KABLOONAS

Kabloonas is the way in which the Inuit who live in the north part of Canada call those who haven´t their same ascendency.

The first time i read this word was in the book "Fatal Passage" by Ken McGoogan, when, as the result of the conversations between John Rae and some inuit, and trying to find any evidence of the ill-fated Sir John Franklin Expedition, some of then mentioned that they watched how some kabloonas walked to die in the proximities of the river Great Fish.

I wish to publish this blog to order and share all those anecdotes that I´ve been finding in the arctic literature about arctic expeditions. My interest began more than 15 years ago reading a little book of my brother about north and south pole expeditions. I began reading almost all the bibliography about Antarctic expeditions and the superknown expeditions of Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton, etc. After I was captured by the Nansen, Nobile and Engineer Andree. But the most disturbing thing in that little book, full of pictures, was the two pages dedicated to the last Franklin expedition of the S.XIX, on that moment I thought that given the time on which this and others expeditions happened, few or any additional information could be obtained about it. I couldn´t imagine that after those two pages It would be a huge iceberg full of stories, unresolved misteries, anecdotes, etc. I believe that this iceberg, on the contrary than others, would continue growing instead melting.

POLAR EXPLORERS VOICES

This is a new and haunting project on which I am trying to share all the audio recorders I can find with the voices of some polar explorers. It was a person in the Polar Facebook group called Polar exploration who gave me the idea of compiling all these voices from the past.

Unfortunately, the first device capable of recording voice, the phonograph, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. Later in 1877 Emilie Berlinier invented the most widely known and popular Gramophone. This means that we would never have the chance to listen to the voices of some of the early explorers, though some of them had long lives which stepped in the period of time where recording was possible.

What I have found are mainly short radio talks or interviews released in television but I will keep on searching.

Henry Larsen (thanks to Logan Zachary)

Richard Byrd

Robert Peary

Umberto Nobile