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Anonymous double portrait of Qalaherriaq

Qalaherriaq (c. 1834 – 1856) was an Inughuit hunter from Cape York in northwestern Greenland. Born around 1834 and baptized Erasmus Augustine Kallihirua, he was taken aboard the British barque HMS Assistance in 1850 as an interpreter during the search for Franklin's lost expedition. He guided the ship to Wolstenholme Fjord to investigate rumors of a massacre of Franklin's crew, but found the corpses of local Inughuit and crew from an unrelated British vessel. Poor sea conditions prevented the Assistance from returning to Qalaherriaq's family, and he was instead taken to England and placed in the custody of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He was enrolled in St Augustine's College at Canterbury and studied English and Christianity. In 1855, he was tasked by Edward Feild, Bishop of Newfoundland, to join him on a mission to the Labrador Inuit. Qalaherriaq's health problems, which he had developed during his service as an interpreter, worsened after his arrival in Newfoundland, and he died at St. John's in 1856 around 22 years old. (Full article...)

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On this day

September 22

François Duvalier

1236 – Livonian Crusade: The Livonian Brothers of the Sword were soundly defeated by pagan Samogitian and Semigallian troops at the Battle of Saule.
1789 – The office of United States Postmaster General was formally established.
1957 – François Duvalier (pictured), nicknamed Papa Doc, was elected President of Haiti as a populist before consolidating power and ruling as a dictator for the rest of his life.
2003 – Dolphin, the first emulator for the GameCube that could run commercial video games, was released.
2013 – Insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan, was attacked by two suicide bombers who killed 127 people.

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Florence Merriam Bailey (d. 1948)

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Boeing Crew Flight Test was the first crewed mission of the Boeing Starliner capsule. Launched on 5 June 2024, the mission flew a crew of two NASA astronauts, Barry E. Wilmore and Sunita Williams, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to the International Space Station. The mission was intended to last eight days, ending on 14 June with a landing in the American Southwest. However, the capsule's thrusters malfunctioned as Starliner approached the ISS. After more than two months of investigation, NASA decided it was too risky to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth aboard Starliner. Instead, the Boeing spacecraft returned uncrewed on 7 September 2024, and the astronauts will ride down on the SpaceX Crew-9 spacecraft in February 2025. This photograph shows the Crew Flight Test launch, with capsule Calypso atop an Atlas V rocket.

Photograph credit: NASA / Joel Kowsky

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