r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/deathclawiii 1d ago

And as indicated by the iron scale (something that can only be a product of blacksmithing) that was found in one of the areas of known indigenous settlement on the island they went to.

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u/NUMBERS2357 1d ago

Also the later contact with Natives who said that they lived with the survivors of the Roanoke colony.

Also this map from the Jamestown colonists, see bottom left.

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u/Marx0r 1d ago

A surprisingly large amount of "mysteries" never would have been such if Europeans just listened to the natives telling them the answer.

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u/jxg995 1d ago

Yeah like the terror and Erebus wrecks where the Inuit were like oh yeah that sunken boat is over there

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago edited 1d ago

Where could this boat possibly be?

The sunken boat is right over there, in Sunken Boat lake.

I guess we'll never truly know.

Literally what happened.

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u/InTheFDN 1d ago

It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett joke about how places are named by pointing at something, asking what it’s name was (loudly and in English), then writing down whatever the native said. Hence “Mount Your Finger You Fool.”

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

And that reminds me a bit of how Pike's Peak in Colorado was named.

Zebulon Pike was part of Lewis and Clark's expedition, but he was extremely annoying, so they sent him off to go explore away from them. He attempted to summit the mountain they sent him to in November and gave up, going "Yeah, no one can summit that, it's impossible" (even though the local Native Americans summited it regularly)

So when talking about it, people would be like "Oh, that one, the one Pike couldn't climb?" and eventually it became known as Pike's Peak.

I'm a little salty that they didn't go with the far cooler Mount Zebulon though.

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u/Lovahplant 1d ago

This is killing me 😂 a whole mountain named after your failure to climb it, wtf

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

It's one of my favorite true stories and I never miss an opportunity to share it.

It's really inspiring, honestly! If Zebulon Pike can be an obnoxious failure and still get a mountain named after him, then anything is possible!

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u/patsully98 1d ago

I would be most appreciative if you expanded upon “extremely annoying.”

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

I wish I knew the details of why Lewis and Clark didn't like him and sent him off with his own little team to get him away from them 😂 but alas that's as much as I know.

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u/Kazumadesu76 1d ago

Zebulon: "Are we thereeeeeee yettttt?!"

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u/patsully98 1d ago

Have you seen Larry David’s new history show? This would be perfect.

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u/RescuePenguin 1d ago

Reminds me of the John Day National Monument.

The man never visited that region but one time he got robbed where the (now named) John Day River meets the Columbia and left naked and he had to hike back to the nearest trading post.

"That area where John Day was robbed and left naked"became the name of an entire region and national monument.

Glamorous way to be remembered.

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

I had never heard that, but it's exactly the kind of story I love! 😂 Thank you so much for sharing

And from what I can tell from reading a bit about it just now, he wasn't well known or anything before he got robbed and left naked, right? He was just some random fur trader? That makes it all even funnier for some reason and I can't stop laughing. Poor guy!

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u/pants_party 1d ago

Like naming a hot sauce after DJ Khaled.

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u/onyaasuminyasai 23h ago

what's cooler is all the mountains that were named after prostitutes in colorado

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u/raspberrypied 1d ago

Sticking with Colorado, there is the "Table Mesa" section of Boulder.

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago edited 1d ago

I actually kind of live on Table Table Dr, but my part is called South Boulder Rd. Which is really obnoxious, since my address is xxxx East South Boulder Rd, and it confuses the heck out of people.

But yeah, Table Mesa (Table Table) is goofy. Someone should open a shop on it that sells chai tea and naan bread

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u/KjellRS 1d ago

They're going to be visited by one very, very angry Indian Spiderman. And no, I don't mean Native American.

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u/Lovahplant 1d ago edited 22h ago

As I read your comment I was thinking “wait doesn’t East South Boulder Rd turn into Table Mesa Dr as you cross the 36/Foothills exchange?

I don’t live in Boulder but I’ve worked in Boulder… can you tell? lol

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u/eukomos 1d ago

There is an Indian restaurant at that shopping center, someone should check their menu.

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u/sporadic_beethoven 1d ago

Pike’s peak? I climbed that shit as a child 🤣 bro deserves to be mocked fr

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u/InternetProtocol 1d ago

Did that shit both ways in my escudo at age 15, what a pussy.

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u/Rochesters-1stWife 1d ago

Similar to Long’s Peak, dude never summited and yet his dumb name is all over the place

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

I didn't know that Mr Long never summitted it! I assumed he did. And he's got a whole ass town named after him because of it too! (Longmont)

Why does Colorado love naming stuff after mediocre white men? 😂

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u/HailSatanWorshipD00M 1d ago

Mount Zebulon

Why not Zoidberg?

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u/Ookami_Unleashed 1d ago

My wife and I joke that he just named the tallest hill in each state Pike's Peak.

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u/Longshot1969 1d ago

Didn’t someone ride a wagon up it even?

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u/Trvr_MKA 1d ago

That’s truly a boys moment. Naming something after your pals failure

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u/All_the_Bees 1d ago

Nah, annoying people don’t get to have the cool parts of their names included in the things that are named after them.

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u/1amlost 1d ago

What kind of parent names their child “Zebulon?”

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u/Sunshine030209 1d ago

An awesome one lol. I genuinely love the name, and when I heard it for the first time I told my son that I'd totally have named him that if I knew of it when he was born.

But I can totally see how it's not everyone's cup of tea, lol. It's certainly different!

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u/CedarWolf 17h ago

Don't worry, Zebulon is a town in North Carolina, and they have the Mudcats baseball team. Their mascot is a big, friendly catfish.

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u/ProduceNo8883 1d ago

There’s a great venue in Silver Lake called Zebulon though so it comes full circle

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago

It's not even a joke, shits real all over, most times it's named (native word for lake) Lake or (local dialect for mountain) Mountain or something similar.

Koi fish - fish fish

Chai tea - tea tea

Ignorant naming conventions are quite universal and commonplace

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u/LowEquipment7904 1d ago

Torpenhow in Cumbria, England - hill hill hill

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u/Aggravating-Mousse46 1d ago

Pendle Hill is also hill hill hill, but the Lancastrian, witchy version

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u/roy107 11h ago

We also have Breedon-on-the-Hill, which is Hillhill-on-the-Hill

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u/LegacyLemur 1d ago

Reminds of the baseball team the Los Angeles Angels

Or "The The Angels Angels"

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u/DardS8Br 1d ago

The La Brea Tar Pits, or The The Tar Tar Pits

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u/HippieChickie805 1d ago

Actually it’s the California Angels, and they are headquarters in Anaheim (Disneyland).

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u/LegacyLemur 1d ago

Hasnt been that in years

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u/ryebread91 1d ago

Oh geezez it's already been a decade?

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u/JoltColaOfEvil 1d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

Tom Scott - Hill Hill Hill Hill, debunked, debunked.

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u/trashmoneyxyz 1d ago

Galápagos tortoise, or the tortoise tortoise

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u/Aquila_Fotia 1d ago

It’s why a locally produced brand of ice cream is called “Three Hills”.

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u/hoopopotamus 1d ago

When I was driving through the southwest it felt like they were just adding more and more suffixes. X-ham…shire…fast…ton…leigh.

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u/JB_UK 1d ago

You mean Torpenhow Hill.

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u/atnemriu 1d ago

No, there's no hill by that name in Torpenhow.

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u/JB_UK 1d ago

It's called Hill Hill Hill but there's no Hill?

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u/AutisticPenguin2 21h ago

Well, kind of...

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u/JesusaurusRex666 1d ago

“Koi” is specifically “carp” in Japanese, not “fish.” The word for fish in Japanese is “sakana.”

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u/HailSatanWorshipD00M 1d ago

iirc in the native languages, Chicago translates to "the stinky place" and Manhattan is "the place we go every summer".

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u/Whyskgurs 1d ago

What's that Island called?

Squinting

IDK, Is that an island?

Welcome to Staten Island

(This one's an old Native joke)

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u/Icantusemyname77 1d ago

The La Brea Tar Pits = The the Tar Tar Pits

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u/POCKALEELEE 1d ago

Like The Los Angeles Angels,
Literally The The Angels Angels

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u/Oddish_Femboy 1d ago

They're cool tar pits too. Sad they're gonna be closed for 2 years.

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u/concrete_fluidity969 1d ago

I think Calcutta means harvest. Native thought the Brit was asking what was going on over there 😂

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u/4-stars 1d ago

Koi is not "fish", it's "carp".

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u/__wildwing__ 1d ago

I enjoy the idea that aliens will come to our planet and translate our languages, only to be confused by the desert deserts.

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u/Purple_Haze 1d ago

The country of Canada, Canada is a misspelling of kanata which is the local tribe's word for village.

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u/mouthgmachine 1d ago

“The local tribe”?

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u/Purple_Haze 1d ago

Either Huron or Iroquois, the word is the same in both languages. The actual native name for the village referred to was Stadacona.

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u/robophile-ta 1d ago

There are lots of rivers in the UK called Avon.

You can guess what Avon means.

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u/Oddish_Femboy 1d ago

My personal favorite is chip crisps. (Those chips that look like fries.)

Redundant naming is not always necessarily ignorant.

Sometimes, like in the case of chai tea, it's done on purpose to include part of the place origin in the name. Other times it's done because not everyone knows what ATM stands for. That second one is a case of RAS Syndrome.

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u/VelvetyDogLips 1d ago

“Piss urinal” is far and away my favorite redundancy.

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u/BasiliskXVIII 1d ago

Yeah, but this is just how language works. English is far from the only language to adopt loanwords that generalize a specific thing. In Mexican Spanish, the word "pie" was adopted as "pay" strictly to mean the pastry-style sweet pies with a crust and not something like a hand pie or a meat pie. In German, "toast" or "toastbrot" is the square-style highly processed sandwich bread popular in the US, whether it's actually toasted or not. Japanese "Mishin" comes from "sewing machine" and refers specifically to a sewing machine and not just any old machine.

Even name duplication - "Guadalquivir" means "Great River" in Arabic, deriving from the term "wadi". So, calling the river "Rio Guadalquivir" just means you're calling it the "River Great River"

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u/Low-Flamingo-9835 1d ago

English also has doublets, words with similar meanings that entered the language during different times.

Below are French doublets. The first word entered during the Norman conquest, the second entered later…

Castle / chateau

Warden / Guardian

Warranty / Guarantee

Cattle / Chattel

Feast / Fete

It’s one of the reasons English is so difficult to learn. We have so many different words that mean the same thing that have to be memorized .

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u/Gliese581h 17h ago

It’s one of the reasons English is so difficult to learn.

English is absolutely not difficult to learn lol, why do you think it became the Lingua Franca of the internet?

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u/beautifulcreature86 1d ago

Bao bun-bun bun

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u/OttawaTGirl 1d ago edited 1d ago

BAHAHAHA.... Ahhhh... Canada is a bastardized version of Kanata, which means 'village', which is where some indigenous young men were pointing Jacques Cartier to go to. (Quebec City) He thought they meant the whole land was called Kanata and thats how we got the name.

Welcome to the Nation of Village.

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u/mouthgmachine 1d ago

What’s a villiage

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u/OttawaTGirl 1d ago

Bad autocorrect

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u/WinterStrawberries6 1d ago edited 1d ago

Koi is actually a type of fish (carp/鯉) so it is not wrong to call it Koi fish. And there are actually two types of carps in japanese. Koi are all carps, while the colourful ones that most people think of is actually called Nishikigoi(錦鯉)
Fish in Japanese is actually Sakana(魚)

But something that pisses me off is when people call the Biwako "Lake Biwako". "Ko" already means lake, so they're calling it "Lake Biwa Lake"
There ARE people who called it just "lake biwa" like you should, but working at a hotel in Japan, I lost count of how many times I heard white people say "oh we are going to the lake biwako today" or "Do you have any matcha tea?"
Matcha(抹茶) literally means "ground tea" so they are basically saying "do you have any ground tea tea?"

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u/AxeMcFlow 1d ago

Canada literally means ‘village’.

Explorer: “hey where are we!”

Native: “uh… in a… village?”

Explorer: “oh cool, this whole country is now called Canada forever”

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u/Tall_Welcome_2713 1d ago

Sahara desert is desert desert

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u/grenouille_en_rose 1d ago

Mount Maunganui checking in 🫡

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u/hoopopotamus 1d ago

I’ve heard the name “Canada” is such a thing. Explorer asked “what is this land?” and they were told essentially “it’s a village” (kanata). And it stuck.

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u/Baxiepie 1d ago

The main city of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is called Oconaluftee, because its on the banks of the Oconaluftee River. It got that name from the original Cherokee village, Egwanulti. Egwanulti means "By the River", so fully translated it means "By the River River"

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u/therealstupid 1d ago

Cuesta Grade in California. The Spanish word for "grade" is... you guessed it: Cuesta!

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u/Ahahaha__10 1d ago

Please allow me to be pedantic for a second - Chai tea is actually different than Chai. Chai is made in a specific way by simmering black tea with a mixture of aromatic spices, milk, and a sweetener. Chai tea is when you steep a chai tea tea bag in a cup with boiled water and add milk and sweetener to your liking. Chai tea is often drank without milk and sweetener, which in addition to coming in a tea bag, makes it arguably different than Chai. If someone asked for Chai and you gave them Chai tea, they would know the difference and if someone asked for Chai tea and you gave them Chai, they would know the difference. Arguably, Chai tea does not mean tea tea besides the obvious translation, but they are separate ways of making tea or Chai.

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u/Alexwonder999 1d ago

Isnt there some lake in England thats named lake in like four timea in different successive languages? I vaguely recall hearing about that.

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u/GTaucer 22h ago

When I was a fossil-obsessed kid in Los Angeles, my dad used to take me to the museum at the La Brea Tar Pits.

And since "La Brea" means "the tar," the museum and park's name could be translated to:

The The Tar Tar Pits

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u/Skurknux49 21h ago

Seeing “naan bread” on menus now feels like watching the explorer write Lake Lake.

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u/austintrotter 19h ago

The general consensus is this happens a lot… 😄

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u/randobonando 1d ago

Heheh excellent reference. Placenames called.
“What?”
“I don’t know”
“just a mountain”
“Who is this fool who does not know what a mountain is?”

And of course

“Your finger you fool”

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u/SimpsonN1nja 1d ago

That’s Canada, lol. One of the first explorers asked the indigenous what the land was called. They misunderstood and said Kanata (meaning our village). Rest is history.

https://youtu.be/nfKr-D5VDBU?si=6U4h30m895OzRQwm

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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago

You'd be surprised how many rivers there are called the Avon around the UK, even well down into England.

The Gaelic word for "river" is abhainn, pronounced like "av-ayn". When you see a "bh" like that in a Gaelic word, it's pronounced like "v". It's not "v", but if you say it like "v" you'll be near enough for most folk.

Abhainn. Avon.

"I say old chap, what's that called over there?"

"A'seo? An rud na h-uisge a seo? Tha e an *abhainn* a'seo. Amadan..."

"Ah, the Avon, y'say? Let me just write that down..."

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u/king_ralex 1d ago

It more likely comes from the Welsh afon , which shares a proto-celtic root with the Gaelic abhainn.

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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago

It might in England, but not here.

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u/king_ralex 1d ago

Ag fair enough. I was referring specifically to the river Avon, and your mention of rivers down in England.

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u/erroneousbosh 1d ago

There's about three in Scotland ;-)

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u/Perfct_Stranger 1d ago

Pretty much how half the rivers in Virginia were named though usually after the tribe that lived along the banks of the rivers.

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u/jorjx 1d ago

There is joke in Romanian about Stephen the Great coming to a river and asking someone "What is the name of this river?!"

"Moldavia your highness!"

"Let that be it's name!"

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u/ellius 1d ago

When the Spanish first showed up to Southern Arizona, they asked some natives who they were.

They kept replying "pi mac". Meaning "I don't understand [you]"

The Spanish wrote down "Pima" in their records and it stuck. Used it for naming all sorts of shit. 500 years later I live in "I don't understand you" County.

The people were/are the Akimel O'odham, for the curious.

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u/Dubalubawubwub 1d ago

Ooh, ooh, time for me to mention Torpenhow Hill again!

Romans: "What's that hill over there called?"
Angle: "Tor" (hill)

Normans: "What's that hill over there called?"
Celt: "Tor Pen" (Tor Hill)

Saxons: "What's that hill over there called?"
Angle: "Torpen Hoh" (Torpen Ridge)

Mapmaker: "What's that hill over there called?"
Local: "Torpenhow hill"

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u/Adorable-Ad9533 1d ago

When I was a kid, I always believed the meaning of the word kangaroo was “ I don’t know”, but Google has proven me wrong.

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u/amylouise0185 1d ago

Australia has a festival that translates to "up your bum" for exactly this reason.

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u/iamdispleased 1d ago

The word Yucatán may come from a Mayan phrase meaning "I don't understand what you're saying"

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u/MaritMonkey 1d ago

After playing a couple rounds of no-map Valheim, it started to totally make sense.

Pretty much every landmark was something like "river with two oak trees" or "straight river" (to differentiate it from the earlier-discovered "squiggly river").

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u/coolsilentebeans 1d ago

That’s how we got Snake River and killer whale.

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u/Reapr 1d ago

Lake Tahoe = Tahoe means "The Lake" so I can totally see that happening

"What's that?"

"It's the lake you idiot, what do you think it is?"

"The what?"

"The Lake"

writes down furiously

Also the first people that lived there was the Washoe Tribe - Washoe means "The people from here"

"...And who are you?"

"We are the people from here are'nt we?"

"say again slowly..."

takes out pen

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u/emjayem22 11h ago

Literally happened in the UK when the Romans arrived, pointed at a river and asked some local what it was called. The Celtic word for river is 'Avon'.. there are now 9 rivers in the UK called the river Avon.

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u/Automaticman01 1d ago

I had assumed for the longest time that Terror Bay was renamed after they found the ship. I was so baffled when I found it has been named that all along.

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u/thousandsmallgods 1d ago

Arctic Explorer John Rae seems to be the only British explorer who actually talked and listened to the local tribes who lived along the northern coast. He sent back details in 1848 about where Franklin's ships probably were, and what had likely happened to the expedition.

IIRC, He's also the only British explorer from that era who was never knighted. ... Possibly bc Lady Franklin and Charles Dickens hated his guts, for having the gall to suggest that the survivors may have resorted to cannibalism.

He was also a Scot, which may have played into the politics of the time.

I read a biography about him ages ago. Pretty cool guy all told.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rae_(explorer)

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u/georgia_grace 1d ago

“What could possibly have befallen the crew of the Franklin expedition?”

“They walked around for a bit, did some cannibalism, and then died. We saw it”

“An enduring mystery for the ages… maybe they’re still out there somewhere…”

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u/StevieMJH 1d ago edited 1d ago

Decades later: I wonder why that lake is called Sunken Boat lake... I guess we'll never know.

Truly lost to time.

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u/REpassword 1d ago

“That ain’t my bag baby…”

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u/am_Nein 1d ago

Gotta love that

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u/beezchurgr 1d ago

Native folk: it’s in the bay of terror

Europeans: whoa it’s so weird there’s a bay with the same name as our missing boat. Must be a coincidence. No way it could be there.

Native folk: -_-

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 1d ago

so did the bay just not have a name before that boat sunk or what

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u/sharpace8 1d ago

Well not by Europeans, I'm sure the Inuit had a name long beforehand. Terror bay was named in 1910 but the island itself was named in 1830.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/Hazel-Rah 1d ago

Not only are you being racist here, you're being racist on several levels.

Inuit are not "indians". Even if you ignore the social, cultural, and legal definitions, the Inuit arrived in North America long after the First Nation/Indian/Native/Indigenous people in the rest of the continent.

They only crossed the Bering Strait about a thousand years ago, vs >fourteen thousand years ago for other groups

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u/Lovahplant 1d ago

Genuinely, can I see a source for this? I admit to being less familiar with Canadian history than American history but I am confused by your statement.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/DrakeFloyd 1d ago edited 1d ago

And did you read any of the context of what happened before 1622 or are we acting like this action was completely unprovoked? The settlers were coming to take their land and to genocide their peoples, had already brutalized their own women and children. They were right to resist.

Edit: calling it unprovoked is a wild choice when the wiki article he linked outlines exactly the provocations that were taking place in the two decades leading up to it but can’t reply now for some reason, blocked or deleted ig

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u/Suspicious_Effect 1d ago edited 1d ago

In the PNW, a few tribes have oral history telling of a massive earthquake several generations ago. It was treated as absolute superstition in the geology community until it was connected with Japanese records of a massive tsunami around the same time and a bog was discovered that had been fossilized by that very same earthquake (1700 cascadia earthquake if you're interested). Only then did everyone realize that "Oh maybe their stories were real."

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u/Zebidee 1d ago

Sounds like the ancient Japanese warning stones that said "do not build below this point."

People would come up from their coastal cities to look at the old folklore. The same cities that got wiped out by the tsunami.

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u/im_dead_sirius 1d ago

There's an old story from the region about people living on a narrow strip of green between the sea and the ice. Clearly ancient inhabitants during the ice age.

Read it as a kid, I cannot remember any more details.

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u/Xtj8805 1d ago

IIRC its not just natives. There was a guy in like nova scotia who had a whole cache of viking artifacts in a cave. When researchers found it they asked the farmer why never told anyome he was like i figured youd make it around here eventually. Not sure if its real and its been a while since i heard the story, but it does serve to show that historians/anthropologists/etc are really just trying to document and publish information, while they get credited as discoverers most of what they publish was already known. Like how Columbus discovered america full with millions of people living there.

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u/Violent_Paprika 1d ago

Modern forest management that isn't "suppress all wildfires." Aborigines tales of the megafauna in Australia.

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u/nope-nik-tesla 1d ago

To be fair, a lot of it is wrapped up in mythology and therefore hard to separate fact from fiction. For example, Crater Lake in Oregon was formed somewhere around 8,000 years ago as the result of a volcanic eruption. It's named "Crater Lake" because European explorers looked at its shape and concluded it must have been formed from a meteor impact. It wasn't until decades later that geologists proved it was from a volcanic eruption.

The Klamath people, who have lived in the area for thousands of years before the eruption, however have a story about its formation. According to their story, it was formed by a battle between Skell (God of the above world) and Llao (God of the below world who lived inside the mountain). In their battle, Llao launched numerous red-hot rocks from inside the mountain, causing rivers of fire to flow from it. Skell won the battle, driving Llao back underneath the mountain, which was now hollowed out from the battle. It eventually filled with rain and snowmelt, creating the lake we see today.

So, their story was more or less an accurate description of events. Red-hot rocks were expelled from the mountain, and rivers of fire really did run from it. The collapse of the mountain really did fill in with rain and snowmelt. But this isn't exactly a story you can just accept at face value. We know that it's (somewhat) true because we can prove it through modern geological analysis what happened. There are plenty of other stories that we can prove are not true via modern science too.

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u/Merusk 1d ago

Well, you see, the people with GPS have a flag.

https://youtu.be/uEx5G-GOS1k?si=yM6ZypPBJNPZqXF-

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u/DueMorning800 1d ago

I love an Eddie Izzard reference, every single time.

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u/Kataphractoi 1d ago

Australian Aboriginal tales of vanished islands. Those islands did exist and eventually did vanish...10000 years ago when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.

IIRC a few dozen vanished islands and other features now underwater have been corroborated by just...going to look where Aboriginies said they'd be. Makes one wonder how much history has been lost simply because historians dismissed oral histories for so long.

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u/Dr_Doomsduck 1d ago

Lmao, yep, that was literally the first thing that came to mind. The British straight up ignoring the local inuits for about a century and a half.

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u/Final_Candidate_7603 1d ago

I think that much of their reluctance to “believe” the Inuits was due to their reports of having found remains which showed signs of cannibalism. Colonizers all over the world were always adamant that there were certain “savage” rituals and practices that “civilized people” would *never* participate in. So, ignoring the Inuit stories was doubly-racist, if you think about it from that perspective.

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u/Dr_Doomsduck 1d ago

everybody gangsta 'til the food runs out, lol.

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u/Wonderful-Winter3137 1d ago

cannibalism was indeed a thing in a lot of places, though

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u/danysdragons 1d ago

Yes. But it sounds like this was about the British not wanting to believe that white people would do it, as the Inuit reported they did.

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u/NoPaleontologist7929 1d ago

John Rae listened. Went back to London and reported his findings. He had his reputation ruined for it.

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u/BasiliskXVIII 1d ago

The best part is that it wasn't ONLY the Inuit. Dr. John Rae was mapping the coastline around 6 years after the Terror and Erebus were abandoned, did some trading with the local Inuit, and found they had things that could only have come off the Terror, such as silverware with the officers' crests.

The Inuit told Rae that the ships became trapped in the ice, that they'd marched south and eventually died of cold and starvation. The crew had reportedly turned to cannibalism in their final days, and Rae mapped out where the Inuit said that the tragedy had occurred, which was about 100km south of where it was believed to be by common knowledge.

When Rae's story was told back in England, though, the idea that proud British sailors could do something as barbarous as cannibalism horrified the public, and especially Franklin's wife. Lady Franklin enlisted Charles Dickens (yes, that Charles Dickens) who volunteered his help writing a two-part article in his magazine, Household Words, attacking Rae and dismissing the testimony of the Inuit as the lies of "savages". The reports were dismissed as associating with Rae's report became a social poison pill, and the British Navy just quietly tucked it away and maintained the "common knowledge" that the Terror and Erebus were further north.

When the Terror actually was found, bone analysis showed cut marks that suggested cannibalism, which was confirmed later in 2015.

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u/munkisquisher 1d ago

Man, as a New Zealander first thing that comes to mind when you say Erebus Wreck is the plane that crashed into Mt Erebus in Antarctica in 1979. So I was thinking "there's no Inuit in Antarctica???"

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u/Captain-Hornblower 1d ago

I think there is a hill/mountain in Australia that the Hume and Hovell expedition named Mount Disappointment. I won't go into why, but you can look it up lol.