Yesterday's News

Ah, the Toronto Star - that bastion of daily life in the GTA, and my favourite source of very old information trying to be passed off as new and relevatory.

The Star's had some real doozys of "well, THAT's nothing new!" before (a recent full-page headline exposing how strip mining is bad for the environment comes to mind), and Wednesday's paper was no exception. The entertainment section front page features an article about a new documentary called Passages, regarding Sir John Franklin's ill-fated late 19th-century expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Sounds all well and good so far; the story of Franklin's final expedition is a fascinating one, and should make a good documentary subject, no?

I'm sure the film is fine, but that article was, for lack of a better word, ignorant, as columnist Martin Knelman tried to expose the findings of the film as new and a "stunning revelation". The controversy surrounding Franklin's expedition is that, for over a hundred years, Britain maintained that his voyage was successful - there's a monument in Westminister Abbey to that effect - and that he and his crew were murdered and eaten by the Inuit. Passages chronicles the adventure of Hudson's Bay employee John Rae, who eventually did find the Northwest Passage, and early on discovered the truth of Franklin's fate. When he returned to Britain, imperialism was at peak levels and no one would believe this upstart outsider spewing heresy about the noble Sir John and his men going mad and eating each other.

My point is, due to how well-preserved bodies are in the Arctic, the world at large has had proof for a very long time that Franklin's expedition, trapped in ice, died from a combination of lead poisoning (from the cans their food was packed it) and scurvy, and the ones who didn't die quickly from poisoning suffered the other key effect of lead poisoning, being insanity, and started killing each other and eating them in desperate last-ditch attempts at survival. And some, as was unfortunately common with failed expeditions, probably started committing cannibalism before madness set in.

But what really caught my indignant disbelief at Mr. Knelman and his editor trying to pass off the Inuit innocence in the Franklin deaths as stunning and new is the fact that, around the age of 9 or so, I had a Scholastic book that combined a dramatization of the voyage with photos of the exhumation and investigation of the bodies, and clearly explained that they had all died of a combination of scurvy, lead, and starvation. Being a Scholastic one, they left out the cannibalism part, but my point is, I knew 15 years ago as a little girl that the Inuit didn't murder the Franklin expedition, and many other people knew earlier than that. It's not news. It's possible to convey information and write a good article about a past event without trying to be sensational and, dare I say it, false.

And I wish the Star would get off its lazy arse and print some real information for once. Or, at least, print it properly, without the bells and whistles that teeter dangerously across the line of hack journalism. The editor is just as much to blame as the columnist.