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Mysterious black spot in polar explorer's diary offers gruesome clue to his fate

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https://www.livescience.com/greenland-ex...-spot.html

EXCERPTS: . . . His name was Jørgen Brønlund; he was a Greenland-born Inuit and was part of a three-man team on the Denmark Expedition to Greenland's Northeast Coast, conducted from 1906 to 1908 and led by Danish ethnologist Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen. Brønlund died in November 1907 and was the last of the team to perish — and the only one whose body was ever recovered.

He recorded his final thoughts in a diary, and the last page included a heavy black smudge. Researchers recently conducted extensive analysis of the spot, finding that it contained burnt rubber, oils and feces. These traces hint at Brønlund's desperate and unsuccessful attempts to light a life-saving petroleum burner before he succumbed to cold and hunger, scientists wrote in a new study.

[...In addition to rubber chemicals...] the researchers also detected three groups of organic compounds: lipids — such as vegetable oil, animal fat, and fish or whale oil — petroleum and human fecal matter (in his severely weakened and desperate state, Brønlund may have tried burning his own excrement to get the stove to light). "At this time, Brønlund had starved for weeks, was tired beyond his capacity, and he was freezing," the scientists wrote. "It is likely that his hands were shaking when he used the matches from the depot to pre-heat and turn on the stove in the small cave."

Such stoves metabolized alcohol for preheating before they could be lit, and there was none in the depot. Brønlund may have left the mark on his diary page after attempting — and probably failing — to preheat the stove with anything he could find, and the presence of feces in the mark speaks to the dire circumstances and poor conditions during his "last dismal days," the study authors reported... (MORE - details)
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