had shiny, mysterious things like disassembled
scientific equipment, which admittedly neither they nor the surviving
crew had the slightest possible use for. Since it is in their interest as well as
that of the British to travel light, why did they want such things? Who
knows, but if experience had taught the crew that such things were
useful as trade goods, why not take them along? It may be they had too
much that was held too desirable by the Inuit; like the little boy in a
bad neighborhood who proudly wears an expensive pair of sneakers, they
were just asking for trouble. The fact that Inuit were found in possession of
items whose rightful owners were deceased would not normally be a point
in their favor; indeed it might excite suspicion.
The Inuit, reportedly, remember Sir John Franklin, who died in 1847,
as a friendly, genial spirit who gave them gifts. They remember the
crewmen quite differently. For generations elders warned the young not to venture alone onto King William Island, because
wrathful spirits, the ghosts of the deceased Franklin expedition, lay
in wait for vulnerable Inuit children. For what are these unhappy
ghosts seeking pay-back? If the Inuit never did them any harm, why are
they mad? While I don't personally believe that the
spirits of murder victims haunt the location where they were murdered,
dealing retribution, the Inuit do seem to believe that, and their fear is
almost a confession. If they never did these men any harm, why do their
angry spirits still to this day desire retaliation?
Fear and resentment are powerful motivators to massacre. The Red
Army murdering the Polish officers at Katyn forest, the Americans
massacring Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, were motivated by these
factors. The Inuit, according to testimony, blamed the Franklin
Expedition for diminishing the reserves of game on which their lives
depended, which they believed 'the spirits' provided:
“The winters that finished off Franklin and his 128 men
were so severe that they became part of Inuit legend. They would long
lay blame on the qalunaaq, the white men, for unleashing malevolent
spirits upon the island. When American Charles Francis Hall gave up
small-town newspapering to go north and hunt for the Franklin
Expedition in the 1860s, an Inuit mother told him two shamans, or
angakkuit, had cast a spell on the area where the ships were abandoned:
'The Innuits wished to live near that place (where the ships were) but
could not kill anything for their food. They (the Innuits) really
believed that the presence of Koblunas (whites) in that part of the
country was the cause of all their (the Innuits’) trouble.'”
(Watson, Paul (2017-03-21). Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost
Franklin Expedition (Kindle Locations 218-223). W. W. Norton &
Company.)
When confronting accusations of massacre, arm waving and hollering
are unhelpful; it is not even true that technologically backward
'savages' are the only people who commit massacres; Germany when it
perpetrated the Holocaust was the most technologically advanced nation
on earth. But if anyone thinks technologically backward people are not
capable of committing a massacre, just because they are technologically
backward, there was never a proposition that more defied empirical
confirmation. They're going to have to serve up a whole plate full of
lead pellets before they'll get people to believe that. History does not
so teach. The ground of North America ran wet and red long before any European landed in these parts.
Inuit ideas about the prevalence of game were not naturalistic but mediated by
magic and taboo; however there might be a kernel of truth to the
original accusation, in that the successful hunting of Franklin's men
left less game available for the Inuit. The sudden appearance of over a
hundred hungry mouths to feed in an area already poised on the
knife-edge of starvation was a real problem, whether analyzed correctly or
not. Unlike the Laplanders, the Inuit never domesticated the animals on
which they fed, the caribou and the musk ox; if they had, generous
plenty might have superseded scarcity. But as things were, they found
it necessary to practice infanticide. It's the old conundrum, ". .
.there are five people trying to survive on a life raft designed for
only four. If one person isn't thrown overboard, then everyone will
die." (I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, Norman Geisler and
Frank Turek, Kindle location 3346).
At what point did relations turn sour, after Sir John died? Did the crew,
frazzled from cabin fever after two solid winters trapped in their
quarters, offend or harm the people somehow? (As is the case with many
other of the indigenous North American languages, 'Inuk' (singular) and
'Inuit' (plural) just mean 'people' or 'human being;' these words are
not a tribal self-designation. Which makes you wonder, what other folks
are.) Reportedly the Inuit blamed the
British for the lack of game right from the start. In fact the crew of the Franklin expedition
were in direct competition with the local Inuit for what little game
was available; the population in the area had spiked when they came
along. But Inuit ideas about the abundance or scarcity of game are not mediated by any realistic or naturalistic conceptions.
Rather, they thought the 'spirits' were angry at the white
men, and that is why the 'spirits' were not sending many large animals.
If competition were the issue, the fact that the men were willingly
and voluntarily leaving the area should have been the final word.
Within several generations the Inuit would abandon the hunting technologies
they were using at first contact,— the bow and arrow,— and
adopt the technology the Franklin men were using, the rifle. Hunting
with fire-arms is far more effective, and it must have been frustrating to
see the prize animals taken, with little effort, by these interlopers.
Why couldn't the matter be composed by giving the Franklin team a big
send-off, and enthusiastically waving good-bye? It may be that if the 'spirits' must be appeased, nothing short of killing
the departing men would suffice. They already blamed the men, while
living, for the shortage of game, because their presence offended 'the
spirits' who donated the game; the events which subsequently unfolded
made them blame the spirits of the deceased themselves for all manner
of ill, and even to avoid travelling on the island:
“A restless spirit trapped in the land of the living 'does
all it can to persecute those that are to blame for its life after
death having been ruined,' Knud Rasmussen wrote. 'Only very great
shamans are now and then fortunate enough to kill these evil spirits.'”
(Watson, Paul (2017-03-21). Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost
Franklin Expedition (Kindle Locations 5268-5270). W. W. Norton &
Company.)
Shamans are the instigators of this line of reasoning. How it
works can be seen from the example of Apollonius of Tyana. This 'wise
man' convinced a mob of desperate people, suffering under a plague,
that a lonely homeless man was the cause of all their troubles. They
beat him to a pulp, so that nothing recognizable as human remained. This
is how that profession operates: they scapegoat any available
passer-by, friendless and powerless enough to avoid any blow-back. You
may be sure the scapegoat the shaman's bony finger points to will never
be anyone rich and famous, with friends in the government! It may be some
helpless, isolated old lady, or a group of strangers in a jam whose own
people were not visibly coming to their aid.
Thereby people frustrated by some inconvenience or disruption in the course
of nature can enjoy the relief of 'understanding' why it happened; not
only that, but the shaman gives them something they can 'do' about it: kill the evil scapegoat. This makes the customer
glad, he wanted to know what he could do, and is relieved to hear there
is a remedy in his hands. There usually isn't much of anything human beings
can do about bad weather! That's the magic of shamanism. It may be the troubling situation,
disease, famine, crop failure, or whatever, will have resolved
itself; circumstances do tend to revert to the mean. However if the suggested remedy does not work,
the shaman can just offer up another victim, whoever in the area happens to be friendless and
unprotected. It's a living.
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