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Dark Cloud
Brigadier General
USA
Status: offline |
 Posted - December 28 2004 : 4:32:57 PM
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Okay, I went out and bought Frozen in Time. Read some, will read it all tonight. Coupla things:
There are no endnotes, no footnotes. Not one. Bibliography for us to guess about. When they write "according to the medical literature of the time" we have to take his word for it. Later "of the time" turns out to be 1883.
The authors spend three pages describing a burial on utter guesswork.
Not seeing graphs on what normal sailor lead level would be for those years, or for anyone.
First impressions only.
This is fully in keeping with the book about Scott where the author Huntford described Scott driving Oates away and keeping they others in while he died, and all on prejudice and guesswork.
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Dark Cloud
copyright RL MacLeod
darkcloud@darkendeavors.com
www.darkendeavors.com
www.boulderlout.com |
Edited by - Dark Cloud on December 28 2004 4:34:15 PM
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bhist
Lt. Colonel
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Dark Cloud
Brigadier General
USA
Status: offline |
Posted - December 28 2004 : 6:04:52 PM
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No, I'm far from there. It's a great story, and they make a compelling case. What is needed, though, is proof the hair wasn't tainted from the paint or coal smoke, and an average lead level in British sailors of the time. Or anyone of the time. And none exist.
EVEN SO, it's very hard for me to argue with this amount of anectdotal evidence, especially the scurvy diagnosis for lead poisoning. |
Dark Cloud
copyright RL MacLeod
darkcloud@darkendeavors.com
www.darkendeavors.com
www.boulderlout.com |
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Dark Cloud
Brigadier General
USA
Status: offline |
Posted - December 29 2004 : 10:13:10 AM
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Frozen in Time doesn't seem to have progressed much beyond the PBS special in the mid-80's. Only a couple of the bodies had "lethal" amounts of lead, most had "elevated." There is a chart that attempts to prove that the isotopes in the container lead is the same as that in the bodies, but the language gets oddly vague at this juncture, claiming that this proves the lead came from the same area of Europe. Can't get more specific than that, eh? What area of Europe, while we're on the subject?
Well, like Wales? Like where all the coal came from they burned? They admit Torrington "must have" (a phrase that appears way too often) gotten his very high 'lethal' amount of lead from the coal he undoubtedly inhaled as a stoker. So........doesn't that mean that the coal and the soldered lead came from the same place if no difference is noted or remarked upon? And didn't the crews inhale a lot of that smoke in immobile ships? And when the question arises how come there's no showing of lead from the innumerable other causes all their life, the authors say those isotopes must have been overwhelmed by the intense lead from the heated cans. Cans heated over coal fires.
Then, there are phrases like "contemporary" hair to compare to those from the bodies. But it doesn't say contemporary to when, then or now. If then, where and who they were taken from? Any confusion for the reader is lightened by utter lack of footnotes, endnotes, or any way to trace these statements. That alone is very suspicious in a supposed scientific work.
And then, the weak assed conclusion: lead undoubtedly reduced the general health of the crew but there were many causes to the failure of the mission. And here's another problem: the authors switch the goal of their studies back and forth between the cause of mission failure and the actual, specific deaths. But their own autopsies show the men all had TB and died of pneumonia, which they assume were hastened by lead poisoning. Mission failure was caused by Franklin taking the wrong turn that Amundson found later, assuming the ice would eventually melt.
It's worth recalling that this all became important because it was evident that some cannibalism had occured, although by who and when are necessarily unknown. If Franklin's survivors had gone mad with poison, the ludicrous manhauling of lifeboats with all sorts of crap and the menu entrees could be explained.
I don't think there's any doubt that the lead reduced endurance and health, and that lead poisoning and scurvy have the same symptoms is pretty convincing, but somehow the book is a lot less compelling than it's made out to be. This was the 2004 edition, and there's no indication what's in and what's out from the earlier work.
When I get home I'll dig through and find the notes from that dig in England and see if it's as I recall. |
Dark Cloud
copyright RL MacLeod
darkcloud@darkendeavors.com
www.darkendeavors.com
www.boulderlout.com |
Edited by - Dark Cloud on December 29 2004 10:14:01 AM |
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Anonymous Poster8169
Brigadier General
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Posted - December 29 2004 : 11:05:24 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Dark Cloud
I don't think it's a weak-assed conclusion: I think it's perfectly right (or at least what I think true). Franklin was done in by several things, and among them the health problems caused by lead was in all probability a significant one. How significant, hard to tell. There's virtually zero documentation for everything related to Franklin; just one note found in a cairn, and silver spoons and bones and lifeboats scattered over King William Island.
It's worth recalling that the expedition was already a disaster before they abandoned the ships and dived into cannibalism before falling dead on their faces. 24 men (according to the note in Victory Point) were dead, the most in any Arctic expedition since the Knight expedition of 40 men was totally wiped out in 1720. That testifies to serious health problems, of far greater magnitude than what any other recent expedition had had to face (and Franklin wasn't the only guy to have had to spend a year or two iced in). That lead from Goldner's cans had something to do with this is likely, considering it would have been their main food source, that Goldner's cans were products of something less than the art of craftsmanship, and that the bones and hair samples from Franklin's men all show evidence of high lead poisoning (and what's present in the hair from Beechey Island can't be attributed to anything other than what they were experiencing on board the ships).
I'm not sure it explains the bizarre march to the Great Fish River --- but if I remember right, the authors didn't claim it to, other than to suggest that acute lead poisoning might have messed up some people's reasoning faculties. Which is possible, but outside the knowledge of history. The PBS specials you refer to might have gone further than that and claimed that with the lead discoveries they'd "figured out" the Franklin expedition, but I don't think Beattie and Geiger ever went that far, which may make their book less compelling if that's what you'd been led to expect going in.
I remember being disappointed when I read the same authors' "Deep Silence," about the Knight expedition. I'd been led to believe before reading it that they'd removed a lot of mystery from that very murky disaster, but quite the opposite. Disconcerting to them I'm sure, their investigations actually made Knight's demise more mysterious. Before Beattie & Geiger went to work, we thought we knew pretty much in outline what had happened to Knight. No details, but we had the outline. Both of Knight's ships were wrecked on Marble Island in 1719, and the survivors built a house on shore and survived two winters before succumbing to disease, starvation, or exposure, their graves being dug nearby. Well, when Beattie & Geiger went to investigate, the graves turned out to be Inuit, and they found no trace of Knight's men except for some teeth and a single vertebra scattered on the floor in the house they built. They discovered the ships, but saw no evidence that they had been wrecked. Instead, they appeared to have been moored, the superstructure scavenged for wood and planking, and then somehow sunk by causes unknown. There were indications that Knight's men had spent one winter in the house, but what happened to them after that is now a complete mystery, which is funny, since the mystery didn't seem so complete before.
R. Larsen |
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Anonymous Poster8169
Brigadier General
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Posted - December 29 2004 : 11:41:02 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by bhist
If you bought that at B&N, our paths probably crossed. I was in the store today for about two hours. I wasn't aware that Frozen in Time isn't documented. I would'nt have bought it. Let me know what you think.
"Frozen in Time" is documented, with a bibliography, just no citations, which is not kosher, though I don't know of any instance where the authors (or author; this is really's Geiger's baby) falsified or distorted their sources. To be fair to him, Geiger does seem to go out of his way to indicate in the text where he is taking something from. "Frozen in Time" is the version for the groundlings; Beattie has published a few technical articles in specialist magazines, which I've never read, which is probably where you should go for the "official" dope.
R. Larsen |
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Dark Cloud
Brigadier General
USA
Status: offline |
Posted - December 29 2004 : 1:54:44 PM
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I guess it strikes me as announcing a mystery and then its solution and concluding that cold and sanitation issues contributed to their death. Well, yeah. Isn't TB contagious in close quarters? Pneumonia?
Whether the lead came from the cans (when was that food first distributed aboard the ships when they had fresh stuff as well?)or the coal fires doesn't strike me as a big deal. Since they can't (or didn't) distinguish the coal lead isotopes from the cans (that I found). I guess I'm suspicious they don't distinguish it, and it had to be a bigger source for lead than anything except maybe the food tins.
I have lots of whalers in the family two centuries ago, and it's hard to believe anyone survived those floating cesspits, even before getting the whole fleet frozen in one year by Greenland. |
Dark Cloud
copyright RL MacLeod
darkcloud@darkendeavors.com
www.darkendeavors.com
www.boulderlout.com |
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Frank Spencer
Private
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Posted - February 21 2005 : 4:13:39 PM
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| Get up the yard. |
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Oh, Those Science Guys
