Imagining the Arctic: Heroism, Spectacle and Polar Exploration 9781350986770, 9781784536589

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For Commander K.H. Dedman RN OBE (1925 – 92) whose tales first led me to these wild places

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2017 Huw Lewis-Jones The right of Huw Lewis-Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Tauris Historical Geography 9 ISBN: 978 1 78453 658 9 eISBN: 978 1 78672 246 1 ePDF: 978 1 78673 246 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in StoneSerif by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgements

... you will excuse the bad writing for my fingers are very cold and ink has frozen several times – where I shall conclude this sheet God only knows!1

Overwhelmed by the intense cold and seemingly endless darkness of the Arctic winter, it’s no surprise that explorer John Ross found it difficult to write. It was his fourth winter trapped in the ice. Yet Ross and his long-suffering men refused to abandon hope. As the winter snows melted for a brief moment, later in August 1833, they took to their boats in a final bid for freedom and were at last rescued by a ship in Baffin’s Bay. Returning home as a ‘hero’, embraced by the nation, it didn’t take Ross long to pick up his pen again. In the course of researching this book the going got tough a few times but I was fortunate to enjoy the support of friends and family. Offering advice, criticism, and encouragement throughout, they all improved my work immeasurably. Fearing for his life in the Arctic, Ross wasn’t so lucky as to have friends around him. Snug in my armchair, I begin to wonder why I made such a fuss. Naval explorers had many people to thank when they managed to make it home – Admiralty officials, sponsors, suppliers, sweethearts and wives – and they repaid them as best they could. Nelson, his biographers would have us believe, tried to secure a polar bear skin for his father, and generations of Arctic men hoped to follow his example. Some inked newly-discovered features on their charts for their supporters, others delivered rousing speeches, whilst most presented gifts as a way of thanks: walrus tusks, collections of rocks, seal-skin trousers, carefully crafted watercolours, an official narrative bound in white silk, perhaps a free ticket to a popular magic lantern show. Ross

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

named what he thought was a new continent after his patron, the gindistiller Felix Booth, and optimistically chalked up the name of the new King on his map of the Magnetic North Pole. I have no grand gesture. It is impossible for me to repay the kindness of all those who have accompanied the passage of my research. At best I can offer my sincere thanks. This book is as much yours as mine, though of course any faults or omissions are, quite reasonably, entirely my own. I should like to acknowledge, in particular, Anthony Cross, for welcoming me into the Nelson Room at the Warwick Leadlay Gallery in Greenwich; Professor Russell Potter, for sharing his expertise on all aspects of the visual culture of exploration; and Dr Beau Riffenburgh, for his guidance and sound editorial. And yet, the cast list includes many more: Professor Klaus Dodds, Professor John MacKenzie, Professor Pete Capelotti, Professor Simon Keynes, Professor Andrew Lambert, Professor Simon Schaffer, the late Colin White, Dr Robin Glasscock, Dr Sue Colwell, Dr Jim Duncan, Dr Michael Bravo, Dr John Sugden, Richard Westall, Jim Cheyne, Laurence Jacobson, Iain Clark, Scott Ford, Sven Pannell, Frat 14, Tim Naylor and the gentleman of Cabot House and Bruce and Kaz Ginsberg. I have troubled a countless number of librarians, archivists and curators too. In particular, I would like to thank Naomi Boneham and Lucy Martin at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Pauline Hubner at the Royal Geographical Society, Sheila Markham at the Travellers’ Club, Stephen Freeth at the Guildhall Library, Rachel Hassall at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, Rachel Foss at the University of Hull Brynmor Jones Library, Sue Crabtree at the University of Kent Templeman Library and Matthew Sheldon at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth. In recent years, with Seamus Taaffe and Joe O’Farrell to guide me, the warm bar of O’Briens in Athy has become a welcome annual refuge. I also gratefully acknowledge the help of staff in the many other collections I had chance to explore: the Old Library of St John’s College, Cambridge University Library, John Johnson Collection in the Bodleian Library, National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Britain, Natural History Museum, Royal Artillery Museum, Royal Institution, Library of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Museum of London, British Library Newspaper Collections, Zoological Society of London, Grosvenor ix

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Prints, Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts at Trinity College of Music, National Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter, Stranraer Museum, Edinburgh Zoo, Diageo Archives, Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, John Ryland Library at Manchester University, Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, University of Toronto, American Philosophical Society, Museum of America and the Sea, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Boston Public Library, Lamont Library Microform Department, Fine Arts Library at the Fogg Art Museum, Houghton Library at Harvard University and the exquisite Harvard Theatre Collection. Illustrators Philip Reeve and Graeme MacKay very kindly allowed their art to be featured here. I should also like to thank David Stonestreet and the team at I.B.Tauris who have enabled some of my work to finally see the light of day. My postgraduate research was supported with a scholarship from the States of Guernsey Education Council. Extended work across North America – first as Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and later as a wandering scholar in all manner of wonderful libraries – was made possible by funding from various sources: St John’s College, the British Association for Canadian Studies, Cambridge University and the Scott Polar Research Institute. I must also acknowledge the ongoing financial support of my family, particularly my stepfather Dr Alan Boyle. For this, as with so much else, I’m deeply grateful. Early versions of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Nelson and the Bear’ in The Trafalgar Chronicle, the annual yearbook of the 1805 Club, and Polar Record, published by Cambridge University Press. Forms of Chapter 5 featured as ‘Heroism Displayed’ in Polar Record and many of its hagiographic themes were discussed as ‘Displaying Nelson’ in the International Journal of Maritime History. With impresario Horatio Blood, the true delinquent of juvenile drama, I was delighted to restage Captain Ross in all its toy theatre glory and I’ve also been lucky to collaborate with Jeremy Bristow and the BBC Natural History Unit developing much of my PhD thinking into the documentary film Wilderness Explored. Some more than most have long endured my odd fascination with Victorian explorer-heroes. I owe a great deal to my mother who has x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

always offered her unquestioning support. When this work is published she will be the first to get a copy and, I suspect, be one of the few who will actually read it. I should like to thank Daisy Ginsberg for her help all those years ago and for her patience, which could also be described as heroic. Kari Herbert and Nell now bring sunshine to every day, even when the Cornish storms threaten to blow the house into the sea. And lastly, to my grandfather, who opened my eyes to the polar world. A decade on from beginning this work I’ve now travelled across the Arctic in the footsteps of many of these explorers, sailing northwest passages and also exploring the remote coasts of Antarctica. Still challenge and delight is everywhere to be found; and hardship too, if that’s what floats your boat.

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In pleasing dreams the blissful age renew, And call Britannia’s glories back to view.2 Samuel Johnson, 1749 Pause on the footprints of heroic men, Making a garden of the desert wide Where PARRY conquer’d death and FRANKLIN died.3 Charles Dickens, 1857 No schoolboy’s task have ye in view, ‘Tis no child’s play a path to hew Where brave men strove, and fought, and fell, Beneath the Monarch’s icy spell. It needs a man of iron mould, To drive the Ice King from his hold; To fight with nature, rude and rough, Requires a man of sterner stuff.4 Robert Whitby, 1875 Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty’s form Glasses itself in tempests; in all time, Calm or convulsed – in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the Pole, or in the torrid clime Dark-heaving; – boundless, endless, and sublime – The image of Eternity – the throne Of the Invisible.5 George Byron, 1818

1. ‘At her feet the Frozen Ocean, round her head the Auroral Lights. Through cycles, chill and changeless, of six-month days and nights. In her bride-veil, fringed with icicles, and of the snow-drift spun. Sits the White Layde of the Pole, still Waiting to be Won’. Punch, 5 June 1875.

Introduction: The Invisible Throne

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes . . . I try in vain to be persuaded that the Pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight . . . I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.1

On 29 May 1875 the beach at Portsmouth was crowded. It was a public holiday, Queen Victoria’s Birthday, and special trains from London were bringing people south in their thousands. As the dockyard clock struck four Her Majesty’s Ships Alert and Discovery cast off their lines. Bands got up a rousing tune and piers swelled with the rush of people hoping to wave a final farewell. Five thousand soldiers from the town’s garrison paraded through the throng, their jackets a ribbon of scarlet lining the foreshore as they offered their own gesture of support. Paddle steamers and Solent ferries panted alongside the ships to give eager punters a closer view of the explorers, and every ironclad in the harbour fired the royal salute. Such a cheer rang out ‘as Portsmouth had never heard before’, reported The Times, and ‘the multitudes who assembled to witness the sailing of Captain Nares and his brave companions indicate pretty clearly that a true chord has been struck, and that the sympathies of all, from the Queen downwards, go with them’. The crowds ‘sensed that the crews were about to enter upon a

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battle with Nature in her sternest aspects’, another correspondent agreed, ‘and that it was for the honour of the country that this should be so’. Hearts and minds were united in expectant celebration. The North Pole, it was said, was just ‘waiting to be won’.2 These men were the Navy’s best and they carried the hopes of their service northward with a confidence inspired by memories of the past. Yet the British Arctic Expedition was not to be the ‘glorious crusade’ that the crowds on the beach that day imagined. Weakened by scurvy and overwhelmed by severe conditions, the ‘gallant band’ failed to reach their goal; the prize of the Pole remaining invisible behind a seemingly impassable chaos of broken ice. The explorers arrived back in England the following year and though many were disappointed by their early return they were embraced as heroes. ‘Overworked, overtired, borne down by the weight of a dreadful and depressing malady, cold, hungry, they struggled on’, narrated one journal, ‘and individual heroism stepped in to save the honour of the day! There are some defeats that are more glorious than victories; some failures which are grander than the most brilliant success. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was a useless waste of life; yet we doubt if any feat of arms in modern times ever had so fine a moral effect as that piece of heroic stupidity. In like manner, these gallant seamen have failed to reach the Pole; but they have won a proud place in their country’s annals. They have done Englishmen good’.3 Some were less impressed by the very real failure of the voyage, for there was to be no ‘hoisting the Union Jack upon the Pole’: ‘Verily the expedition of 1875 –76 has but little of which to boast. It went out like a rocket, and has come back like the stick’.4

EXPLORING HEROISM

This is a book about the making of heroes. It describes how and why a cult of polar exploration was constructed and developed in the nineteenth century, examining the diverse ways that naval officers were imagined. There are countless stories, numerous expeditions, a few real successes and frequent setbacks. It’s also a story of how the boundaries of the known world were pushed back as blanks were filled 2

INTRODUCTION

on the charts of the north. And, as we shall see, in some ways it all begins with a boy and a bear. This study seeks to make a contribution to what is now a well established and growing literature on the politics and culture of the heroic.5 A fleet of works have offered new light on topics such as Christian hagiography, nationalism and chivalry, and concepts of genius in science and the arts.6 Recent accounts – by a range of scholars with backgrounds in history, sociology, art history, literary and media studies – have explored the evolving reputations, shifting images, and varied uses of a succession of historical figures, from William Wallace to George Washington, Joan of Arc to Mary Queen of Scots, Columbus to General Custer, Shakespeare to Churchill.7 A bewildering array of iconography has been examined, from Renaissance texts, military portraiture, Islamic art, to American cinema.8 Changing concepts of the heroic may be read in the lives of revolutionaries and missionaries, poets and statesmen, Cossacks and cowboys, even footballers and film stars.9 Others have examined the heroic cultures of British Imperialism, Communism, the French Revolution, or have explored the gender dimensions of heroic reputations.10 This book draws upon this literature and hopes to develop some of its insights whilst suggesting new possibilities for the writing of naval and polar history. Though a good deal has been written about the wide-ranging meanings of the term ‘hero’, and the type of men that the public accepted as such, nineteenth-century myths of the sea have attracted only intermittent academic attention.11 There is much to be gained by looking at the lives and reputations of naval heroes and lionised polar explorers. At it simplest, this study will explore changes in the general understanding of the idea of heroism and what type of individuals and actions could be considered heroic. Though the word hero cannot be easily defined, we can trace those characteristics that were regarded as being ‘admirable’ throughout the century. A range of meanings, articulated in languages of patriotism, duty, service, and morality, could satisfy the images of great men that people made for themselves. A hero is any man or woman whose existence is endowed by others, not merely with fame or ‘celebrity’, but with a special allocation of imputed meaning and symbolic significance; raised above others in public esteem whilst also being 3

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the object of some kind of collective emotional investment. The concept of reputation is therefore central to an analysis of the heroic, and reputations are understood here not as ‘the vapour trails of natural glory that the great and the good leave behind them’, but as cultural constructions reflecting the values and ideologies of the societies in which they are produced. What resonates is not merely the life as lived, but the life made sense of, the life imaginatively reconstructed and rendered significant upon a broad canvas of ‘imaginings’.12 Heroes may also be seen as the products of publishing and spectacle, whose images are made and mediated by individuals, by organisations, and by the demands of the market; the heroic image as sites through which a range of imagined communities are capable of expression. I want to consider more closely the value of the heroic image and how it could be put to work, by whom, and why. Sir Charles Brenton might still emphasise the lowly aspect of the word: ‘a mere hero is a despicable creature’, he wrote in 1855, ‘and what many understand by heroism is but a refined intoxication’.13 Yet for so many others the word hero was being used in an overwhelmingly positive sense, describing a type of ‘English virtue’, Charles Kingsley would suggest, ‘at once manful and Godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing’.14 I want to understand the cultural machinery that sustained this layered heroic ideal and explore the aesthetic and ideological proclivities that helped a narrative of duty to be imprinted in impressionable minds. This ethos of service was celebrated above all in naval heroes. Before expanding more fully on my objectives, it may be easier to say what this book is not. This is neither a definitive history of nineteenth-century polar exploration, a biographical account of major explorers, nor an uncritical hagiography. Rather, it is to the changing nature of polar imaginations that I’ve directed my efforts. This is not a traditional art history or a literary study, although neglected texts and a range of rediscovered iconographies are examined throughout, as I attempt to better understand exploration’s culture. I don’t present a seamless sequence of celebrated voyages, uninterrupted within a story of progress and endeavour, nor would I want to write this type of history. Chronologically encyclopaedic accounts of expeditions are undoubtedly useful but they are

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INTRODUCTION

unsatisfying. They present narrative histories akin to sailing a coastline, ticking or noting the headlands but not taking the time to go into the bays, let alone make much progress ashore. Two major limitations have been made in order to produce a manageable result. In the first place, appealing though it would have been to examine the complicated hagiographies of eighteenthcentury naval men like James Cook, or early twentieth-century polar officers such as Robert Falcon Scott, my story is largely devoted to the nineteenth century. Secondly, my research was focussed on the reception and popular meaning of explorers in the British Isles. As the range of audiences for exploration, even within a single town, is so obviously diverse it seemed unnecessary at this stage to expand my explorations too far into Europe, North America, or even further afield. Support for polar voyages fluctuated in the space of weeks, let alone over the course of a few years. For some it became an obsession; for many others it was all just humbug. So, it is rewarding then to attempt to trace the geography of public support for explorers and their exploits. A balanced profile reflective of the range of opinions has yet to be offered and so one can easily justify the desire to stay, for now, firmly at home. This book will engage dynamic naval hagiographies and a range of representations. Within six chapters I have chosen to examine nautical biography and children’s literature, the making of a polar celebrity, an early history of Arctic ballooning, an imperial naval exhibition, and the recent discovery of a shipwreck. At first sight this is an unusual mix, however each chapter shares a common theme: to recapture the ways that explorers were imagined and ask why. In each part I have chosen to examine aspects of the culture of polar exploration that have never before been considered. This approach essays to raise questions, to open up new areas of enquiry, to remind historians of the intriguing stories that exist in histories of exploration, and, not least, the useful materials that can still be discovered in museums and archives if you’re willing to work hard to get to them. Instead of leaving explorers and their legacies to popular biography and conventional narrative accounts, this study will demonstrate the interdisciplinary merits of asking questions about the culture of exploration, its changing dynamic, and its continuing relevance.

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ATTRACTIVE PERFORMANCES

A comet races across the sky, its tail a mosaic of those people and events, noteworthy and trivial, that attract the attentions of the ‘great British public’. The year is 1853. Queen Victoria and her consort Albert preside over a potpourri of contemporary scandals and curiosities, all rendered by George Cruikshank at his Lilliputian best. Heroes of the Peace Conference and Chinese battles share the public gaze with feasts and festivals, politics and pantomime. The glittering roofs of great exhibitions rise above the fog of war, whilst an eager public crowds to the Derby Day, to London spectacles, or the ‘glorious’ naval review at Portsmouth. And, at a distance removed, trailing in the wake of this blaze of show business, far off in the top corner of the image, Captain Robert McClure enacts the discovery of ‘the long-looked-for, longdisputed North West Passage’.15 It is tempting to declare polar exploration the bright sensation which storms across the page of the nineteenth century, as many histories have done, over-exaggerating its importance. A concentrated study of exploration’s imaginative reach inevitably tends to make it loom too large. So, its useful to remember from the outset that polar exploration was, for the most part, of marginal importance to the national attention, just one of many appealing pageants in the year’s cycle of spectacle and performance. Another tendency of hagiographic

2. ‘Passing Events; or, The Tail of the Comet of 1853’, etched and designed by George Cruikshank.

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INTRODUCTION

polar histories has been to think of exploration as something that was universally popular, which of course it wasn’t. Though polar explorers were generally received with kind feelings, particularly if they managed to bring their crews safely home, hearty congratulations were tempered at almost every moment with mixed reviews in the press; both reasonable criticism and, at times, bitter condemnation. Changing public ideas of the value of exploration require further consideration. Men like Sir John Barrow and Sir Clements Markham, among others who we meet in this book, went to great lengths to convince the British people of the merits of polar exploration as an appropriate peacetime project. Had exploration been universally popular during the century then its prime advocates would not have had to lobby so vigorously on its behalf. A variety of individuals and institutions promoted invented traditions of polar heroics that could chime with public sympathies. They constructed imaginary goals – a ‘Northwest Passage’, a ‘Farthest North’, to ‘conquer the Pole’ – that could capture attentions, motivate servicemen, persuade governments to finance their ambitious proposals, maybe even to sell their products or advertise the latest polar show. Narratives shaped public understanding, narratives circumscribed the actions of explorers at home and in the field, and narratives informed the responses of exploration’s considerable audience. Exploration was theatre and its representation a series of performances. Exploration results, and the idea of whether an expedition was successful or not, depended as much upon what happened as what was represented, or what was imagined to have happened.16 Perception was as important as fact. Polar exploration and discovery are inherently ‘performative’; images of achievement and success are often created out of invisible accomplishments, and depend almost entirely upon the way they are re-enacted back at home.17 To reach the North Pole is, perhaps, the ultimate gesture of performance, a ‘conquest’ in the absence of any obvious features, a total whiteness, the remarkable ambition to replace a space on the chart with a few lines and yet another blankness. Within a barrage of narratives – of progress, patriotism, science, and discovery – the image of exploration in the nineteenth century was freighted with multiple and contested meanings, and sustained by a rapidly expanding visual culture. In theatres, in art, in verse and song, the achievements of explorers were performed before the public gaze, 7

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3. John Franklin recalled as ‘polar hero’ in the Pictorial Chronicles of the Mighty Deep, published by Warne, 1880.

circulated, promoted, justified, debated, scrutinised, celebrated, and manipulated, whilst explorers themselves became, willingly or otherwise, the subjects of significant attention, often idolised and admired, sometimes ridiculed, even vilified. Visions of exploration could be packaged into positive and potent iconographies: in official narratives, in the display of artefacts and relics, polar spectacles and panoramas, or in grandiloquent oils on canvas. 8

INTRODUCTION

As Chapter 1 demonstrates, the Arctic became a new theatre of war in which the Navy could refashion a role for itself. Voyages were calculated to renew the image of the Admiralty, an opportunity for restoring naval prestige in the eyes of a weary nation. Sustained by hagiography and sailing with a stiff wind of maritime idealism, polar exploration became, to borrow a modern term, an expedient ‘PR exercise’ for a service looking to maintain its post-war public profile. Some regarded exploration as a campaign that approached military combat in the virtues it demanded of its participants, while most applauded Arctic service as a substitute for the experience of combat at sea. Here was a form of ‘colonial warfare’ that appeared to be about heroic action, which could afford the luxury of chivalric codes, in theory if not in practice, and which lent itself to art and literature. Managed and manipulated in this way, Arctic campaigns fitted perfectly a number of cultural and literary traditions of the period: the adventure ideal testing bravery and character, the enthusiasm for knightly virtues, heightened moral absolutism, and a fascination with individual action in the service of the state. Four ships left British waters in 1818 with the combined prestige of the service and the nation resting on their shoulders. As the century progressed naval explorers met the challenges and dangers of the Arctic wilderness in the name of Queen and Country, and became living (and dying) symbols of national and heroic idealism. By the end of the century, in a speech to mark the half-centenary of Sir John Franklin’s fateful expedition, the naval explorer Sir Leopold McClintock would declare: In laying down their lives at the call of duty our countrymen bequeathed to us a rich gift – another of those noble examples not yet rare in our history, and of which we are all so justly proud, one more beacon light to guide our sons to deeds of heroism in the future. These examples of unflinching courage, devotion to duty, and endurance of hardships are as life-blood to naval enterprise.18

In rhetorical flourishes such as this, Arctic exploits assumed the dimensions of an allegory of good versus evil, a testing ground for British hardihood that could provide uplifting examples. But this florid language of heroism was not merely a tool for the orator, the lecturing 9

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4. ‘The Arctic Regions, showing the North-West Passage of Captain McClure and other Arctic Voyagers’, compiled by Hugh Johnson, 1865.

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INTRODUCTION

explorer, or city showman, but was a widely cherished nineteenthcentury ideal, genuinely supported across all levels of society. As Chapter 1 shows, in the light of immediate naval requirements, the ways in which exploration was spoken about, represented and reinterpreted is revealing. Moving away from a historiographical focus on exploration as just a field-based pursuit, we can make new discoveries. It becomes clear that polar voyaging was a complex cultural activity and it is only by engaging the relationships between actors, institutions, and a range of audiences that exploration can be fully understood.

A HAGIOGRAPHY OF ACTION

The earth is a stage and though it may be an advantage, even to the right comprehension of the play, to know its exact configuration, it is always the drama of human endeavour that will be the thing, with a ruling passion expressed by outward action marching perhaps blindly to success or failure, which themselves are often undistinguishable from each other at first.19

In recent years historians have paid attention to the intellectual contexts in which projects of exploration were conducted, emphasising in particular the relationships between expeditions and imperial ambitions.20 In this new historiography an equally taxing question has been how to deal with explorers themselves. Recent work on geographical traditions has remedied this to a great degree, though the problem has shifted to the placing of explorers back into a revised history of empire.21 It has also been difficult to position the field itself as a location of culture, a space that will be thought of here as both a material and an imaginative landscape. Exploration may be understood as a set of cultural practices which involve the ‘mobilization of people and resources especially equipment, publicity and authority’ – an idea best expressed as cultures of exploration – which enables us to situate the travel and narratives of individual explorers within a wider context. Geographical exploration did not merely overcome distance, as Felix Driver has demonstrated so ably; it helped create a range of ‘imaginative geographies’.22 Joseph Conrad, we remember, once 11

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described explorers as ‘conquerors of truth’, not because they exposed the inner secrets of distant regions, but rather because they established particular ways of reading unknown landscapes.23 Some scholars have focussed more explicitly on narrative as a form of field practice itself and as a vital element of the traveller’s weaponry. Narrative, defined as a ‘technology of travel’, can embody storytelling to orientate a traveller, to justify an individual’s actions, to create achievements and embellish discoveries, or to give credence to a scientific discipline.24 It is equally useful to appreciate the role of narrative in creating the image of the heroic explorer, and the role of narrative as a sequence of strategic practices aimed at legitimising exploration itself. We have the opportunity now to bring polar explorers within an academic gaze that is examining the reception of geographical knowledge in context, and to do so in ways attentive to textual and visual culture, narrative and depiction. We realise the situated nature of knowledge.25 To cite McNeil, now is a good time to explore ‘the autonomous generation of meanings . . . in a variety of sites’.26 Whilst developments in Pacific and African exploration historiography have opened up rewarding new areas of academic research, it is only relatively recently that the polar regions have been approached with a new scrutiny.27 Though traditional histories of the Arctic have tended to be dominated by general accounts, narrowly focussed biographies or bare chronologies, new aspects of Arctic history are being recovered. Cawood’s early studies of the Victorian ‘Magnetic Crusade’ for example, placed Arctic exploration ‘squarely within the compass of international networks of Humboldtian science’.28 Levere’s Science and the Canadian Arctic demonstrated the range and quantity of nineteenth-century polar science conducted under the banner of British exploration.29 Some have looked at the aesthetic contexts of Arctic exploration, describing ways that the sublime polar space could be a source of both exultation and terror, and improving our understanding of contemporary imaginations considerably.30 The search for an elusive ‘Northwest Passage’, and for the missing Franklin expedition, became icon-forming tests of the prowess of English virtue in a place of monstrous icebergs and inhuman coldness. Naval heroism, discovery and progress, the superiority of western technologies, were all narratives predicated on a hostile and empty Arctic periphery. For most audiences Arctic exploration was, above all, a human drama. 12

INTRODUCTION

5. ‘Return of the Arctic Expedition’, The Pictorial World, 4 November 1876.

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6. Advertising handbill for Rignold’s ‘Panorama of the Arctic Regions’, 1883.

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INTRODUCTION

‘Explorations’, wrote Carl Sauer, ‘have been the dramatic reconnaissances of geography’, a natural theatre in which the actions of individuals predominate. The Arctic offered an appealing blank stage, a distant space of adventure for reflecting and redefining one’s sense of self.31 Some scholars have considered how polar exploration provided a stage for national fantasy – in penetrating studies of polar myth in the former Soviet Union, and within Nazi propaganda – though, remarkably, British Arctic exploration has received only limited academic attention.32 Fewer still have attempted to understand the machinery of mythmaking that made heroes of its naval officers. The experience of explorers in the Arctic, what they did and how they acted, were subject to a heterogeneous mix of pressures and socio-political mores: nationalist designs, the ideals of heroic personae, the demands of science, the needs of their own individual career advancement, and military and governmental requirements. There would be a delicate bargain between all of these imperatives and expectations. Polar endeavour existed as a complex cultural construction within the public domain, represented in various forms, re-enacted before a range of audiences, and remembered in changing, and often surprising, ways. Reception theory has thus far been chiefly concerned with textual meaning and with the history of political ideas, but we can look to the history of exploration and to its enduring iconographies to offer new avenues of research across disciplines.33 Understanding how explorers have been thought about and publicly commemorated over time and space demands the relinquishing of essentialist claims to the nature of geographical knowledge; shifting from an excessive focus on official texts and travel narratives to popular engagements with exploration, and with explorers themselves. In revisiting the lives, and afterlives, of some nineteenth-century explorer-heroes we can consider a range of new sources. This is a wide realm of representation that complements and enriches what we know about geography’s diverse histories.

REALMS OF REPRESENTATION

With this challenge set, Chapter 2 examines the imaginative legacy of the most famous naval hero of all, Admiral Lord Nelson. A necessary 15

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stage in the assessment of any historical figure is the identification of the legendary aspects that shape their reputation, and recent biographers have begun the job of attempting to differentiate the man from the myth. The tale of the young Nelson engaging a huge polar bear on an ice floe off Spitsbergen in 1773 has been met with varying degrees of delight and dismissal through the years, yet examining its evolution can improve our understanding of the way Nelson has been remembered. This chapter engages the machinery of naval mythmaking to look at the variety of texts and iconographies that sustained the image of the hero in the public eye. This approach also enables us to track changing enthusiasms for the Arctic in the nineteenth century and to make an entry into the visual and written culture of exploration. In a broader sense, examining the literary and visual manifestations of Nelson’s encounter with the bear is a useful historiographical exercise into the genesis of heroic myth. At a simple, denotative level we have an image of a midshipman engaging a bear. At a connotative level the image carries associations with young Nelson’s ‘youthful intrepidity’, and the hostile conditions of the Arctic more generally. At a mythic level there are multiple meanings, allegorical, imaginative and ideological: it is a metaphor of man conquering nature; a vision laden with the historical connections of Britain, her Navy and the polar regions; a formative experience in the making of a maritime hero. This chapter attempts to explain the deep-rooted British attraction to the spirit of exploration and the ways that this interest brings forward multiple images. In providing an insight in the iconography of Nelson, my analysis attempts to understand the symbols associated with the encounter episode, and to learn more about the aesthetic and imaginative conditions that sustained these images. Examining just one small part of the Nelson mythology enables us to consider the commemorative trajectory of the hero, to follow the art of biography, and to enjoy a canvas of appealing iconographies. It is clear that much of heroic imagining rests upon falsehood and part truths, a web of idealised narratives and romanticisms. Work by historians such as Lynn Hunt and James Epstein, influenced by the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and others, has led to an emphasis on the importance of ‘symbolic practice’ – flags, processions, rituals, and potent images – in the negotiation of political and social meaning.34 This kind of approach has redefined our perceptions of 16

INTRODUCTION

what realms of representation constitute, extending beyond written and verbal discourse to the ‘languages’ of costume, gesture, and the performative act. If there is a problem in this kind of cultural history, it lies in a tendency to overcompensate for previous neglect of these languages by underestimating the significance of the written discourses in which they are embedded. We only have access to such symbolic practices through the mediation of a text, whether in the form of an official narrative, newspaper accounts, or works of imaginative literature. My analysis assumes the impossibility of ever being able to retrieve what ‘really’ happened in a particular event. Like a game of Chinese whispers, truths are distorted away from the field as they are retold and refashioned. What we can be sure of is that some texts are more privileged than others, and it is certainly useful therefore to try to understand how and why particular types of representation dominate. We can also try to translate the cultural language of exploration, notably the rhetoric and iconography of discovery. For acts of exploration, it soon becomes clear that ‘truth’ existed, in so much, in its ability to be represented and reenacted in appealing forms that could capture public interest, and in languages that could satisfy diverse audiences. Each of my chapters examines the various ways that Arctic news was presented at different moments in the century, considering what sort of information people might have had access to, informing the judgements they made about exploration’s ongoing value and future success. That there were mixed opinions suggests Barrow’s need for a totalising rhetoric of national and naval achievement. In the face of ambivalence, and sometimes a real hostility to continuing with the polar project, his energy in constantly creating and promoting a dominant narrative is impressive. Nelson’s polar engagement provided an iconography that was circulated, reused, and long cherished, yet as the century progressed there would be many new images of the Navy amongst the ice – whether Parry’s crews over-wintering, the imagined memory of Franklin’s noble death, or the ‘ennobling toil’ of men hauling sledges to a new ‘Farthest North’. Some images of the Navy, despite failure, could be source for great celebration: at other moments the naval explorer could equally be exposed to criticism, even sharp satire. I chose Nelson, the most conspicuous naval hero whose image as an explorer was manipulated after his death, because this story had never 17

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been analysed. In Chapter 3 I will look at another naval figure imagined as a hero, a man who has been the subject of a good deal of popular attention yet, thus far, no academic scrutiny.

POLAR CELEBRITY

Still attending to visual culture and popular literature, the next stage of this study considers a succession of heroic images drawn from a focussed period: the years 1833 – 5. John Barrow was clearly responsible for cultivating an enduring myth of the naval explorer-hero, yet extending the story beyond him we see that there were many individuals that played their part in inventing appealing histories and shaping the public imagining. And sometimes, much to Barrow’s annoyance, an explorer made his own stage and went off script. In a move that foreshadowed other explorers much later in the century, John Ross took a remarkably active role in promoting his own exploits. As a performative act it can be said there was no absolute truth, merely accounts borne back as baggage, and explorers could shape their own truths.35 Escaping from the Arctic in 1833 after an absence of four years, Ross was widely celebrated in Britain and quickly became one of the most well-known figures of the day. Having courted controversy throughout his career, his providential return to London was in many ways a passage of redemption and the public responded eagerly to news of his successes. He orchestrated his homecoming by energetically constructing, and defending, his image as an explorer. He commissioned heroic portraits to be sold as engraved souvenirs, he arranged exhibitions of his equipment and polar artefacts, he provided his own watercolours and sketches for public display, and in other ways oversaw a fixed-circle panorama in Leicester Square, provincial theatrical performances, a touring show of dioramic paintings, and a massive outdoor entertainment with papier-maˆche´ icebergs seventy feet tall. His impact on the visual culture of Arctic representations was considerable and influenced many later productions. Tracking the ups and downs of Ross’s contemporary reputation, Chapter 3 springs again from an extensive study of primary and secondary materials: original manuscripts and correspondence, 18

INTRODUCTION

newspapers and periodical reviews, theatre playbills, illustrated souvenirs and pamphlets, and a selection of adult and juvenile literature. Scrutinising these sources also helps us to think more about the nature of celebrity in the 1830s, and the central role of theatre and spectacle in this process, redrawing a profile of popular opinions surrounding exploration itself. Sensitive to the production and consumption of knowledge, this kind of contextual approach can bring exploration scholarship far beyond the conventional narrative history. From the columns of leading editorials in metropolitan newspapers, through a range of popular journals, among debates in the House of Commons, to picking up the tunes of the bawdy songs of quayside drinking dens, we can follow a variety of contrasting accounts. By reclaiming a range of contemporary voices the history of exploration comes alive.

NEWFANGLED TECHNOLOGY

If Chapter 3 is essentially all about a homecoming, then Chapter 4 has the aim of learning more about the intense period of lobbying that foreshadowed a new departure. We can consider an expedition that never managed to win public or governmental support and ask why this was the case? Gaining an insight into the culture of technological change, we discover the difficult domestic terrain in which polar explorers had to promote themselves, an infrastructure of exclusion that disabled individuals from advancing their polar ambitions. Turning our attention away from Ross, we recover the polar career of another naval officer gripped by the appeal of exploration. Commander John P. Cheyne is a forgotten actor in the history of nineteenth-century polar voyages yet, like Ross, for a short moment he became a renowned public figure. Until this work there has been no biographical treatment and no image had been republished. You can see Cheyne for the first time here. A veteran of three expeditions in search of the missing Franklin party, his retirement was unusual to say the least. He first announced his grand plans to discover the North Pole by balloon late in 1876, after the disappointing return of the Nares expedition, and embarked on a transatlantic lecture tour in an effort to raise funds. It was a novel proposal that captured public 19

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imaginations but also drew criticism and ridicule. Though Cheyne was for many years a bright personality in the field of exploration, both aeronautical pioneer and itinerant showman, he was increasingly maligned as a charlatan and lunatic and his innovative visions for polar flight were abandoned. Writing a chapter on an expedition that never happened may seem an odd way to think about exploration, but it can be revealing. As I’ve already suggested, a history of polar endeavour can be written just as profitably about the ways expeditions were imagined at home, as it can by writing an account of action in the field. We are able to get a sense of the currents of public feeling about the value of exploration; we can listen to debates over new techniques of polar travel; and we can witness the changing image of the explorer. Appetites for news of the latest Arctic discoveries were satisfied by a vibrant public culture of performance, a swirl of exhibitions, spectacles and panorama, and we see much of this in the present world of adventure too. Though he failed to fly to the Pole, Cheyne was a pioneer of sorts, as the first polar explorer to become a professional lecturer.

SPECTACLES AND SHOWMEN

Despite the obvious popularity of the polar shows, not to mention their national coverage, very little is known about the new breed of itinerant lecturers. So, I attempt to follow Cheyne on his travels – offering the first geography of polar lecturing – which is a difficult task as you have to trawl an almost limitless array of local newspapers, playbills, and print ephemera. This chapter should demonstrate though that with a little patience we might achieve a comparable depth of analysis for other explorers, and in the process begin to understand far more about the many ways that audiences came to see the Arctic regions. As the returning-hero, Ross’s principal stage was the panorama and a lavish outdoor spectacle. As the aspirant-hero, Cheyne became the master of the magic lantern and public lecture, in hoping to persuade the nation to join his leap of faith and back a pioneering balloon attempt. Modern adventurers continue to resurrect the myths of the past and they utilise all manner of media to advance their reputations in the hope of 20

INTRODUCTION

securing funding, public recognition, or coverage for their expeditions – whether in photography, film, exhibition displays, online blogs, or in extravagant publicity stunts. Paying equal attention to the visual culture of polar expeditions before, during, and after, helps us to better contextualise exploration and its hand on the public imagination. Extending this analysis of the Victorian business of exploration, in Chapter 5 we make a visit to the century’s most significant polar show. Overlooked by historians, the Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891 offers many entry points to this discussion of exploration’s culture. We can think more about the machinery of naval mythmaking and reconsider the ideology of polar exploration in the context of political debate surrounding naval reforms. Again, this chapter draws upon an extensive study of diverse primary source materials and highlights the continuing imaginative potential of the Arctic as a resource for imperial visions. In particular, I examine the role of the RNE in displaying the ‘heroic martyrdom’ of John Franklin and shaping his posthumous reputation, a tentative foray into a fascinating field; an exercise in the ideology of reputation and, at least by implication, the relationships between the creation of reputation and the writing of history. Reconsidering the largest polar exhibition ever mounted we can recover an unparalleled material record of the reinvented cult of exploration. The chief organiser of this Arctic spectacle, Clements Markham, hoped that displaying the polar heroes of the past would bolster his ambitions for future exploration.36 It is intriguing to look more closely at Markham’s role as a polar lobbyist in this period. It was a ‘Heroic Age’ captured in texts and images that sustained a renaissance of maritime romanticism and polar imagining, and which swept Captain Scott to the edges of the map at the beginning of a new century. Today the Arctic remains a region of challenge and a focus of heart’s desire: a contested space where individuals and nations imprint their fantasies. In cities far to the south narratives are still being scripted about this remarkable place and Chapter 6 will reflect on this by considering some modern incarnations of Arctic activity. Our new sources are photocalls and press releases, online blogs and news feeds, old ships and yet more expeditions; it’s a time of celebrated discoveries and renewed dreams. No longer Nelson and his bear, of course, but the curious power of imaginative geography continues.

21

7. ‘Markham Reaches the Highest Latitude’, in Prescott Holmes, The Story of Exploration and Adventure in the Frozen Seas, published by Altemus, 1896.

1

On Naval Heroes

To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be, at any time, but more especially in time of profound peace, more honourably or more usefully employed than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver and Flinders, and others of our countrymen?1

In 1818 the Arctic geography of North America, the existence of a navigable northwest passage, even the insularity of Greenland were problems yet resolved, blanks on the polar map. In John Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions the coast of northern Siberia winds away for thousands of miles. In comparison there is nothing of the northern coastline of Canada save two widely separate points: points set down by Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie where each had explored a river to its junction with the polar sea.2 The incomplete map of the Arctic region cried out for refinement and completion, and these points beckoned out of the encompassing emptiness, inspiring imaginations, summoning men to further exploration. Over the course of the century in an unprecedented spate of treks, expeditions, disasters and triumphs, the secrets of this coastline would be unravelled, a passage in all its tortuous complexity revealed. The North Pole would remain hidden beyond ramparts of ice for the whole century, an elusive prize waiting to be won. As an introduction to polar and naval hagiography, and to the context of naval reform, this chapter examines the representation of explorers and naval officers in literature and art to consider multiple, and varying, definitions of heroism throughout the nineteenth century. The scientific challenge of the Arctic mostly came second to the

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

8. ‘A Tribute to the Memory of the late Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson’, commemorative print after John Hopkins, 1 January 1806. History records his deeds, Fame crowns him with laurels, while Britannia mourns her loss.

romantic and imaginative potential of the voyages. This chapter also develops the new historiography of the heroic reputation, evaluating the ways that personalities have been constructed and embellished, both during and after their lifetimes. Nelson clearly looms large in this pantheon of service. 24

ON NAVAL HEROES

NAVY AND NATION

The arrival of peace brought massive disarmament, social unrest, and severe economic retrenchment to a war-weary nation. Whereas exploration as an activity has been traditionally translated as an expression of imperialist power, Arctic voyages in the immediate years after Waterloo took place at a time of fiscal restriction and national unease. At the height of the Napoleonic Wars in 1809 the British Navy was the most powerful in history and had swelled to proportions that would not be equalled for a century: 773 ships, 4,444 officers and some 140,000 sailors. By 1817 the figure had fallen to thirteen ships of the line and some 23,000 seamen. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, forty years later, the manpower was a meagre 45,000, and even in 1900 it had only risen to 112,000.3 Whilst regular sailors were discharged relatively easily, officers were career men; they had political clout and they could not be dismissed so freely. In fact their numbers increased until the Navy, in 1818, had one officer for every four men. But ninety percent of these officers had nothing to do; of 1,151 officers on the lists in 1846 only 172 were in full employment. Exploration and survey can be regarded as a useful employment for a peacetime navy, a suitable outlet for the skills of trained officers. Taking the lead in renewing attentions to polar exploration, during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century no fewer than 190 Admiralty ships were employed on missions of discovery. Before John Franklin’s last expedition in 1845 the Admiralty had been responsible for ten expeditions to ‘battle’ to find a northwest passage or to ‘lay siege’ to the North Pole.4 In an influential essay published anonymously in The Quarterly Review in 1817, John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, spelt out his convictions for Arctic discovery. He warned that the Russians were ‘strongly impressed with the idea of an open passage around America’, declaring that ‘it would be mortifying if a naval power but of yesterday could complete a discovery in the nineteenth century, which was so happily commenced by Englishmen in the sixteenth’.5 Barrow grew impatient with those who thought the exploration of the Arctic to be a useless project, and for the whole of his life he remained convinced of the broad benefits of discovery voyages.6 But this is perhaps not enough to explain how the Admiralty was able to 25

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9. The cartographic temptation of the unknown, the alluringly empty chart from John Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, 1818.

mobilise government and popular support for the ventures. Barrow submitted expedition proposals as ‘worthy of research . . . no less interesting to humanity than to the advancement of science and the probable extension of commerce . . . and the facility it offers of correcting the very defective geography of the Arctic regions in our western hemisphere’.7 With an unrivalled passion, Barrow envisaged the Navy as an untapped resource for the advance of geography and hydrography. He identified more abstract scientific problems that might be resolved with valuable information gleaned from high latitudes. That the aims 26

ON NAVAL HEROES

of science and empire were complementary was recognised quickly by Barrow and under his direction the Admiralty succeeded in forming an alliance with the Royal Society. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century ‘science’ and the Navy were unhappy bedfellows – institutionally and practically disparate – yet Barrow was able to bring the two together, offering a variety of justifications for exploration that would have appealed and resonated with different interest groups, whilst the alliance itself was consecrated by reforms to the Board of Longitude. The Royal Society and the Admiralty would operate together under the banner of a ‘disinterested’ science, whilst at the same time the idea of exploration could also meet national and naval prestige concerns. Through the acceptance of this rationale, Barrow’s Arctic exploration programme became a matter of national imperative and moral obligation. ‘If left to be performed by some other power’, he announced many times, ‘England by her neglect of it after having opened the East and West doors should be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold’. The contradictions inherent in his vision of progress and discovery were sustained by social hierarchies and controlled by the Navy with the support of the Geographical Society of London, the Royal Society, the King and Parliament. In a career devoted to lobbying and promoting exploration, Barrow cultivated the public image of explorers, endowing exploration with value, to counter the great many critics who questioned the usefulness of these voyages. Barrow’s historiography of exploration, a personally constructed Arctic myth, predominated throughout the century. Evaluating the merits of polar voyages by 1845, unsurprisingly, Barrow remained committed to their benefits. Beyond the long list of scientific justifications, exploration’s fundamental value lay in its instructive potential. He summarised his life’s labours as a polar publicist: a career devoted to ‘the instruction of a class of readers in the record of achievements of their countrymen’, and to ‘popularise the fame of gallant and enduring men’.8 Moral achievement, perilous danger, and individual action were key components of this vision. Deliberately cultivating a myth of piety, fortitude, and duty, Barrow invented a tradition of national enterprise that could be robust even through failure.9 Barrow’s efforts drew praise from Francis Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, who saw in exploration the potential to 27

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

vivify the public’s impression of their Navy: ‘a more enviable position on the record of human achievement we can hardly conceive than that which will be enjoyed by the leaders of these various expeditions by sea and land . . . adorning our history with exhibitions of stern resolution coupled with the purest humanity’.10 Explorers took the stage as ‘heroes in a long and varied Saga of northern adventure’, prime examples raised for emulation for those within the service and those who could enjoy reading about their deeds, ‘for nothing is more remarkable than that wonderful pertinacity in enterprise which maritime pursuits have the power to generate’. His narrative imagining of naval engagement was a romanticised ideal, yet it was one that could be of benefit to everyone concerned, particularly so for the Navy. The post-war naval ‘crisis’ was not only one of size, but also one of identity.

A CENTURY OF CHANGE

Interest in Arctic exploration may be justified in the context of Admiralty weakness. After the cessation of war with France, domestic interests soon marginalised the Navy, which proved painfully slow to adjust to a different, increasingly commercial, world and reassess its relevance to a post-war society that had fewer pressing martial preoccupations.11 For the Navy, as with the nation, it was an age of reform and technological revolution. In this context of change it is no surprise that heroic images, a construction of an imagined chivalrous past, found a receptive audience. Projected in an appealing light, polar exploration was an expedient national advertisement for the Navy, for its ongoing vitality and the spirit of its seamen, and the Admiralty seized its potential to generate positive publicity. In the absence of any major crisis abroad the Navy was highly vulnerable to spending cutbacks and demands for retrenchment were insistent: more than twenty-five percent of all reports about the Navy appearing in The Times between 1815 – 25 related to calls for greater economy in the service to relieve the huge burden of national tax. Scores of ships were ‘laid up in ordinary’ and hundreds of officers sought active employment. As the imminent reduction in manpower 28

ON NAVAL HEROES

threatened capability and its, up till now, die-cast reputation, the image of the explorer was press-ganged into service. This period was a time of profound changes in the nation’s Navy: witnessed in new uniforms, a ‘continuous service scheme’ which dispensed with impressments, the increased respectability of life at sea and the movement to humanise punishments, the restriction of grog, and, most important, far-reaching reforms of the Admiralty itself. But the naval changes that attracted most speculation and ridicule in the press, and in the increasingly popular journal Punch for example, were those of technology. However nostalgic the image of a naval supremacy secured ‘by glorious sail’ might seem – with the image of Nelson central to this imaginative makeup – it remained a key component of the service’s collective consciousness during the long Victorian period despite the fact that ‘Nelson’s Navy’ was soon but a distant memory.

10. Satirising naval reform: ‘Britannia and the Admiralty’, Punch, 15 December 1849.

29

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Change was heralded by the decline of the wooden ship-of-theline, the advent of the ironclad, and the highly contested adoption of new methods of steam propulsion. The main lines along which the modern battleship evolved are now easily distinguishable: from sail to steam; from wood to iron; from guns mounted broadside to guns mounted in turrets. Yet it was not, of course, an effortless process and the public were frequently confused by the costs and the merits of this ‘progress’. And, unsurprisingly, all of these developments were chronicled and commented on in the pages of the metropolitan newspapers, journals like Punch and the rapidly expanding illustrated press. Whilst there is no space here to expand more fully on the introduction of steam propulsion into the Victorian Fleet, suffice it to say, it was a trial of protracted contests and negotiations, technical difficulties, and, not least, considerable expense.12 Though the last battle between sailing ships was fought at Navarino in 1827, the last line-of-battle ship under sail was Sanspareil, laid down in 1851. The first to be designed as a steamship, instead of just having auxiliary engines installed, was Agamemnon of 1852. As late as 1847, John Barrow was ridiculing the idea ‘of a fleet of iron steam vessels, altogether useless, it would seem, as ships of war’.13 The first five iron frigates built in 1845 were found to be totally inadequate. Waves of concern about the combat readiness of the British Fleet swept Westminster. Newspapers and journals ran articles on parlous armoury and the inadequacy of domestic manpower. Uneasy relations with France were exacerbated by her adventurism in Morocco, political sabre-rattling, and the channel-crossing bellicosity of Parisian commentators. In January 1848 The Times and other papers printed what, under the circumstances, could only be called a ‘bombshell’: a letter from the Duke of Wellington to Sir John Burgoyne, the inspector-general of defences, expressing his concern over the nation’s vulnerability to a continental invasion, as well as the unaddressed problems attending the Navy’s slow conversion to steam. Reaction was divided: some shared the alarm whilst others were quick to mock the idea of an invasion. The following year Rear Admiral Sir Charles Napier, commander of the Channel Fleet, wrote a series of letters on the steam fleet to The Times, questioning its size, combat effectiveness, and escalating 30

ON NAVAL HEROES

11. The Navy’s changing face: ‘The “British Tar” of the Future’, Punch, 12 April 1862.

costs. The Navy, he warned, was dangerously under the strength it had possessed at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The policy of breaking up oaken warships, ‘the wooden walls’ of England, and replacing them with untried iron ones or, alternatively, ‘modernising’ dilapidated old hulks by converting them into leaky new tubs was, according to Sir Charles, misguided – even suicidal.14 Journals echoed his concerns over Admiralty retrenchment with satirical broadsides. ‘The public is aware that there is something very rotten in the state of our Navy in general’, Punch declared, ‘and a large number of screws are loose in the steam portion of it in particular’.15 Recent additions to the Fleet were described as ‘marvels of uselessness and inefficiency’, boilers were unprotected from the enemy’s shot, and main-deck ports were too low for their guns. For the Retribution ‘with her main-deck unarmed, utterly incapable of any retributory act’, Punch suggested the new name Tolerance, and for other ships of the line, the Hash, the Mistake, the Mess, the Bungle, the Awkward and the Clumsy.16 31

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

Reacting to proposals to replace all wooden ships with ironclads, an ‘Old Salt’ would lament: Now Farewell, my trim three-decker, / Sails and spars and all farewell: Iron’s proved of wood a wrecker, / Where ’twill steer us who can tell? In glorious Nelson’s days, d’ye mind them, / Our tars were sailors every inch: Stout hearts, with pigtails stout behind them, / And ne’er a man to skulk or flinch. But now – my dear eyes! British sailors / Half soldiers and half stokers are; And if we manned the fleet with tailors, / ’Twould in a month be fit for war.17

Punch presented the new breed of mechanised British mariner, catching the public mood as technology overwhelmed the service. Songsters piped hearty ballads decrying the Navy’s changing face; the baritone Herbert Campbell earned concert-hall plaudits with The Iron-Clad Tar.18 The future promised new ships and new seamen, the ‘glorious’ age of Nelson and his ‘hearts of oak’ retreating on the horizon. In this context it is no surprise that the Navy turned to exploration to offer a rousing image of the bravery and spirit of its seaman and the capability and honour of its officers; not mechanised and anonymous, but rugged, individual, and inspiring.

TARS OF THE FUTURE

With so many changes occurring in the 1860s and 1870s it would be impossible to catalogue all of the developments in naval architecture. For our purposes, a few are enough here. The last to be built of wood were Defence and Collingwood in 1861; the ironclad Warrior, launched into a frozen Thames in 1860, was impressive with her twenty-eight guns set broadside and a speed of fourteen knots; the first to deserve the name of a modern battleship was the Devastation of 1873, incorporating all the new developments, iron hull, screw propulsion, twenty-five-ton turrets, a ram and short signal mast;

32

ON NAVAL HEROES

culminating in Fisher’s revolutionary big-gun battleship Dreadnought, launched in 1906. Yet technological reform continued to injure the Navy’s domestic reputation, as public trials became embarrassing failures, all played out before an attentive, and overwhelmingly sceptical, press and relayed across the country by telegraph. On the return of the Conservatives to power in 1874 the newly appointed Admiralty First Lord George Ward Hunt produced something of a naval scare by charging his Liberal predecessors of creating a ‘mere paper navy’. Newspapers were full of shocked letters and strident editorial; engineers defended their designs in pamphlets, whilst satirists took great delight in mocking the naval leadership.19 John Tenniel, that stalwart of Punch cartooning, provided a series of illustrations that further fanned the flames of debate.20 Even so, in a decade in which the service image was scrutinised as never before, Hunt was intent on expansion and campaigned vigorously for increased naval estimates. Yet at the same time he also had to account for a series of naval catastrophes, including the loss of Vanguard in a collision in 1875 and the sinking of Thunderer after a dramatic explosion in 1876, which followed so soon after the Captain tragedy had shaken the Navy’s domestic reputation.21 Cowper Coles’s controversial masted turret ship, designed with a deliberately low freeboard, was caught in a gale during trials in the Bay of Biscay on 7 September 1870, just a few months after commissioning. Her stability was insufficient; she rolled and then sank without trace. Just eighteen of the ship’s complement of five hundred survived. These disasters did little to bolster public confidence in the Navy or help assuage criticism over the spiralling costs of developing the Fleet.22 So, for a Navy under pressure polar heroics had great currency. In 1875 the Admiralty fitted out a polar voyage in order to provide a more appealing narration of the state of the nation’s Navy.23 Lobbyists within the RGS were certain that a new polar expedition would reflect well on its metropolitan standing and attract new memberships too. The new Prime Minister Disraeli also supported the idea, recognising its potential to appeal to the electorate, its spirit keenly fitting with imperially minded popular politics. It is clear that Disraeli turned to foreign adventurism and imperial expansion to side-step potential social unrest, and exploration promised diverting entertainment. 33

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

A new polar voyage was a perfect expression of his new vision for Britain, energetic, self-confident, and patriotic. ‘Her Majesty’s Government have determined to lose no time in organizing a suitable expedition’, he would write, because of ‘the importance of encouraging that spirit of maritime enterprise which has ever distinguished the English people’.24 Most of all though it was a naval affair. A series of lavish banquets made heroes of the officers even before they had departed; poets and composers hoped to profit, offering eulogia to their bravery; an onboard Arctic exhibition allowed visitors to meet the crew and gaze at the well-stocked ships; and a number of Admiraltyendorsed lecturers toured the country with their magic lanterns circulating positive histories of Arctic exploration which further cultivated the naval image: Thank God for noble spirits! Thank God for swelling hearts! Thank God for that bright heavenly spark through hero-souls which darts, And fires them with high enterprise, and faith to bear it through; He gave them this in olden times, He gives it in the new! Stand forth ye Arctic heroes! In glorious manhood stand, And plant upon the Northern Pole the flag of Eng-land.25

The Nares expedition, as we have seen, returned early from the North; its crews weakened by scurvy, and having failed to win the Pole, the main objective.26 Yet the explorers were warmly received when they struggled home and in the immediate afterglow of ‘victory’ their achievements were reconstructed and eulogised. A ‘New Farthest North’ had been reached – bettering a fifty year old record set by Edward Parry back in 1827 – and this was flagged as the expedition’s primary success. It was imagined in heroic oils on canvas, allegorical images of the conquest filled illustrated journals and popular lectures, and stirring descriptions of the journey, provided by the Admiralty, appeared in almost every newspaper in the country. ‘So long as our naval officers and first-class seamen are made of such stuff’, wrote The Times, ‘we may confidently trust them with the honour and interests of the country, whether it be their duty to fight with men or the elements’.27 The Queen sent her congratulations. An Arctic Medal was struck and given to each member of the expedition, whilst Nares 34

ON NAVAL HEROES

12. ‘A Cold Reception and A Warm Welcome’, Punch, 11 November 1876.

lectured in St James’s Hall before the Prince of Wales and was honoured with the RGS Founders Gold Medal. With an eager Ward Hunt in tow, he dined with the Queen at Windsor Castle, and would return there in December to collect a knighthood. The poet Thomas Lee Smith praised the expedition – ‘the venturous toil, of the Sons of British soil’ – and others rushed to offer their own tributes: Gallant band! We give you welcome! Honour, credit and renown Are yours. To Endless ages shall your noble names go down! You have storm’d the Arctic fortress – you have braved the Frozen Sea; In the grateful Heart of England your memorial you see! Hail! ‘Discovery’ – we greet you! Hail! ‘Alert’ – we give you joy! Every English man and maiden, every English girl and boy Dwells with patriotic fervour on the bright historic page Which narrates how British seamen solved the riddle of the age!28

As an expedition that, as the facts stand, could be equally described as an embarrassing and disappointing failure (it was to be the last naval voyage sent in search of the Pole), the Navy nevertheless looked to the expedition to provide a rousing narrative of competence and 35

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hardihood. The expedition’s failures were re-scripted into a sequence of exploits from which value could be derived: Albert Markham and his team had shown their mettle by sledging to that ‘Farthest North’; new coastlines had been charted by a succession of other sledge teams, their chivalric pennants trailing behind them as they ventured courageously into the unknown; and throughout, the crews had struggled on with ‘honour’, ‘vigour’, and an ‘admirable piety’ that was supposed fitting for the new make-up of the late-Victorian sailor. As Nares himself said many times, his men had ‘done their Christian duty’. Following many more years of difficult reform and technological transformation, by 1891 the Navy was again in need of a new national imagining. Soon all talk in London was of the Royal Naval Exhibition, which would go on to impress over two million visitors during the short summer season. We will look more closely at this show in Chapter 5. Suffice to say, it was a resoundingly popular pageant of naval heritage and new industrial capabilities. ‘Monster’ munitions of war, torpedo boats, and submarine technologies were celebrated alongside a sweeping narrative history of British maritime supremacy. It reintroduced the Nelson story to a generation who had never known of the necessities of war.29 In the exhibition grounds were a full-sized replica of his flagship and a panorama of Trafalgar ‘gloriously displaying the decisive moment at which victory was secured for the nation’. It was all keenly timed too, in a period of unprecedented political, economic and diplomatic competition from other nations. In the hands of lobbyists calling for increased public commitment and governmental investment to expand the Fleet, the image of Nelson had great rallying utility. In the 1890s his memory was reinvigorated as the embodiment of the ‘maritime heritage’ of the nation; an historical and imaginative link to a glorious past and a comforting ideal of British seamanship and resolve for a troubling future, in a world grinding on its axis inexorably toward war. Punch responded in kind by dedicating its one-hundredth volume to the memory of Nelson, ‘tutelary deity of the Naval Exhibition’ and ‘Father’ of the peace enjoyed, for now at least, by the maturing Empire. But what did this all mean? How and why were these images recalled, and what exactly was this ideal that naval lobbyists were so quick to evoke? How was it that naval officers, as heroes, could continue to inspire public imaginations? 36

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13. The sufferings and success of a new generation of Arctic heroes provided ample material for a special edition of The Graphic in November 1876.

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CHIVALRY OF THE SEA

Over the warring waters, beneath the wandering skies, The heart of Britain roameth, the Chivalry of the Sea . . . Staunch and valiant-hearted, to whom our toil were play, Ye man with armour’d patience the bulwarks night and day . . . Till, in the storm of battle, fast-thundering upon the foe, Ye add your kindred names to the heroes of long-ago.30 Effingham, Grenville, Raleigh, Drake, Here’s to the bold and free! Benbow, Collingwood, Byron, Blake, Hail to the Kings of the Sea! Admirals all, for England’s sake, Honour be yours and fame! And honour, as long as waves shall break, To Nelson’s peerless name!31

Saved by the hand of an admirer, heroes join ranks in a rich historical canvas of naval achievement. Nelson is pre-eminent, surrounded by the familiar faces of illustrious comrades and those ‘Admiral Worthies’ that would be immortalised in Henry Newbolt’s eulogy to the maritime past. Polar explorers take their place in this pantheon too: directly behind Nelson is Leopold McClintock; far to their right William Parry and John Ross; and up at the top, the image of James Cook shoulders John Franklin, the cherished ‘polar knight’.32 The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges shared Newbolt’s admiration for naval heroes, also quoted above. He turned his pen to a subject that had captured the minds of many people throughout the nineteenth century. This ‘grand style’ of heroic action, to borrow Reynolds’s conception in Discourse on Art, came directly from Scott’s recreations of the feudal past; from Byron’s Childe Harold, where the ‘aspirations of the mind after greatness and true glory’ were stoked by a portrait gallery of great men, ancient and modern; and, most of all, from the Napoleonic Wars.33 The evocation of Britain’s seaborne legacy was a maritime romanticism shaped by great poets before him – Robert Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson – and which sustained an ideal of national service that found active articulation in the expanding Empire. Naval officers provided inspirational examples and their 38

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memories were cherished by generations brought up on the victories of the past. ‘The Victorians’, wrote Edmund Gosse, ‘carried admiration to the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they defined it, they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it Hero-Worship’.34 Though one may think of hero-worship as a peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon, recent studies have shown how heroic representation has, of course, a much longer history than this. For example, some historians have become increasingly attentive to anniversaries, thanksgivings, processions, and parades – and the realms of symbolism and ritual – that were very much a part of Georgian society. This cultural perspective has revised our notion of the ‘popular’, which can no longer be consigned unproblematically to the actions and aspirations of the subaltern classes, but instead to the complex interplay of all groups that had a stake in the domestic terrain. Our notion of popular and political representation has broadened too, beyond the confines of Parliament or inaccessible literary tomes, and even the press, to include the fluid cycle of city spectacle, the theatre of the street and the marketplace with their balladry, pageantry and iconography, both solemn and satiric, austere and ribald. From military painting, grand funerals, civic sculpture, metropolitan memorials, to panorama, adventure novels, and public-house songs, one is able to begin to understand the ways in which imagery that pantheonised national heroes could be built into the popular experience, part of the ‘web of cultural events that ebbed and flowed through the country’.35 Whilst the ‘contours of support’ for admiral-heroes like Edward Vernon and Augustus Keppel have been mapped in a number of excellent studies, the details of nineteenth-century naval pageants, symbols, and narratives, have thus far eluded us.36 Work by Kathleen Wilson, Timothy Jenks, Nicholas Rogers and Gerald Jordan make us aware of the degree to which naval officers became patriotic icons that articulated distinct political and ideological aspirations for the crowds that acclaimed them. These studies have also brought into focus the question of ‘audience’, for at almost every level there were competing interpretations, and individuals were free to make images of their heroes for themselves. The concept of heroism is dynamic, responsive to the culture and context in which imaginations flourish, and it is 39

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14. A collage ‘Gallery of Naval Worthies’, 1890.

neither necessary, nor possible in fact to provide a definitive account. But an attempt can be made to decode some of the many performances and striking iconographies that sustained the ever-changing idea of heroism throughout the nineteenth century. This section explores some of the dimensions of various identifications with perhaps the greatest ‘Admiral Hero’ of all: Horatio Nelson. 40

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I WILL BE A HERO

For a generation embroiled in what seemed like an endless war, imaginations cried out for a conjuring, wise, and triumphant leader. Nelson filled some of these expectations, and his high conception of his destiny in life inspired his contemporaries. In mid-1776, as a seventeen year old on Dolphin, weakened and desperately thin, having just emerged from a life-threatening attack of malaria, we are to believe he experienced an extraordinary visitation, a moment of heroic clarity: My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount . . . I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me, and presented my king and country as my patron. My mind exulted in the idea. ‘Well then’, I exclaimed, ‘I will be a Hero, and confiding in Providence I will brave every danger’.37

As if a religious conversion, the young Nelson was seized by an idea of patriotism, and he embraced it gladly in return. Within the layers of motivation, belief, expectation, self-aggrandisement, and self-possession, Nelson fulfilled the expectation of an archetype. His sense of daring and the totality of his style of battle; his understanding of the need for destruction as a route to creation; the acceptance of selfsacrifice; his portrayal of his enemy as corrupt and profoundly wicked; his ideal of England as a place of goodness and beauty: all of that fuelled his immense popularity at home. Yet by 1805 it is perfectly clear that heroism had acquired another layer. Many officers of the Navy saw themselves as heirs, strange as this might sound, to the knights of the Middle Ages. Their sense of honour was stoked by the rich, antiquarian fuel of chivalry and the imagined and unhistorical idea that the English were, above all nations, its champions. It was to chivalry that Edmund Burke most famously appealed after the French Revolution – ‘the fresh ruins . . . which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes’ – saddened by the arrival of the sterile realities of mechanistic and rational government: 41

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. . . the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the chief defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!38

His words implied, of course, that in Britain these dignities survived. England was not the rapacious villain of the oceans, nor the usurper of nations on land; it was a ‘scept’red isle’, a ‘throne of kings’, Arthurian in its purity. ‘This England’ was still, in Lancaster’s familiar call, renowned for deeds ‘far from home, for Christian service and true chivalry’.39 It was a vision of a country that thrived on companionship, nobility, and manliness, the name not of the increasingly efficient, ruthless modern state which paid for the Fleet at Trafalgar, but of a preexistent kingdom, unfettered by commercial ambitions, straining to a higher ideal. In the place of a corrupt government and an uninspiring royalty, the Navy would take the lead in nursing the nation’s youth in a renewed culture of service and hardihood. Away from the disenchantment of life in the nation’s overcrowded towns, the Fleet at sea became a place where chivalric ideals could be re-enacted, its heroes untarnished. Burke’s fantasy of the imagined nature of Englishness found a receptive audience in a country already turning toward the reassurance of the medieval, and poets, artists and authors sustained this invisible throne of self-imagining. As the national attention became consumed in war, Nelson gave birth to a ‘chivalry of the sea’, and his deeds captured the combined imaginations of his country. The ideas represented by ‘England’, ‘expectation’, ‘honour’, and ‘duty’ would sustain a fleet in the horror and grief that would surround them that fateful morning on 21 October. Nelson’s status as England’s greatest modern hero was forged at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and consecrated in the bittersweet triumph of Trafalgar. In life, his popular celebrity was unprecedented: in death, his image was romanticised, embellished, and endlessly re-imagined, assuming mythic proportions. It became 42

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increasingly difficult to discern the real Nelson and his deeds behind the massive and diverse forms of hero-worship that enveloped him. An iconic hero, venerated in poetry, eulogies, in art and on stage, his status soared to that of a demi-god, saintly, revered, a national figure, a sacred symbol.40 Though Trafalgar confirmed Nelson’s place in the pantheon of national heroes, his life remained something of an enigma. That posterity would honour his achievements was certain, but precisely how his reputation would be remembered was less clear. His unwillingness to subordinate to the authority of his superiors, his naive but deep disdain for politicians, and his very public desertion of his wife Fanny for the tempting Emma, Lady Hamilton, all reinforced this tension between his public career, the values of polite society, and the image of what the nation wanted in its heroes. Though his undoubted courage was forever tainted by rebelliousness, vanity, and a distastefully naked ambition, Nelson’s image confronted admirers and critics alike in many forms, which could satisfy even the most sceptical. Various sectors of Georgian society competed with one another in their effort to commemorate him – and in so doing brought to the forefront cultural tensions that alternately sought to distance or bind themselves to aspects of the developing sense of national identity. At a time when war was mostly experienced through representation, the idea of the nation’s greatest battle, and with it Nelson’s dramatic death, was mediated by a barrage of written and spoken texts, sermons, biographies, monumental sculpture, popular ballads, and public spectacles, from military plays, aquatic and equestrian drama, shiplaunches, victory processions, and by imagery – portraits, prints, textiles, souvenir collectibles – and a flood of emotionally charged ‘commemorabilia’.41 The rush to celebrate the hero-departed illustrates the friction to be expected from a cultural phenomenon partly motivated by consumerism, commodification, sincere patriotism, plays for associative popularity, and outright propagandising. The lavish funeral, the spectacles and the memorials that would hold his image before the public eye and inscribe his achievements for later generations were served by a complex web of interests material, political and spiritual. If these rituals created anything for certain for British national identity, 43

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15. Nelson’s death inspired a cult of hero-worship. ‘The Apotheosis of Nelson’, a concept for a monument to the ‘Immortal Hero’ by Benjamin West, 1807.

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they did so on the level of equating Britons with success, British arms with triumph and British heroes with national service.42 At times Nelson would be acclaimed by radicals as well as by loyalists, and by none in more illusory and rousing terms than by his most enduring hagiographer, the future Poet Laureate Robert Southey.

A NEW PATRIOTISM

Southey’s prime intention in writing his Life of Nelson was to celebrate the Admiral as a national hero – a hero of a particular kind of nation – and in doing so to reclaim him for the Establishment. In Southey’s account, Nelson’s heroism helped define English nationhood.43 If politicians may have balked at the manner of his victories, at their unorthodoxy, and his willingness to question the judgement of his superiors, the people by contrast wholly approved because they perceived Nelson’s deep and impassioned patriotism.44 In the overtly nationalistic struggle with revolutionary and imperial France, the language of patriotism was increasingly sustained by discourses of civic duty and effective action, and within the common crisis robust evocations of a national ideal provided a substantial basis for this popular patriotism. Expressions of a new benevolent paternalism, which in a larger political context might be called conservative populism, found many forms, in print and in spoken word. It was entirely predictable that loyalist groups should invoke the long-standing heritage of British naval supremacy for conservative purposes and appropriate naval victories for the cause of King and Country; a process that became commonplace from the 1790s onwards. News of naval victories were frequently accompanied by bumper celebrations that allowed loyalists to trumpet the benefits of British constitutional rule and the follies of radicalism. Theatres staged impromptu re-enactments of the glorious events to the refrains of ‘God Save the King’, ‘Rule Britannia’, and ‘Britons Strike Home’. In pageantry and ritual performances even monarchs had now to court – and to flatter – the people. George III and his advisers worked hard at this, seeking to erase the memory of the terrifying 1797 mutinies by holding a grand victory parade in London (at the risk of 45

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being criticised for aping the public spectacles of the French Revolution), and hiring the theatrical impresario Charles Dibdin to compose patriotic songs about brave sailor lads. ‘Long live our Seamen’, ran the opening line of one Covent Garden song, ‘Our Nation’s true Defenders’. Nor were such sentiments held only by conservatives. Britannia’s sons were championed by Major John Cartwright in 1802 as enthusiastically as any Pittite. In the Trident he advocated the building of a naval temple to celebrate ‘a thousand years of naval prowess’ and ‘heaven-born Liberty: the Guardian Genius of Britain’.45 It became increasingly clear, as the war neared its end, that late eighteenthcentury patriotism was more populist than royalist, as ‘reverential and sentimental of the plucky British tar as of the Lear-like head of state’. As The Gentleman’s Magazine noted in 1803, ‘the anchor of Great Britain’ was ‘the constitutional courage of her seamen, among whom Nelson stood highest in the pantheon of naval heroes’.46 Though the Conservative’s increasing monopoly of the patriotic language in the period between the Nile and Trafalgar was also a consequence of the eclipse of radicalism more generally, its increasing effectiveness as discourse relied on the construction of appealing and increasingly populist images, heroes fighting for the national cause. It is clear that positive images of officers, in its most obvious manifestation the Nelson-worship, served the war effort. Southey drew particular attention to three figures who came to constitute essential pillars of his new vision of patriotic history: Nelson, Wellington, and the Duke of Marlborough. In such names, he would declare, ‘nations have much of their permanent glory, and no small part of their strength’.47 Southey’s Nelson was a patriot whose instinctive sense of the nation’s interest was more authentic than the diplomatic manoeuvrings of politicians and more edifying than petty and lamentable interparty squabbling.48 Romantic portraits of the Navy could provide moral exemplars for the domestic and imperial spheres, promoting the chivalry of the sea when the chivalry of the land was in doubt. Whilst the governing aristocracy became, during the Regency, notorious for its dissolution and corruption, naval officers presented new examples of breeding that could relocate and reassert meanings of conduct and gentlemanly behaviour. Southey’s literary idealisation of naval heroes, 46

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like others who followed him, would play a significant factor in this redefinition of the social and political order. Romantics like Campbell, Bowles, and Scott would celebrate Nelson as a ‘saviour of Britain and Britishness’. Wordsworth called Nelson ‘England’s pride and treasure / Her bulwark and her tower of strength’.49 Yet Southey’s Nelson had more depth than the basic image projected in these paeans to valour. His Nelson was the model naval captain whose paternal care for those under his command was unrivalled, whilst also a man imbued with a Christian patriotism that assumed the moral primacy of a Christian public culture. He had left ‘a name and an example’, Southey wrote, ‘which are at this hour inspiring thousands of the youth of England – a name which is our pride, and an example which will continue to be our strength and shield’.50 His narrative style, an intricate weaving of naval history and patriotic rhetoric that revelled in a new loyalist vocabulary, captured the public mood and his Life of Nelson sold in great numbers. The work had first appeared at a moment when the war with France was not yet over and Southey presented Nelson as the hero whose example and memory could inspire others. His preface urged young men to carry the Life of Nelson ‘till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart’.51 ‘Ennobled beyond all addition of nobility’, as Southey would have it, Nelson’s status as the pre-eminent national hero had been confirmed in the apotheosis of Trafalgar: The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity: men started at the intelligence, and turned pale; as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and our hopes, was suddenly taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never, till then, known how deeply we had loved and reverenced him. What the country had lost in its great hero – the greatest of our own and of all former times – was scarcely taken into the account of grief.52

During the remaining years of the war this evocation of Nelson as popular hero was designed to bolster the nation in crisis, and to varying degrees throughout the rest of the century this language of patriotism found renewed articulation as a more self-conscious English nationalism, a self-imagining chivalric ideal. Generations of 47

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poets, artists, and authors took up this beating drum, and through an admiration of Nelson, and the array of idealised qualities that he had come to embody, Englishmen could identify with the national spirit: ‘England has had many heroes but never one who so entirely possessed of the love of his fellow-countrymen as Nelson. All men knew that . . . with perfect and entire devotion, he served his country with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength; and, therefore, they loved him as truly and as fervently as he loved England’.53 It was Southey, above all others, who was responsible for shaping this idea of the chivalry of the sea, a myth of a somehow-ingrained ‘national spirit’. His patriotic ideal, constructed around national heroes, history, and institutions, would provide the aesthetic context for much of the century, and beyond. By 1900 there had been more than one hundred editions, the most successful naval biography ever written. In Chapter 2 I examine the making of Southey’s biography in greater depth, which justifies too why I’ve devoted so much space here to Nelson. Whether one may love, or loathe, his dominance in naval histories, one cannot ignore the fact that he was the century’s most enduring hero. He provided the example by which all others were judged. In the dangers and daring that characterised his career, and in the lengthy eulogies of his biographers, his memory would provide the heroic image that a great number of naval officers – not to mention generations of ardent boys, a queue of jobbing authors, and a succession of populist politicians – were keen to follow and imagine for themselves.

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY

From Southey, the task of stirring the nation’s imaginations passed to others, and among the makers of Victorian culture none saw history in grander terms than Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle’s history had purpose, it was ‘poetry, prophecy, biography and social criticism – all in one’, and he played an important part in adapting the concept of chivalry to Victorian life.54 A gloomy, puritanical, self-opinionated mason’s son from the Scottish lowlands – at first sight not the stuff of a narrative of 48

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chivalry and romance – Carlyle became one of the most significant messengers of this new ideal. His heroes, in fact, were a product of his profound disappointment with the Britain in which he lived. He made his reputation with Sartor Resartus, first published in instalments in 1831, but it was his Past and Present of 1843 that grabbed the attention of his contemporaries. In an extraordinary mixture of growls, indignation, slapstick and sarcasm he took aim at the times, mercilessly attacking the aristocrats, millowners, landlords, politicians and clergymen, the advertisements, the fashions, the smoke-belching industries, and the endless shop-rows and work-houses of an England heading for destruction; a nation full of ‘Puffery, Falsity, Mammon-worship’ and ‘Phantasms riding with huge clatter along the streets’.55 This was a radical portrayal of a nation in decline, far removed from Lancaster’s ‘Eden’, yet it echoed the disdain for the state of his country that had given form to Southey’s heroic ideal, twenty years before. Carlyle was radical in so far was he felt that society was in need of radical reform, and his ideal was a governing hero, or heroes, or at least a governing class near enough to heroism, to rise above self-interest and dedicate itself to governing justly. He saw the ethic of such a governing class in terms of chivalry, and it was incumbent on them to provide examples that could lead the nation. Carlyle admired two qualities above all; toughness and idealism, which combined to typify a muscular Christianity that he saw lacking in the ruling classes, which shirked their duty, and neglected by the new wealthy middle-classes – manufacturers and merchants – who were worried more about the health of profits than the state of their workforce. Strong in body, of heart, and of soul, dispensing mercy and justice with one hand, whilst ready for vital action when it was necessary with the other, Carlyle’s definition of the heroic individual was, of course, an impossible ideal, yet it was an ideal that he found many wanting to believe. In 1837, Jane Carlyle’s friend Harriet Martineau managed to find two hundred people willing to listen to Carlyle lecturing, and to pay a guinea each for the privilege. The performances were held in Willis’s Large Rooms off St James’s Square, where, after a little anxiety, they proved to be a literary and commercial success. Three years later, in 1840, his now annual lecture series had seen the Carlyle’s through the worst of their financial troubles, and in late February he began to write 49

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up his notes on a subject that was to mark his final appearance as a public lecturer. Delivered that May, his six lectures On Heroes, HeroWorship, and the Heroic in History, were an immediate hit and were rapidly published for sale in the London bookshops.56 Across his diverse taxonomy of heroic accomplishment there was a fundamental biographical pattern, and a shared conclusion – each historical society receives their heroes and adapts them to their own needs. Heroic images are clearly identifiable products of the age in which they are constructed. From oral histories, lavish iconographies, to a revolution in print culture that gave birth to accessible biographical accounts – ‘the book, for all learners far and wide, for a trifle, have it each at his own fireside’ – the many meanings of the heroic were culturally constructed in a complicated dynamic of representations. Carlyle’s evocation of heroes was a direct response to his frustrations with the age that surrounded him. The alarming increase of both the commercial spirit and religious doubt made moral inspiration a primary need. In the face of ‘scepticism, insincerity, and mechanical atheism, with all their poison-dews’, Carlyle urged his audience to turn to heroes for inspiration and moral example. Following heroic lives gave confidence in an uncertain future, yet a future brimming with possibility if the right choices were made. In its grandest declaration, Carlyle thought that a nation’s entire history could be told in terms of its heroes. At its most simple, his conception of the value of heroes was that they offered ‘admirable’ images: ‘Worship of a Hero is transcendent admiration of a Great Man. No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life’.57 His essays helped to shape a new sensibility, elevating the great men of the age to a quasi-religious status, and he did not ignore the nation’s favourite hero. In fact, among his first writings in the 1820s was a brief biography of Nelson composed for an encyclopaedia. Though Carlyle’s approach was more elevated than his predecessors, his main source was Southey and he rearticulated the Poet Laureate’s strain of patriotism in light of his times. Carlyle reserved highest praise for the ‘most important’ of his ‘Great Heroes’: the ‘Commander of Men’.58 Like Southey, Carlyle’s Nelson became a symbol, the sublimation of an imagined idea of the 50

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nation. His Nelson was descended from the Norse sea-kings and, recognising the fine line between true greatness and divinity, his Nelson continued to perform in the chivalric mould: The victory of Trafalgar, the greatest ever gained, completed the fabric which a succession of brave men since the time of Queen Elizabeth had been slowly rearing with their toils and their blood. It stamped with increased importance and durability, as it were, the deeds of our Drakes and Frobishers, our Blakes and Benbows, and rendered the English flag indisputably triumphant in every sea.59

While Carlyle considered that the naval supremacy which Nelson ‘completed’ would soon pass away, his image could endure: ‘Nelson’s name will always occupy a section in the history of the world, and be pronounced wherever it is understood, as that of a HERO’.60 Carlyle’s approach to history enjoyed a long popularity but few matched his elevated conception of purpose, or achieved his insight. Froude looked to past heroes for their instructive value – ‘we cannot educate a character unless we have some notion of what we would form’ – whilst Emerson described the value of hero-worship as ‘the basis of all possible good, religious or social, for mankind’.61 Yet few others aspired to ask questions of their heroes. Over time Carlyle’s thoughts became common currency, but their deeper meaning was lost. The Victorians put their heroes on pedestals and looked to them for uplifting examples, but this process was profoundly anti-intellectual and inevitably reduced them to a homogenised stereotype: a Christian hero, moral, pure, chivalric. While some new figures came close to this model, the polar explorer most notably, this conception of heroism could only be sustained by ‘strenuous editing’.62 The myth of the chivalry of the sea required many mediators to maintain the ideal, to keep ‘the race of hero spirits’ alive, as Charles Kingsley put it, ‘to pass the lamp from hand to hand’.63

BRAVE SPIRITS

Though the idle comfort of peace gnawed at the most ambitious, retarding promotion and reducing opportunities to secure renown

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by performing within spectacular sea-battles, naval officers continued to be popular heroes, in life and in fiction.64 The old men who fought alongside Nelson were lionised, while their fictional alter egos, in the new literary genre created by Captain Frederick Marryat, were used to teach moral lessons in an attempt to reinvigorate the governing classes. While the impulse was romantic, the underlying idea actually reflected the rising power of the professional classes. The Reform Act, signed by King William IV in 1832, handed a great share of political power to middle-class men, and dramatically changed the nature of leadership; many new members were professionals, their status based on competence, not birth. They were part of a new culture of service, and their patron saint would be the apparently self-made hero Nelson.65 Marryat had joined the Navy as a boy and participated in minor actions against the French. Having risen to the rank of captain he found further promotion slow to come by in a Navy that had no enemies strong enough to engage the Fleet, and he began his career as an author whilst still in the service. His fiction, consciously modelled on the work of Jane Austen and Southey, provided comfortable reading matter, portraying officers as ‘ardent and enterprising’, paternalist and professional. Naval endeavours were framed in stark contrast to the ‘dishonesty and servility’ of the ‘Hanoverian Court with which, I trust, our noble Service will never be contaminated’.66 Marryat wished to reaffirm the gentlemanly qualities of a new breed of naval officers by romanticising their achievements, and his idealised portraits showed them to be fitter to govern than the landed classes. He made officers into embodiments of the virtues he thought necessary for command – like the chivalry venerated by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, and Wordsworth – such as patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and above all, attentiveness to duty. Marryat saw corruption in much of the nation’s literature too, so set about to offer a ‘purifying literature’, putting ‘good and wholesome food before the lower classes’.67 This ‘food’ proved popular indeed, his tales became bestsellers, and were consumed in large numbers amongst all classes. From 1820 to 1848, his naval romances, transparently based on his own shipboard experiences, persuaded the nation that the Navy offered a romantic and heroic life. His friend, Washington Irving, wrote to him in 1830 after Frank Mildmay had proved a publishing triumph: ‘You have 52

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a glorious field before you, and one in which you cannot have many competitors, as so very few unite the author to the sailor. I think the chivalry of the ocean quite a new region of fiction and romance, and to my taste one of the most captivating that could be explored’.68 Marryat’s ‘chivalry of the ocean’ found a generation of admirers, and the popularity of his work continued well into the twentieth century. It is impossible to do justice here to the imaginative reach of Marryat’s ideal, or the way his fictions sustained and reflected the deep and intimate English love affair with the sea, that ‘sea-fever’ as Masefield called it. His fictions were read in nurseries and schoolrooms throughout Britain, recited, performed, sections learnt by heart. A succession of authors imitated his style, whilst a great many more acknowledged that he had sparked their imaginations as children. Robert Louis Stevenson confessed that he turned both to Marryat and Southey for inspiration, and he declared that ‘these stories of our sea-captains, printed so to speak, in capitals, and full of bracing and moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit in all the books of political economy’.69 Yet just as Stevenson began to question the mechanics of the maritime imagination, he found himself affirming its appeal: But it is of the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I wish to speak . . . they are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, of a virtue in which most Englishmen can claim a modest share . . . the exploits of the Admirals tell in all ranks of society. Their sayings and doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should still leave behind us a durable monument of what we were in these sayings and doings of the English Admirals.70

Joseph Conrad, who also acknowledged Marryat as a predecessor, described him as ‘the enslaver of youth, not by the false glamour of presentation, but by the heroic quality of his unique temperament’.71 Conrad, we see, in an effort bolster his credentials as an author in England, also became an admirer of Nelson, making him the epitome of Britain’s ‘chivalrous national spirit’, and winning himself public plaudits in the process. Though Conrad’s outlook was generally despairing – his work at this time is shot through with his awareness of 53

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the costs of battle and the dangers of exalting glory – he was sure that naval heroes of the past could provide rallying examples in the face of the mechanistic terrors of future war. His essay was published in the London newspapers on Trafalgar Day 1905 under the title ‘Palman qui meruit ferat’ (Nelson’s motto, ‘Let him who merits bear the palm’), and it was so popular that he decided to include it in a new volume of sketches, The Mirror of the Sea, published in time for the next anniversary the following year.72 Back in July 1905 he had written to Henry Newbolt, who had recently published The Year of Trafalgar, and he asked the poet for assistance. He confessed that his ‘ignorance of the Admiral’s career’ was ‘appalling’, but that the request to write for the newspapers had been ‘too tempting’.73 Newbolt kindly replied a few days later, advising him to devour Southey’s Life of Nelson. This he did, and his evocation of Nelson as national hero could have leapt straight from its pages. ‘Nelson’s nobleness of mind’, Conrad would write, ‘and his splendid and matchless achievements will be remembered with admiration while there is gratitude in the hearts of Britons, or while a ship floats upon the ocean; he whose example on the breaking out of war gave so chivalrous an impulse to the younger men of the service that all rushed into rivalry of daring which disdained every warning of prudence, and led to acts of heroic enterprise which tended greatly to exalt the glory of the nation’.74 By adherence to his duty, courage in the face of danger, and concern for his men, Nelson had maintained discipline and won. So, at least, said Conrad – like Southey, Carlyle, and many others before him.75 Marryat’s fiction fostered this new maritime romanticism and it was sustained in novels, poetry, on stage and in song, in performances real and imagined, in the hearts and minds of audiences, before the eyes and on the lips of those men who went out in the service of the Empire. From its battles and its colonies, Britain had imported, with the help of its naval romances, images of authority that continued to shape a myth of national character, and it flourished at home and abroad. The Victorian sons of the nation would carry across the oceans an ‘ideology in which Britons were fit to rule because of their self-sacrifice and self-command’; an imagined chivalry of which Marryat and Southey would have been justly proud for it proved to be a significant, and enduring, illusion.76 54

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DUTY AND DARING

Images of heroes were projected as rousing examples of how men might better themselves. The lecturer turned author Samuel Smiles, a huge figure on the imaginative landscape of the Victorian period, followed the tremendous success of Self-Help with a series of character manuals, including the last in his series, Duty, published in 1880. His paeans to selfimprovement offered a catalogue of manly heroes, and naval officers and polar explorers all featured within his construction of the national virtue.77 Smiles placed Nelson, as he did John Franklin and David Livingstone, and Mutiny heroes such as Henry Havelock and Colin Campbell, at the centre of an empire of celebrated personalities achieving notable acts of improvement against stirring, fantastic backdrops. The struggle of the everyday could arouse admiration too. Naval officers, just as artisans, labourers, industrialists, and men of science, might inspire in their acts of honest effort, straining toward a better future for themselves and their families. Charlotte Yonge’s Book of Golden Deeds, to give one final and very typical example, indexed these achievements in a chain of ‘duty, self-devotion, courage, and Christian enthusiasm’ for the ‘wholesome contemplation’ of a huge readership.78 The heroic image certainly filled books – Smiles and Yonge were bestsellers – and it was no passing sensation. Individuals were free to make images of their own heroes and the maritime ideal proved an appealing resource. The chivalry of the sea was a natural imaginative fit for the expanding seaborne Empire. It was a myth that would reach all corners of the nation, entrenched within the public consciousness, and which became a critical part of a robust national identity. It is impossible to ignore the effects of this maritime romanticism. Ideals may fill novels, colour canvases, providing authors and artists alike with a living, but these imaginings were also translated into action too. If one moment can be marked as catalysing the imperialism of the later nineteenth century, then it may fairly be said to have taken place in performance. In his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1870, John Ruskin exhorted the youth of England to pursue the imperialist agenda: There is a destiny now possible to us – the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused . . . We are rich in an inheritance of 55

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honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive . . . Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a scept’red isle, for all the world a source of light? There is indeed a course of beneficent glory open to us . . . [England] must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea . . . These colonies must be fastened fleets; and every man of them must be under authority of captains and officers . . . The England who is to be mistress of half the earth cannot remain herself in a heap of cinders . . . She must yet again become the England she was once.79

Of course, Ruskin was not alone in hoping to imprint upon the young a construction of masculinity through an imagined narrative of what England ‘was once’. His nostalgic appeal to the all-conquering spirit of a maritime past was well voiced by this time; it was attractive, it filled lecture halls, it was familiar. One can trace an almost inexhaustible range of sources that are soaked with this maritime ideal. The moral was manipulated, enthroned in the consciousness, projected into the public domain in striking iconographies and appealing texts, and then left to grow in the minds of impressionable audiences. Just a few more examples will do, being suggestive of the whole. Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! glorified a past era of seafaring supremacy, an age when England’s triumph over Spain, France, and the Pope was assured. Elizabethan sailor-conquerors and nineteenth-century imperialist-voyagers alike could be typologised as adventurous Argonauts, exploring in the name of the nation.80 As long as patriotism continued to arouse attitudes of devotion it could also be utilised for moral purposes. Alongside Nelson, have Drake and Raleigh too. The biographies of England’s ‘seadogs’ could provide the same kind of moral counteroffensive which heroic legends were called on to perform.

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Or look to John Millais’s eulogy of maritime romanticism ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, exhibited in 1870. It was a canvas ultimately inspired by his reading of Froude’s 1852 essay of exemplary lives, England’s Forgotten Worthies.81 It was a painting that fulfilled Ruskin’s appeal to imprint on the young men of England a vision of ‘maleness’, a summons to Empire whose appropriate counterpart may be seen in Henry Newbolt’s Admirals All, quoted at the beginning of this section. Newbolt in fact would provide the introduction for a new edition of Southey’s Life of Nelson in 1916, and the hero returned once again as an example of the national character, illustrated as a boy’s-own adventurer, his career a series of decisive actions.82 From lectures and biography, in verse and in art, the chivalry of the sea flourished. It was a version of gentlemanly masculinity that became paradigmatic.83 It was in this context that Clements Markham would write that polar exploration was ‘a nursery for our seamen . . . a school for our future Nelsons’, while the Poet Laureate Tennyson spoke of an enduring ‘spirit of chivalry’ when asked about the meaning of Idylls of the King: ‘We see it in acts of heroism by land and sea, in fights against the slave trade, in our Arctic voyages’.84 Though Ruskin’s call to settle and exploit may not have found an obvious target in the polar regions – there was clearly no hope for a colony in the ice – the Arctic could still be a stage for imperialist imaginings and re-enactments of dominant naval capability. The maritime ideal persuaded individuals and governments to devote huge sums of money to the project. It encouraged officers and seamen alike to leave their families and loved ones at home, choosing instead to risk their lives for meagre wages amid horrendous conditions. There were, of course, many reasons that motivated explorers to look to the North, yet this ideal must be seen as a significant impetus. Exploration became a potent expression of patriotism, and imaginations carried heroes ever closer to the Pole. For the amateur hymnist Edwin Hodder naval explorers took their place within an expanding pantheon that shone with national self-confidence. His catalogue of the century’s great men, Heroes of Britain, published in 1878 and enjoying several reprints, provided an enriched definition of heroism that sustained the growing culture of national service: 57

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The longer I live the more I am certain that the difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy – invincible determination – a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory! A HERO may be defined as a man of distinguished valour, intrepidity, or enterprise in danger; HEROISM, as the qualities of a hero, are bravery, gallantry, intrepidity, daring, courage, boldness, magnanimity, self-sacrifice.85

Under this broad ideal Hodder found many individuals worthy of his reader’s admiration – preachers ‘devoted to their faith’, philanthropists ‘improving the lot of their brothers’, men of science ‘expanding the realms of human understanding’ – yet, again and again, it was to ‘patriotic heroes’ that the laurel was given. ‘Daring deeds and heroic feats’ ranging from Trafalgar, the Indian Mutiny, to the Crimean and Afghan Wars, all ‘emphatically prove that British arms have not lost their lustre, or British hearts their pluck’, he rejoiced.86 Interestingly, beyond Nelson, Hodder’s pre-eminent hero in this mould was the ‘polar knight’ Sir John Franklin. The Arctic was an adaptable stage for the creation of naval heroisms, and exploration a commensurable naval engagement, a substitute for the ‘sea-battles of the recent past’. The image of the polar explorer, he lauded, was without doubt the perfect symbol of manly labour and inspirational self-denial.87 Having scoured his brother’s library of Arctic books, the artist Frederick Whymper, to give one final example, set about writing his own collection of ‘thrilling polar histories’. He based his script almost entirely on the published works of Barrow and Markham, whilst adding appealingly patriotic flourishes to meet the mood of the market. His Heroes of the Arctic was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1875, when public enthusiasms for such a work were high, and it proved an immediate success with ten re-printings. ‘England knows – not merely expects – not this, but every day each man will do his duty’, he would begin, hoisting Nelson’s famous signal once more. For Whymper, in a disillusioning age of ‘city-bound drudgery’ and heady commerce, the memory of exploration provided for a reassuring and uplifting self-imagining: ‘Arctic enterprise runs like a bright silver thread through the history of the English Nation’.88 58

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NOBLE FAILURE

This imagining of naval explorers as ‘new Nelsons’ was shared by many authors and, though not as elevated as Carlyle’s vision, nor as politically potent as Southey’s, their conceptions of what constituted heroic action would prove enduring. Franklin’s voyage ended in the death of his entire crew – second only to the sinking of Captain in 1870 as the worst tragedy in the naval history of the nineteenth century – and the Nares polar dash in 1876 limped home after a single season, and yet the record of naval adventurers continued to be mined for inspirational reading matter. Fashioning victory from defeat would become a peculiar but long-running exercise. The popular author Davenport Adams projected polar explorers as paragons both of Elizabethan chivalry, and Victorian bravado.89 In Neptune’s Heroes; or, The Sea-Kings of England, to give one example, the record of past exploits could provide confidence in the service as it underwent technological reform: At the present time, public attention is strongly attracted to the condition of the British Navy; and it is therefore hoped that other than juvenile readers may also accept, with some small degree of favour, a volume which faithfully records its earlier triumphs, and presents a summary of heroic actions of its most illustrious chiefs. Even in this meagre outline there is enough to stimulate our patriotism and excite our enthusiasm. Reflecting upon what English seamen have achieved, we may reasonably continue our faith in their courage, endurance, and heroic virtue, and believe that, in a just cause, victory will still attend, ‘The flag that’s braved a thousand years, the battle and the breeze’.90

The hard realities and horrors of war, like the privations of an Arctic voyage, were disguised somewhat by the idea of the ‘exquisite moral drama’ of distant violence.91 Exploration, like war, could be sublime moral theatre. As we shall see, the fact that Nelson, as a young boy in 1773, had taken part in a polar voyage made the imaginative link between the naval heroes of the past, and the explorer-heroes of the present, all the easier to embellish. 59

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16. The music of exploration, ‘Composed and Dedicated to the Heroic Members of the Arctic Expedition’. Robert Cocks, The Arctic Waltzes, 1876.

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And so it was, in the hands of countless Victorian biographers, Nelson had like Willoughby, John Davis, and Henry Hudson before him showed ‘conspicuous gallantry’ in the Arctic. His taste for adventure and toil set him apart from his contemporaries on the path to his future glory. This was hyperbole indeed, yet few were unsatisfied by this massaged history. Explorers crowded Adams’ works, inflated with imagined qualities, whilst their exploits were presented as fact: The compiler has endeavoured to preserve whatever was most valuable and interesting . . . he has sought to do ample justice to the courage, patience, and resolution of the enthusiastic adventures who have dared and suffered so much . . . Many of the incidents related would seem extraordinary if introduced by the novelist into his history of a fictitious hero. Many of the scenes described would seem incredible if depicted by the poet in the course of the most stirring epic. Yet these incidents are true – the storm, the drifting ice-raft, the falling berg, the sinking ship, the breaking up of the great frozen floe: these scenes are real – the vast plains of ice, the rugged hummocks, the bird-thronged cliff, the far-stretching glacier. And the reader, therefore, may enjoy all the excitement of romance, while conscious that he is being beguiled by no invention of the romanticist.92

Regardless of patriotism or politics, people wanted to think about heroes. They wanted to read heroic literature – and artists and authors wanted to write it – because it satisfied an emotional need as imperious as any desire they had for didactic inspiration. Heroic exploits were diverting entertainments. The huge popularity of Kingsley’s Heroes, Tennyson’s Idylls, and all the catalogues of Golden Deeds and Ages of Romance lay in their power to give many Victorians, weighed down by the commercial, political, and intellectual anxieties of the time, the two things they most desired: inspiration and escape.93 The Arctic satisfied readers with escapist fantasies. Exploits were inspiring enough in themselves, yet they improved tenfold in the retelling. Similar accounts, similarly dramatised, were joined with a mass of familiar images in these improving history books and

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17. A library of polar heroes: a montage selection of late-century juvenile literature.

adventure novels, creating a sort of composite manual of language and behaviour. And for many this imaginative make-up was both inspirational and comforting. George Meredith would suggest wryly, ‘thoughts of heroes were as good as warming pans’.94 The truce from cares, which the Victorians found in contemplating the hero, was essentially a withdrawal from the cares of living in a world where one feels an acute sense of weakness, and it is no surprise that the reaction was nostalgic. But hero-worship was equally indebted – and often in the same minds – to a growing spirit of national confidence, which would exalt the hero in the name of the expanding Empire. It was because the heroic image could serve so ambiguously as message and as compensation that it won so conspicuous a place in popular imaginations, and it was a hagiography of action that remained energised until World War I. In success and in defeat, the narrative of exploration chivalry produced its own world of myth and fantasy, a sequence of alluring legends, which sustained the cult of the polar hero. 62

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CURIOUS CULTURES OF EXPLORATION

Hoping to offer a more rigorous account of the culture of exploration – the business of exploring, the changing political and social conditions in which explorers operated, the public culture that welcomed them home – it is crucial to learn more about explorers themselves. Beau Riffenburgh’s pioneering analysis of Anglo-American press sensationalism drew attention to the ways in which individuals created various images of exploration as a way of mediating reputations in the midst of controversy and, not least, in the face of failure.95 Robert Peary’s quest for the North Pole, to give an obvious example, was as much a reflection of his personal need for ‘fame’ – as he so often wrote in his journals – as of the willingness of the public to celebrate his efforts in a language of national achievement. And this was a language sustained by vigorous journalism, enabling both the explorer and newspaper editors to profit from the discovery following his return in 1909.96 That he never actually reached to the Pole is beside the point. Yet long before Peary, who so often bears the brunt of criticism because of his personal profiteering, there were many other explorers who tried to cultivate an image of their achievements. For Martin Frobisher, the venturesome Yorkshireman who made three expeditions to the North between 1576 and 1578, voyaging to the limits of the known world was both a prospecting exercise and a means for his personal advancement in the Elizabethan court. His contemporaries were both shocked and enthralled by the record of his daring, reconstructed in published accounts of the voyages and laboriously compiled histories such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.97 Though friends entreated him not to risk life in search of a northwest passage, Frobisher was adamant: ‘It is the only thing in the world that is left yet undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate’.98 Or consider Edward Parry, ‘the beau ideal of an Arctic officer’ who endured a number of Arctic voyages.99 His supporters frequently recycled a romantic idea of his exploits in an effort to keep the project of exploration alive when enthusiasms had begun to wane. In this vein, Parry, as an Arctic veteran, was a courageous hero who had offered his life to the cause; he was rational and interested, willing to expand his mind to new scientific possibilities; he was a compassionate paternalist, 63

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a leader who could keep himself and his men alive through the long Arctic winter; and, most importantly, he was a sincere evangelical whose religious convictions – placing his trust in providence when perils threatened to overwhelm his ships – were a source of considerable comfort for large sections of his audience. Parry’s fans could read about his trials in the journals and in a series of ‘official narratives’ edited by John Barrow and published by John Murray in the years after each return home. Yet Parry’s apotheosis as an example of a Regency heroic ideal – an ideal which was, of course, fluid, multiple, and contested – was not merely based upon texts, but also a range of striking iconographies.100 His achievements as an explorer were idolised on canvas, and widely circulated in souvenir prints, and it proved lucrative for many to provide images of their heroes in this way. Roberts offered a diorama of Parry’s abortive 1824 –5 expedition with Hecla and Fury, which commanded the Theatre Royal Covent Garden stage in a positive vision of naval success which moved swiftly past the expedition’s very obvious failures, instead celebrating the stoicism and piety of the explorer amidst sublime icescapes.101 Parry’s voyages were re-enacted in other theatres across Britain, in illustrated lectures, touring panorama, and in a growing number of nautical melodrama, where contested acts of discovery were translated into uncomplicated expressions of patriotism and national achievement. Melodrama houses such as the Royal Coburg – that hosted the first play of this type, William Barrymore’s The North Pole! in 1818 – continued to offer flattering portraits of naval heroics.102 John Haines’s ‘new NAVAL SPECTACLE’, North Pole; or, A Tale of the Frozen Regions was sold-out during its season in the provincial theatres, as show-goers thrilled to the adventurous performance of a replica vessel making its way amid a stage of crashing mock icebergs.103 A generation removed from the fervour of the Napoleonic Wars still enjoyed these pro-Navy nautical melodramas, as theatres such as the East End Pavilion provided the stage for polar theatricals. Parry’s popular reputation was sustained in shows such as these, and as the century wore on naval officers continued to perform as popular heroes in the drama of exploration. The ‘heroic return’ could be managed and mediated, despite the death of the explorer, or the total failure of an expedition. 64

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18. The apotheosis of the explorer: imagining Parry as polar hero. Souvenir print published 24 November 1823.

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Although British exploration was, in the main, part of a glorious epic of the Navy, the cult of the polar hero – an individual willing to serve and suffer in the name of his nation – found nourishment both in success and in defeat.104 The tragedy of John Franklin’s final voyage, for example, drawn out by the subsequent searches to assume the proportions of a national loss, was nevertheless reconstructed into a narrative of national achievement, providing inspirational images of piety and fortitude, and which ultimately become a celebration of the tenuous claim that he had ‘discovered’ a northwest passage. Most recently, Max Jones’s fine study of Robert Scott drew attention to the range of Edwardian media that shaped public understandings of the explorer as a hero during his lifetime, and which sustained memories of his achievements long after his death. The loss of Scott and his companions became a national tragedy, although as much as it horrified, the drama inspired its audience. When the news reached England, and the journal and letters were published, the dead men became national heroes. A memorial service was held at St Paul’s; the cathedral was packed, and King George V led the country in its ritual of grief. Especial honour was given to Captain Oates, who had sacrificed his life in order not to be a burden to his friends, and to Scott, leader and beating heart of the expedition, ‘firm in his friendship and chivalrous in his conduct’, as The Times put it. They entered that pantheon of polar heroes of whom Clements Markham, Scott’s ardent patron, had written, ‘the thrilling narratives of their exploits team with deeds of devotion unequalled in all the deeds of knighterrantry’.105 Scott wasn’t a ‘great’ explorer; that much is clear. He failed to attain priority in reaching the Pole, and he died in the attempt. He was not the charismatic leader that Shackleton became, a man it may fairly be said also had his share of virtues and failings. Yet Scott was certainly not the man he would become in so many recent accounts, which were burdened both by an unreasonable post-colonial guilt and some lazy scholarship, and which took his defeat to represent the greater failings of the Empire. For many years a byword for ‘bungling incompetence’ – and his failure a bitter allegory of arrogance and moral stupidity – Scott has suffered for some time at the hands of his critics. Stiff, shorttempered, and obstinate, this explorer was certainly not without his flaws. One recent account, David Crane’s Scott of the Antarctic, can be 66

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praised at least in rescuing Scott’s distorted reputation from music-hall villainy and in giving the record space again to speak new truths.106 Stripped of posthumous baggage, the Scott that emerges is neither the fool nor the hero, but a very human character. It is impossible, and perhaps unnecessary, to offer a definitive account of men whose lives are the source of many competing re-interpretations, whilst their stories continue to offer a variety of meanings for different audiences. Yet, by re-engaging the diverse cultural histories of some naval explorers who looked to the North almost a century before Scott took to the ice, you can get a better feel for the makings of this polar hagiography. The cult of polar heroism that flourished in Britain in the early twentieth century sprang from a variegated, yet discernible, ancestry. It was born after the storm of Trafalgar, was sustained by a range of Arctic voyages, and made sacred in the search for ‘the heroic sailor-soul’, John Franklin, long before its chief idol perished on the polar plateau in 1912.

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE IMAGINATION

As much as truth, exploration often existed in what was imagined to have happened. The value of exploration was rigorously debated within the public gaze and, no real surprise, this value was usually a measure of how well a journey could be represented.107 Charles Withers has examined the life and death of Scots-born African explorer Mungo Park, directing particular attention to various rituals of memorialisation which constructed images of his achievements as an explorer in the collective memory, ably describing the ‘commemorative trajectory’ of the departed hero.108 John MacKenzie’s work on David Livingstone shares a similar approach, attempting to understand how an image of his exploration triumphs was relayed to an enthusiastic domestic audience through a range of late-Victorian media representations and, equally, how his changing public reputation informed responses to the memory of his achievements.109 As British exploration boomed in the 1850s and 1860s under the aegis of RGS president Sir Roderick Murchison, explorers’ narratives, particularly those of the lionised Livingstone, sold in unprecedented 67

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numbers. After his death in 1873 – and a grand funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1874, which secured his reputation as stoic missionary, vital geographer, and imperial pioneer; the ‘patron saint of African exploration’ – Livingstone’s apotheosis enshrined an image of what was expected of an explorer in search of the heroic. It was an ideal which linked progress to prosperity, and which was able, for a short while at least, to bring together the elements of Livingstone’s complex character to become a eulogised image of the man. In the 1890s imperial rivalry in Africa brought an increase of exploration histories that beat the expansionist drum, which also continued to manipulate the explorer’s reputation as a hero. Readers were provided with an image of his achievements, a heroic continuity if you like, which schooled the next generation to maintain imperial commitments.110 Like Mackenzie, Felix Driver has also offered new insights within this emerging historiography of the explorer-hero, studying the contemporary profile of the adventurer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley. Driver explored representations in Stanley’s published travel narratives, in addition to more widely accessible visions constructed in exhibitions and music-hall songs. Having ‘discovered’ David Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika in 1871, Stanley returned to Europe in a blaze of publicity. His brash and dashing style of exploration, transmitted rapidly through the press to his audience, ‘secured him a place in the popular mythology of imperialism’, and his image was circulated widely: reproduced in collectible souvenirs; eulogised in hagiographic poetry; immortalised in waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s; and endorsing everything from cheap trousers to Bovril.111 With a keen grasp of the tools of self-publicity, Stanley exploited an image of his achievements as an explorer to advance his career and profit from his discoveries, in the face of a mixture of public adulation and mounting criticism. Half a century before Stanley’s notoriety was filling the minds of his contemporaries, Arctic mariner John Ross was sedulously cultivating his public persona in the midst of a culture of commodity and sensation in its beginnings. In time, professional lecturers were able to profit from public interest to join in the cycle of show business: combining appealing images of the Arctic space with rousing scripts detailing daring exploits. Throughout 1875, for example, as the Navy 68

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made its final preparations for a new expedition, the veteran showman Edward Bennett exhibited his ‘New and Brilliant Diaphanic Diorama of Arctic Exploration’, satisfying his audiences with an ebullient lecture which elevated naval men as national heroes: The duty to be done is hard and dangerous. For two whole years the crews of the Alert and Discovery will be wrapped in interminable night and the all-encompassing ice of the Arctic regions. They have unknown perils to encounter. They are to Boat and Sledge where no civilised man has yet ventured. They have before them A MYSTERY AS GREAT AS THAT WHICH DREW COLUMBUS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC. That they have gone forth to certain suffering and dangers innumerable; and that they leave only jealous comrades behind them, must be enough to prove to the most sceptical that the quality of the English sailor has not deteriorated. An Expedition conceived in a lofty spirit of enterprise for the pure love of knowledge; arranged and composed with the utmost care; commanded by such an officer as Captain Nares, deserves success. We can only hope and pray that it may command it; and that the men to whom we have wished a hearty God-speed, will return to our shores having added to the fame of England A GLORY GREAT AS THAT OF TRAFALGAR, viz, the DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH POLE!112

Despite the disappointing early return of the Nares expedition, lecturers projected an almost unwavering popular image of naval successes. Material failure was turned into moral victory: a triumph of British pluck and manly character. One Mr Rignold, for example, ‘the acknowledged Premier Lecturer of the Day’, performed almost five hundred times in London (including an engagement of three hundred lectures at the Egyptian Hall), before touring the country with his ‘Colossal Panorama of the Arctic Regions’ where he filled village halls, schoolrooms, and theatres with striking images of polar heroics dancing upon his canvas. ‘A High Class and Instructive Entertainment at Prices with the Reach of ALL’, so playbills declared, Rignold’s lectures drew wide support.113 Reconstructing a narrative of continuous polar conquest, Rignold’s heroes were naval officers whose ‘hearts beat with the spirit of their ancestors’, engaging perils in search of a northwest passage ‘in a 69

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sequence of inspirational acts of discovery’. His programme even included a robust ‘defence of Captain Nares and his doings’, to shame ‘the national ill-feeling of his detractors’, and audiences responded dutifully to his call. In Portsmouth, where Rignold lectured for six weeks during the spring of 1883, the famed explorer McClintock was happy to offer his patronage, and a rush of notices advertised his endorsement, pronouncing the show the ‘most legitimate Panorama before the public, unanimously THE FINEST MARINE PAINTING, and the most stupendous record of ARCTIC SCENERY, DISCOVERY, and ADVENTURE extant’.114 By 1885, Rignold had outstripped the competition and his panorama had shown in almost every town in the county. For many later explorers, such as Nansen, Shackleton, Peary and Cook, Amundsen and Scott, the illustrated lecture formed a crucial part of the theatre of exploration; a way of drawing newspaper attention to future ventures, raising funds, winning the argument, showcasing discoveries. When a naval story might be hammered home, the Admiralty were keen to offer their support for rousing lecture programmes, understanding the political value of endorsing and circulating stirring images of past and future campaigns; an ideal form of advertisement. The image of the Arctic – the suitable stage for these constructed heroisms – shone brightly across the country, and many were happy to play their part in spreading the message.

ARCTIC DREAMS

Though opinions over the value of exploration were always mixed, John Barrow’s dream had inspired others. On one of the Franklin search ships was an impressionable midshipman named Clements Markham. He was greatly taken by the ethos of Barrow’s expeditions, the struggle to succeed, the camaraderie and adventure, the pitting of strength against the far greater forces of nature. He admired the man-hauled sledges that toiled out from his ship and he spent his spare time compiling the ancestry of the men in each team.115 Many years later, Markham followed Barrow in becoming the President of the RGS and, like his predecessor, he was chiefly 70

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19. Imagining polar discovery: ‘A Glory Great as that of Trafalgar’. Playbill for 6 October 1875.

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responsible for narrating a history of exploration sustained by the image of individual naval heroes. It was a narrative he acknowledged he had inherited from Barrow, in parts too the veneration of Carlyle and the romanticism of Marryat, and it was a passion that had been nurtured in his childhood. Quarantined with mumps as a schoolboy, he ‘amused himself by reading Sir Edward Parry’s Polar Voyages’. In actual fact, one of his school chums was Parry’s son and they often went walking together with the ‘great’ explorer. In a recently discovered manuscript, Markham offers an intimate account of the earliest years of his polar interest: When Sir John Ross returned from his four years in the Arctic regions and published his large quarto I was only six years old. We had a dissecting puzzle with four pictures, one of them being James C. Ross planting the British flag on the North Magnetic Pole. Both my uncle and my father subscribed to Sir John’s Book, in a handsome navy blue cover; and I remember hearing that he presented the King with a copy bound in white satin. I was never tired of looking at the pictures, and in the famous winter of 1838 we played at being in the Arctic Regions, with the Rosses. My father would describe what the different pictures represented, and the next day we used to play at it in the snow. 116

Markham continued to project his fantasies upon the ice and the puzzle of the polar regions would command his imagination for the rest of his life. He became a prolific writer on the history of exploration, a mentor to many naval officers, including the young Scott, and a consistent and vocal lobbyist for naval enterprise. At RGS meetings, as one contemporary would have it, ‘he seemed the embodiment of the romance of Geography; his bosom swelled, and his shirt front billowed out like the topsail of a frigate, and as his voice rose in praise of “our glorious associates”, he often roused a rapturous response’. Though Markham’s methods were not to everyone’s taste, many were encouraged by his enthusiasm: ‘What new worlds are opened’, a young officer wrote after hearing him speak for the first time, ‘and how small [everything] seems by the side of great endeavours and heroic sacrifice like Ross, Parry and Franklin’.117 Attached to a 72

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romantic image of the past, Markham scripted exploration as a central part of a historical narrative of naval achievement, whilst promoting future voyages as the essential means of maintaining its operational capability; polar exploration was, and should continue to be, the ‘life-blood of the Navy’.118 And, as we shall now see, there was no better place to begin than conjuring up the old tale of Nelson and his bear.

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20. The Arctic as the first act in the adventurous life of a naval hero. Nelson; or, The Life of a Sailor, Playbill for 19 November 1827.

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Nelson’s Bear

I chose Nelson in preference to the others because near bedtime in the evening my father told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakespeare lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to make himself interesting.1

When should the truth get in the way of a good story? A great deal of exploration exists in the way stories are told as much as what happened in the field. As soon as stories are released they go on all sorts of journeys, appearing in places beyond control and often without reason. Consider for a moment The Adventures of Harry Richmond, by the dazzling, yet at times maddening, Victorian poet George Meredith. It was his sixth novel, ten years in the making, and it proved tremendously popular when published in 1871.2 It was the tale of an impressionable lad torn between the commonsense rearing of his landowning grandfather and the preposterously fantastical schemes of his dashing, but penniless, father. The boy is kidnapped by a sea captain, tours the Continent, and finds romance amongst German royalty, in a mix of love story, political satire, and social criticism. But most relevant here are young Harry’s formative experiences. On Sunday mornings in London, ‘before the cathedral monuments’, his father captured his imagination by narrating tales of great heroes: ‘I understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson’s name’.3 The rest of the day was devoted to reading and maritime adventures were the clear favourites. It’s no surprise that the story of young Nelson engaging a huge bear on the ice was a good imaginative fit, not only for boys like Harry and an

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author like Meredith, but for a wide Victorian audience. In the tenor of late nineteenth-century idealised heroisms, the Bard and the Politician didn’t really stand a chance.4 In Meredith’s account, just as in a whole host of popular naval biography and juvenile literature, Nelson’s encounter was a formative episode, adventurous and fantastical. It’s a tale that has been met with varying degrees of delight and dismissal through the years, yet in the enduring mythology of Nelson the youth and his bear have proven inseparable. Clements Markham – throughout his career as historian of exploration, lobbyist for polar expeditions, and long-serving president of the Royal Geographical Society – looked to Nelson’s Arctic experience for inspirational capital: The future hero thus gained his first naval experience in the Arctic regions, as other naval heroes of lesser fame have done before and since his time . . . Great as are the commercial advantages obtained from Arctic discovery, and still greater as are its scientific results, the most important of all are its uses as a nursery for our seamen, as a school for our future Nelsons, and as affording the best opportunities for distinction to young naval officers in time of peace.5

Though his reputation was forged through the rigours of war, Nelson had also ‘bequeathed’ the nation a ‘polar heritage’: a legacy that Markham, like John Barrow before him, was vigorous in maintaining. Real or, indeed, imagined, Nelson’s polar experience continued to provide authors and lobbyists throughout the nineteenth century with an appealing image of heroism.

THE MAKING OF A MYTH

Recent biographers of Lord Nelson have begun the job of attempting to tease out the man from the legend; not an easy task as the two have become so closely woven. Episodes of Nelson’s life, large and small, have been exposed to scrutiny: the realities of his conduct in Naples, his colourful encounters with Lady Hamilton, his adventurism at the Nile, his relationship with his mentor St Vincent, and the particulars of key tactical decisions at Trafalgar. Whilst some aspects can be substantiated by a mass of original documents, other potent and 76

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universally accepted facts have not stood up to this level of examination. Often the only surety that surrounds parts of the Nelson mythology is a paucity of available evidence. Ernle Bradford cast a critical eye over the ‘boyhood bear episode’ in his study of Nelson’s ‘essential heroism’, while Terry Coleman gave it short shrift.6 David and Stephen Howarth dismissed the tale as one best cherished by ‘eager hero-worshippers’, yet they continued to draw from the anecdote, suggesting that it provided an attractive example of Nelson’s ‘recklessness’.7 John Sugden’s study of Nelson’s life from childhood to the threshold of fame in 1797 was the first to fully scrutinise this period and he handled the ‘bear incident’ with considerable skill. It is high time, he noted, ‘to fill in the gaps . . . to explain all the twists and turns, and remove all the persistent mythology’.8 As Professor Simon Keynes has suggested, in his analysis of heroic iconography, the necessary stage in the assessment of any historical figure is the identification of the legendary aspects that make up that figure’s reputation: ‘for only when we understand the circumstances in which received tradition developed can we begin to strip off and clear away the accumulation of preconceptions, assumptions and expectations’.9 An extended examination of the literary and visual manifestations of Nelson’s encounter with a bear is a useful historiographical exercise into the genesis of myth. This is a story of the art, and perhaps artifice, of Nelsonian biography: from Clarke and McArthur’s unwieldy royal quarto, through Southey’s enduring pocket duodecimo, to recent accounts, academic, popular and sometimes nonsensical. This is also a study of the visual detritus of this Arctic adventure, witnessed in theatrical oils on canvas, crude souvenir prints, advertisements and cartoons, to images found on collectable cigarette cards. The bear has appeared almost everywhere; the only place it has proven difficult to find it is in the historical record itself. In his comprehensive study of Arctic voyages in the ‘Age of Reason’, Glyndwr Williams did not dwell on Constantine Phipps’s expedition of 1773. ‘The voyage is remembered’, he noted, chiefly ‘because on the Carcass was a young midshipman, Horatio Nelson, whose encounter with a polar bear was to become part of Nelsonian legend’.10 It is the intention of this chapter to examine the processes by which this legend was made, 77

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and provide some clues as to why mythic episodes are necessary for the creation of heroes.11 Cynthia Behrman’s analysis of the social role and durability of hero myths called for scholars to map out the ways in which myths were created. For heroic ‘acts’ to become celebrated, achievements had to ‘inculcated’ in the public imagination.12 This process required potent images that could be widely distributed, and that could be ‘absorbed’ and then fixed in the imagination by a thick body of persuasive and appealing accompanying texts.13 John MacKenzie’s examination of ‘heroic myths of empire’ indicated the need to dig deeply into the culture of the time, particularly by studying popular literature, in order to provide an account of the construction, development and utilisation of enduring mythologies.14 Tim Barringer’s analysis of a sequence of visual representations of David Livingstone’s life has revealed the ways in which key episodes were readily mythologised. Livingstone’s encounter with a lion, for example, proved a central component in the cultivation of his domestic reputation, as well as forming an enduring idea of Africa in the imagination of the Victorian public.15 Beau Riffenburgh’s seminal study The Myth of the Explorer pointed to the cultural mesh of images and texts that maintained popular images of the Arctic space, and of exploration as a project, and the rapidity with which these narratives could be manipulated and entrenched.16 This chapter can be read in light of these studies. In providing an insight in the iconography of Nelson, it attempts to understand the symbols associated with the encounter episode, and to learn more about the imaginative conditions that sustained these images. How was a vision of Nelson in the Arctic disseminated and historicised? Did it have a function, and did that change through time? Glyndwr Williams asserted that ‘the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century represented a determined attempt to dispel myth, superstition and ignorance’.17 The Arctic expedition on which Nelson participated sailed north in 1773 with these sorts of aspirations. Piece by piece the blank areas of the polar chart were filled in: discernible features – capes, bays and navigable straits – gradually replacing fantastical sea-beasts and magnetic mountains. Whilst some enchanting myths were quickly exchanged for discoverable facts new ones were also created. 78

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THE EXPEDITION AND THE ANECDOTE

For the savants of the late eighteenth century – a period that had witnessed pioneering circumnavigations and South Pacific voyages by the likes of James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville – the uncharted areas on the globe were seen as something of a reproach. In early 1773, the new vice-president of the Royal Society, Daines Barrington, pushed a vision of northern exploration into the public domain. The First Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, became supportive of the idea and plans were laid before King George III for an expedition towards the North Pole.18 By February 1773 two bomb vessels were being fitted out. On hearing of the bold plans, Captain Constantine John Phipps offered himself as commander and was appointed to HMS Racehorse at Deptford on 19 April. His second-in-command, Captain Skeffington Lutwidge, later Admiral of the Red, would have command of HMS Carcass. Final instructions, dated 25 May 1773, ordered them to head north between Spitsbergen and Greenland, and to make a direct attempt to reach the Pole. Phipps was instructed to recruit only ‘effective men’ to join him on the expedition, such was the prospect of difficult conditions. At that point, young Nelson volunteered for a place on the voyage, ‘as I fancied I was to fill a man’s place’, he reminisced years later. ‘I begged I might be his coxswain, which, finding my ardent desire for going with him, Captain Lutwidge complied with’. Fortunately for the boy, his uncle, Captain Suckling, was on good terms with Lutwidge. By May, Nelson had been discharged from HMS Triumph and joined Carcass at Sheerness, one of five midshipmen onboard. Meeting Racehorse at the Little Nore, both ships headed north on 3 June 1773. Polar bears were first encountered on 25 July at Moffen – an island just off the northern coast of Spitsbergen – eliciting an exciting story. The master of Carcass, James Allen, went ashore with a party of men and saw three bears, one of which was shot. Another member of the crew of Carcass, in a wry anonymous account, later described the episode in a little more detail. According to him, two of the three bears had been killed, but not before one of the wounded animals had given chase to its tormentors. Allen, or ‘Major Buzz’ as he was known to the crew, ‘a full fathom in the belly and always the boldest man in the 79

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company over a bottle of sack’, had lagged behind. He dropped his gun, stumbled into a goose nest, and ‘filled his breeches’ before his crewmates returned to rescue him.19 The ships continued to work their way towards the northeast, but by the end of the month both were locked in the ice offshore the Seven Islands. On the morning of 1 August, a large bear approached the ships, perhaps drawn by the smell of a good breakfast, but fell to musket fire from Racehorse. Early on 5 August, men from Carcass would shoot a female bear and her two cubs, for no other reason, it seems, than for fun. But by far the most notorious episode had occurred the previous morning. At the time it was considered a minor incident, compared to the many other encounters with polar bears during the voyage. In fact, only one of eleven logs or personal diaries of expedition members refers to it at all, and then only briefly. ‘But legend would magnify the event in literature and art until it became the most famous of all the stories about the young Nelson’, Sugden agreed.20 If the popular perception of the incident was a realistic one, why did Nelson, never shy to advertise his own bravery, make no mention of it? Both in the brief memorandum of his services written around 1796 and in later correspondence there is no reference to the episode. Invited to write his own autobiography in October 1799, the Hero of the Nile had dashed off a ‘Sketch’ of his life for John McArthur, then editor of The Naval Chronicle; the result – a curious mixture of modesty and melodrama – made no mention of a bear encounter.21 There is also no account of what happened on 4 August either in Phipps’s manuscript journal of the voyage or his official narrative, which was published in London in February 1774 to wide approval.22 There were also a number of striking images of the ships locked in the ice, which were reproduced as popular souvenirs; for example, a composite image of towering bergs, battered ships and a resolute crew, engraved by Hawkins and published by Alexander Hogg, was sold to eager patrons in a London pub. But there was no bear. A second impression of Phipps’s account was issued in Dublin in 1775 and a German translation, with added commentary by Swiss geographer and polar enthusiast Samuel Engel, was published in Berne in 1777.23 Although the expedition had failed to make any real progress toward the Pole, in the public’s estimation the expedition had been a 80

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great success and Captain Phipps returned to a hero’s welcome. In 1776 he entered parliament as a member for Huntingdon and in December 1777 he joined the Admiralty board, later becoming Paymaster-General of the Forces. He was rewarded with the command of Ardent, a line-of-battle ship, and also distinguished himself at the Battle of Ushant in Courageaux in the summer of 1778. Shortly after his return from the Arctic, the theatrical artist Johann Zoffany created what may be regarded as the earliest heroic portrait of an Arctic officer. In a scene of pure polar theatricality the Honourable Captain appears in a classical contrapposto before an ethereal Arctic backdrop of swirling cloud and precipitous ice, urging his men forward, while far below him they labour on their traces, hauling boats across the frozen ocean. In 1779 Phipps sat for a richly coloured half-length portrait by Ozias Humphry, which was later engraved by Walker and offered as a popular souvenir in a number of London print-shops. Now second Baron Mulgrave, following the death of his father, Phipps also sat for Joshua Reynolds in a group portrait for the Dilettanti Society. Surrounded by other members of this fashionable dining club – including his good friend Joseph Banks – before a table heavy with precious antiquities and vintage claret, Phipps now presented himself to London Society

21. ‘Racehorse and Carcass enclosed in the ice, 7 August 1773’, sold at the King’s Arms Pub on Paternoster Row throughout 1774.

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as gentlemanly explorer; a clubbable aristocrat, displaying his credentials.24 The Phipps voyage is actually one of considerable scientific interest. Though little progress had been made toward the Pole itself and the theory of an open polar sea persisted, the expedition conducted a detailed programme of scientific observation.25 As well as the customary observations on compass variation, the swinging pendulum, the dipping needle, and different methods of measuring ship’s way, more elaborate tests were carried out, employing a barrage of the latest philosophical equipment: Nairne’s ‘Marine Barometer’, Luc’s ‘Hygrometer’, Charniere’s ‘Surveying Megameter’, and Fahrenheit’s revolutionary ‘Thermo-meter’. Observations were conducted in the hope of ascertaining the longitude of the Moon, and Dr Irving, the surgeon aboard Racehorse, engaged the pressing question of the gravity of ice by floating small chunks in his glass of proof brandy. It was also on this expedition that the first detailed studies of the polar bear were made, and Phipps would give the bear its scientific name, Ursus maritimus, the ‘sea bear’.26 A reviewer in The Gentleman’s Magazine of September 1774 found Phipps’s scientific work a particular success: ‘the appendix of this curious voyage . . . does equal honour to the navigator and the nation’. ‘Those who may be so minded’, he continued, ‘may re-examine the facts, and judge of the solidity of the conclusions’. ‘Certain it is’, the review concluded, ‘there has not yet appeared a voyage in any language so replete with nautical information, nor in which the mariner and philosopher can find such liberal entertainment’.27 For the geographer Rudmose Brown, author of a history of Spitsbergen, the Phipps expedition earns the laurel as being the first polar scientific exploration. Yet this achievement is always eclipsed by the ‘noteworthy fact’ that it was the stage for Nelson’s first ‘campaign’.28 It ‘deserves greater recognition than merely being known as the expedition on which young Nelson tried to shoot the polar bear’, noted Ann Savours in her analysis of the voyage.29 Whilst this work has done much to salvage the expedition’s achievements and place them in context, the voyage is still passed over by most historians, or reduced to a few episodes. As such, inevitably, the Nelson tale is recalled and its undue importance is multiplied. So what exactly happened that foggy morning on 4 August? 82

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FACT AND FICTION

Master James Allen of Carcass, the only member of the expedition to make any reference to bears that day, wrote in his log that at about six in the morning ‘a bear came close to the ship on the ice, but on people’s going towards him he went away’. Neither Nelson nor anyone else was named. The bear simply ambled off when some crew members started out. Certainly, there is not much heroic fodder in this account, the only contemporary reference for the encounter.30 It was not until 1800 that the first retelling of the ‘incident’, as it is now known, was published in a sketch of Nelson’s life in The Naval Chronicle, when Skeffington Lutwidge provided a new version of events: As a proof of that cool intrepidity which our young mariner possessed even amid such dreary and foreboding scenes, the following anecdote is preserved by an officer who was present. In these high northern latitudes the nights are generally clear. During one of them, notwithstanding the extreme bitterness of the cold, young Nelson was missing. Every search that was instantly made in quest of him was in vain, and it was at length imagined he was lost. When lo! As the rays of the rising sun opened the distant horizon, to the great astonishment of his messmates, he was discerned at a considerable distance on the ice, armed with a single musket, in anxious pursuit of an immense bear. The lock of the musket being injured, the piece would not go off, and he had therefore pursued the animal in hopes of tiring him, and being at length able to effect his purpose with the butt end. On his return Captain Lutwidge reprimanded him for leaving the ship without leave, and in a severe tone demanded what motive could possibly induce him to undertake so rash an action. The young hero with great simplicity replied, ‘I wished, Sir, to get the skin for my father’.31

For Nelson, then famous, a heroic ‘initiation’ had been created: the attack on the bear cast as the formative engagement of his youth. It was this anecdotal version that the early biographers reproduced wholesale when rushing their publications into print, to make a quick profit after Nelson’s death in 1805. John Fairburn’s Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, for example, published in major towns across the country and

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reputedly in its thirty-fifth edition by 1806, borrowed the Naval Chronicle text exactly.32 Joshua White’s Memoirs of the Professional Life of Horatio Nelson, already ‘considerably enlarged’ as a third edition in 1806, used this version word for word, spicing up the narrative by describing the boy’s ‘unmatchable bravery’ amid ‘scenes so dreadful’.33 White was ‘at a loss which to admire most, the matchless courage of the youth, or the ardent desire to afford pleasure to his worthy parent’.34 So, too, James Harrison, who lifted the text for his much-maligned twovolume The Life of Lord Nelson, released late in 1806, pasting in his own flourishes by praising the episode as ‘a fine picture of filial affection’, now amongst ‘scenes of such stupendous horror’.35 By examining this series of rival publications, you can get a sense of the scramble during 1806 as publishers vied for customers. The outpouring of national grief led both to the sentimental glorification of Nelson’s exploits and the sedulous cultivation of his legend. It exists as a sequence of texts and images, shameless plagiarism and advertisement; each offered a more thrilling account, or a ‘new’ and more ‘wonderful’ plate. In February 1806 just such an image went on sale, exploiting the ‘dramatic and sublime’ confrontation to its full potential. It showed the boy, his ship lying in the distance beyond mountains of broken ice rendered up by an angry sea, armed with musket and drawn cutlass, charging after a wounded beast.36 Entitled ‘Youthful Intrepidity – Young Nelson’s Attack and Chase After a Bear’, it was published in Blagdon’s Orme’s Graphic History and was accompanied by a description of the action, more exciting than ever before.37 One severe night, ‘when gagg’d with ice, the waves no longer roar’, the boy went missing. All feared for his safety until the ‘first rays of the sun were reflected by the distant mountains’, whereupon, ‘to the astonishment of the entire ship’s company’, he was discovered flashing his sword and pursuing ‘an uncommonly large bear’. Blagdon’s narrative drew clear conclusions about the whole adventure: ‘his cool and determined courage was fully illustrated, insomuch as to prove that with him it was not a passion, but a principle; for every action he exhibited a decisive combination of intrepidity and foresight’. Moreover, ‘several anecdotes are related of his boyish years which indicate that his courage was in a peculiar manner inherent; but it is not our object to record the relations of puerility’. Blagdon concluded, 84

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22. ‘Young Nelson’s Attack and Chase After a Bear’, published by Edward Orme, 20 February 1806.

‘the following instance, however, of his juvenile bravery, we cannot dispense with’.38 Even at this early stage the tale was being wheeled out to give instructive lessons. Each time the anecdote was sewn crudely into a text, the episode was overblown a little more, and it quickly pulled the event beyond all sense of proportion. Hardy’s Authentic Memoirs of Nelson presented ‘a young adventurer who feared no danger’ and pursued ‘the shaggy bear in the hopes of running it out’.39 Lloyd’s Accurate and Impartial Life of the Late Lord Viscount Nelson, which also appeared in 1806, raised the stakes further with a wonderfully eccentric plate entitled ‘NELSON engaging the BEAR’, which showed the young hero, top hat at a rakish angle, advancing on his quarry.40 Adam Collingwood’s Anecdotes of the Late Lord Viscount Nelson, whose preface made clear that ‘acts should always be heightened’ when they show ‘bravery as the basis of character’, led with the episode on its opening page with Nelson managing to run the bear down, kill it with his broken musket, and thus ‘conquer the prize’.41 In 1808, Churchill’s The Life of Lord Viscount Nelson, ‘illustrated with engravings the most striking and memorable incidents’, not only included a new visual 85

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configuration of the action by William Bromley, but also stretched the morsel of truth to the limits of its credibility by telling of the boy slaughtering a huge beast with a small dagger and the butt of his gun.42 But it was not until four years after Nelson’s death that the most detailed, and now famous, narrative of the polar incident was let loose. James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur’s The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson was published in 1809, in two handsome volumes in royal quarto, fourteen inches by eleven, weighing twenty-three pounds, and embellished by a series of engravings from pictures specially painted under commission.43 It was a formidable effort. McArthur had used all the family papers then available, and obtained access to the correspondence that had passed between Nelson and the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV. But it was unscholarly, in the sense that doubtful and questionable matter was accepted in an uncritical spirit and interspersed among documents of reliable authenticity.44 It was an unwieldy hagiography, an official memorial that was endowed with an air of unimpeachable biographical authority. Nestled amongst the solid facts of other parts of Nelson’s life, the bear episode remained free from challenge. In fact, Clarke and McArthur’s Life would enshrine the account for posterity. McArthur revitalised his Naval Chronicle text of 1800 and Captain Lutwidge provided a spiced up account of his anecdote. He also gave the young hero his lines: ‘Never mind,’ exclaimed Nelson, on realising that his musket had flashed in the pan, ‘let me get a blow at this devil!’45 How Lutwidge knew what Nelson had said to his companion on the ice – possibly Hughes, also a midshipman from Carcass – when confronted by the bear is anyone’s guess. The major difference in this new account was that the bear, no longer in retreat, had advanced within attacking distance, and had only fled when scared by repeated fire from Lutwidge’s ship. He added a role for himself in the action and the danger of the encounter magnified considerably. This was enhanced further by perhaps the most famous of all the visual representations of the encounter: ‘Nelson’s Adventure with a Bear’ created by Richard Westall.46 Engraved by John Landseer in 1809, Westall’s striking image formed part of a series of five he painted for the book.47 They were consciously intended to portray Nelson’s life as a sequence of heroic acts, each one leading to his final victory and apotheosis at Trafalgar. As a naval Ulysses, a modern Hercules even, Nelson was thus engaged 86

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in a series of ‘labours’: he boarded a captured privateer in 1777; he received the surrender of the San Nicolas in 1797; he lost an arm whilst attempting to land at Tenerife; and so on. And in this spirit the bear encounter was the first, and formative, engagement.48 In Westall’s image, Nelson is dressed as a midshipman. Wearing his dirk on his left, he raises his musket in an attempt to strike the bear. They confront each other and make eye contact, Nelson standing on one part of the ice silhouetted against a shaft of light. Carcass can be seen in the background far to the left, firing the gun that frightened the animal away. It is a hopeless confrontation: an utterly unequal challenge. Nelson has no companion, nor is there is a chasm between boy and beast. Westall’s theatrical image actually suggests the artificiality of the account. Nelson stands with no coat, in buckled shoes and bare hands. Westall’s was an entirely romantic reconstruction, in common with much of his other portraiture, such as that of Lord Byron, whereby elements of truth became ‘fictionalised’ on canvas.49 Of one Byronic portrait, exhibited in 1825, a contemporary reviewer would comment: ‘this is as much an ideal as historical . . . the picture is not deficient in a certain poetical elegance, but this is gained at the expense of nature and truth’.50 An obituary of 1837 would suggest that Westall’s chief virtue as a ‘historical artist’ had been his ability to excite the viewer through embellishment: ‘to point to the moral, and adorn the tale’.51 One can be certain that Westall’s ‘bear’ was a self-consciously contrived image, just as it was an exciting embellishment of what really happened that foggy morning on 4 August 1773. But, crucially, this was a point missed by subsequent biographers, who saw in the image a partner to McArthur’s prose. The image persisted as truth, and the encounter itself became historicised. Even before Clarke and McArthur lent a visual and textual legitimacy to the anecdote, the expedition had already been reduced in the public mind to a sequence of Nelsonian victories: so it was that he joined as a boy despite not being officially allowed on the expedition; that he took command of the Captain’s four-oared cutter, ‘navigating it far better than any other’; that he saved the crew from a mauling by some irate walruses; that, in a fit of individual brilliance, he set off in search of a bear, the ultimate polar trophy. For a young boy 87

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23. ‘Nelson’s Adventure with a Bear’, a souvenir engraving from 1809 after the cherished canvas by Richard Westall.

only briefly mentioned in the ship’s log, his role on the expedition had grown in the hands of his early biographers into a quite remarkable panorama of achievements.

SOUTHEY AND AN ARCTIC IMAGE

Following in the cycle of biography came the most popular of them all: the work of Robert Southey. Receiving a bundle of tomes from the publisher John Murray in 1810, Southey accepted a commission to make a general assessment of the state of Nelsonian biography, and to offer to the public a new eulogy of the man. In addition to Clarke and McArthur’s recently completed account, he scrutinised Charnock’s Biographical Memoirs of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the books by Harrison and Churchill.52 The result was a forty-two-page essay published in The Quarterly Review.53 Whilst a patriotic encomium might have been expected – five years after Trafalgar, with the war still raging – Southey instead chose to be highly critical of all of the other volumes, dismissing Churchill’s biography as merely ‘a vehicle for prints’ 88

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(some of which were ‘absolutely contemptible’), and ridiculing Harrison as ‘shamefully unreliable’. Clarke and McArthur’s official narrative, whilst intended to be ‘a literary monument erected to record his deeds for the rest of the world’, was for Southey almost unreadable: ‘ill-proportioned, confused, and unsatisfactory’.54 Southey instead made an elegant pre´cis of Nelson’s career and suggested others had misunderstood the art of biography. ‘True biography’, he said, required three things: ‘industry, judgement, and genius – the patience to investigate, the determination to select, the power to infer and enliven’. Southey was soon persuaded by his publisher Murray to build on his vignette of Nelson’s life. He actually made little in the way of new investigation and like most writers lifted passages straight from previous books, but the elegance of his prose won out. The result of his ‘labours’, perhaps best described as ‘an attractive and palatable digest’ of Clarke and McArthur’s biography, nevertheless became a classic. The Life of Nelson was published in 1813 as a fashionable duodecimo in two volumes and it was reprinted the following year.55 Southey reassembled the narrative of Nelson’s career, boldly reconstructing it in a series of superbly visualised scenes. Its articulate patriotism caught the public mood and he was offered the Poet Laureateship later that autumn. One reviewer would proclaim that Southey’s ‘compendious and more portable life’ had, in fact, rendered a service to the nation: a joy for all discerning readers ‘either rolling on the ocean, or idling on terrafirma’.56 Sir Humphrey Davy, a personal friend of Southey and admirer of Nelson, declared the work to be an ‘immortal monument raised by genius to valour’. Macaulay, in a rakish style, turned out a nautical metaphor: ‘It would not be easy to find’, he said, ‘an instance of a more exact hit between wind and water’. Even Byron, so often quick to mock Southey’s work, exclaimed that The Life of Nelson was ‘beautiful’.57 It was indeed a stylish summary to suit popular tastes and it was never intended to be an authoritative biography. Southey conceived it as a patriotic manual for the nation’s boys; his preface urged young sailors to carry The Life of Nelson ‘till he has treasured up the example in his memory and in his heart’.58 Appearing at a moment when the war with France was not yet over, Southey presented Nelson as the model whose example and memory could inspire servicemen. His evocation 89

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24. Nelson and his bears: the visual genealogy of an Arctic myth, 1806 –2003. Montage constructed by the author.

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of Nelson as popular hero – designed to shape a self-conscious English nationalism – dramatised Nelson’s life like no other had been able. Unsurprisingly, for impressionable boys the bear episode remained appealing and it was reproduced in full. Whilst he injected McArthur’s account with new e´lan, the essential ingredients were maintained: a distant ship, a ferocious bear, a brave lad delivering his plucky lines, and a sublime Arctic landscape.59 Providing a full explanation of why Southey followed Clarke and McArthur’s lead on the polar episode is difficult, although some suggestions are possible. First, he had no reason to suspect that the story was, in reality, a somewhat overzealous fabrication, and indeed, it was, as it still is, of little consequence to the real substance of Nelson’s story: his naval career and wartime honours. Second, a pressing deadline meant that Southey had little room to conduct his own investigations. Indeed, he cherished no illusions about his understanding of the finer points of seamanship and strategy, so crucial to making an authoritative biographical portrait of Nelson’s exploits. In a letter to his uncle, Herbert Hill, in 1813, having completed the manuscript earlier that morning, he wrote: ‘This is a subject which I should never have dreamt of touching if it had not been thrust upon me. I have walked among sea terms as carefully as a cat does among crockery’.60 At times Southey told the story in his own words, avoiding the smallest mention of technicalities, but more often he ‘borrowed’ the narrative of Clarke and McArthur without altering a word.61 And in this process of appropriated editorial the polar encounter was carried forward unchallenged. Meanwhile, John Murray, as editor and publisher, worked hard to keep the publication on course. Writing in 1810, Southey had stressed the importance of individual action in creating powerful imagery: ‘subjects can be treated as to impress the beholder by taking as much of the scene . . . in which human action and human passions can be exhibited’.62 In a biography of Nelson, he concluded, ‘visions of large fleets on even larger seas’ would not arouse enough interest; instead, ‘close depictions’ of perilous engagements and singular bravery was required to stimulate readers to the full. Yet, the most important factor of all is simple: the Arctic fascinated Southey. Writing to a friend in 1817, he enthused: 91

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Great news from the North, which excited much more interest in me than any thing which is going on at present in the political world! The Greenland-men, last season, got as far as 848, and saw no ice in any direction; they were of opinion, that if they could have ventured to make the experiment, they might have reached the Pole without any obstruction of this kind. The coast of East Greenland, which had been blocked up for four or five centuries, was open. It is believed that some great convulsion of nature has broken up the continent of ice which has during those centuries been accumulating . . . for the last two years the fish have forsaken the Kamchatka coast, so that the bears have been carrying on a civil war among themselves, and a war plus quam civile with the Russians.63

Four naval ships were fitting out that very winter to leave for the Arctic the following spring: Isabella and Alexander under John Ross in search of a northwest passage, and Dorothea and Trent under David Buchan in an attempt to reach the North Pole. Southey was well aware that Nelson’s Arctic episode made a great story: ‘the materials are, in themselves, so full of character, so picturesque, and so sublime, that it cannot fail of being a good book’, he would write in 1813.64 The Eclectic Review praised Southey’s handling of the encounter: ‘he presents to the mind a scene of beauty . . . and terror, that makes the heart throb with expectation and fear’.65 And this was precisely what his readers wanted.

POLAR PERFORMANCE

Buchan’s ships returned to London in the autumn of 1818 having made little progress toward the Pole, yet this naval engagement captured imaginations. Newspapers were full of vivid accounts, with new visions of the North entertaining London audiences long before expensive official narratives appeared on the shelves of the bookshops. William Barrymore’s melodrama The North Pole! played before a packed house at the Royal Coburg Theatre, and its crashing sets of shifting icebergs were accompanied by staged tableaux of ‘Naval Allegories’ and a ‘glorious’ musical interlude re-enacting ‘the Death of Nelson’. The polar spectacle resumed, the hero of the show, the ‘Gallant Captain Manly’, with a patriotic midshipman at his side (also, unsurprisingly, 92

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named Nelson), engaged the perils of the Arctic ‘to bring honour for the service, and to inspire merry England’. The drama of exploration offered the playwright, and his audience, the material with which to imagine a satisfying narrative of past and future naval heroisms. ‘The performance shall prove’, playbills confidently declared, ‘that native Courage and Perseverance, with Providence on their side, will triumph over difficulties, and ensure that success which has ever attended British Intrepidity’.66 Henry Aston Barker meanwhile presented a gigantic panorama of Spitsbergen at Leicester Square – a sublime vista of the northern space, populated by naval explorers painted upon on a stage of ice – which also allowed its viewers to travel vicariously to the scene of Nelson’s formative engagement.67 Southey had followed Westall’s lead to make Nelson’s escapade on the ice a thrilling theatrical performance. Remarkably, the performance was increasingly regarded as a fact. Between the first issue of Southey’s book and 1830 a number of important works on the ‘Nelson period’ had appeared, including James’ Naval History, a five-volume chronicle completed in 1824; the Public and Private Correspondence of Collingwood, 1828; and Ralfe’s Naval Biography of Great Britain, also issued in 1828, notable among others.68 Armed with these new works, Southey began revising his manuscript, untouched since 1814. But he did not rewrite the entire book. Where new material seemed to him important, he busied himself with scissors and paste-pot, amending sections and appending new material in illustrative footnotes. He took great pleasure in returning to naval history: ‘nothing pleases me better than this sort of mosaic work, in which labour and laziness may be said lovingly to meet’.69 The first chapter on Nelson’s childhood and early career was left relatively untouched. As the ‘morning fog lifted’, the boy and the bear were still to be seen. The fortunes of the biography, and the perceptions of the kind of book it was, changed radically in the 1830s. Just as the Pre-Raphaelites had to wait for Ruskin to champion their work, catapulting it into the popular domain, The Life of Nelson only became a true publishing triumph once Thomas Macaulay proclaimed it an essential factor in every self-respecting Englishman’s education. Writing a full-scale retrospective of Southey’s career for The Edinburgh Review in 1830, 93

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Macaulay declared it ‘beyond all doubt, the most perfect and the most delightful of his works’.70 A fourth edition followed swiftly on the heels of his essay, and the market was captured. The 1830 Southey contained a new series of images, including a charming woodcut of the polar incident by George Cruikshank.71 Macaulay had re-launched the Southey biography as a gripping adventure story of an ideal hero: a precursor to The Boy’s Own genre that would prove all the rage by the end of the century. Now a bestselling single volume, The Life of Nelson was tremendously popular with the English middle-class and its sales were unrivalled by any other biography. Southey’s Nelson was the embodiment of ‘patriotism in action’, an ‘appealing hero’ who also spoke in the language of patriotism.72 As the century wore on Nelson was increasingly projected ‘as paragon of a properly self-restrained manliness’ that was the source of Britain’s imperial power. In constructing this myth of the imperial Hero, Southey was performing an ‘influential service for a Britain in the process of defining itself as an imperialist nation’, and in reviving the code of chivalry he defined British authority in terms of paternalism, courage, and duty.73 The public responded eagerly, buying his naval romance in large numbers and using it to mould the character of future generations. The makers of Victorian policy recognised the political import of the work too. Sir Robert Peel, soon the Prime Minister, recommended The Life of Nelson to his son William, who had become a midshipman in the Navy in 1838.74 When Southey dined with the Duchess of Kent in 1830 the young Victoria was brought in to tell him how much she enjoyed it. The Poet Laureate’s patriotic narratives were helping to train a new generation of rulers in a tradition of chivalric deeds, and renewing a myth of national character in the process. It was a tradition that Queen Victoria and the soldiers who extended her empire did their level best to emulate, having learnt Southey’s version of it in their nurseries and schoolrooms. In Southey’s lifetime there were two more editions (bringing the total to six), which sold as many as 70,000 copies. In 1844 the seventh edition appeared, in 1857 the fourteenth. It was published in New York in 1843, the year of Southey’s death, and it was reported that every officer and rating in the United States Navy received a copy on entering service. 94

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25. The image of Nelson, the National Hero, looms large over the mid-century. Over a hundred thousand people visited Edmund Bailey’s colossal statue in the two days it was displayed on ‘terra firma’ in Trafalgar Square before being hoisted to the top of the newly erected column. ‘The Nelson Statue’, The Illustrated London News, 4 November 1843.

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The first German translation was published in Berlin in 1886, during the initial expansion of the Imperial German Navy, a process that in half a decade trebled manpower and saw the launch of eighteen armour-clad warships. Unsurprisingly, it regularly re-appeared in bookshops at moments of enthusiasm for the Royal Navy. A reprint had been hurriedly put on sale in 1827, stimulated by the victory of Navarino on 20 October 1827, when Admiral Sir Edward Codrington – Captain of Orion at Trafalgar – led a combined British, French and Russian force to destroy the Ottoman fleet caught at anchor and close inshore, as at the Nile. That Christmas in London, the public thrilled at a number of reenactments of this latest engagement; on stage, in heroic odes and song, in a ‘spirited representation’ at Burford’s Panorama, lavish canvases, and in vivid accounts in the press.75 Messrs. Terry and Yates, proprietors of the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, took advantage of this frisson of naval pride – ‘anxious to avail themselves of the impression which the recent achievements of the British Navy has made upon the town’ – by engaging the famous actor T.P. Cooke to direct the latest Edward Fitzball nautical melodrama.76 Nelson; or, The Life of a Sailor opened to rapturous applause on 19 November 1827 and it proved an instant hit.77 Cooke himself starred as the gallant Jack Sykes, ‘Lord Nelson’s favourite coxswain’, and the Arctic became the first in a series of heroic acts. By early December, the theatre would confidently proclaim that ‘The New Nautical Burletta has exceeded both in Effect and Attraction, any former Production, and nightly creates the most powerful Sensation on the Audience’.78 From ‘expanses of Icebergs’, to the battle-torn quarter-deck of Victory, the image of Nelson as hero commanded the stage, rousing and populist, and was every inch Southey’s creation. Southey’s Nelson was ‘every schoolboy’s favourite’, Edward Dowden wrote in 1878 after the ‘By Jingo’ Eastern crisis, and it also sold well during the years of naval rivalry with continental powers before World War I.79 By 1900 there had been more than a hundred editions.80 Meanwhile, a handful of Victorian naval scholars – starting with Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas and his formidable Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson, which appeared between 1844 and 1846 – began to view Southey’s work as a children’s book, no longer relevant to serious readers. In A.T. Mahan’s The Life of Nelson, for example, whilst the hero 96

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became the ‘embodiment’ of British sea power, the bear episode was handled with a commendable irreverence.81 ‘In this Arctic expedition he underwent the experiences common to all who tempt those icebound seas. During it occurred an incident illustrative of Nelson’s recklessness of personal danger – a very different thing from official recklessness, which he never showed even in his moments of greatest daring and highest inspiration.’ Mahan was perhaps the first to articulate unease with the reliability of the ‘received’ account.82 ‘The story is so hackneyed by frequent repetition’, he concluded, ‘that its relation is a weariness to the biographer, the more so that the trait of extreme rashness in youth is one by no means so rare as to be specially significant of Nelson’s character’. Mahan’s frustration was directed at those who made more of the episode than was realistic, although he made no attempt to substantiate the truth of the account himself, but instead reproduced Clarke and McArthur’s text in full. Assessing Southey’s contribution reached a head in Professor Geoffrey Callender’s highly critical annotated edition of 1922. Callender suggested that ‘the Nelson whom we know today is almost as truly Southey’s as Henry V and Richard III are Shakespeare’s’, and he remained certain that the value of the work as rigorous scholarship was limited. ‘The book is not biography at all in the twentieth-century use of the word’, Callender concluded, ‘but an impressionistic sketch by a prejudiced contemporary who completed his task before it was possible to collect the material out of which a real biography could be evolved’. 83 Yet the public enthusiasm for Southey’s masterpiece continued, and many other scholars happily turned a blind-eye to the signal of any inaccuracies in favour of Southey’s lucid prose. Callender had overlooked the fact that the book was never intended to be a definitive study; Southey was aware of its limitations. Despite this, the series of visual engagements that Southey skilfully constructed in The Life of Nelson were carried forward into a wide range of scholarly and popular books beyond the reasonable limits of their credibility, and without any of the reservations that Southey himself had declared. His description of Nelson’s bear encounter – in part a repetition of Clarke and McArthur’s original mistake, and in part his own invention – continued to be the source for visual representations of the episode. 97

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CONTINUING THE TALE

By the mid-century, with public interest in the Arctic intense owing to the protracted searches for the missing Franklin expedition, Nelson’s encounter with the bear had been enshrined as a central component of the popular legend.84 A Southey edition of 1854 bore a decoration of the statue by E.H. Bailey that had been hauled into position on Nelson’s Column in November 1843. However, the protracted non-completion of the monument in Trafalgar Square was continuing to attract criticism and in the absence of a satisfying public memorial Southey’s biography remained the main statement of Nelson’s popular image.85 ‘England Expects’ was inscribed in gold on the decorative cover. The well-known water-colourist Birket Foster created a jaunty new illustrated title-page that ratcheted up the dramatic intensity of the encounter of boy and beast. ‘Go thou and do likewise’ the edition instructed through Nelson’s famous memoir; and ‘look to the North’ for examples of his enduring heroism.86 Bear encounters often provided the first major excitement for vessels headed north, and drew vivid accounts in the journals of officers. In many cases Nelson’s example was recalled, and officers and seamen alike rushed to emulate his efforts. To give one example, Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, officer in command of the steam ship Pioneer in Austin’s Franklin search squadron of 1850 – 51, recorded a number of these encounters during his Arctic tour. The first bear being sighted on 2 July 1850, his crew took to the ice en masse, ‘to bring a bear home’ and ‘win honour’ for the ship. After expending all of the available ammunition (including peppering the quarry with small shot, used for felling birds for the ship’s cooking pot), some of the more daring members of the company gave chase. Osborn described the scramble: ‘my heroes followed, and, for lack of ball, fired at him a waistcoat button and the blade of a knife, which, by great ingenuity, they had contrived to cram down one end of their muskets’, before engaging the wounded animal with boat hooks and the butts of their guns.87 The act of winning a bear skin remained a coveted prize for enthusiastic sailors: to prove their ‘courage and intrepidity’, as gage d’amour for a sweetheart, perhaps, to ‘open the purse-strings of a hard-hearted parent’, or even given as a gift to the 98

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26. The legendary bear encounter redesigned: Birket Foster realised the tale as a new title-page for Southey’s classic biography of Nelson, published by Bogue in 1854.

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Lord of the Admiralty, or Queen Victoria herself, in an attempt to win promotion.88 In retirement, John Barrow – a man who was often called the ‘father of British Arctic exploration’ – published his digest of exploration narratives. He would stress the moral accomplishments of past explorers: ‘whether employed on sea, or on shore (or on the ice), they exhibited the most able and splendid examples of perseverance under difficulties’. Further, he wrote, ‘The physical power of the Navy of England has long been duly appreciated at home, also by most foreign nations, and is a matter of public record; its moral influence, though less the object of publicity, requires only to be more extensively known to be equally felt and esteemed’, and finally, he asserted: ‘nothing can be more conducive to this end, than the results to be derived from voyages of discovery . . . whose great aim has been the acquisition of knowledge, not for England alone, but for the general benefit of mankind’.89 Deliberately cultivating a sense of piety, fortitude, and duty, Barrow’s vision actually imposed a story-like sense of uniformity upon the voyages. Tales of moral achievement, perilous danger, and individual action, rather than the specific details of an expedition’s instructions or successes, were thrust to centre stage. The myths became the story themselves, a semi-fictional parade of heroic masculinity for a family readership. Polar stories took their place among the other tales of glory presented to the young in order that they might know what they were inheriting, and that ‘Englishness’ might be reproduced and re-created in their minds.90 Though there was some disquiet among ‘scientists’ surrounding Barrow’s hollow rhetoric of discovery, most were happy that voyages north were an excellent means of training for naval men. Whilst the post-war state continued to prove lukewarm toward Nelson’s fighting memory, his Arctic experience had a peacetime impulse and so became an acceptable part of his story.91 It is fair to say that the incident, with its Nelson connections, had helped keep an image of polar exploration alive in the popular imagination during the long years of war. Likewise, one can reasonably suggest that the very image of the boy in the ice played a small, though not insignificant, part in sustaining an interest in Nelson during the mid-nineteenth century, when enthusiasms for the Royal Navy were ‘apt to slumber in the piping times of peace’.92 100

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NELSONS OF DISCOVERY

Many shared Barrow’s attachment to naval exploration. Francis Egerton, for example, was glad that such a patriotic narrative would inspire public minds. Writing for The Quarterly Review in 1847, as Barrow had so often done, he was quick to draw attention to the imagined benefits of Arctic service, offering rousing images of the nation’s Navy and comforting proof of the vitality of the ‘national spirit’: Few greater pleasures, indeed, are ours than when, from our literary signal-post, we can make the number of one of those gallant vessels, returning ‘rough with many a scar’ of bloodless conflict with the floe and iceberg, and with its log one continuous record of danger and difficulty vanquished by courage and intelligence, and of triumphs unpurchased by other human suffering than the voluntary endurance of the wise and brave in pursuit of noble ends. Well pleased have we lingered so long within the confines of that Arctic circle which had been penetrated by so many expeditions, and with interest which accumulates by the hour do we watch for the return of those two vessels which are, perhaps, even now working their southward course through Behring’s Straits into the Pacific. Should the happiness be yet allowed us of witnessing that return, we are of opinion that the Erebus and Terror should be moored hence-forth on either side of Victory, floating monuments of what the Nelsons of discovery can dare and do at the call of their country in the service of the world.93

Though the drama and tragedy of Franklin’s expedition would lead to considerable public disenchantment, the memory of past naval engagements would continue to provide inspirational images. The public looked toward the Arctic in the 1870s, as lobbying increased for a naval expedition, and the ideal of polar chivalry found a renewed articulation. A Southey edition of 1870, published in London by Bell and Daldy, reproduced Foster’s memorable rendition of the bear image and included woodcuts of Arctic sledging. Lobbyists recognised the ability of exploration to provide inspirational images, and they mined the imaginative capital of past expeditions to try and secure support for a new attempt at the Pole. ‘The various explorations’, The Times appealed, ‘have redounded to the national honour and repute and [have] in no small degree, contributed to keep alive, 101

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through a long period of peace, that spirit of courage, enterprise, and self-denial which is so essential to the character of seamen of a great maritime nation’. Other leading editorials matched the tenor of public sympathy for the project, recognising its potential to fill their columns with stirring accounts of ‘an assault on the polar throne’.94 The British Arctic Expedition under Nares returned in 1876. Murray Smith’s Arctic Expeditions described the benefits of exploration as offering reassuring images of national intrepidity, countering suggestions of naval malaise. In ‘The Sea is England’s Glory’, he wrote: . . . and the spirit of our old sea-king fathers is strong in England still; and the nation glows and thrills to-day over stories of ocean adventure – of devotion among messmates, of discipline stronger than death, of perils courageously braved, of scenes of wonder and mystery discovered – with a sympathy as full, and an admiration as hearty and as high, as filled out fathers’ spirits when they read the stories of Cook’s voyages in the wondrous southern seas, of the splendid battles of the Baltic or the Nile, or the crowning sea-fight that “was in Trafalgar’s Bay” . . . Though our modern ironclad looks more like a floating gasometer than a craft fitted to walk the water like a thing of life . . . and though victory in the sea-fights of the future will be due as much to science and engineering skill as to personal intrepidity and resource, yet it is certain that the romance of the Navy did not pass away with the three-decker and the trim frigate.95

In John Millais’ rousing canvas ‘The North-West Passage’, which impressed Royal Academy audiences in 1874, the image of Nelson appeared in the background, presiding guardian of the country’s naval spirit. It was as much a re-statement of past naval glories as it was a call for future endeavour. This construction of masculinity matched the beating drum of imperial expansion, and its sentiment received wide praise in the press. The Athenaeum thought it the exercise of a ‘master’, the Art Journal announced it a work of ‘genius’, whilst for The Times it was a ‘triumph’, declaring there to exist ‘nothing better in character or more powerful in painting’.96 John Guille, Millais’ son, was sure that its masculine theme would stir the hearts of his countrymen: ‘it was perhaps the most popular painting at the time, not only for its intrinsic merit, but as an

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27. A biting satire on the vanity of human effort, Edwin Landseer’s ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ showed bears working their way through the wreckage of the Franklin expedition. The Art Journal praised its ‘pathos and terror’; the public reaction was one of shocked admiration and souvenir prints were soon in high demand. The original oil painting now hangs in Royal Holloway.

28. ‘The North-West Passage’ by John Everett Millais was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1874 with the quotation ‘It might be done, and England should do it’. The public responded warmly to its sentiment and the canvas became widely known, reproduced in the illustrated press and circulated in souvenir prints and postcards apparently available ‘in any part of the world’.

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expression more eloquent than words of the manly enterprise of the nation and the common desire that to England should fall the honour of laying bare the hidden mystery of the North’. Though John Ruskin was not entirely convinced – ‘I have not seen the picture, but it must be a glorious one, judging merely by the coloured print. But as for Passages, either North-West or South-East, if only England would mind her business at home it would be the better for her!’ – most responded warmly to the evocation of stoic polar achievement and the call for future maritime endeavour in the Nelsonian spirit. This memory had a real political value too, as Punch’s cartoonists were quick to realise. For the new Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, polar exploration was a vehicle for his nationalist politicking and rhetoric of popular imperialism, and his government were quick to support the Nares expedition. With Britannia at his feet, Disraeli looked to the Arctic for popular visions that could intoxicate the electorate. The image of the explorer continued to have considerable value for naval lobbyists, as well as for authors, artists, and politicians, who employed a language of patriotism much like Southey had done so many years before.97 But the imaginative connections between naval achievements and the polar space were not always uncomplicated. Edwin Landseer for example – sculptor of the notorious couchant lions for Nelson’s Trafalgar Square memorial – courted more controversy with the haunting canvas ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’. It is arguably his greatest work. Reacting to the tragedy of the missing Franklin expedition, Landseer found material for a bitter satire about the vanity of human effort in the Arctic saga. There are no heroes on the ice, just the wreckage of a ship, and a polar bear chewing on the Union Jack. It was a vivid representation of exploration failure and the ‘hostility’ of the Arctic space, now embodied as a ravenous bear. The Illustrated London News questioned whether the representation ‘was not too purely harrowing for the proper function of art’.98 The symbol of a naval champion engaging the Arctic had been familiar and heroic: Landseer’s unsentimental image twisted this motif to devastating effect. In 1891, when public interest in the Navy and the Arctic was revitalised by a grand exhibition held in Chelsea, the incident with the polar bear was again thrust to the fore, but in a more comfortable configuration.99 In the Franklin Gallery, devoted to the relics, texts, and images of a century of naval polar exploration, Westall’s oil-on104

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canvas ‘Nelson and the Bear’ was prominently displayed. Nelson’s northern adventure provided exhibition organisers with a useful visual link between the Arctic and well-established naval heroes, celebrated in his formative engagement in the ice. It set Nelson, however tenuously, within a constructed tradition of maritime discovery in the polar regions, of which Cook was the celebrated progenitor, and Nares the most recent participant. In a period of growing imperial rivalries, the image of Nelson provided the Navy with rallying potential and remembering his exploits helped to defray anxiety about the escalating costs of maintaining the ascendancy of the fleet. Southey’s language of patriotism found a renewed articulation. A commentary from The Illustrated London News in 1896 is typical: ‘Britannia rules the waves!’ is our great national motto, copyright, complete; and Nelson, the greatest of all her sons remains our most

29. Disraeli, with Britannia at his feet, looks to the Arctic to provide an appealing stage for patriotism in action. ‘The North-West Passage’, Punch, 5 December 1874.

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30. The artist Richard Westall reimagined the scenes of Nelson’s life as a series of heroic engagements: Nelson volunteering to board a prize in 1777, in conflict with a Spanish launch, shot through the arm at Santa Cruz in 1797, and in his glorious death at Trafalgar. Westall’s images were reproduced many times throughout the century. The prints shown here were made for a new edition of Southey’s classic Life of Nelson in 1854.

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30. continued

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30. continued

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30. continued

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popular, perhaps our ‘only, hero’. To the man to whom our first line of defence is a meaningless phrase Nelson sums up once and for all the naval history of England. His glory grows year by year; distance only helps to magnify the magic of his name, and his grip tightens on the imagination of his countrymen. This week has witnessed a popular outburst of enthusiasm throughout the length and breadth of the country, which demonstrates as nothing else could the canonisation of the hero of Trafalgar . . . Nelson comes home to the hearts of all men, not as a spotless saint, but as an intensely human brother. His picturesque personality has silenced the Puritanism that forgot to be patriotic, and to-day he stands as far above all our heroes as, in stone, he actually looks down on London from his splendid pinnacle in Trafalgar Square . . . his countrymen have worshipped him, even in an age which is fain to break images and pull heroes down. Nelson, indeed, is the darling of the people.100

A SCHOOL FOR FUTURE NELSONS

In an age that called for new heroes, Nelson’s example still offered value to a wide range of admirers. In the consistent lobbying for a renewal of Arctic exploration throughout the 1890s, many pointed to the benefits of polar service: the demands of the Arctic, real and imagined, could provide a ‘school for future Nelsons’. The image of the encounter with the bear became a recruitment tool. As one advocate proclaimed: No service, during peacetime conduces more to the development of the energies of our seamen, their resourcefulness, skill, and all those other great qualities than service in the Polar Regions. It is a service that necessitates constant watchfulness, courage of no common order, dash combined with prudence, and, above all, that trust and confidence in the power and help of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, who alone can guide our footsteps in safety, and crown our efforts with success.101

This was the voice of Albert Hastings Markham – a man who had secured his fame sledging to a farthest north of 83820’ on the British 110

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Arctic Expedition under Nares – and he would also publish a popular history of polar exploration in which the Phipps expedition featured prominently.102 Significant too was the publication of the narrative of Thomas Floyd, one of six midshipmen aboard Racehorse. Dedicating his book to ‘the Midshipmen of the Royal Navy’, Markham wrote: ‘I felt it would be almost a sin to allow the manuscript to be longer buried in obscurity, more especially as any relation of that particular voyage must be rendered doubly interesting, from the fact that our great naval hero, Nelson, served as a midshipman on board one of the two ships’.103 Markham seized on Nelson’s Arctic experience as an imaginative publicity tool for generating interest in future exploration: ‘to direct their thoughts northward, and turn the attention of the public once more to the great and glorious work of Arctic research and enterprise!’ Should the ‘heroic deeds performed by our countrymen, during the last three hundred years, which I have briefly attempted to record in these pages’, Markham effused, ‘inspire an enthusiastic desire in the minds of the young officers of the present day, to achieve distinction and renown in the ice-clad seas of the Far North, and encourage them to emulate the deeds of Franklin and Parry as well as those of Nelson and Collingwood, I shall feel I have successfully accomplished the object I had in view’.104 Sadly, Floyd’s diary didn’t actually give any information about the events of 4 August 1773. In a section of Floyd’s account optimistically entitled by Markham ‘Nelson to the rescue!’ there is no mention of the bear episode at all. No fewer than ten consecutive pages at this part of Floyd’s manuscript are missing, or have been destroyed. ‘A most unfortunate circumstance’, Markham suggested, ‘more especially during such an interesting part of the cruise’. Tantalisingly, the one source that now could tell us more about the facts of the incident, tells us nothing at all. Withstanding the best effort of Markham to refer to it at every opportunity, the bear encounter remained an imaginative and apocryphal speculation. Yet it is interesting to consider why Markham was at pains to emphasise the Nelson connection. ‘To Captain Markham’, a sceptical reviewer for the Athenaeum would remark, ‘the puerile diary was as sacred as a manuscript of the Koran to a Moslem mufti’.105 The purpose of rescuing the journal was obvious: the diary offered a reasonable justification to look back to the Phipps expedition, and the Nelson 111

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connection, however tenuous, attracted immediate attention for the work. Accordingly Albert determined to print it with an extensive introduction detailing naval justifications for past and future expeditions. This was to be a useful platform for his views: the book was widely circulated, sold well, and was the subject of various newspaper and periodical reviews. The Daily Telegraph praised the work for reintroducing, in a colourful way, the expedition ‘in which, by-the-bye our great naval hero served’. ‘Thus dedicated to the midshipmen of the Royal Navy’, the reviewer suggested, ‘[it] will serve to remind not only them but all in whose veins runs patriotic blood, that “the White Ladye of the Pole is still waiting to be won”’.106 ‘That ardent advocate of Polar exploration has unearthed for his young readers a veritable trouvaille in the original logbook’, The Graphic announced.107 ‘No ship, naval or mercantile, should go to sea without it’, the Daily Review likewise enthused, ‘for it is well designed to fill all midshipmen, and boys, with an honourable emulation’.108 ‘In addition to the log-book of this gallant young tar’, described the review periodical Sketch, ‘Captain Markham gives his readers a succinct history of Arctic exploration from the time when King Arthur made his mythical voyage to Iceland up to the termination of Sir George Nares’ expedition’.109 ‘But Captain Markham is not content merely to instruct us,’ the Daily Review noted, although this point was surely obvious, ‘for he has a very practical object in view – that is to stir up the public and the Government to renewed enterprise’.110 Weaving a ‘fabulous’ historical narrative to portray polar exploration as an intrinsically British quest, whilst also making the book a vehicle for lobbying, was a popular tactic, as John Barrow had proved many years before. Markham’s approach was equally unsubtle. Although one reviewer expressly demanded ‘more fable, and less lobbying’, most readers were satisfied. The Literary Churchman welcomed the effort to ‘revive the waning interest in Arctic discovery’.111 Though it proved a popular success, unsurprisingly, the work did not greatly alter the climate of government opinion at this time. ‘It is much to be desired that the discovery of the North Pole should not be given up as impracticable, and that in due time a fresh expedition should renew those efforts which have reflected honour on the English name’, one reviewer concluded, yet ‘for the immediate 112

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31. The encounter as advertisement: Nimmo’s new popular cover for Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, 1891.

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present amid depression at home and anxiety abroad, it appears to us that the subject must be regarded as shelved’.112 Returning to a few of the reviews can be justified here, for this little work was certainly responsible for maintaining an image of the polar explorer in the public eye and it is interesting to draw attention to Albert’s role in this. He remained a passionate advocate of exploration throughout his life and his written works, as the RNE itself, were clearly the vehicles by which he promoted and popularised his Arctic ambitions, ‘for the benefit of the nation and the Navy’. ‘Like that other Arctic Captain in Jules Verne’s story’, The Scotsman suggested dryly, ‘Markham has become “polarised”; his head has been permanently turned due north, and he longs for an opportunity of revisiting the dismal chaos of icefloes’.113 Precisely because of its imaginative potential, Nelson’s Arctic encounter graced the front cover of the new decorative edition of Southey’s The Life of Nelson, sold across the country in 1891, and also featured on popular editions throughout the decade.114 Lathom Browne’s Nelson: The Public and Private Life, also published in 1891, dedicated to Queen Victoria, and relying heavily on Clarke and McArthur’s narrative, recounted the bear encounter with gusto. It was ‘an adventure characteristic of Nelson’s habitual daring’, Browne would rejoice.115 The boyhood episode was given increased emphasis by the frontispiece – not the usual noble portrait of Nelson as a man – but an image of Nelson as a midshipman, meeting late-Victorian tastes perfectly.116 An American edition even suggested that Nelson’s action on the ice floe was worthy of celebration as ‘a voyage of discovery of its own account’.117 An edition of 1922 placed the Phipps expedition in the context of a long tradition of polar exploration. The voyage, it’s editor Callender stated, ‘undoubtedly increased men’s knowledge of the path to the top of the Pole and so helped modestly to pave the way for Peary’s triumph in 1909’.118 But there was nothing modest in the insertion of a polar chart, a first for a Southey edition, grandly entitled ‘The Siege of the North Pole, 1616 – 1909’, with Nelson’s ‘farthest north’ proudly sharing the ‘expanse of white’ with the explorations of the celebrated Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. However tenuous these links now appear, making explicit imaginative connections between the Royal Navy, exploration as 114

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a project, and Nelson as a hero, had much rhetorical potential. The year was 1922, and in a similar way to the immediate post-war years following 1815, the benefits of exploration were continually reinforced, framed as a pure and disinterested peacetime activity, and as a project ideally timed to capture the imaginations of a weary nation. For this to be played out in the footnotes of a Nelson biography comes as a genuine surprise. By 1956 there were new visualisations of the bear episode, as well as reproductions of original plates from Phipps’s published narrative showing ships locked in the ice.119 Even in 1999 the opening chapter of a new Southey begins, as had a succession of editions since 1813, with the account of Nelson’s Arctic adventures. A dashing image of boy and beast is first to meet the eye; a heroic Nelson in his now familiar pose.120

CREATIVE TRAVELS

Biographies of Nelson are not the only place where his supposed encounter with the bear has been mentioned. From the earliest moments the story runs loose in fiction. Consider for example A Voyage to the North Pole by Benjamin Bragg, sold across the country for three shillings and sixpence in 1817, combining the truthful and fantastical to produce a rich caricature of polar exploration.121 After a childhood reading ‘with delight every book of voyages and travels’ he could lay his hands on, the brave youth Bragg determines to search for ‘some pursuit which might rouse his exertions’. He manages to join an expedition heading north under Captain Slapperwhack and embarks on a series of Arctic adventures. Despite being at once a fictional voyage – a polar continent is discovered, no ‘paradise’ but a sterile expanse enlivened only by some beguiling mermaids – parts of the narrative closely mirror the Phipps expedition: the ships are caught in the ice north of Spitsbergen; the crews prepare to abandon them for sledges in a desperate bid for freedom; and a remarkable escape is made. Elements of the factual record are mixed with those more familiar. Armed with a musket the hero heads out across the ice to engage ‘the great white bear’, and duly fells the beast after a terrifying combat. Even at this early stage in the 115

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century the perilous bear encounter becomes a central part of the imaginative stock-in-trade.122 In another example, the narrative of a real expedition sounds like a fictional account, and bears feature prominently. In 1875, Allen Young’s expedition on Pandora hoped to reach the North Magnetic Pole. Although they came nowhere near achieving this goal, they did examine relics of Franklin’s expedition and had all manner of thrilling episodes. On 15 August the officers were interrupted with the cry, ‘A bear alongside’. This was the first they had seen. Lieutenant Frederick Innes-Lillingston described the scramble: ‘we deserted the tea-table at once filled with memories of great naval heroes’ and ‘were soon on deck with our rifles’. A few of the officers got in a boat and gave chase to the nearest bear. One officer finally managed to ‘catch him with a crack shot of his Express’ and secured himself a skin, later made into ‘a handsome rug’. This was ‘the naval trophy’ for which they had long wished. The polar bear, ‘Nelson’s foe’, continued to prove a prime target for officers.123 In John Tillotson’s Adventures in the Ice the Nelson story provided inspirational potential. Describing ships trapped critically in ice north of Spitsbergen, Tillotson offered a whimsical evaluation: ‘It was here that young Nelson, actuated by that spirit of daring which always distinguished him, ventured on the ice on a fine moonlight night’.124 An article in The Boy’s Own Paper of 1879, ostensibly a short piece on the habits and characteristics of the polar bear, in the hands of John Knox Laughton became an instructive piece on the ‘resounding’ character of a ‘polar hero’.125 Whilst ‘a volume, and a good sized one too, could be easily filled with the adventures of sailors with these Arctic monsters’, Laughton asserted, it was only necessary to focus on ‘a strange and narrow escape’, whereby ‘England might have lost, by the claws and teeth of a Polar bear, one for whom the whole nation mourned in after years’. A large engraving by Pearson, after Westall’s oil painting, took pride of place as a ‘vivid lesson of indomitable courage and determination’, reinventing the boyhood drama of the Nelson episode for a new audience. Laughton reminded his readers to view the picture then hanging in the hall of Greenwich Hospital and quoted directly from Southey’s The Life of Nelson. In a reading climate of late-century sentimentalism, which produced an excessive focus on boyhood, it is not surprising that 116

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the bear anecdote continued to have an imaginative currency. Even notable naval scholars, such as Laughton, whilst beginning to reject the factual basis of Nelson’s polar heroics in their academic writings, persisted in re-using the image of the encounter in popular works. The bear would remain an attractive part of the Nelson myth for juvenile audiences. The Realm of the Ice King, another popular work published by the Religious Tract Society, which appeared in a new edition during the Arctic enthusiasms of 1891, promised to be more comprehensive, offering a distilled chronology of the century’s foremost explorations.126 This time around, the Phipps expedition was given the credit of tying together many centuries of British polar exploration and their ‘legendary’ heroes, from Hudson and Baffin, through Cook, to Ross, Parry and Franklin. An episode on Captain Buchan’s expedition towards the North Pole, which had sailed from the Thames in 1818, at once provided a continuation of the heroic narrative surrounding the Nelson engagement, and was prominently illustrated. With ships sequestered in the ice off Spitsbergen, one young officer endured a particularly lucky escape from a ‘man-eating’ polar bear: having burned some walrus fat ‘in the hope of attracting a bear to the spot’, his shot failed, he struck the beast with the stock of his musket, and, having wrestled it to the ground, the ‘bear was slain’. He rejoiced in ‘being able to show his friends in England so rare a trophy as the skin of a Polar bear’, something even the ‘great Naval hero’ had failed to achieve.127 H.W.G. Hyrst’s Adventures in the Arctic Regions, with the aim of ‘romanticising the lesser-known worthies of Arctic enterprise’, turned its back on the Phipps expedition. Although the Nelson episode was not explicitly mentioned, its visual reach was inescapable. A fine frontispiece and some sterling narrative carried forward the stock ‘encounter-trope’ of naval exploration hagiography in a new configuration; its longevity ensured. In place of Nelson was Alexander Fisher, doctor on board Hecla on William Edward Parry’s expedition in search of a northwest passage during 1819 – 20, engaging a ‘famished brute’ with panache, wielding his musket like a club. He ultimately secured ‘a specimen’ for his dissection table. In Hyrst’s narrative, a regaled heroic encounter became at once, in a new and modern configuration, a scientific necessity.128 117

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32a. Encountering the brute in the name of science. H.W.G. Hyrst’s Adventures in the Arctic Regions, 1910.

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32b. ‘Marvellous Achievements’ in a fanciful polar world. Jay Henry Mowbray’s Discovery of North Pole by Cook and Peary, 1909.

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32c. The heroic encounter as enduring trope. Frank Shaw’s First at the Pole, 1909.

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33. The encounter narrative stripped to its comic essentials, from Philip Reeve’s Horatio Nelson and His Victory, 2003.

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New renditions of the bear encounter continued to be diverse. In Jay Henry Mowbray’s unashamedly patriotic celebration of American North Pole discoveries, setting the ‘Marvellous Achievements of Dr Cook and Commander Peary’ alongside a narrative history of previous British expeditions, and illustrated with ‘more than 100 scenes of the polar regions and Portraits of Arctic Heroes’, the motif is used as the prominent frontispiece; sardonic, fantastic, mocking. In a ‘Polar World’ bedevilled by hordes of ravenous walruses and ferocious bears, a landscape in which ‘Nelson the future hero of England’ had won his spurs, a new generation of American explorers would be sure to rise to the challenge.129

DISTORTED TRUTHS

There are, of course, countless other examples of bear encounters in both factual and fictional accounts that have no Nelson connection. Yet an examination of juvenile literature across this period can readily show the ways in which the Nelson bear encounter as trope and motif provided a rich imaginative legacy. In popular late nineteenth-century works that blurred historical narratives with fictional figures, the myth left a discernible impression on many authors and their readership. The preface of a number of novels by Robert Ballantyne chimed with the promise that ‘truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction is a valuable assistant in the development of truth. Both therefore shall be used in these volumes’.130 Ballantyne’s masculine adventure tales were immensely popular, many times re-issued. He drew on a whole century’s worth of polar visual images and myths. When young boys took to the ice, their first encounter was frequently a perilous one, eye to eye with some sort of brutish, and invariably ravenous, bear. In Fast in the Ice, to give just one example, at a great distance from an ice-clad ship, a young sailor is only saved from a mauling by a fiendish bear by a large chasm in the ice. In another episode, after a long and daring fight, the bear is finally defeated by a lucky shot and the back end of the musket, and a jolly feast is enjoyed by all.131 In Captain Frank Shaw’s First at the Pole, published in 1909, British and American adventurers race to reach the North Pole, whilst a young 122

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Jack, who ‘dreamed about Polar bears ever since he was a kid’, steals from the ship and encounters a ‘monster bear’. Customarily, his rifle fails at the crucial moment, and he is left in a ‘perilous fix’ until saved by his comrades.132 The encounter here was a necessary plot device for the author, just so for many Nelson biographers, as it provided an opportunity to reveal the protagonist’s virtues, until then not called into action. The bear brought out bravery or cunning, or revealed cowardice in a central character, and became a necessary component of the genre. The encounters were formative, a rite of passage, a test of courage that won the audience. Consider William Kingston’s Arctic Adventures, which sold briskly in 1882 and enjoyed a number of reprints. In it, the Hardy Norseman heads north on a voyage to the ‘wonders of the Arctic Regions’. Stealing away from the ship, the young adventurers chance upon a ‘shaggy monster’ and, after a strange reversal of the trope – this time, it is the bear that has charge of the musket – ‘Master Bruin’ is defeated. On returning to their ship with the skin, ‘so valuable a prize’, they are reprimanded by the captain, although welcomed heartily by the crew, who enjoy and evening of grog and fresh meat.133 To abscond far across the ice and encounter a bear, in Kingston’s hands, was a telling experience for the fictional aspirant naval officer. This was familiar fodder for Kingston. In his Story of Nelson, a fictional account of a visit to Greenwich Hospital, a young boy is guided visually through the lessons of Nelson’s life by ‘the fine pictures illustrative of England’s naval victories’ hanging in the halls. His head swims with stories recalled by a procession of ‘crusty salts’, some of ‘many hundreds of the gallant veterans who had maintained the honour of Old England’. Enraptured with the display, the young chap stays for a few days and is sustained by entertaining tales: ‘we’ll fish out some of the men who long served with Nelson, and if he keeps his ears turning right and left he’ll hear many a yarn to astonish him’. Almost immediately the storytelling turns toward Arctic wonders, and the boy is transported amongst towers of ice and a storm of aggressive walruses. At once, ‘a very little fellow, with an axe in hand, springs to the bows’, and begins to repel the danger, ‘dealing his blows right and left at the heads of walruses till several were killed’. Who is the anonymous and timely hero? ‘That young lad was Nelson,’ Kingston declares. 123

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The excited fantasy continued: ‘for a long time they had little hope of getting the ships clear of the ice. Mr Nelson exerted himself to cut a channel to let them escape’. With a providential wind at precisely the moment Nelson required it, ‘they stood clear . . . just as it was expected that they would be frozen in. They found themselves free, and reached England in safety’.134 It is known, from the available facts, that the part played by the ‘plucky coxswain’ in the expedition was insignificant. Yet, in Kingston’s narrative, the lives of all the men, the very deliverance of the expedition itself, were owed chiefly to Nelson. Yes, this was just a children’s book, but the exaggerations are pretty impressive. It certainly points to a process of how legends can be made and passed on; the way a barrage of images, astonishing facts, and anecdotal tall-tales are regaled to impressionable audiences, growing exponentially in the act of retelling. Sometimes the truth was overwritten, on other occasions new images were added to the mutating mix: an active palimpsest. Like a parlour game of whispers passed on, the truth was continually distorted. The Leeds stationer and self-titled ‘educational printer’ E.J. Arnold – who made his reputation in lively school books (and rather less-lively railway timetables) – used the bear episode to the limit of its didactic potential as part of an early twentieth-century young readers series, ‘Real Stories’. Key childhood episodes from the lives of heroic figures were a source for accessible and morally uplifting reading matter: ‘every one of these books contains an interesting true story . . . all historical . . . and in a simple form’, the advertising wrappers reassured parents. And so, in Florence Tapsell’s I Want to be a Sailor, which proved a favourite in the series running to at least seven editions, Nelson fought with a huge white bear on the ice, whilst providing a keen lesson to unruly children: ‘It was brave of Nel-son not to be a-fraid of the bear; but he ought not to have left the ship with-out leave. The cap-tain was very cross with him. He told him that if he want-ed to be a good sail-or, he must al-ways do as he was told’.135 By the time these children were possibly using the Nelson story to teach their own children to read, a new collection had mastered the market. ‘Adventure for History’, introduced by Ladybird in the 1950s, quickly became the most far-reaching children’s series of the twentieth century. Lawrence du Garde Peach’s The Story of Nelson was an immediate hit when first published in 1957, and was lavishly, if a little 124

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energetically, illustrated by John Kenney. A heroic little Nelson, fully clad in furs as some sort of native Inuit, rode the rigging impervious to the ‘cruel conditions of the north’.136 Meanwhile, the Eagle comic serialised the Nelson story weekly for eight months during 1956 – 7 and the bear encounter filled a colourful back page.137 Another Eagle cartoon asked its young readers ‘to guess the hero’ through six vivid clues and again the bear was a crucial element in the iconographical sequence of Nelson’s life. A new ‘Ladybird Nelson’ appeared in 1980, written by Frank Humphris, and took the opportunity to reinforce the now-familiar account of Nelson’s northern adventure. Taking its lead direct from Southey’s text, Westall’s image found a new configuration: theatrical pose, a stage of ice, a distant ship and an increasingly implausible, yet rather comic, polar bear.138 An even more recent rendering of the encounter episode appeared in Philip Reeve’s Horatio Nelson and His Victory, part of the incredibly popular and gleefully irreverent ‘Dead Famous’ series published by Scholastic. Reeve’s cartoon neatly captured the episode’s absurdity and posturing.139 It is certain that there will be yet more versions of the incident. Firmly embedded as the formative experience of a hero’s childhood, the simple fact that it is all a fiction is, perhaps, a futile point to

34. ‘What’s His Name?’, a cartoon published in The Eagle, 1953.

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make. Nelson’s encounter with a bear, thoroughly entrenched in the visual language of the Nelson myth, continues to prove a curious part not only of his story but of the polar regions more generally, an imaginative space that is at the heart of British maritime and exploration folklore.

INVENTING THINGS

Two hundred years after Nelson’s death at Trafalgar the new Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, like Southey before him, turned his thoughts to the nature of Nelson’s appeal. The image of Nelson as hero had captured his boyhood imaginations, and Motion offered this very personal response: Dad got home late, and I never heard the gravel Or his door-clunk in the drive-through, Still less his shoeless step As he crept to perch on my bedside. ‘What have we here?’ It was a Yeomanry day or used to be, And not even the thick whiskery cloth Of his battle-dress trousers Could blunt the edge of a Ladybird under the covers. ‘Nelson, dad.’ He squared his shoulders. The order was: no reading after lights out, So I was caught cold – like the polar bear I’d just seen dispatched In the pack-ice off Spitzbergen. On the other hand, Nelson was England’s darling. I’d seen that too, in the cock-pit death-scene With Hardy’s kiss on my forehead. Dad checked a page, before his weight lifted and went. I fell at once into a dream of Victory – How she wallowed through Biscay, With her battle-tatters smoking – 126

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Then gave my signal for a change in nature. At which she side-stepped her Channel lane, Shimmied over the Hampshire hills, Caught the surge of London, And made fast to a spire of Westminster Overlooking Trafalgar Square. With that, the famous brandy barrel Burst its ropes at the main mast, And the man himself slithered out Crumpled and glistening as a baby But perfectly fit again. He proved this by scaling the column A grateful nation had raised for him, And leaned on his coil of rope to wait For as long as it took to stiffen into stone. Next morning, with dad in his city suit again, I woke in time to snaffle his Times at breakfast And rolled it into a telescope So I could show him my grasp of history. ‘What have we here?’ This time of course I couldn’t answer. The thing was pressed to my blind left eye, And supposing I’d said ‘Your face’ He would know I was only inventing things.140

Constructed in the afterglow of victory, Southey’s Nelson was clothed in a rich language of patriotism and was presented as the model whose example could inspire servicemen. Motion’s Nelson, struggling for modern relevance in a bicentenary year, was more immediate, and more human, yet shares so much with Southey’s creation. The image of Nelson as hero is an appealing mix of memory, adventure, invention, and a fleet of real achievements. The Nelson story continues to be a source for multiple imaginations. For the benefit of ‘those who like to read slowly and meditate on what they read’, Geoffrey Callender’s 1922 edition of Southey’s Life of Nelson provided a series of questions in an extended appendix.141 Readers were encouraged to expand on Southey’s views of the French Revolution, to 127

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draw a plan of ‘what happened’ in the Bay of Santa Cruz, to collect ‘halfa-dozen pithy sayings of Nelson’ and commit them to memory, to give detailed explanations on going ‘athwart-hawse’, the use of ‘langridge’, and the location of the ‘mizzen-peak’.142 Deftly avoiding these tricky tasks, the reader could tackle a more pertinent puzzle. ‘The story of the bear is undoubtedly true’, Callender stated, but ‘would you admire Nelson any the less if it could be proved untrue?’ Attempting to clarify the uncertainties surrounding this episode in Nelson’s life does not mean that one has to bring the hero off the ice altogether. We can certainly begin to scrutinise the ‘Nelson myth’ more generally, and to pen its narrative outlines more clearly, without making an assault on Nelson or his bear. Examining the passage of this polar anecdote, as represented in a selection of biographies, popular journals, children’s books, poetry, and art, helps make clear the processes by which images are manipulated, transmitted, and historicised, the ways in which myths themselves are made. Academic study need not just be a case of traducing heroes and pulling apart the myths that sustain them. Documenting the durability, instrumentality, and popular appeal of myth is a more useful and realistic exercise than attempting to provide a definitive version of events. Examining one small part of the Nelson mythology allows us to consider the commemorative trajectory of the hero and the construction of enduring naval hagiographies. In the scheme of Nelson’s eventful life and his unquestionable naval successes this Arctic expedition is of limited significance. The tale’s truth is questionable, but it’s certainly interesting to consider how such an account came to be relished by parents and children alike, and how Nelson’s exploits informed a generation of Victorians who grew up with the cult of polar exploration. The question is not merely about Nelson in the Arctic, but rather the idea of the Navy itself in the Arctic. Striking images of naval heroes – some real, others invented – were promoted and manipulated to sustain the project of exploration. The polar bear image seems irrelevant yet it can be read in terms of a larger fiction: part of a national mythology of naval engagement in the polar regions, a narrative that was first articulated by Barrow, and later by Markham, and which was advanced throughout the nineteenth century. 128

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As the years passed there were many new heroes. Whilst Nelson’s lasting fame was hard-won in battle, the reputation of John Ross, for example, was forged amongst the ice, yet he is now more a notorious caricature than one of exploration’s brightest stars. This chapter has been a journey through many decades of imagining, but the next will focus instead on the years 1833 – 5. For a man like Ross it was not enough just to supply an image of the Navy engaging the Arctic; he had to be centre stage. He had learnt the hard way that it was too great a risk to leave his reputation to others and his ambition outgrew metaphorical bears in the ice. He would take matters into his own hands.

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35. The theatre of exploration. Captain Ross; or, The Hero of the Arctic Regions, playbill for 13 March 1834.

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The North Star

Hope long deferred, sickened by the hearts of thousands who merely knew the adventurers by name, but who appreciated notwithstanding their high moral courage and self-devotion; and as the winter storm raged, drew closer by the fire, and thought of those whom misadventure might have deprived of a hut or a husk for shelter and food, amidst the iron inclemencies of a polar winter. Despair, in short, had begun to seize the public mind.1

As Captain John Ross and his men were enduring the darkness of yet another polar winter the British public were unaware of their survival. Since leaving London full of confidence in the summer of 1829 there had been no word and many at home doubted that they would ever return. By 1833, after growing anxieties, subscriptions and florid newspaper eulogies had resulted in a search effort being mounted, most still believed that the explorers had met a gruesome end. It was into this atmosphere – of a pitch of public anticipation enveloped by the spectre of death – that a very healthy Ross landed in Hull taking the stage dressed in his seal-skin trousers. And at the heart of this incredible public interest, there was a silence: what had Ross done in those four Arctic winters? How had he survived to enact a quite remarkable rescue? What had been achieved? Ross set about to answer these questions by orchestrating a wide range of media – newspaper interviews, panoramic paintings, a bestselling book, a Vauxhall Gardens outdoor spectacular – in a bid to become known as the nation’s pre-eminent explorer. For a while at least his efforts paid off. He was feˆted by his admirers at gala functions, dined with royalty, and was gifted with poems and gold snuffboxes, a governmental grant, a knighthood, and the Founder’s Medal of the Geographical Society of London. Yet, it was not all a mindless adulation.

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Amid the chorus of praise there remained a healthy level of scepticism about the merits of his heroic image and the value of polar voyages more generally. In time there would be boisterous debates in the House of Commons and even an official enquiry where his achievements were scrutinised as never before. As Ross’s immediate celebrity waned he was unable to secure what he wanted the most: an enduring reputation.

HERO OF THE ARCTIC REGIONS

John Ross’s Victory expedition of 1829–33 occupies a pivotal position in story of the Northwest Passage explorations of the first half of the nineteenth century, between those that took place in the immediate years following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and Franklin’s fateful expedition, which left England in 1845. It is important in many ways: it was not a naval expedition, but instead the first privately-funded venture; it was pioneering in its application of a steamship for the purposes of polar exploration; it was the first to overcome four successive winters; sledging campaigns added new coastlines to the chart; and they were the first to accurately ascertain, and ‘reach’, the North Magnetic Pole.2 There was clearly a lot that went wrong too. The much-vaunted steam equipment was a total failure. Read with modern eyes, original journals of the voyage reveal his woeful man-management and erratic decision-making and the discovery of the Magnetic Pole was arguably an achievement of limited value. Yet the Ross expedition was received with an unprecedented level of popular celebration. It is interesting to ask why this was the case and to consider what role Ross played in the process. Equally, for a variety of reasons – most notably some vitriolic condemnation by John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, founding member and President of the Geographical Society of London – the memory of Ross as an explorer was not long cherished in the public consciousness. His death in 1856 was not met with an outpouring of affection, as with other explorer-heroes, nor with an array of publications dedicated to drawing meaning from his life. There were to be no hagiographic biographies, no grand statue to grace a 132

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36. ‘Hero of the Arctic’: John Ross the explorer celebrity, popular souvenir prints from 1833 – 4.

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metropolitan square, nor eulogies cast in oils upon canvas. Though hugely famous in the immediate years after his return in 1833, Ross’s ‘heroic image’ soon lost its lustre and his memory has not fared well in recent accounts either. The job of reappraising his life only really began in 1973 with the publication of Ernest Dodge’s Polar Rosses, which also looked at James Clark Ross, the nephew who joined him on the Victory expedition.3 The most comprehensive account yet written is by Maurice Ross, the greatgrandson of James, and it presented John as an Arctic ‘pioneer’ within a rich exploration history.4 Yet there is much that can be added to our understanding of the man and there is much that must be added, for John Ross has been reduced in other accounts to the state of a caricature, his image oversimplified. Most dwell on the failure of his first Arctic voyage in 1818, the ensuing ‘Croker Mountains’ controversy, and spice up their narratives by stressing the ongoing acrimony with Barrow. Ross is the ‘man who was fooled by a mirage’; he was ‘cantankerous, selfish and unstable’; he was ‘the bungling inept’ who went to discover a northwest passage but found only red snow, and so returned in disgrace.5 But I’d say we owe Ross the benefit of a more sophisticated scrutiny. Many of these caustic treatments belie the fact that he was one of the most widely admired explorers of his generation. In an instant he had become Britain’s newest hero. Rarely had exploration as an activity, or the Arctic as a place, been so firmly in the public eye. It was in every sense a national excitement. This chapter offers an insight into the particular ingredients of the public idea of heroism at this moment in the 1830s, to try and better appreciate the way these ideas were formed and contested. Ross’s heroism was populist yet open to many different interpretations. As the highly-visible actor in this drama of heroic return, he managed and manipulated his image as an explorer fully deserving of the laurels that were being bestowed upon him, briefing the press, self-publishing books, issuing prints and endorsing souvenirs, and presiding over a series of lavish panoramas, the Georgian equivalent of a blockbuster movie. Evidence from all of these sources can be pieced together to recreate a reception geography of his achievements. It improves our understanding of the popular culture of exploration and the atmosphere of public interest in which exploration results were celebrated, justified, and debated. Though he wasn’t the first explorer 134

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to recognise the value of presenting an appealing image of his efforts, it might fairly be said that Ross was the first Arctic ‘celebrity’ – if one can bear the modern incarnation of the term.6

THE FRENZY OF RENOWN

Though biographies have often concerned themselves with fame and the nature of the exceptional life, celebrity itself has now received wide scrutiny from cultural theorists and sociologists as well as film analysts and theatre historians.7 Most simply thought of as the condition of being ‘much talked about’, celebrity as a concept focuses our attention on the interplay between individuals, institutions, markets, and media representations.8 Daniel Boorstin’s seminal study The Image defined modern celebrity as the manufacture of secular human heroes, representing an alternative structure of authority and an expedient route to power. Yet, the celebrity is essentially powerless: though momentarily in control, the individual is ultimately at the mercy of the market. Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown highlighted the mechanics of public performance upon which popular reputations are often founded; the fictional contrivance of staged events being a key component of a manufactured popular image. It is easy to see this in our modern world, but when did this peculiar state of frenzy really begin? Following Chris Rojek’s lead, we can examine late-Georgian celebrity within a framework that is, for want of a better word, poststructuralist.9 Moving beyond thinking about the personal qualities that led to an individual’s renown allows us to consider instead the intricate sets of negotiations through which the representation and consumption of ‘achieved’ celebrity took place.10 The rationale for this argument arises from the conviction that celebrity is above all a media production: it is only in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth century that an extensive apparatus for disseminating fame emerges. Ross became a ‘new media hero’ whose image was sustained by a vigorous print culture and spectacular forms of visual representation. By returning to these sources, we can anchor this loose phenomenon of celebrity to a range of social, economic, aesthetic, and imaginative negotiations. In this way, this 135

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chapter will attempt to better understand the various meanings of Ross’s heroism and the changing shape of his reputation. Not only does this suggest the fickle nature of popular sensation in this period, but this approach also gives us insight into the character of a man actively trying to manage his public profile. What is remarkable in the case of Ross is the extent of his personal involvement in creating his heroic image, and how far his image was circulated in this emerging public realm of representation. This new cultural context of representation was a result of changing patterns of readership, the economics of publishing, new technologies of vision, and the growing possibility of ‘mass’ consumption.11 The 1830s may be regarded as marking a watershed in the history of the printed image, just before reforms to the Stamp Act and other ‘taxes on knowledge’ combined with mid-century technological developments – steamdriven printing presses, the railways, the trans-Atlantic telegraph – to revolutionise the business of news-gathering and distribution. By the time Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, improvements in engraving and printing techniques were already making possible the production of cheap newspapers and periodicals that mixed text with fashionable illustrations. Though it would be ten years before those most famous printed periodicals of the Victorian period, the comic weekly Punch and The Illustrated London News, would bring visions of the cultural life of the metropolis into homes across the country, there were many other printed mediums for the news of exploration to be carried to an eager readership.12 If you are willing to dig deep into archival collections, a vast deposit of printed materials useful to the polar historian can be found that enrich our understanding of the culture of exploration. In theatre playbills, illustrated weeklies, provincial newspapers, and through a huge number of cheap magazines – far more accessible to most at this time than the long-established quarterlies such as The Edinburgh Review and the London-based Quarterly Review, which form the mainstay of previous histories – the achievements of exploration were read, debated, and revisited by large sections of the population. Engaging this range of print culture enables us to approach the Ross voyages as his contemporaries may have understood them. Just as new technologies of vision – the panorama and the illustrated periodical, among many others – were opening public 136

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imaginations to the world, so too new scientific societies were attempting to comprehend it. In a decade in which the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geographical Society of London were founded, the image of exploration provided a vehicle of spectacle that enabled these bodies to increase their public visibility.13 Yet at a time of increasing social and economic unrest in the country – in the context of changes in the monarchy, pressures on agriculture, popular movements, and widespread agitations for political reform – it is true to say that polar exploration was, for the most part, of marginal significance to the national attention. So how exactly can one explain the tremendous excitement, a public sensation by all accounts, surrounding Ross’s return in 1833, and the huge resurgence in public interest in the Arctic that followed it? This chapter will provide some answers to explain this excitement, dubbed ‘the polar mania-Rossiana’ by some contemporary journals. Having been absent amongst the ice for four winters, Ross returned home not only to a new monarch, the ‘Sailor-King’ William IV, but also to a nation whose political landscape had been changed dramatically by the ‘Great Reform Act’ of 1832.14 In a period of considerable uncertainty, Ross mobilised a language of national achievement that was inspiring and reassuring.15 We can attempt to redraw a profile of this popular opinion. Ross encouraged the idea that his exploit had a national significance, casting it in populist terms to buttress his claims for financial reward. His language of patriotism transformed his private expedition into one that was public-spirited and this provided a platform for the making of his popular celebrity. Arctic exploration caught the imaginations of a weary public, a welcome diversion from the pressures of every-day life, and by following vivid accounts in the newspapers and in a tremendous variety of other visual forms they too could follow the new naval hero, ‘Brave Captain Ross’, and escape into the marvellous spaces of the North.

CONTROVERSIAL BEGINNINGS

It is fair to say, however, that the return of Ross’s first Arctic voyage was a public disaster. The expedition sailed from London on 18 April 1818 137

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and brought fair reward: he proved the existence of Baffin Bay, confirming William Baffin’s discoveries of 1616 at a time when they had been dismissed by many as a fantasy, and he opened up the bay to the whaling fleets, which brought considerable benefit to the industry. He also made first contact with, and extensively described, the Inuit of northern Greenland, and returned with a variety of scientific observations. He landed the trophies of his discoveries at Whitehall Stairs – including four native dogs, a large bearskin, a bone sledge, ‘some very remarkable star fish’, and ‘some other curiosities’ – and they were rapidly sent to the British Museum to be put on public display.16 In other circumstances his safe return may have brought a measure of congratulation, but his inability to make any progress further westward in search of a navigable passage aroused criticism. It was the first voyage of a new era. People didn’t want it all to be over so soon. Lancaster Sound was the setting of a notorious misjudgement that would shape his future career. On 30 August he was deceived by a mirage and decided that the way ahead was blocked by a mountain range – the Croker Mountains, as he named them – and he turned back. Edward Parry, following at some distance behind him in Alexander, didn’t see any mountains and after their early return home in November 1818 continued to maintain that Lancaster Sound was an open strait. The quarrel over the Sound, which erupted in an exchange of differing opinions in the press and soon produced a rally of pamphlets, so overshadowed the positive achievements of the expedition that it quickly came to be thought of as a disaster. Ross found himself the victim of this failure – although he was promoted to Captain, and thanked by the Admiralty, he never again took command of a naval ship – and when Parry sailed triumphantly through the Sound on his voyage the following year, his ignominy was complete. As Admiralty Secretary, John Barrow had lobbied hard to promote the expedition. He charged Ross with gross incompetence and made a bitter assault on his abilities as a naval officer. Ross’s ingloriously short tour of Baffin Bay had led to his declaration that a northwest passage was ‘impracticable’, even non-existent, and this challenged the very heart of Barrow’s exploration programme. At loggerheads with Barrow, Ross also insisted in preparing his journal for publication without official support, whilst Barrow set about discrediting him in a vitriolic 138

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attack in The Quarterly Review. Referring to his voyage as a ‘pleasure cruise’, and damning him for turning away from the challenge of finding a passage, this savaging of Ross’s reputation would leave him with few hopes of commanding a naval expedition again. Ross’s journal of the voyage was published as an expensive quarto volume in 1819, just as people were raising doubts about his competence. It was obvious that the very definition of what it meant to be an explorer, and a public ‘hero’, was up for grabs.17 He also became embroiled in an unseemly dispute with the young artillery officer Edward Sabine, who had accompanied the voyage as its jobbing astronomer; an argument which called into question Ross’s abilities as a ‘man of science’, but also drew attention to the issue of trust in the field, and the question of who should credit from polar discoveries.18 Ross also found himself set upon by those who thought, conversely, that the idea of a passage itself was worthless. His efforts were parodied by the caricaturists, even taken up in an ambitious satire by one anonymous hack who likened the returning explorer to Baron Munchausen, all puff and vanity, and consumed by his search for self-aggrandisement: the shameless performer in his own pageant of ‘folly and falsehood’.19 This was rough treatment for Ross, a decorated naval officer and war veteran who had fought with distinction on a number of stations, and it would be ten years before he was able to return to the Arctic again. Having become, in his years of semi-retirement, something of an authority on steam power, he conceived of an expedition on a smaller scale, a single steam-powered vessel with a shallow draught to enable it to navigate unexplored costal waters. He had even managed to encourage his wealthy friend Felix Booth – owner of a successful gin distillery, and a new sheriff of London – to support the project.20 With the steam engine misfiring, his ship Victory slipped its moorings in the Thames on 23 May 1829. Ross turned his hopes northward in a bid to answer his critics and salvage his reputation.

REPORTING EXPLORATION

After an absence of four years, news that Ross and his crew were alive stunned the nation. When Ross made his dramatic return to the public 139

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gaze late in 1833 London was in the middle of a print culture revolution. The potential for popular representation had never been higher, and there would be many competing mediums in which his image as an explorer was circulated. Unsurprisingly, newspapers were first to respond and details spread quickly. Within the week other public journals added to the story. It is interesting to attempt to describe the geography of the way this information circulated in print, recapturing the making of a public sensation. Taking a representative range of metropolitan and provincial newspapers, we can follow the news as it travelled across Britain. Examining how Ross’s heroism was constructed helps us to appreciate a time when an explorer’s return could be a genuine ‘national celebration’. The first words came in The Edinburgh Observer on 15 October, after a letter arrived from a ship that had met the whaler Isabella in Davis Strait. ‘Accounts suggest that the intrepid navigator may be alive, when even the most sanguine of his friends had given over all hopes of his return’.21 Newspapers that had previously carried morbid eulogies, now rejoiced in his salvation. ‘With what pleasing emotions do we now behold the scene reversed’ confirmed The Edinburgh Evening Courant, ‘and we scarcely remember any occurrence which has diffused such a heartfelt satisfaction among all classes’. The ‘miraculous’ prospect of the ‘gallant Captain’s return’, The Edinburgh Observer agreed, should be a point of ‘national celebration’, in a mix of naval pride and genuine relief.22 The Glasgow Free Press picked up the ‘joyful’ story of ‘the Arctic Wanderer’ in its pages the following morning. The Caledonian Mercury and Glasgow Herald both carried the same news in their next editions, whilst The Edinburgh Observer offered more praise for the ‘heroic Captain’ in a leading article on 18 October.23 Though the particulars of the voyage, and the record of its discoveries, were yet to be disclosed newspaper editors were certain that the expedition should be celebrated. Whether ‘laden with the fruits of discovery’, or revealed to have ‘been so hopeless an enterprise’, for now, the very fact that Ross and his crews had struggled to safety was an ‘inspirational’ story that deserved attention. ‘The gallant band of adventurers return safe from their perilous voyage to the scenes of civilised life’, concluded The Edinburgh Evening Courant in a typical commentary, ‘and they return to the pleasing task of relating, for the instruction of others, the adventures, the perils and hair-breadth 140

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escapes which they must have encountered during their long sojourn in the desolate abodes of winter’.24 The Morning Herald broke the news in London early on 17 October, as extracts of information were rushed down from the Scottish newspapers. ‘Although accounts are exceedingly meagre’, its editor announced, ‘we have scarcely a doubt that Captain Ross has accomplished his object, has pernavigated the Polar seas, and solved the great geographical problem of the North-West Passage’. They even suggested that Ross had penetrated to the Pole itself. ‘Rescued from the dead’, another journalist thrilled, this ‘miraculous restoration’ promises to be ‘the sensational story of the year’.25 The news reached Birmingham that morning via the Liverpool newspapers and William Hodgetts published an announcement in his weekly Advertiser. He continued to offer accounts in the months that followed.26 Receiving tidings from the Lloyds agent in Aberdeenshire, John Taylor spread the word in the pages of The Bristol Mirror, sending the news forth from his Small Street printing office to his readership across the west counties and southern Wales.27 Over the Irish Sea in Dublin, the five-penny Evening Mail sourced its information from the city’s postmaster general, who had received

37. ‘Captain Ross in his Polar Dress, with a View of Boothia Felix and the Aurora Borealis’, souvenir print by William Wright, 1834.

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his intelligence from his counterpart in Peterhead. A few days later The Dublin Observer offered its paean to Ross’s ‘gallant heroism’, wedged in its columns between the latest news of a shop robbery, a miscellany on the London fashions, and an account of a fire at a local button factory. The following week Dublin audiences were offered a full supplement of accounts pulled from Hull, York, and Scottish newspapers, as well as a colourful description of Ross’s gifting of two polar bears to the Surrey Zoological Gardens.28 The York Herald, a market-day weekly published by William Hargrove and one of the principal sporting papers in England, also announced the news on 19 October, giving its punters a potted history of polar voyages since 1818 and a series of comments relating to the heroic aspects of exploration.29 The next day, Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, a Sunday paper containing ‘sixty-four columns of the latest politics, reviews and chitchat’, carried extracts from The Edinburgh Advertiser and The Glasgow Free Press to expand on its account of the missing expedition’s deliverance.30 The weekly Manchester Herald offered its account on 23 October, with a hack pre´cis of exploration history, a story about the ‘improving merits’ of polar endeavour, and extracts from papers that had circulated the ‘fabulous news’ in the previous week.31 As each newspaper looked to add to its coverage, there was one event that was reported verbatim in every town across the country: the explorer’s landing on home soil. Ross arrived in Hull aboard a Rotterdam steam-packet on the morning of 18 October. The Hull Advertiser stopped its presses and was the first to describe the ‘joyous scenes’, rushing a new edition into print later that evening. Its coverage provided the lead material on this ‘heroic return’, and its text was reproduced in almost every British newspaper in the week that followed: ‘The hardy veteran was dressed in seal-skin trousers, with the hair outwards, over which he wore a faded naval uniform, and the weather beaten countenances of himself and his companions bore evident marks of the hardships they had undergone’.32 Accompanied by James Ross, the surgeon George MacDiarmid, William Thom, the purser, and Captain Humphreys of Isabella, Ross made his way to a local hotel. Word was spreading rapidly through the town and a huge crowd was gathering. The town’s mayor and local dignitaries were on hand to ‘offer their warm congratulations’ and they led Ross through the crowded streets for refreshment at the Hull Mansion House. 142

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Church bells rang out, colours were hoisted on every ship in port, and a public dinner was got up for the afternoon. After a long series of speeches Ross ventured out onto the hotel roof to address the throng on the street below and, having accepted the freedom of the town in a lavish silver box, he promptly left on a steamer for London. He arrived there the next day and put up at the Portland Hotel. On Sunday, accompanied by his nephew, he visited the Admiralty; they left ‘their cards at all the Government offices in Downing Street’; and later that evening travelled out to Windsor, where they had the honour of dining with the King.

A HERO IN PRINT

News spread to all corners of Britain as editors pulled together all the information they could find. By way of an example let’s look closely at Guernsey, an island that Ross knew well serving under the flag of James Saumarez. As elsewhere, the news of his return was received here ‘with an outpouring of public relief and immense feelings of joy’. William Maillard provided the readers of The Comet – a paper with circulation across the Channel Islands and ports on the English south coast – with their first details on 21 October, extracting information from a number of Scottish papers with the commentary that had broken the story in the 15 October Edinburgh Observer. Maillard was a patriotic publisher who had served as a seaman in the Navy during the wars, so it’s hardly a surprise he took up the story with enthusiasm.33 At the same time, Henry Brouard, competing proprietor of The Star, offered his coverage of the sensation with an ‘eyewitness account’ borrowed from The Sun and a colourful description of the ‘hardy veteran and his seal-skin trousers’ clipped from The Edinburgh Advertiser.34 Readers in Guernsey could buy the next issue of Maillard’s Comet on the afternoon of Friday 25 October and it contained a sequence of extracts borrowed from the British newspapers: there was testimony from the crew, cut from the Caledonian Mercury; a series of items pulled from the previous Saturday’s Hull Rockingham; and The Hull Advertiser’s account of his triumphant arrival. Maillard also offered his own commentary, praising ‘gallantry’ and ‘national spirit’: ‘On the whole, it may be truly said that this expedition has done more than any that has 143

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preceded it, and be it remembered that Captain Ross and his nephew were volunteers serving without pay for the attainment of a great national object, in prosecuting which they have lost their all’.35 At this stage, the most comprehensive account of the voyage, and its quest for this apparently ‘great national object’, was a letter written by Ross to George Elliot, First Secretary to the Admiralty, which he had composed in September whilst safely aboard his rescuer Isabella as she continued her whaling in Baffin Bay. Just days after his arrival, the letter was released by the Admiralty to the press. It was this outline, written as it was with a measured stoic detachment, in a language that also swam with his religious convictions, which provided the first major source for his immediate renown. Newspapers throughout the country reprinted the text of his letter in the following week. It was a statement of exploration achievement that reflected well on the Navy and which catapulted Ross into the public estimation.36 It was a carefully constructed narration of his progress over those four exacting winters, a sort of hymn of coastal discoveries and the forbearance of his companions. In Guernsey, Maillard published the letter on 1 November, though it’s likely that his readers would have already seen it in other papers arriving on the island. He placed Barrow’s announcement alongside notes on Ross’s naval career plucked from The Courier and roughly extracted from Marshall’s Royal Naval Biography.37 In London, a number of enterprising printers recycled the text of Ross’s letter by creating small pamphlets, which often featured crudely engraved plates lifted from other narratives, in the hope of turning a quick profit.38 The Gentleman’s Magazine included the letter in its October edition with a sketch of Ross’s progress in the metropolis and an exuberant commentary that echoed the tenor of public opinion: ‘his safe return has diffused one universal feeling of joy throughout the empire’.39 The Nautical Magazine agreed: Behold Captain Ross himself, and his little band of hardy fellows appear among us! . . . no satisfaction was ever more general than that occasioned by the safe return of the travellers; every heart was gladdened by feelings of humanity, and, whether discoveries of a scientific kind had been achieved or not, all rejoiced that he was come home.40 144

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For many people, the real usefulness of exploration was in its potential to inspire. ‘Casting aside any criticisms’, said The Nautical Magazine, ‘we rest our approval of these and similar expeditions on the sole and simple grounds of their utility, in exciting a spirit of enterprise, of which, till these degenerate days, England was justly proud’.41 Here was a story to stir the idle patriotisms of susceptible audiences. As a vehicle for this patriotism – manipulated as it was by the rhetoric of eager editors – the voyages could have real value. Could exploration be the means of restoring national pride? Might an explorer reinvigorate a nation’s vitality? Well, what is certain is that for many publishers exploration meant a profitable source of copy. Let’s consider the construction of heroism in other periodicals. The cheap miscellany, for example, was one of the primary means of structuring the new reading audience, as both commercially and ideologically motivated publishers began realise the potential of the emerging technologies of book production. The adventures of explorers provided factual and uplifting subject matter and these accessible improving magazines became a major means for the public to learn about exploration.42 In the diverse and rapidly expanding reading culture of the 1830s imagining explorers could satisfy a range of interests. One of the leading miscellanies was The Mirror of Literature, launched by John Limbird in 1822, offering a weekly mix of reading matter in a closely printed twopenny octavo. Its blend of original contributions and choice extracts was in the spirit of the traditional miscellany like The Gentleman’s Magazine, yet it managed to capture a much wider audience. That it was able to respond to events reported in the news gave it a popular following, at a time when newspapers, most priced at sevenpence, remained relatively expensive. It bettered the competition by adding wood engravings, a significant attraction for sales, which soon exceeded fifteen thousand copies.43 It was avowedly apolitical, ‘giving no offence to the government’, rather concentrating on ‘useful knowledge’ and subjects of a ‘strict moral character’, which enabled it to reach an inclusive audience.44 At the same time, Limbird used unorthodox distribution techniques, such as his own system of ‘newsmen’ and street-corner sellers and a city-wide advertising campaign of posting and handbills, which ensured his magazine an unprecedented circulation.45 ‘Literature, 145

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Amusement, and Instruction’ maximized his market share.46 Instead of dry factual accounts explorers were presented in resounding terms: The maritime superiority of Great Britain is not confined to the ascendancy of its naval armaments, or to those triumphs that have annihilated whole fleets, swept oceans, and laid every shore open to us, from Nova Zembla to the Pole. Our pre-eminence in maritime science is equally evident, and we surpass all the rest of the world in the zeal and success which our navigators discover and explore new countries, open new sources of human intercourse, extend the blessings of civilisation, and advance those branches of natural history, which are at once curious and useful.47

This confidence found a renewed articulation at the height of the polar interest in 1833. Readers of The Mirror could be comforted and entertained by revisiting the record of ‘those gallant naval officers who crown the nation’s annals’, and Ross became the latest in a long line of polar heroes in his pages.48 Other journals fuelled the renewed public interest by providing new texts and new images using the latest techniques of stereotyping and steam printing. Ross’s miraculous return prompted The Saturday Magazine, a new penny weekly, to issue a series of supplements detailing the history of naval Arctic explorations. They also attempted to explain the innate and long-standing ‘British attachment’ to all things polar. ‘The existence of a North-West Passage’, began its November special, ‘is a question which has exercised the ingenuity of the learned for the last three centuries; and the return of our adventurous countryman Captain Ross has once again created a lively interest upon the subject among all classes’.49 Accompanied by striking images borrowed from old travel narratives – notably those of Parry, Lyon, and Franklin – the magazine’s narration of Arctic heroics was uniformly positive. Constructed in this way, the actions of explorers could demonstrate characteristics to define an idea of the national virtue, being persevering, gallant, patriotic, and adventurous. For the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which had appointed a ‘Committee of General Literature and Education’ in 1832 to direct the content of The Saturday Magazine, the story of naval exploration deserved to be ‘frequently retold’.50 The failure of Ross’s first voyage was recast as the moment that 146

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had made him strive for future success on his life journey. In this sense, failure was turned to an ‘inspirational’ triumph, and the ‘Croker Controversy’ would lay the seeds for his improving heroism: It will not, of course, be supposed, that the chivalrous honour of a British seaman, could tamely brook a censure so directly impugning his personal and professional character. To vindicate his wounded reputation from the stain, which, to his jealous eye, seemed to rest upon it, became, therefore, with this gallant officer, an object of paramount importance; for the attainment of which, neither the sacrifice of his property, nor the venture of his life were thought too great a price.51

Ross was able to redeem his previous failings by applying his thoughts to a task far greater than himself. For the readers of The Saturday Magazine, as can be seen in other serials of this type, the principal benefit of polar exploration lay in its imaginative and instructional value. The results of the Ross expedition ‘lack any immediate practical benefit’, the journal decided, but an appealing ‘incentive’ for exploration sprung up in its place: exploration ‘reaffirmed’ the ongoing strength of the national character and readers could take encouragement from the journey of the ‘exemplary’ individual.52 Other religious periodicals took up this theme. In the Youth’s Magazine, a four-pence monthly published by the Sunday School Union, his heroism was defined by his success as an ‘exemplary Christian’.53 We remember that in the first major statement of his achievements – the letter composed for the Admiralty in September – Ross had described the benefits of his religious conviction and, widely printed, this articulation of faith pleased his public. ‘The glory of this enterprise is entirely due to Him whose divine favour has been most especially manifested towards us’, he would write, ‘who guided and directed all our steps; who mercifully provided, in what we had deemed a calamity, His effectual means of our preservations; and who, even after the devices and inventions of man had utterly failed, crowned our humble endeavours with complete success’.54 The son of a Scottish minister, Ross’s convictions were genuine yet they also made for appealing copy for these sorts of publications. His triumph over difficulty was presented as a spiritual journey, a path to 147

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38. Ross the magazine hero: Arctic adventure as inspirational material in the improving journals: The Saturday Magazine, Pinnock’s Guide to Knowledge, The Mirror, and The People’s Magazine.

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38. Continued.

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38. Continued.

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salvation: a pilgrimage on which he had faced the difficulties of life, ‘whilst maintaining religion in the whole of his conduct’. In the hands of the Sunday School Union, Ross was a hero empowered by the strength of his faith. Specific details of discovery did not command these accounts, but rather the image of the individual; the example that he could present and the aspects of his character that could be mined by editors. Though the general conclusion, for many, was that a northwest passage of any sort was ‘pretty worthless’, Ross’s explorations had been re-scripted. Exploration could be a noble pursuit, just as reading about exploration was itself an acceptable form of rational recreation. Exploration was an ‘improving endeavour’, both for the explorer and for his audience, in its ability to reinforce piety, to cultivate youthful spirits, and to provide inspirational reading matter. To give one final example in this competitive culture of print, look to William Pinnock, a former schoolmaster turned enterprising metropolitan bookseller. In the pages of his penny weekly Guide to Knowledge, founded in the summer of 1833, polar explorers provided ‘appropriate’ moral lessons for his young readers and boosted sales. ‘In consequence of the lively interest excited by the recent arrival of Captain Ross’, the magazine announced that it would run a series of ‘lavishly-illustrated’ special numbers.55 Early in November, Pinnock adorned his front page with ‘an Interesting Map of the Polar Regions’, a graphic advertisement for an issue packed with ‘a concise History of the Discoveries made by Captains Ross, Parry and others’. He included a series of images of jaunty sailors adventuring for King and for Country amongst landscapes of towering ice. Exploration, he delighted, was unmatched in its potential to ‘interest and instruct’: ‘whether among the burning deserts of the torrid, or among the desolate and more dreary regions of the frigid zones, British genius, gallantry, and capital, have always been foremost in the field’.56

LION OF THE SEASON

As the season is yet young, any animal will do for a lion; and the animal now dressed in the skin is Captain Ross, who is playing the part at the various soire´es and conversazioni. . .57

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Pinnock was not alone in wishing to thank Ross for providing a rousing image of the national virtue. Just as praise was doubling in print others hoped to congratulate the hero in person. Within days of his arrival in London, Ross embarked on a series of guest appearances, which allowed him, as the actor in his own drama, to meet his public, to mediate with his audience – to enjoy a good feed whilst, at the same time, enhancing his celebrity.58 These dinner galas and theatrical functions were a central feature of fashionable social life in lateRegency London, and Ross instantly became the ‘must-have’ guest.59 The irreverent editors of The Age responded to this gush of popular admiration by following his movements in their weekly columns and labelling the polar sensation ‘Rossiana’. ‘Captain Ross since his return, as may be supposed, is quite a lion’, began a characteristic entry, ‘he is, if not the “glass of fashion and the mould of form” at least, “the observed of all the observers”, and many are the mansions anxious to be honoured with the presence of the Polar hero’.60 And so, the following week brought the next update of his ‘intrepid explorations’ among his fans. Some accounts shared titbits of social gossip, or information on his eating habits and ‘favourite tipples’, whilst others presented lines about his most recent public performances: earning the applause at a civic banquet, a Portland-place dinner party, or before attentive audiences whilst lecturing at a society gathering.61 As the latest metropolitan celebrity Ross performed on many stages. His admirers pressed him into a long sequence of public ovation but he probably needed little persuasion. These celebrations were an easy way for him to maintain his public visibility. They were also a chance for different groups to demonstrate their associations by allying themselves with his achievements. A measure of the currency of his celebrity was that just as devotees queued to see their hero, the hacks lined up to joke at his expense. ‘It seems by the papers that Ross, the great lion of the day, is by the hospitality of the public regularly converted into a stuffed one’, one journalist would remark, ‘for the poor man can’t move without being lugged out to dinner by somebody’.62 ‘As the season is yet young, any animal will do for a lion; and the animal now dressed in the skin is Captain Ross’, gossiped Fraser’s Magazine. ‘In one respect it will be admitted that he is well qualified for showing off; for both in movement and countenance he bears no small similitude to a walrus, one of the greatest personages about the Pole; 152

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39. ‘Captain Ross at the North Pole’, McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures, 1833.

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and he gets through the various straits, creeks, and bays of a miscellaneous party of prattlers, with the same kind of heavy alacrity that we may conceive distinguished his attempts to find a north-west passage’.63 He is ‘as indispensable to all public dinners, as the soup’, joked the penny weekly Figaro in London: In fact he has been served up at every entertainment as a kind of oddfish to be relished by the visitors. Having had the run of metropolitan dinners, he has lately crammed in the suburbs; and the other day, the good folks of Brentford resolved on filling the stomach of the veteran, as a mark of respect to the discoverer of Boothia.64

These socials had their advantages, of course, for he stayed long enough in the public eye to draw the attention of one Mary Jones, the twenty-three year old daughter of a Navy commander, and the two married later the following year. On 8 November he graced the opening meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the ‘lion of the day was most cordially received by the fellows and gentlemen present’.65 A memoir of his discoveries was read at the season’s first meeting of the Geographical Society on 11 November, the largest gathering yet held in its history. Worth remembering, it was announced, was the ‘skill and care’ he had shown to preserve the health and lives of his crew; a chief theme of the panegyric addressed to Captain Cook by the late President of the Royal Society Sir John Pringle so many years before. Ross entered the room to cheers and as he stood in front of a polar chart the Society awarded him its Founder’s Medal. Whilst providing a platform for Ross’s ‘well-earned and widely extended fame’, it was clear that the Society also stood to benefit by association. ‘The meeting was unusually numerous’, ran The Nautical Magazine, ‘and much enthusiastic feeling was manifested in the course of the evening. The Geographical Society goes on prosperously. While its prizes are bestowed on such men as Lander, Biscoe, and Ross, it is rendered illustrious by the honours which emanate from it’.66 As his popularity increased Ross enjoyed the plaudits on other stages. At the anniversary dinner of the ‘Royal Humane Society’, the hero was on hand to rouse the company to donate. He proved an able fundraiser and The Times announced that the evening’s subscriptions 154

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had been ‘exceedingly liberal’.67 When the ‘Sons of the Scottish Clergy’ held their winter dinner at the Albion Tavern Ross was invited to talk about the merits of his exploring life. As is no surprise – being one of the oldest members of the society – he was roundly applauded with much speechifying about his ‘steadfast faith and manly perseverance’.68 At the City of London Tavern the following evening, to give one final example, Ross was the guest of honour at the banquet of the ‘Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum Society’, and, after yet another round of toasts, he left with a standing ovation.69 At the Drury-Lane Fund annual dinner, held at the Freemason’s Tavern on 19 March 1834, a tuneful re-telling of polar expeditions would entertain an illustrious company. Before three hundred guests, and a handful of lords, knights, and landed gentry, a Mr Fitzwilliam ‘described with great vocal humour the vicissitudes to which Ross, the HERO, had been exposed’. Jacob Cole’s libretto took listeners on a slapstick voyage, punning his way about Ross’s public image: ‘as they’d lived so long with Savages and Bears from which nobody cou’d free’em . . . Captain Ross has been thought a Lion ever since and every body wants to see him’.70

ACTS OF DISCOVERY

Moving from the taverns back to the theatres, the polar theme continued. Playwrights seized upon the Arctic as an imaginative space by offering the public new images and new accounts. Long before audiences could read the details of the expedition in a full travel narrative, which wasn’t published until 1835, the achievements were reenacted upon the stage. Pantomime, for example, was particularly responsive to public sensations and polar exploration proved a fertile source of inspiration.71 On Boxing Day in 1829 Charles Farley’s Harlequin and Cock Robin; or, Vulcan and Venus opened at Covent Garden and it was ‘the season’s most popular performance’. Moving swiftly from ‘familiar local scenes’ in quayside pubs, and the city’s bustling markets and fashionable squares, the audience were transported to the Arctic. Robert’s moving diorama presented the drama of polar exploration in thirteen brightly painted drop screens.72 155

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40. A Voyage to the North! Playbill for 30 December 1833.

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Or, look to the winter pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Hull, which had opened on New Year’s Day in 1829. William Leman Rede’s Harlequin Harpooner; or, The Demon of the North Pole was something of a success and ran, unusually for a pantomime, well into March, with ‘new alterations’ and ‘improved’ polar scenes keeping audiences satisfied.73 Towering icebergs and ‘terrifying’ visions of Greenland whaling ships tossed in stormy seas, were contrasted with ‘local and incidental scenes’, such as those showing Hull’s pier and its busy market-place. That the dangers of the Greenland fishery and the mysteries of the Arctic regions found a receptive audience in Hull, as in other provincial coastal towns, is no surprise. The Arctic was a profitable subject for the metropolitan playwright too. Charles Farley returned to the ice for what was to be his last pantomime, at the height of the Ross sensation in 1833. His ‘Grand Mythological, Comic, Melo-dramatical, partly Operatical, Innubibus Historical Spectacle’, more popularly known as Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog, opened at Covent Garden on Boxing Day, and it is said to have ‘captured the imaginations of young and old alike’.74 The painter J.H. Grieve offered a seven-section diorama that re-enacted the expedition in bold colours. The hero embarks on his steamship, fights walruses, and then gets stuck in the ice. The Times, generally not enamoured by the pantomime, reserved special praise for these polar additions. ‘And, the whole concludes with a grand Naval Allegory . . . brilliant enough to please everybody’. Through the mist and snow an actor playing Captain Ross appears and, lit by the pyrotechnic halo of a ‘brilliant aurora’, he plants the British standard upon the Magnetic Pole as the band played Rule Britannia.75 The speed with which theatre responded to Ross’s return is remarkable. On 28 October 1833, just eight days after he had set foot in the city, The Times announced the arrival of a ‘sensational new melodrama’ on the London stage: Captain Ross; or, The Hero of the Arctic Regions, written by a local actor John Farrell.76 And what an intriguing stage it was. An entrepreneurial cat-meat merchant named Wyatt, with Farrell as his business partner, had converted a cavernous clothing factory opposite the London Hospital on the busy Whitechapel Road, one of the major thoroughfares out of the city. Their Pavilion Theatre opened on 10 November 1828 and soon became one of the most popular venues in the rapidly expanding East End.77 Though early 157

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productions are noticeable only for their gory and mildly sensational subject matter – ghouls and villains, murder and robbery – the theatre soon became famous for staging nautical melodrama and topical, escapist spectacles.78 ‘Sailors and banditti seem to be the never-failing resource of our dramatic authors of the present day when in search of a subject with which to astonish the frequenters of the minor theatres’, one critic attending the Pavilion would remark.79 John Farrell’s Captain Ross was a nautical melodrama of a well-tried configuration. Here was a picture of innate British hardihood bound by a tight package of familiar pro-Navy messages. The nautical melodrama was a prime medium for the popular and sentimental veneration of naval heroes, as scholars of the genre have recently demonstrated, and Captain Ross was little different.80 The real star of the show, however, was not the eponymous Captain – stoic and steadfast, played by a good looking local actor named Heslop – but rather the ‘honest tar’ ‘Will Weathergale’, performed energetically by Farrell himself. The play was structured around the then-known details of the voyage, the ongoing newspaper reports and that letter Ross had sent to the press, and it combined familiar components of the genre to present a play which can perhaps be best described as a ‘polar romp’. ‘The present drama’, ran a typical puff, ‘truly depicts the privations, sufferings, and patriotic perseverance with which this Veteran prosecuted a discovery so useful towards the extension of the arts’.81 There is little evidence to gauge popular reactions to the performances, but with a run of many weeks, as well as later staging at other London venues, it is tempting to think it was a success. The Pavilion Ross was the embodiment of patriotism and service. Accompanied by his ‘gin-shop sponsor’, the gallant hero made his entrance: ROSS

The moment is at last arrived, when, by thy generous assistance, we loose our topsails to the breeze, commencing joyfully our great career. How is it to end? – Perhaps in death, a miserable agonizing death in cold inhuman climates, or by a glorious return to my native land, rewarded with honour, popularity, and a nation’s thanks. BOOTH Think only of the end to be achieved. The eyes of thousands are upon you, Ross, and much by them is now anticipated. 158

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ROSS

Disappointment shall not vex them. If all the energies of an experienced life, excited by the glorious love of enterprise which fires a breast devoted to the task, can conquer the opposing difficulties, we shall indeed succeed. Should nature war against us, and in those savage realms her sway indisputably reigns, a calm submission to the will of heaven will not impeach our courage. BOOTH You say well, my hero. Who dare impeach the courage of an Englishman? It has placed the British name foremost in the list of nations; has made this little island, a spot merely upon the world’s huge surface, to rule the destinies of millions, and speak its thunder in every quarter of the globe.82

Farrell’s script continues in this way throughout, balancing earnest appeals to the national valour with equal measures of bawdy slapstick. The play follows the familiar formula of nautical melodrama of the period – the heroic passage of stiff, yet redoubtable, officers, brave and enterprising seamen, and an array of colourful stock characters. There is Farrell’s ‘Will Weathergale’, ‘a hardy North-Sea Tar, and Mate of the Victory’ with a ‘dancing heart alive to the call of honour and glory’; ‘Chummy’, the comic stowaway, a ‘Chimney Sweep from Cow Cross’ showing cheerfulness and perseverance despite the limitations of his class; ‘Matt Moonshine’, an ‘Amateur Philosopher fond of making observations’, expressing his nation’s scientific aspirations with comic awkwardness; ‘Phil Blubber’, an old Whaler ‘fond of the bottle’, redeeming his vice through an unwavering loyalty to his superiors; and a number of female sweethearts thrown in for spice, including ‘Clara Truemore’, in love with the dashing Lieutenant Ross. With the safe return of the real expedition well known, what could have become a predictable re-telling was instead enlivened by a romantic subplot played out before a succession of elaborate visions of the northern space. It was exaggerated, unrealistic, but theatrically effective. It was fun. There were vistas of ice-choked seas, including a ‘splendid myriorama’ entitled ‘The Captain’s Vision’ (a series of panoramic views wound upon a large spool across the rear of the stage), with Ross reclining dreamily on a chaise longue imagining his triumphant progress to the Pole. Icebergs are wheeled on from the wings, Victory is attractively set 159

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with gin barrels, rigging, and bunting but then abandoned, whilst the buffoon Chummy careers around the stage ‘pursued by a polar bear’. Now in a perilous situation on the ice, the crews drink heavily and a fight breaks out with a group of ballet-dancing ‘Red Indians’. Ross restores order by initiating a programme of scientific observations and resolves to save his men by voyaging through the frozen sea in Fury’s ‘jolly boat’. He is trapped ‘within a prison of immense icebergs’ although everyone in the audience, from the pit up to the gallery, could well predict the outcome. At the crucial moment Isabella arrives from England to rescue them all from destruction. In a grand tableau finale of waving flags, shifting sets of crashing ice, and ‘three cheers for Old England’, Captain Ross is saved and the curtain falls. This rousing theatrical image of exploration soon spread beyond the metropolis. Captain Ross opened in Liverpool at the New Theatre Royal later in December 1833, finishing a successful year for the theatre that turned in record profits.83 On the evening of 13 March 1834 a hack version of the play opened at the Theatre Royal in Bristol. It was a fashionable affair; four shilling boxes sold out as soon as tickets went on sale, crowds swelled in the pit, and the gallery was so full, at one shilling a head, that many eager punters were turned away, and had to console themselves with pots of foaming ale outside on the street. This Captain Ross was produced by a local actor, a Mr Elliot, and was billed as an ‘entirely New Melo-Drama founded on the Expedition to discover the North-West Passage’. As it had done in London, it proved a topical hit.84 Although no original sets of the Ross melodramas survive, by digging a little further we have a reasonably clear idea of what they would have looked like. Just as Captain Ross was being restaged in towns across the country, the tale was also being re-enacted in middleclass nurseries and parlours. It is captured in a fascinating visual media of this period: the toy theatre. For many generations of ardent boys, the toy theatre was not only an introduction to larger drama; it was an introduction to life. There could be found nobility and courage, honour and romance, challenging landscapes and stirring conflicts. The tale of Ross’s endurance was itself a performance in miniature – of a patriotism and an imagined quality of the national spirit – to captivate juvenile imaginations.85 160

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41. A toy theatre Arctic wasteland with characters from the play overlaid. ‘Splendid Tableau, exhibiting the awful situation of Victory, with loss of foremast, in the midst of immense icebergs. Capt. Ross and his crew on deck, looking out for assistance’.

One enterprising shoemaker, Martin Skelt, sold halfpenny character portrait sheets, accompanied by colourful miniature theatrical sets and drop scenes, from his shop on Swan Street at the bottom of the bustling Whitechapel Road, just a short walk from the docks and taverns of the Thames bank. But this was by no means a marginal occupation – within a year Skelt and his family had begun to monopolise the trade, printing many thousands of sheets to cover their costs and effecting a quite remarkable distribution for their prints. They employed a legion of ‘bagmen’ who toured the provinces in search of trade and by the end of the 1830s Skelt’s sheets were sold at newsagents, stationers, and circulating libraries not only across London, but also in major towns all over Britain. Skelt reconstructed a script of the play ‘from the acting copy’, which he sold for sixpence accompanied with engravings from sketches taken inside the Pavilion. He also offered large twopenny souvenir portraits of the ‘gallant Captain’, which children could take home to paint, 161

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applying tinsel to his uniform, buttons, and sword, and enjoying their part in re-creating his heroic pose. Another competing publisher, W.G. Webb sold halfpenny sheets of Ross and his companions, based upon Skelt’s portraits, from his shop on Old Street.86 Exploration was confirmed as a theatrical performance and many were happy to reduce it to a series of heroic acts.

POLAR PORTRAITS

In the immediate years after his return, Ross was the subject of more than twelve formal oil portraits, a considerable number probably exceeding any other explorer during the nineteenth century. Some are republished here as engravings for the very first time, for portraiture adds another layer to our understanding of Ross’s celebrity.87 It is possible to reconstruct an iconography of his homecoming and trace the ways he constructed and circulated his image.88 The number of portraits painted within a year of his return is a clear reflection of popular interest. Devotion fired his admirers to paint images themselves, or commission works to decorate their own homes, just as other artists turned to a ‘famous’ subject in the hope of selling a work. James Green was inspired to begin his large canvas the same week that news of Ross’s safety reached London. He worked hard in his Bedford Square studio to prepare a study that could be engraved for sale. His canvas was finished by December and was exhibited the following year. Ross was shown in the full dress uniform of a naval commander of the period, draped in a fur skin before a vivid ice landscape, and proudly wearing the class badge of the Swedish order of the Sword, which had been awarded for his service in the Baltic. The first oil portrait completed, it was a romantic image that chimed with public sensibilities and can be read in the context of the immediately positive reaction to his return to Britain. One can also trace the explorer’s part in this process, cultivating his public image through portraiture. Image making was a key element of his publicity campaign and you can find Ross selecting and rejecting artists, choosing engravers, and varying compositions until he was happy with a favourite pose. He commissioned five different portraits 162

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hoping some might be ready in time for the fashionable Royal Academy summer exhibition. He was well aware that a flattering portrait might contribute to his lasting fame: a visual monument to hold his achievements in the public eye, long after the details of his explorations had been forgotten. The first ‘official’ souvenir print was also available in December. Just days after his arrival in London Ross sat for Harriet Gouldsmith in her studio off Regent’s Park, and she captured his image on stone. Though it doesn’t merit much attention for its artistic quality, it sold widely as a commemorative lithograph accompanied with his autograph. ‘The features well express the good-humour and boldness which belong to the original’, one kind reviewer decided, ‘and the poise of the head is highly characteristic’.89 Before long others made their own images. The nation’s latest celebrity was fair game. The print-seller William Wright rushed off a copy placing ‘the Hero’ before an Arctic backdrop with Victory at anchor over his right shoulder. Page and Son copied Gouldsmith’s print and added new Arctic scenery in February 1834, selling their print from Dean and Munday’s premises on Threadneedle Street. Engleheart reversed the bust and offered his penny souvenir free with other prints purchased from his shop. Another autographed copy of Gouldsmith’s portrait was published early in 1834 and presented gratis to readers of the Sunday Herald United Kingdom Family Weekly Newspaper. Unable to meet the great demand for its free souvenir plate, the paper had to postpone publication, promising eager customers that it would soon be ‘seen at every respectable Newsvendor across the country’.90 The portrait proved so popular that scores of subscribers wrote to the paper requesting more copies to give as gifts to their friends. Other readers bombarded the newspaper’s offices with letters of complaint, frustrated not to have received theirs at all; many prints had been secreted away by not so respectable newsagents and sold for a quick profit. ‘We are not to blame for it’ the Sunday Herald would later defend itself, ‘any injured parties should complain direct to his local newsman’.91 Others meanwhile published their own souvenirs. The Mirror released a miniature portrait, which, once coloured by adoring fans, found its way into juvenile scrapbooks. The newly-founded Bell’s Weekly Magazine gave a free print with their first issue, with a Byronic 163

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Ross appearing in windswept pose to swell the hearts of his increasingly large following of female admirers. Soon afterward, Fraser’s Magazine offered a caricature by Alfred Croquis which presented Ross in a rather more realistic pose: the weather-beaten navigator warming his feet by his hearth, a glass of grog in hand.92 The Scottish-born artist Benjamin Rawlinson Faulkner captured the celebrity explorer in at least four oils. Unlike Green’s work, which was a private speculation, Ross commissioned Faulkner to fashion his public image. Although he can’t have been too unhappy to see so many flattering images of himself on sale across the country, Ross couldn’t directly profit from these prints nor had he control over where they might appear in the future. By creating another official image, like Gouldsmith’s, personally endorsed and marketed by the ‘authenticity’ of its representation – a key factor – Ross was able to construct an image of himself that best suited his ambitions. Ross first sat for Faulkner in the winter of 1833 and a print of his second canvas, drawn on stone by R.J. Lane, was published in London early in January. Dedicated to the King, it was widely sold in print shops and was republished by agents acting for Ross in various forms at least six times by the end of the year. The Faulkner portrait showed Ross in uniform draped in a fur-skin cloak, staring back across his right shoulder with his hand at his hip in a defiant stance. It proved to be a popular image of the man and his admirers commissioned many reproductions.93 Evidently, Ross was satisfied with this Faulkner portrait, selecting it to be included as the frontispiece for one of his books published in 1835.94 A later Faulkner portrait captured Ross as enlightened explorer, sitting in his study holding a sheaf of papers, with a chart of his discoveries – ‘King William Land’ and ‘Boothia Felix’ clearly labelled – lying across his desk. The tools of his achievement as navigator and ‘man of science’ are clearly displayed: a thermometer, a pair of cartographic dividers, a compass and armillary sphere. Behind him is an Inuit hunting spear, a kakivak likely from his personal collection of Arctic artefacts, and beyond is an open window and the sea. It was a consciously constructed portrait in which Ross hoped to display his latest credentials. It was knowingly historical too, bearing a striking similarity to a number of eighteenth-century portraits. Joseph Banks, for example, as young explorer botanist, commissioned Joshua 164

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Reynolds to commit his image to canvas in 1773 whilst he was trying to arrange a second voyage with James Cook, and he presented himself as a committed enlightenment philosopher in his metropolitan study, a globe to his left and the open sea in a window behind him. Banks later commissioned a portrait of Cook too, a fine canvas executed by Nathaniel Dance in 1776, which again placed the explorer in a study, a picture of gentlemanly resolve surrounded by charts showing his latest discoveries. The new portrait by Faulkner was a deliberate echo of this genre, offering a clear message about its sitter. Ross was no mere celebrity but a credible man of science, an intellectual, gentlemanly explorer. No record of the reception of this portrait has been found but as it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834 one thing is certain: having returned safely from the Arctic – in honour, not disgrace – Ross was eager to rebuild his metropolitan reputation.

PANORAMIC DEPICTIONS

And there would be even larger canvases on which he could advertise his achievements. The grandest of all, ‘a mass medium’ in every sense, was the Panorama at Leicester Square. Though his show here was not the first panoramic vision of the Arctic to be displayed to late-Regency audiences, it was an unprecedented success. It should be regarded as a prime tool of sensational news reporting and a major feature of his public representation. The panorama architecture, first patented by Robert Barker in June 1787, was specifically designed to narrate a story in the boldest manner possible. Barker’s purpose-built exhibition rotunda opened in 1793, bringing exotic, inspiring – and above all, ‘accurate’ – views to London show-going audiences and it continued in business for over seventy years. Yet the popularity of the panorama was not assured. Elsewhere, its expense had caused many competing establishments to close after a poor season. Authenticity would be the key element of success. The Arctic was an attractive subject for the panorama artist. Not only in the nature of sublime landscapes and their ability to invoke appealing naval histories but, even better, the visions they offered were so novel as to not admit an undue level of scrutiny. And as the Arctic 165

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42. ‘Boothia’, the circular key from Description of a View of the Continent of Boothia Discovered by Captain Ross in his late Expedition to the Polar Regions, ‘now exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square’, 1834.

periodically re-entered the public vogue, well-timed grand panoramas would be likely to benefit from a steady stream of visitors. Whether relaying news of Fleet victories, land battles, a grand view illustrating the life of a city, a royal procession, or a fabulous landscape, the panorama was a medium that offered its audience vicarious escape into the latest fashionable sensation.95 By 1834, Ross and the Panorama’s latest proprietor Robert Burford both recognised that projecting heroic images would be a profitable exercise. Their ‘Boothia’ panorama officially opened on 13 January 1834 at a gala reception held in his honour and it was attended by a host of dignitaries, including his close friends Lord and Lady de Saumarez. His guests climbed up darkened stairs to an elevated central viewing platform immersed in the heart of the canvas. In an instant an audience would see the magnitude of his journey, a vision of his achievements shaped in exactly the way he wanted. So, long before his travel narrative, the panorama was a hugely important means of guiding public opinion. The panorama provided a visual experience 166

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43. Hero of the panorama, ‘Captain Ross’, The Mirror, 1834.

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that surpassed anything that could be evoked in the pages of a newspaper, or the plates of a travel narrative. The principal scene was that of an encounter between Victory’s crew and the Inuit, whose village could be seen in the distance. The parties proceed together in the direction of the ship. Ross, wearing his ‘Polar Dress’, holds a spear in his right hand and encourages his men forward, in a pose not dissimilar to Zoffany’s vision of Captain Phipps engaging the ice so many years before. To his left the old man ‘Illictu’, is drawn on a sledge by some of the ship’s company. Following behind comes ‘Tullooachiu’, the one-legged Inuit for whom the ship’s carpenter fashioned a wooden leg, and to the rear comes James Ross, also gesturing towards the ship. And the panorama provided the magic: ‘the vast and clear firmament is studded with myriads of stars (whose apparent magnitude and relative position, we are assured, are preserved), of such refulgent brightness, that to the eye of the beholder they actually appear to scintillate. At the same time, they are so well relieved from all surrounding objects, that they seem to be floating in the immense ocean of space’.96 As the landscape itself was generally just one vast canvas of snow, bare of any major landscape features, Ross constructed a few of his own. A mountainous Magnetic Pole appears and it is clear that Ross felt that its ‘discovery’ justified his whole expedition. He crafted this as its major achievement and it soon became confused in the public mind with the North Pole itself. The Arctic vision was compressed, telescoped in space and time, with the Pole brought within sight of the ships whereas it was, in fact, a two-week sledge journey away and little more than a featureless expanse of snow and rock. The circular key indicated Victory’s three wintering sites – ‘Felix Harbour’ (1829 – 30), ‘Sheriff’s Harbour’ (1830 – 1) and further past this, ‘Victory Harbour’ (1831 – 2) – scripting the long labour of the Arctic winter into an appealing, allencompassing view of the progress of the voyage. Though the human figures in the canvas were dwarfed by the immensity of the land surrounding them, and the vast sky that framed the whole, the image of the explorer as hero was central to the vision. Ross played a large part in the design of the canvas. Not only was it ‘based upon sketches made at the spot’ but uniquely he also watched over its construction. He made several visits to the studio of Henry Courtney Selous – the able young artist employed by Burford as a 168

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painting assistant – and he was quick to offer advice and to recommend improvements. Selous’s diary for this period survives and so we can eavesdrop on the encounter between artist and explorer. On the evening of 25 November 1833, for example, Selous writes: ‘Had a good practice [playing violin] and afterwards went to the painting room and retouched upon the sketch of the North Pole. I am afraid when Captain Ross comes tomorrow he will destroy a great many flights of fancy of ours’.97 Ross arrived late the following afternoon and left Selous with a host of changes to make: Tuesday 26 November 1833: Went into the painting room and assisted in making arrangements for the reception of the canvas for commencing the new picture of the discoveries of Captn. Ross at the North Pole. I certainly did porter’s work on half a pint of ale after waiting till near 4 O Clock. Captn. Ross made his appearance and did us the favour of obliterating nearly half our sketch and we shall have to commence our work over again.

Two days later Ross returned to the studio, and Selous was irritated to find him ‘making the necessary alterations’ himself. Ross also visited the completed panorama on a number of occasions, clearly enjoying the representation and the chance to step once more into the public eye.98 As a further endorsement, Ross’s steward William Light was employed to act as a narrator in the panorama gallery to describe the view and add further insights into its heroic subject. Burford eventually fired Light in disgrace, for providing just a little too much detail: disgruntled by his expedition pay he had begun fabricating rumours against his Captain, which he would later publish in a scandalous account of the voyage.99 Burford and Ross moved quickly to protect their investment, and to ensure no competing readings. He ended up writing a detailed description of his interpretation of the canvas, in a handbook printed by J.G. Nichols, which included a circular key and an image of himself dressed in his polar outfit. He stands in his now familiar pose before a mountainous Magnetic Pole on which the Royal Standard of England flies proudly and then guides the viewer through a series of his heroic acts. Souvenir prints and pamphlets, both those officially endorsed and others printed by speculators, circulated the panorama narrative 169

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beyond Leicester Square.100 ‘No voyage had been conducted with more zeal, courage, and ability, nor attended with greater personal sacrifice, than that recently made by Capt. Ross’, one pamphlet chimed. So often guarded in its praise of popular spectacle, even The Times gave the show a grudging plaudit: . . . those who anticipate that such a subject can produce nothing but a dull and monotonous picture will be most agreeably disappointed, as we were, on paying a visit to the panorama. It is true that in this painting we discern none of those rich and luxuriant landscapes, or stately cities, which have hitherto supplied Mr Burford with subjects; but in their place we have other effects singularly striking and beautiful.101

The journalists of The Sunday Herald also enjoyed their visit to ‘the spectacular new panorama’, having assured themselves that it presented a ‘truthful’ image of the polar space: ‘This is an exhibition which we are bound to take, in a great measure, upon the faith of circumstances. To be qualified to criticise it, a man should winter at the North Pole’.102 The Literary Gazette offered a large review of the canvas in its ‘Fine Arts’ column: On Monday we visited this interesting panorama in Leicester Square, and found it so admirably executed that we will venture to predict it being as attractive to the public, as the magnetic pole, within its circle, to the needle. The subject is happily drawn, and it is no less happily painted. The ice and snows, in all their various aspects and colours – the heavens bespangled with stars, and irradiated with the aurora borealis – the vessel, stations, and persons, British and native, who gave life to this scene, are all depicted with great truth and spirit. Some parts of the painting are most skilful and strikingly fine, the whole effective, and replete with matters which cannot be looked upon without exacting feelings of gratification and delight. Indeed, we would say, that we have never seen a production of the kind so likely to be universally popular.103

Above all, the panorama offered its creators the chance to tell a story. The panorama allowed Ross to mediate both his public image and the expedition’s results, essentially presenting another ‘official’ narrative 170

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44. ‘I Come Here on Business’: Ross ridiculed by Hudson’s popular comic song Captain Ross Versus Jack Frost, 1834.

of his achievement, and expressing visually and textually his growing sense of self. As a medium of the business of spectacle, the panorama presented a dual fiction: an idealised view of the Arctic landscape and of Ross’s achievements within it.

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Other spectacles continued to cater to the considerable public interest. Up in Edinburgh veteran showman J.B. Laidlaw relaunched his panorama of the Hull whaling fleet with new Rossinspired scenes and he toured it to Dublin and Manchester with much success. At the Queen’s Bazaar on Oxford Street a new diorama of ‘Boothia’ – advertised as ‘one of the most novel and interesting exhibitions ever opened in London’ – promised to transport its audience ‘straight to the North Pole’. It featured two views of the Arctic based upon drawings that Ross lent the proprietors, and he visited Mr Lambert’s team of painters a number of times to ensure that ‘every particular of character and costume of the Natives, and the singular appearance of this inhospitable climate were faithfully attended to’.104 The first scene was a representation of Ross ‘interviewing the Natives of Felix Harbour’, throwing down his arms in a display of friendship, with Victory in the distance housed in for the winter surrounded by a wall of ice. The second view was of Fury Beach in Prince Regent Inlet and the hut in which they had survived in for fifteen months over the winter of 1832, covered with snow ‘so they actually became the inhabitants of an iceberg’. Ross could also be seen directing his crews to repair the boats that would be their means of salvation. The views were joined with music and a lecture that described ‘the Captain’s hardy intrepidity’, the miraculous rescue, and ‘the universal congratulations of all classes on their safe return’. By mid-March more than fifteen thousand people had paid the shilling entrance to travel vicariously to the Pole. Ross was the hero of the performance, the ‘benign’ and ‘bold’ explorer whose ‘leadership and foresight’ had saved his men.105 And there were other shows in London too, each responding in their own way to public fascination for the mysteries and heroics of the Arctic space, but as fashionable displays they were transient forms and little trace can be found in the archives. It is impossible to detail all the side-shows, street-corner lectures, display prints, pub-songs, and lantern shows that provide the cultural context in which the value of Ross’s achievements were created and debated by the public. Yet one cannot ignore, chief among all of these attractions in 1834, the largest Arctic spectacle ever mounted in London: the polar ‘Extravaganza’ at the Vauxhall Gardens. 172

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ARCTIC EXTRAVAGANZA

For long a fashionable gathering place on the south bank of the Thames, the Vauxhall Gardens were a perfect place for Ross to capitalise on popular enthusiasms in the summer of 1834.106 As public excitement grew, notices began to appear in the newspapers, which predicted that it would be ‘the sensation’ of the season.107 With public interest intense, the Gardens gave in to demand and opened two weeks earlier than usual on 30 May. Playbills advertising the spectacle plastered walls throughout the streets of Lambeth and across Westminster Bridge to carry word into the centre of town. Ross personally supervised affairs as the builders got to work, suggesting scenic effects to the theatrical machinist Mr Lowe and encouraging Mr Cocks and his team of artists to work closely to his drawings. He visited the Gardens almost daily in the run up to the show. It was very much his vision of the Arctic and, no surprise, his image as heroic explorer was at its centre. The scale of the event was remarkable, by far the largest ever attempted. The Gardens were filled with a huge outdoor diorama – occupying over sixty thousand square feet of the showground – featuring a valley of papier-maˆche´ icebergs seventy feet tall and a sea of frozen ice through which a replica of Victory forced a passage between moving floes and mechanical whales. Actors dressed as polar bears ran amok. The story was re-enacted in a sequence of dramatic tableaux: ‘the crews abandon the vessel and overwinter’, ‘a tribe of native Esquimaux add to the wildness and barbarous appearance of the scene’, ‘the crew take exercise and make observations’, ‘the aurora burns across the sky’. Ross offered the discovery of the Magnetic North Pole as the expedition’s grand achievement, staging ‘an exact representation of the Ceremony and Procession of the Crew and Natives to the summit of the rock on the Continent of Boothia’ where the British flag was planted. ‘The principal feature of the entertainments’, The Times rejoiced, ‘is the representation of the termination of the Polar expedition of Captain Ross and his companions; of the dangers they encountered and overcame; and of the vicissitudes which they endured’.108 Into a perilous sea of ‘immense icebergs’ the crews pitched their tiny boats and were duly saved by Isabella. With Ross miraculously rescued, the spectacle finished with a flourish: 173

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45. Handbill for the Royal Gardens, Vauxhall, 30 May 1834.

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‘an allegorical display complimentary to British Enterprise’ – essentially a thunderstorm of fireworks, smoke, flags, and a brass band – from which rose ‘a gigantic image of Captain Ross in his Polar Costume’. Re-enacted as one massive and dramatic act of discovery – patriotic, improving, miraculous, adventurous (so chimed the advertising spiel) – the type of exploration you might find in the Arctic of the Vauxhall Gardens was pure entertainment. And yet, that seems to be exactly what the punters wanted. ‘It is almost impossible to convey an accurate idea of the effect of this exhibition’, effused The Times, ‘which is in every respect the most interesting both in general arrangement and detailed execution that has been submitted’.109 ‘The spirited proprietors of these gardens have spared no expense and have produced a Polar Exhibition on a magnificent scale’, The Age would likewise declare.110 For a moment at least the spectacle was the talk of the town, even attracting the attention of the young journalist Charles Dickens. After an evening’s game of cribbage, the conversation in a London boarding house turned to the latest sensation: ‘Never saw anything like that Captain Ross’s set-out – eh?’ ‘I saw the Count de Canky and Captain Fitzthompson in the Gardens’, said Wisbottle, ‘they appeared much delighted’. ‘Then it must be beautiful’, snarled Evenson. ‘I think the white bears is partickerlerly well done’, suggested Mrs Bloss. ‘In their shaggy white coats, they look just like Polar bears – don’t you think they do, Mr Evenson?’ ‘I think they look a great deal more like omnibus cads on all fours’.111

Though you can be sure that the show didn’t please everyone, Ross was said to be very happy indeed. Again The Times reported that ‘he expressed his unqualified satisfaction at the manner in which his directions were executed’ and at ‘the complete approximation of the appearance of nature in the barren realms with the Arctic Circle’.112 Visitors continued to crowd across Westminster Bridge to enjoy the Gardens as the summer wore on.113 For the last weeks of the season the Gardens were opened for one-shilling entrance and as many as ten thousand visitors passed through the gates at polar galas held on each of the final three nights.114 No detailed records of total visitor figures, 175

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or the overall costs, survive so it is impossible to estimate what sort of money Ross might have made from it. Having lost his ship it was said he was still unable to pay his crew’s outstanding wages. In this context, it’s no surprise that he so actively looked to feed interest in his expedition and advance his profile. He needed to profit from his discoveries. Basically, he was broke.

REWARD AND RECRIMINATION

Should the Government step in to reward him? We remember, as soon as he got to London, a letter memorandum of his successes in hand, he had gone directly to the Admiralty and introduced himself at the Downing Street government offices, hopeful of casting his private expedition as a national achievement.115 From his London Hotel, Ross wrote to the Admiralty describing how the voyage had served a public service in the name of science and the nation. His letter to George Elliot, First Secretary, is revealing, using the language of patriotism when he needed it most. He asked that in light of the ‘public nature of the undertaking’ the crew be paid in full. ‘Whose constancy was never shaken under the most appalling prospects’.116 He was instructed to submit a list of claims for review and just a week later he got the good news. ‘Their Lordships have directed the Accountant-General of the Navy to advance to you the sum of 4580£.12s.3d. as the amount which by your statement you feel yourself under an engagement to pay’.117 With a discontented crew clamouring for their wages, and the whole affair beginning to attract some unfavourable notices in the city press, Ross was lucky that the Navy was willing to settle the matter quickly by bailing him out. It was in their interests for it to be a good news story even though the naval connection was tenuous. Naval men had manned the voyage and that was enough. They had done the Service proud. By the following spring however, some were beginning to feel that Ross himself had not been amply rewarded. The exact role that Ross played in this ‘remuneration lobby’, as one journalist described this ‘movement’ for his compensation, is difficult to describe, but his vigorous self-advertisement was clearly beginning to pay off. Having presented 176

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46. ‘Arrival at the North Pole’ by George Cruikshank, engraving by Thomas McLean, 1 August 1835.

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such positive and appealing images of his achievements in so many forms – on stage, on canvas, in spectacle – his private venture had been transformed in the public imagination into a national enterprise deserving of official recognition. In a busy session of the House of Commons on 11 March a formal application was presented on his behalf, with ‘signed petitions from the people of Kingston-upon-Hull and Liverpool’.118 It was met with cheers in many quarters, but others took the opportunity to voice their dissatisfaction. The radical agriculturalist William Cobbett was incredulous that money should be lavished as a prize in this way: ‘How could the house relieve the burdens of the country, if it were always voting away the money of the people?’ (Hear). Viscount Sandon, an Admiralty lord and secretary to the India board, rose to Ross’s defence, arguing that anyone who was hostile to the proposal was seriously misjudging the tenor of public feelings, and he asked that the appeal be presented straightway to the King, in recognition of Ross’s public services (Hear, hear). Debate flowed over into the public journals. ‘We perceive that our worthy friend Ross, the indefatigable hero of the canvas breeches, the discoverer of Snooksia, and the bosom friend of Booth, the gin-shop keeper, has sent a petition to the House of Commons for some cash on account of his recent grope into the unknown regions’, described one journalist: Now really we are sorry Ross should be so dreadfully out of pocket by his wild-goose errand into the North, but consideration for the public purse forces us to say, that we see no claim Ross can have on account of his late long walk, and his retreat on discovering there was no thoroughfare.119

As the relative merits of exploration filled newspaper columns, the matter was again taken before the House. It was proposed that a sum of £5,000 be granted from the public purse to the King himself to enable him to reward Ross for his ‘great public services’, chief amongst which was ‘their value in establishing the fact that no passage could be found in any latitude useful for practical purposes’.120 Before long even Sir Robert Peel was moved to add his opinion on the matter. In ‘admiration for his chivalric character’, Peel felt certain that a reward for Ross was 178

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appropriate. He called for a formal inquiry into the matter and within days a select committee met to consider the claims.121 Never before had the achievements of a polar expedition been subject to such a close scrutiny. The committee, which included Peel and a young William Gladstone, met three times over a period of two months and gathered together all available information. They considered Ross’s reconstruction of events, and heard testimony from his nephew, Booth, and many other ‘polar authorities’, including Francis Beaufort. Towards the end of April, Lord Sandon issued the select committee’s findings, stating that they had ‘no hesitation in reporting, that a great public service has been performed’.122 Other officers had been promoted. James Ross received a commission on Nelson’s old flagship HMS Victory and Humphreys of Isabella had been compensated for his role in the rescue. Yet Ross, ‘who bore anxious and painful responsibility of the health and discipline of the party for above four years, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty and hardship’, had received nothing. He estimated his losses to have been about £3,000. In consideration of the ‘great importance of his scientific discoveries’ the committee eventually decided he be awarded the full £5,000.123 What a financial boon for Ross, but his critics would soon be back. For among other things, the enquiry had revealed a growing rift between Ross and his nephew. Evidence from the various testimonials would eventually be used against him, disparaging his lasting reputation and exacerbating the deteriorating relations between the two. But for now at least it had done little to dampen public enthusiasm. In fact, the award now gave Ross the official stamp of approval that he was looking for, and he was free to continue in the swirl of public engagements. The Panorama at Leicester Square was still attracting a steady audience and within a few weeks his polar spectacular opened at Vauxhall for its immensely successful summer run. On 17 September 1834 Ross enjoyed another audience with the King, and, like old friends, ‘the enlightened pair instantly got upon the puff reciprocal’. He was invited back as a guest at a number of levees in the coming months. Early the following year, Ross secured himself a knighthood, complete with a new coat of arms that featured a standard flying over the Magnetic North Pole. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, whilst Booth’s philanthropy earned a baronetcy.124 179

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This cycle of reward and acknowledgement was well followed in the press and the public journals, and became a theatre unto itself, sustaining Ross’s public image.

THE BOOK

Let nobody fancy for a moment that we are blaming Captain Ross for taking care of himself while upon this chilly voyage. Far be from us such a thought. The only thing for which we think he ought to be condemned was for going at all . . . this is quite fame enough for any one, and upon the strength of it he may continue to lionise until some worthier specimen of the species is caught in due season, and then he will melt and dissolve away. We confess that we shall be happy to find ourselves altogether mistaken in our anticipations as to the contents of his forthcoming book.125

The public would have to wait another twelve months before the official account of the voyage was published. With so many other ways for details of his heroics to reach the public we should not overstress the impact of the book. It’s useful to give a quick outline of its reception nevertheless, to consider how it was reviewed, the ways that it might have been read, and the effect this could have had on his enduring reputation. Ever keen to the chances of making a profit, Ross made the decision to self-publish his book. He opened a Regent Street subscriptions shop and flooded the London newspapers with advertisements early in April 1835.126 Though it was a handsome affair in royal quarto – with over eight hundred pages and thirty-one plates, eleven in colour – at two pounds twelve shillings and sixpence it was, for most, prohibitively expensive.127 The Times led the newspapers in offering a positive review after it was published on 1 May. Remember, this was almost eighteen months after the return of the expedition. ‘Although public curiosity has been already abundantly gratified by details of the geographical results of Sir John Ross’s expedition to the Arctic Circle . . . and although the toils and sufferings of that enterprising officer and his companions, whilst imprisoned in “thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice”, have been made present to the eye by means of panoramas and scenic 180

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representations, yet the authentic narrative, from his own journal, robbed as it is of the gloss and bloom of novelty, is still calculated to act powerfully on our sympathy and admiration’.128 Ross had worked hard upon his narrative, casting the rather meagre benefits of his explorations, as he had so often done, in glowing terms. The Times approved: Never did we read a history of almost unexampled disappointment, labour, suffering, and peril, written in a tone so free from querulousness; never, perhaps, did a body of British seamen exhibit an example of so much steadiness, sobriety, patience, and alacrity, to undergo fatigue and endure privation, and submission to judicious restraint, as the companions of Sir John Ross. The moral effect of the narrative, in showing how much it is in the power of man to accomplish, in the most adverse circumstances, by patient resolution acting in subordination to skill and judgement, may ultimately be as beneficial to science as the great fruit of the expedition – the actual discovery of the Magnetic Pole.129

It is likely that more people actually read the newspaper’s account than the book itself, despite the fact that Ross was claiming that seven thousand people had already subscribed.130 The Observer noted ‘that the volume abounds with interesting details . . . written with simplicity, but in a very pleasing manner’; The Leeds Mercury found it ‘deeply interesting’ and was impressed by Ross’s ‘cool seamanlike heroism’. The Sheffield Mercury called it ‘a monument of maritime devotion and success’, which ‘should be immediately placed in every respectable library’.131 In June, however, Ross’s reputation suffered its first major blow. At a meeting of the Geographical Society – with Sir John Barrow, as President in the chair – Captain Beechey read a paper on the failings of the narrative in ‘a spirit that was neither personal, or offensive’, yet apparently ‘highly critical’. Beechey drew attention to discrepancies that existed between Ross’s text and his map, and raised doubts over his abilities as a surveyor. All this before an audience who had welcomed Ross back so warmly in 1833. A Founder’s Medal, it would seem, would not be enough to protect him from his critics.132 Undaunted, Ross continued with his publishing schedule. Later that month he released a second volume, a compilation Appendix full of 181

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pseudo-scientific memoranda – including an ‘analysis of water’, an ‘Eskimo Vocabulary’, tabulated magnetic measurements, and an account of his iceberg aurora theory – and which also included a full list of subscribers and a new heroic portrait of himself.133 Some were beginning to find it all rather unappealing. Ross had chosen to revisit his 1818 voyage and revive the old controversy about Lancaster Sound, asserting that junior officers had been guilty of ‘gross misconduct’ by not telling him that they thought that the Sound a strait. ‘That foolish man, Ross is determined always to get himself into a hobble’, said Edward Parry to Franklin, who was urging him to answer the slander. In the event, Parry preferred to let the matter drop, the thought of entering a protracted public dispute both unseemly and wearisome. ‘Pamphlet would be sure to beget pamphlet’, he wrote privately, ‘and an endless controversy would ensue, of which one half of the world would not understand the real merits, and two thirds of the other half would not care about it’.134

BITTER CRITICISM

Others would not be so willing to let Ross’s narrative go unchallenged. One of the most consistent points of objection surrounded his ‘discovery’ of the Magnetic North Pole: an ambition that had not figured in the original plans for the voyage, but which had been transformed upon his return into its major achievement. True, it was something that deserved recognition – James Ross had presented his account to much acclaim at a gala reception at the Royal Society way back on 19 December 1833 – yet as it was so invisible a goal it remained confused in the public mind with the attainment of the North Pole itself.135 Ross did little to correct this mistake. He was well aware that the very notion they had ‘mastered the North Pole’ provided a good degree of positive publicity. It was a graspable achievement that he was happy to exploit and it was a vital part of the visual pageantry of his moneymaking ventures.136 His Narrative title page announced the ‘grand discovery’ and so too his Appendix, which promised to shed some light on the ‘miraculous event’: yet, there was no more 182

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information to come. Many of the journals picked up on this and ridiculed him for trumpeting so intangible an achievement. The Athenaeum was ‘at a loss to understand the omission’, whilst The Literary Gazette was sarcastic: ‘we did want to learn something of that “marvellous discovery”, touching which we have now no expectancy of ever being a whit the wiser on this side of our grave’.137 Writing a scathing review in The Edinburgh Review, David Brewster used the episode to question the value of polar exploration itself: It may doubtless gratify the national vanity to plant the standard of England even upon sterile regions where snow falls during one-half of the year, and drifts and thaws during the other . . . and geographical amateurs may delight to contemplate a new line of coast studded with the names of the royal family, the favourites of court, the minions of office, and the pot-companions and cousins to the tenth degree of the successful navigator. But though this is all a real addition to our mass of knowledge, yet if no advantage can be gained by revisiting such inhospitable regions, it must be admitted that the mere knowledge of their existence . . . is comparatively useless, and utterly unworthy of that sacrifice or risk of life and resources by which it may have been acquired.138

The Magnetic Pole became a ripe target for this increased scrutiny. Brewster voiced misgivings about the measurements that had been made and also drew doubts about the equipment used to make them. He mocked the pageantry of the whole act, in a delicious swipe at Ross’s efforts to make his mark: We have no desire to detract from the high merits of this officer, but we cannot regard his observations in the light of a discovery . . . we consider it most incorrect to have given it the name of The Magnetic Pole of William IV. Some Russian or French navigator may next year find it a degree to the east or west of the present cairn, and will be equally entitled to give this new place the name of the Magnetic Pole of Nicholas, or of Louis Philippe. The Magnetic Pole belongs to science and not to courts; and we think our English pride would be somewhat mortified, if a Swedish vessel passing over the Pole of our Northern hemisphere should call upon geographers to give it the name of the North Pole of Carl. IV. Johan.139 183

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That the Magnetic Pole was moveable made the notion of the flagplanting discovery a little ridiculous. ‘Its proximity to Cape Adelaide, and the places named after the other sovereigns of Europe must soon cease’, Brewster concluded. ‘Our revered sovereign is already parting from his royal friends, and is destined to be carried round the Arctic zone, pointed at by all the needles of all the world for nearly 2,000 years, till he returns to Boothia Felix in A.D. 3725 – unless he may have suffered dethronement in passing through the territories of other candidates for polar fame’.140 Meanwhile, others were also looking to remove Ross from his polar throne. Unsurprisingly, the sternest disapproval came from John Barrow who vented his loathing in The Quarterly Review. It is probable that Ross’s decision to go it alone had also aroused the annoyance of John Murray – the publisher with close links with the Admiralty and who had handled most of the polar narratives prior to this point – and this may explain his willingness to let Barrow mount such a vitriolic broadside in the pages of his journal. There was little that Barrow did not condemn and there is certainly no space here to detail the long list of insults. Driven by a personal animosity that seems almost irrational in its intensity, Barrow was convinced that Ross had ‘tarnished’ the image of exploration. While the public embraced the expedition as a success, Barrow was annoyed that Ross’s celebrity had inflated its achievements and outraged that he had bagged a government reward. He accused Parliament of ‘inaccuracy’ when it reported that Ross had performed a ‘great public service’, despairing that the motion in the House of Commons had been brought about by the ‘puffing parade of Captain Ross’s countrymen’. He summed up Ross’s motivation for exploration as a shameless ‘lust for lucre’.141 The memory of Nelson and Captain Cook was at stake: Our northern explorers, whose conduct under the most trying circumstances has been above all praise . . . their names will live though all posterity, and be enrolled among the first and choicest in the list of those naval worthies, who by their exertions and discoveries, have contributed to establish and extend the reputation of England. They have the proud reflection that, although they have not had the good fortune to be rewarded, as they well deserved to be, 184

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with honours and emoluments, they have not condescended either to flatter foreign potentates with names on a worthless chart – or to traverse the continent of Europe in quest of baubles and bits of ribbon, to dangle from a button-hole – or to petition Parliament for grants of public money, and yet, at the same time hire brazen-faced bagmen to beat up for private subscriptions – the last resource of Malesuada Fames.142

Barrow was convinced that in cultivating such a high profile Ross had acted ‘dishonourably’. He forgot perhaps that Nelson too had chased accolades in this way, but that was beside the point. Barrow seethed. Ross had gone too far. His conduct in London was an ‘ungentlemanly parade’ of vanity and deceit, whilst his actions in the Arctic were a ‘disaster’ for those who had the bad luck to be stuck with him. It was a catalogue of complaint. It is true that the voyage was illequipped and poorly executed, but Ross had managed to bring his men home. Surely that was worth something? Anyhow, Barrow continued to begrudge him for the rest of his life. His great history Voyages of Discovery published in 1846 barely touched on Ross’s voyage, but instead offered unflattering titbits from the Parliamentary testimonies and repeated his version of the Lancaster Sound affair of 1818.143 Ross could keep his silence no more. He launched an angry, sixtytwo-page attack, refuting all accusations, but it didn’t really reflect well on either of them. ‘Sir John Barrow incessantly seeks to depreciate my professional character and services’, he despaired. ‘The main object of his work . . . is to traduce the professional character of a brother officer, and to destroy the reputation of one who, for upwards of fifty years, has laboured assiduously to serve his Sovereign and to maintain the glory of his country’.144 ‘His language is so imbued with bitterness’, Ross would continue, indignantly, ‘the spirit he manifests is so alien to everything like kindness and generosity, and his attacks are so gratuitous and unprovoked . . . when I looked for an historian I found a calumniator’.145 Barrow never replied. By now he was an old man and the sour squabble had gone on long enough. Yet perceptions of the feud would tarnish the memory of both men. Ross, for his part, had only himself to blame. He would continue to feel wronged by the ‘vulgar taunts’ of his critics – ‘the spirit of envy and detraction was at work from the first 185

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moment I set my foot on shore’, he lamented – and he got sucked in to many needless quarrels.146 Ross died in London on 30 August 1856, weighed down with honours yet estranged from his second wife. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, his hat and sword reversed upon the coffin dressed in the union jack, with a number of his friends and old shipmates to see him on his way.147 Though the London newspapers reported his passing, in comparison to the fanfare that accompanied his rescue from death in 1833, this was modest coverage indeed. There were no lengthy eulogies, no statue erected in a smart city square, no rush of public feeling. Although history would prove Barrow wrong – a northwest passage is still, at least for now, difficult and financially impractical – it is Ross who has come off the worse from their exchanges. His biggest mistake was continuing to get drawn into protracted public arguments. Even now, the controversy between the two men dominates historical accounts of his voyages, clouding a more appealing truth: Ross had survived the Arctic in all its toughness and lived to tell his tale. In the final analysis, it is certain that Ross’s voyage had achieved something. It had catapulted him into the public domain, making him an instant celebrity and bringing him unprecedented attention. As his profile began to wane in 1835 the critics circled overhead. But if there was still something to be drawn from it all, The Literary Gazette concluded, it was that Ross had shown future explorers how they too might become the ‘lion of the season’. Here was a handy guide, an ‘ABC’, for cultivating polar celebrity: - Always keep yourself in the eye of the public. - A panorama is a good thing; but previously frighten the world with a story that all your precious manuscripts have been lost in a cab, or elsewhere . . . - Go dine with the King, if you can, and spin his Majesty a long yarn, in which you do not stand on particulars. - Still better it is to get up an exhibition in Vauxhall; and have tremendous boards with pictures thereof all over town and country. - Open a shop in a conspicuous situation for the sale of your work alone. - Placard every wall, hole, and corner. 186

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- After having got as many subscribers as you can at home, go abroad and fish for foreigners; taking special care to inform your delighted countrymen, from time to time, how the list is filling, and what the monarchs and the courts of the continent said of the unexampled exertions and glory of Englishmen. - The order-book for the book being completed, go into the Order of Knighthood line. . .148

Ross was launched into the public arena and for short while at least he became a national hero. Yet, as much as his efforts brought him the recognition he craved, they also brought him envy, ridicule, and at times a most bitter censure. Ross had provided a checklist for the making of an explorer-hero but his experience would also illustrate the perils of living your life in the public eye.

REPUTATIONS

Before we separated, Sir John Ross came on deck . . . He was a squarebuilt man, apparently very little stricken in years, and well able to bear his part in the toils and hazards of life. He has been wounded in several engagements – twice desperately – and is scarred from head to foot. He has conducted two polar expeditions already, and performed in one of them the unparalleled feat of wintering four years in Arctic snows. And here he is again, in a flimsy cockle-shell, after contributing his purse and his influence, embarked himself in the crusade of search for a lost comrade. We met him off Admiralty Inlet, just about the spot at which he was picked up seventeen years before.149

Early on the morning of 21 August 1850, the young American surgeon Elisha Kent Kane caught sight of something in the distance. Far off beyond the bows of his ship Advance a little schooner was driving before the wind, ‘fluttering over the waves like a crippled bird’. Kane ran for his captain Edwin De Haven, who joined him just as the mystery vessel came alongside. At its helm was ‘an old fellow with a cloak tossed over his night gear’, weathering the storm as both ships ploughed northward: at the ripe age of seventy-three John Ross was back in the Arctic again.150 187

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Kane was greatly impressed by Ross’s ‘manly engagement’ with the perils of the North and he provided a colourful description of the veteran, quoted above, in his best-selling book about searching for the missing Franklin party. It seems fitting these two men should meet. Like Ross before him, Kane would become one of the most famous explorers of his generation, celebrated in print, verse, and art, and whose voyages would be re-enacted in lecture halls and on the rolling canvas of panorama at venues across the United States. Admired by his female readers, idolised by a generation of ardent boys, and thanked by his country, Kane was elevated as a national hero. His adventures seized the public imagination and once again the Arctic became the stage on which celebrities were made.151 In the initial flush of public sympathy for Ross in 1833 there would be many tributes to his heroism. These paeans to polar discovery defined an image of exploration that was noble, enlightened, masculine and inspirational. Yet never before had an explorer taken such a direct role in mediating the way his voyage was represented, or so actively tried to shape his public profile. Ross was a media hero, a celebrity in every sense of the word, and his profile was as much a reflection of genuine public interest as it was a reflection of his business ambitions. Just as public attitudes toward the benefits of exploration were deeply mixed, it is also clear that Ross’s heroism could mean different things to different people. Some praised his religious conviction; many, like Kane, admired his bravery and manly perseverance whilst others would gush about his humanity as a ‘devoted man of science’. His celebrity had many faces. He was well aware of this and others knew this too; each offered their own images to feed public imaginations. There were newspaper editors and hack journalists riding the wave of popular interest, theatre managers trying to increase their audiences with escapist spectacles, jobbing playwrights hoping to kick-start their careers, composers amusing concert goers, artists expressing their patriotism, reviewers venting their personal jealousies, even members of Parliament articulating their sense of the national feeling. In panorama, in print, in song, and in art, exploration was caught in a cycle of performance. As enthusiasm gave way to scrutiny and ridicule it was clear that the ‘heroic image’ could be pulled apart just as quickly as it had been erected. As supporters endowed the gallant 188

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explorer with positive qualities others would feel compelled to charge him with incompetence. His celebrity can be measured by the kind of cultural visibility consequent on controversy. He certainly benefited from his notoriety, in the borderland between fame and disgrace. Polar exploration provides a good terrain for questions about historical celebrity as explorers were often subject to the kind of intense media manipulation, frenzy, outrage and obsession that seems to characterise our modern commercial culture too. Explorers had a real interest in trying to manage their renown and perpetuate their popularity: to win funding, social advancement, service promotion, and improve their future earnings. Some would perform magic-lantern lectures, and later still, photography and film would become the best means for spreading new images and for shaping imaginations. By returning to these sources we can tether the mercurial phenomenon of celebrity to a tangible set of social, economic, aesthetic, and imaginative negotiations. We see the ways reputations are built and how they are broken too. By joining Ross on his return to Britain we can begin to gain a more complete understanding of his reputation as an explorer: a man caught in the public gaze and at the centre of his own drama of survival.

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47. ‘No Thoroughfare?’, Funny Folks, 11 November 1876.

4

A Flight of Fancy

The voyage we are now about to describe established no new ‘Farthest North’ but we are including it in our polar chronology because it is unique in the annals of Arctic exploration, and will add variety to a narrative that may have already become slightly monotonous through its repetitious accounts of travel by ship and sledge. The leader of this expedition proposed to abandon recognized modes of travel and make an attempt to reach the Pole by air. This method, which seems quite natural to us today . . . was considered fifty years ago as something fantastic, a page out of Jules Verne.1

The early return of the British Arctic Expedition in 1876 was met with disappointment and relief. Its leader George Nares telegrammed a message declaring the North Pole ‘impracticable’: a single word that crushed the polar dreams of many. All were pleased that the expedition had returned safely, thankfully no repeat of the Franklin disaster. Some newspapers now called for an end to the historic ‘polar folly’ and most were happy to rest, comforted in the belief that the Navy had played its part with fortitude. But there were a few men in Britain who were unsatisfied with this blunt assessment of the possibility for future exploration. Surely there might be another way? Lecturing at Tunbridge Wells on the evening of 18 November 1876, Commander John Cheyne took to the stage with a new spring in his step. Until 2000, when the English adventurer David Hempleman-Adams dared to reach the North Pole by balloon, it was often assumed that Arctic ballooning both began, and abruptly ended, with the fateful flight of Salomon Andre´e in 1897.2 Yet polar ballooning has a far more colourful history than this, full of optimistic proposals and a host of

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eccentric characters. Perhaps the most appealing character of all – not least, as his story is almost wholly forgotten – was a retired naval commander and journeyman lecturer who became fascinated by the entertaining possibilities of flight. Whilst some narratives of Arctic exploration history overlook aviation, most entirely neglect the proposals for early ballooning. If mention is made, then attention naturally falls on Andre´e’s attempt. Crouse’s account of that ill-fated voyage provides the above quotation: a comment that could reasonably be applied to Commander Cheyne’s balloon proposals. One can be excused for thinking, as many at the time did, that his plans leapt straight from the pages of a Verne novel, or from the latest juvenile adventure story. There are certainly similarities: a bold plan presented by a man with brave credentials; implausible machinery sustained by an ideal of progress; an elusive goal.3 When asked about Commander Cheyne in 1930, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an Arctic historian of some authority, confessed his ignorance: it ‘indeed took down my pride for I have long been a collector of polar books’, and ‘have a library of several thousand volumes’. After many months of research Stefansson was glad to announce that he had learnt a little more about the Commander. His ‘plans were so ill assorted, in addition to being ahead of his time, that his detractors succeeded in placing him where he has been remembered, insofar as he was remembered at all, as a charlatan’. ‘Cheyne may not have been sound’, he concluded, ‘but he was provocative, active, and early. He therefore has a place in the history of the application of aeronautics to geographic discovery’.4 Cheyne was among the first to imagine and campaign for a voyage into the polar sky. Prompted by Stefansson’s appeal, Carolyn Ward researched early ballooning, affirming the ‘historical importance’ of Cheyne’s proposals. It was hoped that there would be enough material for a publication on the subject, but the archival trail went cold.5 Since Ward’s account, published over seventy years ago, nothing new has been added to our understanding of these remarkable plans. In Segal’s Conquest of the Arctic, Andre´e is celebrated as the first to imagine polar aviation.6 In Grierson’s Challenge to the Poles, a narrative sweep of aviation from the end of the nineteenth century through to modern passenger services, it is Andre´e who takes the laurels as pioneer, as well he might.7 Despite languishing in obscurity, there is much to 192

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commend us looking at Cheyne’s struggles to launch an expedition by balloon: this is the first chapter in the history of polar aviation. The popular profile of ballooning as a capricious and ‘unscientific’ business has a long history. From the very first ascents in the lateeighteenth century, it was identified with risk and showmanship, a spectacle both of the fashionable pleasure garden and the unruly common crowd, and it never lost an association with entertainment and fantasy.8 Though state-supported natural philosophers and engineers increasingly controlled French aerostation, English ballooning continued to be the province of ‘adventurers seeking instant fame and fortune’.9 Despite their best efforts, throughout the nineteenth century professional aeronauts and men of science alike failed to get balloons accepted as serious and viable platforms for exploration and scientific observation. For the many who commentated on the ‘aerial craze’ in England during the late-Victorian period, the balloon remained a symbol not just of discovery, innovation, and travel, but also of recklessness, decadence and moral impropriety. Cheyne’s struggle for credibility as an explorer with an innovative plan can be read within this climate of public scepticism.

TRANSFORMING TECHNOLOGIES

Writing a chapter on an expedition that never happened may seem an odd way to engage the culture of exploration, but it is revealing. A history of polar exploration can be written just as profitably about how an expedition was imagined at home, as it can by a conventional narrative of events out on the ice. A range of performances, spectacles and shows satisfied appetites for news of the latest Arctic discoveries. As the century careered onward, rapid improvements in technologies such as printing and photography expanded the realm of representation as never before.10 This was a vibrant culture of public performance and though we may loathe the modern incarnations of fame we remember that explorers were there right at the beginnings of popular celebrity and mass entertainment. Cheyne was a prolific lecturer and was likely the first polar explorer to turn professional public speaker. For many later explorers, like Nansen, 193

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Shackleton, Peary and Cook, among many others, the illustrated lecture became a crucial part of the theatre of exploration; lectures were a way of drawing newspaper attention to future ventures, raising funds, tackling your opponents, and trying to win the support of the public. Lectures helped explorers to spread news of their successes and they formed part of orchestrated homecomings that sustained their heroic image.11 Yet, we remember that public attitudes varied dramatically. After the Nares expedition had returned so soon from the Arctic many turned against the idea of exploration. The question increasingly asked was not ‘why explore’ but rather ‘at what cost’? The mixed reactions to Cheyne’s proposals allow us to reconstruct a profile of public feelings; of an ongoing debate in which individuals like Cheyne had to campaign tirelessly not only for their chosen technique of travel but also to justify the continuation of polar exploration itself.12 There have been a number of fine histories that detail the trials and tribulations of aviation’s pioneers. Meyer’s Airshipmen interwove the influences of society, politics, and culture on the contested history of flight.13 Van Riper’s Imagining Flight illustrated the value of more nuanced cultural histories and so too Wohl’s elegant Spectacle of Flight, which reintroduced an array of aeronautical personalities. His study revealed a rich mix of popular media – the press, art, photography, and film – that sustained the image of the pilot as ‘hero’, transforming the concepts of distance and nationhood in a modern age.14 With new realms of possibility public imaginations soared. As much as this new technology was innovative, it was unreliable and possibly fatal. Of course there were – and despite massive technological advances there still are – so many dangers attendant to polar travel yet this novel technology posed an interesting question. How would it possible, in the future, to explore the sky as much as the sea and land? Was ballooning merely an amusement best reserved for the showground, or could it be a valid platform for modern exploration? Does the way one travels have a bearing on the way exploration results are imagined? The history of exploration reads so often of new technologies with comparisons framed by technique. Amundsen and Scott’s later race to the South Pole, for example, is often revisited in the striking contrast of the way each covered the ground. One thinks of Vivian Fuchs’ trailblazing Sno-Cats, or Wally Herbert’s 194

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pioneering crossing of the Arctic Ocean by dog sled and air resupply. Consider the remarkable overland efforts of John Rae, by sled, canoe and snowshoe, and it is easy to make an invidious comparison with the over-stuffed ships of John Franklin’s fateful expedition, which left London in 1845 confident of the very latest Victorian technologies that it carried into the unknown. Reconstructing an early history of Arctic aviation, alongside a detailed study of Cheyne’s protracted struggle for support, encourages us to think more about the aesthetic dimensions of flight as a source of cultural inspiration. My friend Russell Potter is the only recent polar historian to mention Cheyne’s plan: ‘Alas, there was to be no return to Tintagel, by balloon or otherwise, and Cheyne ended his days more an entertainer than an explorer, his schemes relegated – fortuitously, perhaps – to an historical footnote’.15 It is the aim of this chapter therefore to present an accurate history of the many balloon schemes prior to Andre´e’s fatal attempt in 1897 and to describe the contested profile of a naval veteran turned itinerant lecturer who hoped to become a hero. His vision of polar flight certainly deserves to rise above historical neglect.

THE LIFE OF A SHOWMAN-EXPLORER

The Commander, although over fifty years of age and with whitened hair, yet looks and is strong and hardy and possesses much more vigor than many men ten or fifteen years his junior. He is a little below the medium height, but with a well knit frame, complexion ruddy, penetrating eyes of gray, and wears small white whiskers.16

With the Arctic Medal pinned to his dinner jacket, John Powles Cheyne was proud to advertise his polar credentials.17 A veteran of three Franklin search expeditions, who had also served in hydrographical survey and convoy during the Indian Mutiny, Cheyne cut a dashing figure as he eked out retirement in crowded lecture halls across the country. Before expanding more fully on his vision for a grand balloon campaign let’s try to reconstruct an account of his life. He was born in 1826 in Islington, London.18 195

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He was the second son of Royal Navy Captain George Cheyne, a Scot who was an old friend of Edward Parry. John’s first voyage was in the brig Chedabucto en route to New Brunswick. In January 1848, at the age of twenty-one, Cheyne secured his first appointment as a midshipman, on James Clark Ross’s Franklin search expedition, and he would later serve on two other Arctic voyages. In 1855, he married Emma, a young lady from Highgate, shortly after his final return from the North.19 Soon after she gave birth to their first son, appropriately named John Franklin Cheyne.20 After John Franklin there followed three daughters – Mirabelle, Kate, and Beatrice – and in 1862 a second son, the prodigiously named Edward Parry Leopold McClintock Cheyne. The boy’s father was evidently proud of his Arctic connections. In 1860, the young family had taken rooms in an Islington terrace, but by 1871 could be found living in more comfortable circumstances in the Hampshire countryside.21 Within a few years the Cheyne troupe had moved back up to London, first living in Addison Gardens, then moving nearby to Westgate Terrace, just off the Old Brompton Road.22 Maintaining a large household on a small naval pension, supplemented by some earnings from his limelight lectures, must have been difficult for Cheyne. Away for long periods lecturing, both in Britain and overseas, family finances were strained and the very public failure of his grand expedition proposals, no doubt, added to the pressures on his marriage. Sometime after 1885 they separated and at this point Cheyne probably immigrated to North America, but details are scarce. It is certain he lived in Hamilton, Ontario during the 1890s, and records survive that suggest he was still lecturing. However, the documentary record runs out in these later years, and it is hard to track him down. On 1 April 1894 he was awarded a Travers Pension, receiving seventy-five pounds a year, which must have improved his circumstances a little.23 Evidence suggests Cheyne travelled east and finally settled in Nova Scotia, taking a house in the prosperous naval town of Halifax. He lived alone at 118 Robie Street, just up the hill from the Royal Yacht Squadron, in a house with a view across the large natural harbour. He died of hepatitis, at the age of seventy-five, on 8 February 1902 and is buried in Fort Massey Cemetery.24 196

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48. Commander John P. Cheyne, showman-explorer, 1876.

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Leaving Cheyne at rest in the country he grew to love, it is fitting that our story now begins, for it was also to Canada that he embarked on his first major expedition. In January 1848 he was appointed as midshipman to Enterprise, under James Clark Ross, on the first of many voyages to head into the Arctic maze in search of the missing Franklin party. Departing London in May, they made a frustrating passage north hampered by heavy ice, and, having entered Lancaster Sound late in August, were forced to winter at Port Leopold, at the northeast tip of North Somerset. The following spring, sledging parties managed to fight their way south to Fury Beach, down Peel Sound, and along unexplored coasts; forays on which a young Lieutenant McClintock would get his first taste of the rigors of Arctic travel. It proved impossible to spend a second season in the Arctic, since the ships were beset in the ice and were only released in September 1849 near Baffin Bay.25 The expedition failed to find any trace of Franklin and his men, but the public welcomed their safe return. It was to be the first act of a prolonged drama of hope, perseverance, suffering, and loss, as numerous search expeditions were sent North. The dangers of the Arctic space, and the individual heroics of a succession of ‘gallant’ naval officers, were played out before an eager public, in the newspapers, on stage, and in gripping narratives.26 As Cheyne returned to his lodgings at the Royal Hospital in Greenwich late in November, London society was thrilled by a number of Arctic spectacles mounted for the Christmas holiday season. At Leicester Square, Robert Burford created another lavish polar panorama, basing his representation of summer and winter scenes on the original watercolours of W.H.J. Browne.27 Gompertz’s Polar Regions panorama was shown at the Partheneum Assembly Rooms in St Martin’s Lane, before touring the provinces. Danson’s View of the Polar Regions was running a brisk trade at the Colosseum, whilst dissolving-views were being shown in rooms all over town, including the Royal Polytechnic Institution and the Western Literary Institution, just off Leicester Square.28 It is probable that Cheyne ventured into the city to enjoy some of these shows. The return of the search expedition made clear that exploration was a performance that lent itself to spectacular representation: a performance relying as much on imagined success, as it did on real achievements. 198

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49. ‘Royal Panorama, Leicester Square: View of the Polar Regions’, Robert Burford, Description of Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions, 1850.

SEARCHING FOR FRANKLIN

Cheyne was next appointed to a frigate but before taking up his post he was ordered to Resolute under Horatio Austin.29 There are just a few pieces of information that we can draw together to describe his involvement as a mate during the voyage of 1850 – 1. In a ‘Fancy Dress Ball’ held that December, among an hodgepodge of colourful costumes – Bedouin Arabs, Roman Centurions, Battle of the Nile veterans, Greenwich Pensioners, pirates and smugglers – we discover that Cheyne attended as ‘Miss Maria’, drawing much compliment.30 He donned a dress once again for the ‘Royal Arctic Theatre’ on 9 January 1851, playing ‘Distaffina’ in the ‘Grand Farcical Tragical Melo-dramatical Serio-Comic’ Bombastes Furioso, drawing special praise: ‘the flirtations of Distaffina could not be surpassed’, wryly proclaimed a mess review.31 It is interesting, as a future travelling showman, that among what little we can learn of Cheyne’s early naval career are a few passing mentions of his skills in accounts of amateur theatricals. In later years 199

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he actively promoted an image of himself as long-serving Arctic ‘veteran’ as a means to attract a paying audience for his lectures, whilst trying to cultivate his aeronautical credibility. His experience of sledge travel, Cheyne would later claim, had given him adequate insight into its advantages, and considerable limitations; his role in scattering silk messages amongst the ice had ‘sharpened’ his understanding of predicting wind patterns, and of the finer technicalities of balloon construction. One may suggest that his time aboard ship in the Arctic, if anything, had introduced him to the particular joys of performance and given rise to a lasting love of the stage. Before the blanket of winter fell on the ships, beset in ice to the northwest of Griffith Island, rockets, balloons, captured foxes, and carrier pigeons were all used in an effort to spread word to any of Franklin’s men still alive.32 With ‘hearty applause’ and three cheers, hydrogen balloons were released with coloured silk messages secured along a slow-burning match, carried aloft to the mangled tune of the national anthem: God bless the Resolute / (A ship of good repute) / And all her crew! Make her victorious / Over old Boreas Whene’er he’s uproarious / Our consorts too! Of Button’s Balloons, a store / We have sent on a tour / Franklin to Cheer! From toil we’ll not refrain / To release his crew from pain And return with them again / To friends sincere.33

Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, officer in command of the screw steam ship Pioneer, the first to operate in the Arctic, was given charge of organising balloon operations. Medical officers on each ship prepared the chemical agents for producing hydrogen and helped maintain the apparatus – a contraption of barrel, siphon and gas purifier.34 Osborn had investigated a variety of paper balloons before leaving England. One manufacturer, Charles Green, had perfected his messenger balloons after many years as an aeronautical showman: he used them for raining advertisements down on the heads of locals in towns where he would perform ascents. Osborn invited Green, a Mr Derby, and George Shepherd, another well-known balloon supplier, to test their messenger balloons by flying them from the roof of the Admiralty. 200

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50. Advertising Shepherd’s Arctic Balloons, supplied to Belcher’s Squadron in 1852.

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Shepherd’s balloon fetched up in Brighton and was deemed sufficiently successful to convince the Admiralty to order a batch.35 In the Arctic, Shepherd’s balloons were used as soon as Austin’s ships had chance to deploy them. ‘Thousands of slips of paper and silk with the news of our arrival stamped upon them have been scattered in every direction’, runs one journal.36 Messages dispatched from Assistance that October were later picked up by sledge crews on the opposite side of Wellington Channel, north of Port Innis. ‘Neither this or the non-discovery of papers by travelling parties in 1851’, Osborn wrote later, ‘can offer proof against their possible utility and success; and the balloons may still be considered a most useful auxiliary’.37 The following spring there began a more conventional campaign of searches by man-hauled sledge: parties were dispatched north and south, tracing large tracts of barren coastline. Cheyne took charge of one of three supporting sledges in McClintock’s ‘Melville Island Division’. Accompanied by seven men, with a sledge he christened Parry, he acted as fatigue party drawing McClintock’s sledge for the first days of travel. Cheyne’s team were twelve days away from ship and marched nearly 200km. During this spring programme McClintock’s main team covered an impressive 1,425km, exploring the entrance to McDougall Sound and resurveying the south coasts of Byam Martin and Melville islands, but returning with no traces of survivors.38 The ships were released from the ice on 8 August and shortly thereafter sailed for home. Cheyne was promoted to Lieutenant on 11 October 1851 and for the third time was assigned to a ship preparing to search for the missing Franklin expedition.39 He joined Assistance at anchor in the Thames, shortly before the ships of Edward Belcher’s squadron sailed on 15 April 1852. Arriving off Beechey Island on 13 August, sledging parties under the commands of Richards and Cheyne set forth to examine the region once more. Cheyne climbed to the summit of the island to search for the cairn left by Franklin’s crew, but no trace was found. Taking Assistance and Pioneer further up Wellington Channel, Belcher discovered Northumberland Sound, off Grinnell Peninsula on northwest Devon Island, and put his ships into winter quarters. The first message balloons were dispatched from Resolute on the clear morning of 12 September, and the ship’s master George McDougall gives a short account of this.40 Having secured a number 202

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of electrometers from Kew, Cheyne was tasked with making a series of scientific observations. Again it proves far easier to find details of his roles on stage than of his daily duties. On the evening of 9 November 1852, for example, in a programme of theatricals got up to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Wales, Cheyne found himself in a frock once more entertaining an eager audience. The young lieutenant was lead player in the corps dramatique of ‘The Queens Arctic Theatre’, playing ‘Rosa’ (‘an electrifying Aurora from Sadler’s Wells’) in the Irish Tutor, and ‘Marianne’ in the Silent Woman.41 The following spring, as sledge parties searched the surrounding islands for relics of the Franklin expedition, Cheyne remained with Assistance, tinkering with his instruments, shooting bears, and taking charge of the balloon apparatus.42 On clear days with brisk southerly winds during June, with the ships still locked in their winter quarters, silk messages were once again sent aloft in Shepherd’s small hydrogen filled balloons.43 On 14 July, as the last of the sledge parties returned to the ships, Belcher began to move Assistance and Pioneer south. The ships were caught in the ice in Wellington Channel and forced to winter to the north of Devon Island. During October 1853, Cheyne was sent to North Star, which had remained at Beechey Island as a base for the squadron, to attend to tidal and meteorological observations under Commander Pullen. It would not be his only visit, for though the ships were released from the grip of ice in August the following year they were still unable to make passage through to Lancaster Sound and so were abandoned. It had been a hard season for Belcher’s squadron. He had already ordered Resolute and Intrepid to be abandoned in Barrow Strait, and so the officers and crews of all four ships assembled on North Star, the last of their ships remaining. Finally relieved by supply ships on 26 August 1854, the crews limped home to face a mixture of public praise and official criticism. Belcher was later acquitted at court-martial over the loss of four ships but his very dramatic failure effectively prevented any further Admiralty search expeditions. The Franklin drama reached a dramatic conclusion in 1859 with McClintock’s return from King William Island, aboard Fox, financed by Lady Franklin herself, bringing relics sufficient to prove the fate of the missing crews.44 Seizing on a chance of supplementing his meagre halfpay, Cheyne approached McClintock, a former shipmate, requesting 203

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permission to publish images of the relics, which were then on display in the museum of the United Service Institution.45 McClintock happily gave his endorsement, appearing himself in a bold pose as returning hero. A set of these stereoviews, with a descriptive catalogue, commanded the price of one guinea and Cheyne sold sets from his London home.46 They are the first photographic records of these sacred objects. He spent much of his time after his Arctic service ashore. In 1873 he is a patriotic officer struggling on half-pay in London, attending evening meetings of the Royal Geographical Society. On 3 November, for example, the secretary of the society, Clements Markham delivered a paper on the failures of Charles Hall’s Polaris expedition, and the successes of his cousin Albert’s cruise in the steamer Arctic. In the discussion that followed, Cheyne offered his support for future exploration. He urged the RGS to continue promoting Arctic research ‘until the North Pole was finally reached’ and warned that ‘if England did not now do her duty in this respect, she would find other nations surpassing her’.47 It is at this moment, with London beginning to buzz with the news of a new polar expedition that he begins to voice his own interests as a potential leader. Cheyne delivered his first public lecture in a crowded London concert hall on 13 November 1875, but it was no glittering debut. For many months he had been working hard on his manuscript, jotting together notes and reminiscences, dipping into popular histories and gathering illustrations. He had even managed to attract the approval of Ward Hunt, Disraeli’s new First Lord of the Admiralty, who was happy to advertise his support for the evening’s entertainment. The curtains were pulled back, an expectant hush descended on the audience, but as the lights dimmed poor Cheyne muffed his lines.48 Perhaps he was trying to be too straight-laced and scientific for this first lecture, rather than using his obvious vaudeville skills to entrance the audience. ‘The attractiveness of the subject . . . drew together a considerable audience, but the result fell short’, The Times reported.49 He ran out of time, he dropped his notes, and his illuminating equipment was refusing to work. Despite these problems the lecture was ‘not altogether unsuccessful’, The Times conceded, and when he offered his services to the Admiralty for future Arctic expeditions, at the close of the presentation, he was given a hearty applause. Some might have felt 204

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51. The Nares expedition re-enacted in magic lantern slides, 1876.

that it would be better for him to get lost in the ice than embark on this new career in the limelight. Whilst Cheyne may have been unable to satisfy a discerning London audience at this early stage, he soon proved a success in the provinces. 205

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On 19 January 1876 he delivered a brisk summary on the state of exploration before a full audience at the Plymouth Mechanic’s Institute, and was booked again for the following night.50 Meanwhile, a script of his lecture had been published by Frederick York, a reputable magic lantern manufacturer, accompanied by an attractive set of fifty of the dissolving views. In village halls and drawing rooms across the country, audiences could explore the mysteries of the Arctic with ‘brave Commander Cheyne’. The reading proved immensely popular.51 The Admiralty were keen to offer their support for the lectures, understanding the value of endorsing and circulating appealing images of past and future naval campaigns; an ideal form of advertisement. These were stirring images of the nation’s Navy at battle amongst the floes and Cheyne was happy to play his part in spreading the message. On 18 November he lectured at Tunbridge Wells, soon after hearing of the early return of the Nares party, and he reaffirmed his belief that the Pole could be reached. He would ‘be prepared to proceed to the farthest point north’ by a vessel, and then ‘if it came to the worst’, he could probably use a balloon to ‘surmount the ice difficulties’.52 Not the most confident of proposals, that’s for sure, but Cheyne would soon get his act into gear.

FIRST ASCENTS

On 28 July 1799 the mineralogist and antiquary Edward Daniel Clarke constructed and released a balloon at the settlement of Enontekis in northern Sweden. Clarke had arrived in the village the previous week ‘with a view of bringing together the dispersed families of the wild Laplanders, who are so rarely seen collected in any number’.53 Obsessed with ballooning since his student days in Cambridge, Clarke provided the spectacle in the name of anthropology and showmanship.54 Notices were sent on horseback and cart all over the surrounding district. In three days, the white satin toy balloon was finished, decorated gaudily with scarlet hangings, and suspended from the rafters of the village church. The following morning the balloon was dispatched. Clarke described the scene: ‘The volant orb rose majestically into the atmosphere, to the great astonishment, and evidently to the dismay, of 206

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all the Lapps; for their reindeer taking fright, scampered off in all directions, followed by their owners, who were not a whit less alarmed themselves’. It soared to a considerable height before plunging into the waters of a nearby lake.55 Clarke’s balloon was the first to be launched in the Arctic. Whether they were performed in a Swedish village, on a broad Parisian boulevard, or in a fashionable London pleasure garden, balloon launches proved to be attractive spectacles. After the first manned ascent in 1783, the French public became obsessed with this new form of entertainment and the fashion soon spread across the channel. Having displayed his balloon before an admiring public in the hall of the Lyceum, Vincenzo Lunardi, a flamboyant young clerk at the Neapolitan Embassy, took to the sky from London’s Moorfields on 15 September 1784. On January 7 the following year, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries, an American doctor, made the first trip across the English Channel. Public imaginations soared as ballooning opened new worlds of possibility. Balloonists became infamous figures, lionised for their bravery yet at the same time criticised for endangering life. As with all fashions, novelty wore away and new attractions had to be added to sustain interest. In 1797, Andre´ Jacques Garnerin successfully descended in a parachute, whilst the following year Pierre Te´stu-Brissy went up mounted on a horse. There soon followed nocturnal ascents in sumptuously decorated balloons illuminated by lamplight or ascents enhanced by fireworks launched by the aeronaut from his basket at great risk. With showmen looking to add lustre and originality to their performances, it would not be long before they dared to propose incredible voyages. By 1838 there had been more than eight hundred ascents in England alone; some balloonists tried to climb to ever-higher altitudes, others tried for longer journeys or proposed intriguing new innovations. Serious references to the possibility of reaching the Pole by balloon can be traced back at least to 1845 and the advocacy of Jules Francois Dupuis-Delcourt, a Parisian showman and aeronautical engineer.56 The ‘fearless’ aeronauts Bixio and Barral used Delcourt balloons in the first high-altitude scientific ascents, rising over Paris in 1850, although a rent in the silk sent them crashing into a vineyard near Lagny.57 Delcourt was the first to test balloons coated in gutta percha and to 207

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construct a large copper balloon, the so-called ‘immense saucepan’.58 Unsurprisingly, he found the French government unwilling to finance this kind of dream for an airborne assault on the Pole. In 1849 ‘Lieutenant’ George Gale suggested a balloon expedition to search for Franklin as a ruse to attract attention to his regular aeronautical performances. Struggling actor, part-time circus performer and expert horseman, Gale had made his first ascent from a London pub just a few years earlier. He attempted a number of ballooning ‘firsts’, including aerial acrobatics and elaborate new firework displays.59 He spent much of 1848 at the Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, tinkering with novel parachute designs, even chucking monkeys out of his basket: to the great delight of the garden’s clientele.60 He continued to go up in towns across the country, telling anyone who would listen about his plans, and all the while taking advantage of public interest in the search effort. Punch reacted to Gale’s proposals with customary scepticism: ‘Imagination forms icicles on the tips of our nose, as we figure to ourselves the daring GALE “blow high, blow low” with the thermometer 15 degrees below zero, his gas contracted, his balloon congealed into a flying iceberg’.61 Gale performed increasingly spectacular airborne stunts to try and prove his credentials as a brave explorer. A few months later, however, his aerial adventurism would prove fatal. On 8 September 1850, making his 114th flight, Gale ascended from a Bordeaux showground with the Royal Cremorne balloon, sat on the back of a pony suspended from the basket, saluting to his audience as a brass band provided the soundtrack. He made a rough landing near Me´rignac and released the pony, but owing to his ‘imperfect knowledge of the French language’ – or, as some press reports suggested, his considerable intoxication – his rope handlers suddenly let go and Gale was carried out of sight.62 The following morning, his battered body was found several miles away in a field. He left seven children and a widow. The English press was horrified by the accident and united to condemn crude ballooning performances as needless folly. The Times urged experienced practitioners to turn away from unnecessary risk-taking and the growing ‘affectation for extravagant and exceptionable modes of excitement’.63 One editorial lambasted the popular ballooning fascination as ‘barbaric’ and a sure sign of society’s moral decline, revealing ‘the decrepitude of national virtue’, 208

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52. ‘Balloon in Winter Quarters, congealed into a Flying Iceberg’. ‘A Strong Gale’, Punch, 1849.

a shameful disregard for the ‘sacredness of life’, and ‘proof of a depraved public taste’.64 Yet across the Channel, enthusiasms for ballooning were soaring. Jules Verne was inspired to write his first short story, Un Voyage en Ballon, 209

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53. The Folly of Mid-Century Ballooning. Punch, 1851.

which appeared in an English translation in the summer of 1852.65 Verne’s balloonist-hero is joined on his flight by a mysterious stowaway, a madman named Erostratus Empedocles, who is armed with a portfolio collection of engravings and caricatures, with which he regales a pottedhistory of the ‘aerial mania’.66 ‘I have studied aerostatics thoroughly’, the obsessed stowaway declares. Rising higher into the clouds, Erostratus commandeers the balloon and reveals his suicidal intentions: he wants to destroy it to ‘save humanity from the evils of progress’. After a high-altitude wrestle, the balloonist overcomes his adversary and the madman plunges to his death. The hero floats gently to earth: ‘a miracle had saved me . . . may this terrific recital, while it instructs those who read it, not discourage the explorers of the routes of air’.67 The balloon is saved. Reason triumphs over blind force and the implication is that progress may prevail despite all opposition. Verne returned to this theme many times. To give another example, his Cinq Semaines en Ballon described the voyage of the hydrogen-filled Victoria over jungle treetops in the heart of Africa.68 Energetically merging fantasy with fact, and released at a time when the world was waiting on news of John Speke’s latest expedition in search of the source of the 210

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Nile, the novel proved an immediate success. It became the first of the Voyages Extraordinaires that would give Verne enduring fame.69 Though newspapers and novels were stuffed with accounts of the latest balloon escape or fatal accident, very real peril did little to dampen the enthusiasm of those looking skyward. In 1866 Gustave Lambert announced his support for an aerial voyage and published plans that included a boat suspended by a giant balloon, which would make its way north through Bering Strait.70 In an attempt to ‘induce the public to take an interest’, Giffard offered the use of one of his giant balloons for a public ascent, and Wilfred de Fonvielle and Gaston Tissandier agreed to act as pilots. The balloon was promptly christened North Pole, and on 27 June 1869, before a crowd of almost 100,000 people, it rose from the Champ de Mars into the evening sky. It landed sometime later in a hay field after a ‘pleasant sojourn’. It was hoped that charging spectators for the best seats around the balloon as it was inflated and launched would have netted a tidy profit, but most watched the ascent from beyond the reach of the money-collectors.

54. ‘Ascension du Ballon Le Pole Nord, au Champ de Mars le 27 Juin’, l’Univers Illustre, 1869.

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The end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871 allowed Parisians to look to ballooning once more, no longer as a vital lifeline but rather as rational entertainment. Others tried to test its scientific potential. In an attempt to salve French pride and resurrect the national image, a few aeronauts also turned their attention to the Arctic. Hoping to better the altitude record set by Glaisher and Coxwell in 1862, the French had developed oxygen-breathing apparatus, tested by Joseph Croce´-Spinelli and Henri The´odore Sivel in a specially designed vacuum chamber. Sivel enters our story, as he also put forward detailed plans for a balloon expedition to the North Pole before a gathering of the French Society of Aerial Navigation in 1872.71 He proposed heading north by ship whereupon he would inflate a giant balloon, its wicker basket replaced by a boat equipped with two keels to serve as skates. Sivel’s plan included detailed diagrams of balloon construction and logistics and can be regarded as the most significant proposal for polar flight prior to Cheyne’s campaign. Ultimately, Sivel’s tragic death in the Ze´nith highaltitude ascent in 1875 put an end to his plans. Most people remained rightly unconvinced of the value, or sanity, of a polar attempt.72

LECTURES AND LOBBYING

There is always a good deal to be said in favour of Arctic exploration. It has been said over and over again, sometimes to willing, at others to reluctant ears, but it will doubtless continue to be said until the great mystery of the Pole has been revealed. We may acknowledge at once that adventure is a good thing, that the advancement of knowledge is a good thing, that the employment of British seamen in deeds of endurance and enterprise is a good thing, that the history of the English Navy, and even the English nation itself, would not be what it is without the great Arctic tradition of heroism and daring, and yet we may fairly hesitate when we are asked to give encouragement and countenance to a new scheme for the exploration of the Pole. We know too well, from repeated and too often mournful experience, what the perils of Arctic exploration are.73

Let us now rejoin Cheyne as he begins his career as an Arctic showman. The idea of reaching the North Pole for the first time clearly had drama 212

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enough to attract an audience. On 29 November 1876, he delivered a new lecture before a crowded hall at the Birkbeck Institution. London was full of talk about the Nares expedition; a dispute was also building in the press on the nature of a future route to the Pole, with the news that the Americans were petitioning Congress for an expedition to leave the following year. Cheyne ‘rejoiced’ to hear of this ‘because he knew England would not be outstripped by another country on the question of Arctic exploration’.74 On 9 February 1877, he was in Edinburgh lecturing at the George Street Music Hall, the fashionable assembly room where Dickens had given public readings, performing under Ward Hunt’s patronage and with the advertised support of Gathorne Hardy, Disraeli’s Secretary of State for War.75 He had ‘a New Dissolving View Apparatus’ powered by oxy-hydrogen limelight, projecting images more than twenty-five feet wide. Growing in confidence as a lecturer, and having significantly improved his performance, Cheyne was beginning to attract a degree of notoriety. He soon secured a regular engagement at the newly opened Alexandra Palace in North London.76 He was given the stage in Westminster’s Royal Aquarium on 20 September 1877 and he regaled his plans for the Pole for three consecutive nights.77 He announced that he had already succeeded ‘in enlisting sympathy for his project’ among twenty-two local committees, formed to promote the proposal and help collect the sum of £23,000, which he calculated would be required. Tracing his finger suggestively across an illuminated map of the Arctic, he appealed to the audience for their help. The following week the first images of his vision for polar flight were published. ‘All attempts made by various nations to reach the North Pole have, up to the present time, resulted in failure’, announced The Graphic, ‘but a novel plan has been suggested by Commander Cheyne, which appears to afford some hope that the idea for which so much money has been spent, and so many hardships endured, may ere long be un fait accompli’.78 Despite confident performances in his London lectures, The Graphic noted, he had ‘yet to receive encouragement from either the Government or the nation’.79 This was, perhaps, little wonder once you had glanced across the page to see Cheyne’s surprising new technique of polar travel. Three large balloons were to be held by rigid spars in a triangular formation, carrying six men, three tons of gear, stores, provisions, tents 213

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55. ‘The Proposed Polar Expedition – How to Reach the Pole by Balloons’, The Graphic, 6 October 1877.

and sledges, a supply of compressed gas and a team of dogs. The spars were to be fitted with footropes so that the men could scramble from one balloon to another ‘in the same manner as sailors lie upon the yards of a ship, and the balloons would be equipoised by means of bags of ballast suspended from this framework, and hauled to the required positions by ropes’.80 The boat cars were to be housed in for warmth and kept in touch with the ship by means of a telegraph wire paid out from a huge wheel as the balloons moved northward. In addition to ensuring constant ‘telegraphic communication’, the wire would also record the distance traversed, being marked every five miles. To aid the navigation of this floating formation, trail ropes were to be used to prevent ascent above a certain height – about five hundred feet – at ‘which elevation they would be balanced in the air, the spare ends dragging over the ice’. The Graphic continued by describing Cheyne’s timetable of attack: the balloons were to start at the end of May, on the curve of a predetermined ‘wind circle’. The nature of this wind pattern was to be forecast, to Cheyne’s great confidence, through a series of shipboard measurements, and at two meteorological observatories some thirty miles distant in opposite directions. He reckoned that the balloons 214

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could be landed within ‘at least twenty miles of the long-wished-for goal’. Having moored the balloons, Cheyne’s band would make their final assault on the Pole, plant a flag, and when the necessary observations had been carried out, secure a favourable wind blowing to the south. The Graphic’s only commentary on Cheyne’s proposals was that they afforded ‘some hope’, which was a flattering verdict at this stage considering the wild optimism of the plan. Though the image was appealing, brimming with the rough-andready reasoning of an adventure story, most would need more information before they could be convinced.81 And so the swirl of engagements continued. On 24 October, he lectured in the Langham Hall, Great Portland Street, before the Turkish Ambassador and Viscount Pollington, and in the following week was the star attraction of a gala benefit held at the Cannon Street Hotel. With a number of important guests attending – including George Gleig, late Chaplain General of the Forces, and the Lord Mayor of London, Thomas Scambler Owden – the ballroom was filled with limelight views and some rousing songs performed by Vernon Rigby, a favourite at the Alexandra Palace.82 Shortly afterward, Cheyne joined the ‘Lecturers Association’ – a group of like-minded popular performers who organised their own bookings – and throughout 1878 he journeyed across the country to spread his message. The Southport Visitor, for example, would declare that his slides were the ‘best that they had ever seen’. The St Helens Standard reported that ‘tales of his experiences amongst the icebergs were thrilling and exciting to an intense degree’. The Hull Express testified to the ‘long and continued applause’, while The Staffordshire Advertiser described that ‘he riveted the attention of the audience and entirely carried their sympathies’. The journalists of The Clifton Chronicle were equally impressed: ‘No entertainment that has ever been given at Clifton can compare in point of deep interest to the lecture of that gallant Arctic officer Commander Cheyne. Highly instructive and most thoroughly entertaining’.83 Cheyne also proved an attraction in Scotland spending much of 1878 lecturing there. In Edinburgh, he was ‘exceedingly well received’; in Dundee, his ‘graphic descriptions of wild scenes’ were ‘intensely interesting’; in Crieff, his performance was ‘most interesting, dynamic and vivid’ and so too in Aberdeen: ‘Views of Arctic scenery are brought out with most telling effect, storms amongst 215

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56. Cheyne is star of the provincial lecture circuit, Salisbury, August 1877.

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tumbling masses of icebergs, ships in danger or crushed wrecks, the frozen north where repose the remains of those brave seamen who perished with the last Franklin Expedition, are all alike beautifully and vividly described’.84 By January 1879, after this intense lecture campaign, Cheyne had managed to form thirty-five local committees. The details of the plan were still broadly the same as they had been when The Graphic raised the public profile of the scheme back in 1877: a triangle of three hydrogen-filled balloons carrying boat cars, men and sledges bound for the Pole on a predicted wind track. Cheyne had also made some appealing additions, suggesting that he might continue over the Pole to attempt a crossing of the polar ocean, whilst his ship performed a multi-year scientific survey, before moving north to affect a circumnavigation of Greenland – optimistically offering a mix of adventure, bold discovery and scientific observation to elicit more support for his plans. Adventurers play many of the same games today. By the end of June, there were forty-nine local committees. A London gathering was arranged, inaugurating the ‘London Central Arctic Committee’, a formal body to lobby government for financial support.85 The group held its first meeting at the House of Commons on 7 August 1879, drawing up action plans for the local committees, securing the use of rooms at the Royal Society of Literature, and opening a Bank of England account. The ‘British Arctic Exploration Fund’ was officially opened to subscriptions the following morning.86 Lord Derby offered one hundred pounds, which was soon matched by other generous donations, and their activities were popularised with another attractive illustration in The Graphic.87 With high hopes, Cheyne travelled north to Sheffield to attend the annual meeting of the British Association, but his plan came under attack. With Clements Markham in the chair as president it’s not surprising that the polar regions were a subject of much debate. On 26 August Commander Lewis Beaumont – whose sledging heroics on the Nares expedition had earned him promotion – delivered a critical commentary on Cheyne’s plans: ‘the future of Arctic work must depend upon the persevering efforts and reasonable arguments of those who advocate it . . . the revival of interest in Arctic exploration will commence amongst those who are sure to be more influenced by 217

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valuable and substantial results as an object, than by the prospect of a brilliant but profitless achievement’.88 Cheyne was incensed that Beaumont had dismissed his ideas so freely. He rose from the audience to defend himself, thinking it just a jealous attack on his plans. Some applauded, others laughed loudly, a few objected to Cheyne’s incendiary language, while everywhere was chaos.89 Markham restored order and asked Beaumont to counter. The young officer reiterated his belief that ballooning was ‘impracticable’ and, moreover, said that ‘he felt it his duty to tell the public so’, pitching the floor into chaos once more. Markham claimed later that he was reluctant to speak out, but he rose to offer his presidential verdict. What was needed, he suggested, was careful thought; a dose of realism. A ship was best, and it was a more pressing challenge to find an appropriate route for it, not be diverted by hopeful ‘speculations’. In perhaps the most public, and damning, criticism of Cheyne’s plans so far – and widely reported later in the national press – Markham delivered a killer blow, declaring, ‘that a balloon expedition would be a fiasco and that it would actually do harm to geographical discovery’.90

BALLOONACY

Protest against these preparations for a costly performance of Balloonacy in the theatre of everlasting ice and eternal snow.91

After humiliation at the British Association, Cheyne immediately left on the train to London. Although frustrated and angered by his treatment in Sheffield, he resolved to increase his efforts, and during the following months campaigned furiously to silence the doubters.92 He arranged interviews with journalists; laid siege to the House of Commons, lobbying members to offer their support; and wrote to popular aeronauts and scientists alike, asking for advice.93 He sent a steady stream of letters to the newspapers, prepared publicity pamphlets detailing the progress of the ‘movement’, and continued to lecture in crowded halls along the south coast of England.94 He visited the local committees (by now a total of fifty-nine in towns across the country), spurring them on to ‘keep up interest in the spirit

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of the cause’, and encouraged the ‘London Central Arctic Committee’ to collect more subscriptions in his absence.95 With the help of some imaginative water-colourists, he created new dissolving views showing balloons ‘floating freely’ to the Pole, and he commissioned a new programme of music, providing the words himself: Names of Franklin, Ross and Parry, scintillate in sparkling glory, through ev’ry English soul! Count not the losses we sustain, but bear our colours yet again, this time to Northern Pole! Hail, Hail, Britannia’s colours fly, Excelsior borne in Arctic sky, by Britain’s fearless band. Thro’ Him our Voyager’s efforts blest, brought safely home to well earn’d rest, in their dear native land. Then rally round our flag unfurl’d, which braves the storm around the world!96

Cheyne’s supporters rallied as best they could by forming a large deputation to lobby the new Lord Mayor, Francis Truscott, to lend his support but the volume of criticism in the press increased. The Times urged the public to wait until the plans had been approved by those who ‘can speak with authority’, namely the RGS and naval officers with Arctic experience. Here was the challenge that Cheyne and other aspirant explorers had to face: a landscape of power and patronage that could advance or dash their hopes in an instant. Without RGS approval, and lacking Markham’s support, Cheyne’s expedition would be unlikely to leave London. The plans found a wicked critic in Punch, whose writers strongly objected to the inevitable ‘waste of valuable money’: [T]heir plan of Polar attack is literally en l’air, being principally based on ballooning, while their sinews of war are to be contributions raised throughout the English Counties by Local Arctic Committees. If these Polar promoters succeed in raising the wind by such means, Punch is prepared to allow that they may not only reach, but carry off, the North Pole in a Balloon. Punch hates to throw cold water on

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57. Northward Ho!; or, Baffled Not Beaten, released in 1879. ‘Count not the losses we sustain, but bear our colours yet again, this time to Northern Pole!’

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anything that aims at serving science, and finds a field for pluck, and cold water seems the best thing to fling on a North Pole adventure; but the line must be drawn somewhere. There are limits to Quixotism, even of the scientific or heroic kind; and if they are fixed at latitude 828 North, Punch does not see who would be the worse for such a fixing. A chain is only as strong as its weakest point, and a Cheyne is no stronger.97

As clamour grew, most thought it would be reasonable to give the equipment a trial run. Friends of the project were sure that this could silence the doubters, while Cheyne’s opponents looked forward to an embarrassing failure to settle the issue once and for all. One anonymous fellow wrote to The Times suggesting that Cheyne might like to take ‘a preliminary canter’ from London to Edinburgh, landing a balloon on Arthur’s Seat.98 The manager of Crystal Palace declared it would be a capital thing and offered his grounds for the launch.99 Unsurprisingly, Cheyne was less enthusiastic. At first he let the matter alone but the public became set on the idea. On 11 March 1880 he wrote to The Times, refusing to be forced into making a demonstration. With North and Irish Seas yawning for his basket no doubt he balked at the risks. His defence, he reasonably concluded, was that it would be impossible to employ the trail ropes, which were a crucial part of his plan for navigating, without sweeping through towns ‘cutting down people right and left, severing telegraph wires, and causing serious accidents alike to people, property, and to the balloons themselves’.100 In 1880, Cheyne established the first ‘Balloon Society of Great Britain’, giving a new name to a loose collection of his contacts in an attempt to breathe life into his enterprise.101 He arranged for a display at Alexandra Palace. Cheyne’s ‘Grand Arctic Exhibition’ opened early in July, with the palace’s concert hall overstuffed with a hastily gathered hodgepodge of items: cabinets of geological specimens, a glass case lined with ivory carvings, a shipboard printing press, a Lapland sledge, hunting rifles, models of boats, cans of preserved meats, charts and watercolours, a collection of scientific instruments (including the apparatus for photographing from the balloons), and a selection of tents.102 The exhibition proved a popular addition to the summer season’s bill of entertainment, drawing visitors from all over London, though it 221

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58. ‘Arctic Ae¨ronautics’, Punch, 24 January 1880.

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may be equally said that they had come to enjoy the troupes of Japanese acrobats, elaborate equestrian pantomimes, fireworks and tightrope walkers, or even the marvels of a ‘celebrated swimming dog’.103 At any rate, on 13 July Cheyne joined the performance, lecturing all day with his dissolving-view apparatus. The distinguished aeronaut Henry Coxwell also came along to give a presentation on the virtues of ballooning. For the gala evening of 15 July it was advertised that Coxwell would ‘make an ascent with the Triple Balloons’ to illustrate the plan for mastering the Pole, but the crowds were disappointed to see him send up a toy model instead.104 By the end of the summer it seems that Cheyne’s plans, like the toy balloons, were falling flat. He knew something was needed to grab attention again, and fast. His hopes were lifted late in August with the news that the newly formed Balloon Society was finally ready to do something practical to promote the effort by holding an ‘International Balloon Contest’ – certainly, a more satisfying prospect than Coxwell’s toy-balloons.105 Late in the afternoon on 4 September 1880, eight balloons took to the skies above London, each aeronaut choosing his elevation in order to travel the longest distance possible in one hour and a half. A journalist was assigned to each balloon, and the man from The Times eagerly took his place alongside Cheyne in the Owl, ascending from Crystal Palace. Mr Wright, the pilot, eased the balloon into the air before a large crowd of onlookers, taking a course toward the northeast, as Cheyne busied himself with meteorological measurements. Passing high above the Thames docks, they soon left the river behind them, floating gently over the meadows of Essex. The landing was less serene, narrowly avoiding some telegraph wires before bumping to earth in a barley field, forty miles from London.106 The following evening all the balloonists gathered at the Charing Cross Grand Hotel to discuss their adventures. Another contest was proposed. Wilfred de Fonvielle, the popular French aeronaut and Vice-President of the Acade´mie d’Ae´rostation, offered to bring his 42,000-cubic-foot balloon to England to compete in a public match with a balloon of Cheyne’s choosing.107 As it happened, perhaps sizing up his odds, Cheyne took a berth in the French balloon, whilst Mr Wright took control of English hopes in his balloon Eclipse. Rising from the grounds of Crystal Palace on Trafalgar Day – in fitting 223

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59. ‘Proposed Method of Reaching the North Pole by Balloons’, The Illustrated London News, 6 March 1880.

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conditions, with heavy snow on the ground – both balloons made rapid progress with a strong breeze to the southwest. Later that evening the English balloon landed gently in a Hampshire clover field, whereas Cheyne was ungracefully pitched out his basket onto a mudflat near Portsmouth.108 It was a good effort but it would not be long before his hopes came crashing to Earth. It was becoming clear that though exhibitions, lectures, and balloon races did much to raise the profile of the proposals and keep them in the newspapers, many key people were still unconvinced. Without official support he knew that it would be impossible to persuade enough people that his plans were credible and gather together the funds so desperately needed. On 22 November, therefore, the Central Arctic Committee laid a statement of their scheme before the Council of the RGS.109 With Albert and Clements Markham so opposed to the plan the RGS Council wasted little time and denounced it in writing the following day. Such an abrupt and public rejection, widely reported by the press in the weeks that followed, marked the end of any hope that Cheyne would find support for his voyage in England.110 The Times was not surprised that the RGS were unwilling to back the idea, not merely because ‘of the very uncertain character of aerial journeys’ but because it could sense a more general shift in the way polar expeditions were being planned by other nations. With talk aroused by the forthcoming International Polar Year – in which Britain would actually take only a small role – the approach to exploration was being scrutinised more than ever. ‘There is a growing conviction that individual “dashes for the Pole” are a visionary waste of money’, The Times concluded: . . . and since the failure of the splendidly equipped attempt of Captain Nares it is doubtful if any single venture in the old style will ever again be paid for out of any national exchequer. Ships will no doubt be dispatched by wealthy owners, eager for the fame of exploration, and valuable results will doubtless be obtained by these, as in the case of ¨ ld’s vessel; but the project of Lieutenant the Vega, Baron Nordenskjo Weyprecht for the establishment of international scientific stations in a great ring within the Arctic circle is the plan which will most likely be adopted in the future.111 225

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‘Should our Geographical Society take any steps in the direction of Arctic work,’ another newspaper agreed, ‘we trust that it will not be to encourage the foolish venture for which the country has been canvassed for subscriptions for years. If our Government be well advised, we are sure they will never give the public funds either for any great national expedition modelled on the lines of the past, nor to any private chimera got up for the glory of one man and the gratification of balloonists’.112

DARING TO BE DIFFERENT

Disraeli’s Under-Secretary for War, William Keppel, had been a long-time supporter of exploration but he too denounced Cheyne’s plans in the strongest terms. Launching a prolonged attack in the pages of The Quarterly Review, Keppel was sure that Cheyne’s ‘vision’ of flight was nothing more than a ‘reckless’ speculation. By ignoring ‘the very ABC of Arctic exploration’ such plans could only spell disaster: The man who rashly rejects the stored-up wisdom of a host of predecessors is not properly described as adventurous, but as unwise. If there is one thing better established than another, it is that man might as well try to sail to the Pole through the Isthmus of Panama, as through the Sounds of the Parry Islands . . . Cheyne expressly declares that he ‘intends to establish no depots in case of failure’. This is not enterprise, but foolhardiness . . . Let the poor sailors at least be told that the expedition is one in which, humanly speaking, success is almost impossible, and in which failure means certain and terrible death.113

Keppel was concerned by what he saw as an assault, not on the Pole, but on the ‘tradition’ of naval expeditions of the past. To do it Cheyne’s way was to attack the image of exploration itself. Sledge travel and man hauling were key features of this tradition, ‘reduced by Osborn and McClintock to a science’, which provided the Navy, and the government, with inspirational examples. Whereas, Keppel decided, a private ballooning voyage ‘puffed into notoriety’ and lacking naval 226

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60. ‘Commander Cheyne: Popular Pictorial Lectures’, Princeton Methodist Church, 6 and 7 December 1881.

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discipline would certainly fail. Though the limitations of the manhauling technique had been well demonstrated by the Nares expedition, Keppel demanded that its ‘virtues’ be protected: ‘There is nothing in the naval story more striking than the pertinacity with which those gallant men struggled on, with their sledges laden’. Daring to offer an innovative technique of travel, Cheyne was facing obstacles that he would be unable to cross. Rejected by the RGS, ignored by the Admiralty, and abandoned by many of its initial supporters, Cheyne’s campaign in Britain was over. In a final bid to raise support for his venture he headed to America. He arrived in New York on 16 November after an eventful voyage across the Atlantic through a hurricane.114 The following day, he delivered the first of three illustrated lectures before an enthusiastic audience at the Chickering Hall. His lecture, titled ‘Baffled, Not Beaten; or, The Discovery of the Pole Practicable’, took the form of an imaginary voyage. Patching together forty ‘vivid and spirited pictures’, Cheyne took his audience toward the Pole, ‘illustrating the various difficulties, dangers, and rewards’.115 On 28 November Cheyne appeared before the New York Academy of Sciences. In the weeks that followed he continued to write to the newspapers and to lobby prospective supporters, sallying forth from his rooms at the Lotus Club to give lectures to school groups and anyone else willing to pay for the privilege.116 In early December he travelled south to perform in towns in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the public continued to look to the North, waiting for news of De Long’s expedition.117 In June 1881, the same month that his ship Jeannette was crushed in the ice north of Bering Strait, newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett sent out a relief expedition. However, his new ship, the USS Rodgers, caught fire off eastern Siberia, leaving its survivors in a desperate condition too. The Herald’s journalist on the voyage sledged almost 2,500 miles across sea ice and frozen tundra to telegraph the news. By December word of the Jeannette’s dramatic failure had also reached the nation. Though it made for thrilling newspaper copy, an expectant public were horrified by the tragedy. Sensational news was soon followed by bitter charges. In this context of recrimination and national loss, it is no surprise that Cheyne found it difficult to rally support for a new polar venture. Enthusiasm for the Arctic was at an all time low. If only for a moment, 228

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the American public were united: to add yet another disaster to the ‘desolate pages of Arctic exploration’ was simply too much.118 On 21 December, when the news of the Jeannette catastrophe broke, a reporter from The New York Herald found a rather tactless Cheyne in a ‘happy frame of mind’. No longer having to tout his plans as a search expedition, he felt vindicated in his choice of route: De Long’s failure had proved that ‘the only way to the Pole is by Smith Sound’.119 He continued to write long letters to the press: Are we forever to keep to one line of action while other untried paths are at our disposal? I declare, sir, fearlessly and emphatically that the Pole can be reached by the air path in balloons. This modus operandi will be but a transposition of the dangers and hardships common to sledges and ships to dangers of a less degree, without the hardships. . . . Mr. Henry Walton Grinnell has energetically responded to the situation, and volunteered to become secretary to a proposed Arctic committee, to be as speedily as possible formed in New York, for the purpose of collecting the sum of $40,000 as the American quota toward the cost of this Anglo-American expedition. The other $40,000 will be raised in England, the total cost being $80,000, of which the balloons will cost $20,000 . . . I start tomorrow for Canada, going to Ottawa and other cities, to gain cooperation of the Canadian people. I expect to be back in New York about January 20. During my absence, Mr. Grinnell has kindly undertaken to watch the interests of the organization in New York, and I will, as having lived twelve years on the soil of America, appeal to enterprising and wealthy citizens of New York and other places in the United States to support Mr. Grinnell, Lieutenant Schwatka, United States Army, and myself in a speedy gathering in of the funds necessary for the equipment of the expedition . . . Asking that no time be lost in this work, so that the ‘Grinnell’, the name determined upon for our vessel, may sail from the harbour of New York for Smith’s Sound by next June, I am, sir, yours obediently, John P. Cheyne, Commander R.N., F.R.G.S. P.S. – All reforms or novelties go through three stages: suggestion, ridicule, adoption.120 229

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On 23 December, Cheyne started for Toronto on the Central Railway. While jostling in the carriage, he wrote to the Editor of The Herald, requesting that the newspaper open up an ‘Arctic Fund’ to collect the money he required. This brash letter, it is safe to say, brought things to a head. The Herald declined, and published a caustic reply in its pages, urging explorers like Cheyne to stay at home ‘instead of running about the world with a visionary scheme in hand and a few lectures in his pocket’.121 This public rejection turned the tide of opinion firmly against him. The New York Times carried a long article condemning the ‘folly’ of his proposals. Considering the ‘total loss of money’ invested in the Jeannette expedition and the ‘incredible suffering’ of her crew, a new Arctic voyage was, in the words of the paper, wholly ‘immoral’: What right has any Captain to go and lose himself in the Arctic ice, and then expect that England and America will send out costly expeditions to search for him? . . . There is now in this country an amiable and accomplished British naval officer who wants to go to the Pole in a balloon . . . There is a fair prospect that in the course of time the American as well as the English public will decide that the Arctic sea is yawning for him. In this case let him take with him all the lunatics who think that polar exploration is a good thing, and let Congress pass a law making it a capital offence for anyone to propose to go in search of him. There will then be an end of the search for the Pole, and sensible people will no longer be harassed by the anxieties to which polar expeditions invariably give rise, nor vexed at the waste of money and energy which they involve.122

The vociferous criticism of the American newspapers proved fatal.123 His trip to North America in search of finance had been an unmitigated failure. He did not return to New York, but stayed with his sister in Canada, no doubt licking his wounds. His reputation was in ruins. It is possible that he never returned to England. He had been on the road promoting his vision of flight since 1876 and though he found wide support he had also faced almost constant ridicule. Perhaps long overdue, it was time for Cheyne to take a final bow, pack away his lantern, fold up his notes, and step out of the limelight. The dream of polar flight, for now, was over.

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61. Imaginations take flight with heroes in juvenile literature. ‘Wild Adventures Round the Pole’, The Boy’s Own Paper, 19 November 1881.

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FLIGHTS OF THE IMAGINATION

As Cheyne’s plans were languishing others took advantage of soaring imaginations to make their own Arctic voyages. Ballooning drifts into fantasy and authors were leading the way. A few examples will do. In the latest Gordon Stables adventure – The Cruise of the Arrandoon, serialized weekly in The Boy’s Own Paper during 1881 – a motley British team set their hearts on the Pole. There was the crusty salt, Captain McBain: a ‘hardy, fear-nothing, daring man, imbued with a sense of duty and with piety’. Ralph Leigh was an educated young landed gent, ‘tall and shapely’ but a ‘lion when aroused’. His friend Rory Elphiston, an Irish orphan, was poetic and artistic; and lastly, Allan McGregor, a brave and worthy Scot, the religious new laird of Arrandoon, whose father had died sword in hand leading his regiment in the Afghan wars. Unable to cross a barrier of impenetrable ice, the boys took to the skies in their balloon Perseverando. Though the wind systems surrounding a volcanic Pole made it impossible to continue, they achieved a new ‘Farthest North’. Soon afterward, their Parisian aeronaut, De Vere, dies deliriously, maddened by his dreams of polar flight.124 Overcoming the perils of polar ballooning was a perfect fit for the self-confident optimism that pulsed through juvenile adventure stories of this period. Victor Patrice’s Voyage Extraordinaire en Cent Trente Jours, published in Paris in 1885, rejoiced in a series of airborne adventures. Fre´de´ric van Egberg, pioneering inventor and aeronaut, and his heroic companions sail on the winds to a mysterious Pole. En route they rescue some hapless English explorers, ‘Lord Northborough’ and ‘Sir James Blumwers’, trapped on their yacht Shakespeare, with their crew mutinous because they failed to sledge farther northward. Sailing in the air provides these explorers with a miraculous passage. ‘Some incredulous persons refuse to believe the details of this voyage’, Patrice wrote with a wink, ‘the best advice one can give them is to go to the North Pole and find out the truth for themselves’.125 The Airship Boys Due North – a popular title in Harry Sayler’s adventure series, published in 1910 when polar enthusiasms were again running high – reintroduced ballooning heroics to an eager audience. Ned Napier and Alan Hope, a pair of young inventors 232

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62. ‘Leave Ye All Hope Behind Who Enter Here: The Tragedies of Arctic Exploration’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 20 May 1882.

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financed generously by a Bostonian rubber boot millionaire, and their friend Bob Russell, an enterprising journalist of the Kansas City Comet, who updates the world on their ongoing exploits, head north on the steamer Aleutian, before attacking the Pole in their motorpropelled ‘aero-sledge’. Just ten miles short of their goal, the winds become violent preventing further progress and the boys are lucky to escape with their lives.126 In another popular children’s series readers followed the adventures of Don Sturdy and his uncles, big-game hunter Captain Frank Sturdy and Professor Amos Regor Bruce, into the wilds of Borneo, deep in the jungles of the Amazon, or adrift in the Sargasso Sea. In the most popular story, an adventure that sold almost 90,000 copies, readers could join the boy-hero on his flight to the Pole in a magnificent airship, just as Amundsen and Ellsworth were taking to the skies in an attempt to cross the Arctic Ocean.127 In Frank Sheridan’s lost-world adventure three young adventurers roam the Arctic by balloon and discover a subterranean race.128 Charles Vincent and Charles Causse’s Under the Sea to the North Pole, to give one final example, described the adventures of a patriotic naval lieutenant named Hubert and Marc D’Ermont, a brilliant young scientist, and their wealthy uncle Pierre de Keralio, aboard the steamer Polar Star. ‘I will go to the Pole’, the young Hubert cries, ‘and it shall not be remembered that Nares and Stephenson, and Aldrich, and Markham got close in 1876, without it also being said the French have beaten them!’129 Plying a new route north of Spitsbergen the steamer is brought to a halt by an impenetrable rampart of ancient ice. Undaunted, the adventurers take to the sky in an balloon fuelled by liquefied hydrogen, before they are brought down on the pack by strange magnetic currents, asphyxiated and discouraged: ‘it was evident that, in spite of all the scientific theories, ae´rostation would never be of use in the exploration of the Pole’.130 It is possible that Cheyne read some of these fictional adventures as they made their way north in the pages of popular books. Yet he had no brave companions to share his journey, no philanthropic millionaire to fund his passion, and no armoury of marvellous technologies to speed him past the dangers. Polar flight remained a thing of fancy, a success only in adventure literature. At this point Cheyne was living alone in Canada, separated from his family. Though many had been entertained by his lectures, his itinerant 234

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campaigning had ultimately cost him his marriage. In England his plans were long forgotten.131 In the following years many others dared to propose a voyage north in a balloon and, like Cheyne, they risked condemnation in the process. In 1890, for example, two young Frenchmen – Besancon, an aeronaut, and Gustave Hermite, an amateur astronomer – advocated a polar flight, publishing details of their plans in the press. Naming their balloon Sivel, in honour of the ‘martyr de la science ae´ronautique’, they hoped to ascend from Spitsbergen and head straight for the Pole, creating a chart of the Arctic with aerial photographs taken through the floor of their elaborate wicker capsule. Their plans, which could easily have leapt from the pages of an adventure novel, captured youthful enthusiasms for a moment but it wouldn’t be enough to attract the funding required to turn the voyage into a reality.132 In 1895 a Russian engineer named Serge de Savine proposed crossing the Arctic in a double balloon with suspended heating apparatus, but he too was unable to raise sufficient support.133 Salomon Andre´e arrived in London that summer and announced his plans for an airborne assault on the Pole. When challenged by a sceptical reporter, the Swede was indignant. ‘No, I don’t see that there will be any dangers at all’, he declared, ‘and I’m sure that before long I shall find any amount of imitators. I do not care a snap of the fingers what my critics say, for I have got the money, and nothing can prevent me starting now’.134 It is safe to guess that Cheyne would have followed these aerial proposals in the newspapers, though we have no record of his opinions. Indeed, the lack of documentary evidence makes it difficult enough just to track him down. We do know that he was still lecturing, despite his project being rejected so many years before. On 20 February 1891, at the ripe age of sixty-four, he gave a talk to the residents of Hamilton, regaling the audience with grand plans for a triple-balloon flight to the Pole, with sleighs acting as baskets trailing ropes made of piano string wire.135 From his long experience of Arctic travel, Cheyne concluded that ‘no other could be more qualified to find the North Pole’, asserting his priority of vision by proclaiming that he had conceived the balloon route as early as 1853. Although the years may have clouded his memory, this eccentric man had lost none of his conviction. 235

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PERFECT MADNESS

On the clear morning of 4 February 1902, just a few days before Cheyne passed away in his Halifax home, the first balloon to be launched in Antarctica rose skyward above the Ross Ice Shelf.136 At an elevation of eight hundred feet, its pilot, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, reached for his telescope to view the great barrier of ice stretching out beneath him, toward mountains far in the distance, and beyond that the invisible mysteries of the South Pole: The honour of being the first ae¨ronaut to make an ascent in the Antarctic Regions, perhaps somewhat selfishly, I chose for myself, and I may further confess that in doing so I was contemplating the first ascent I had made in any region, and as I swayed about in what appeared a very inadequate basket and gazed down on the rapidly diminishing figures below, I felt some doubt as to whether I had been wise in my choice.137

Ernest Shackleton gamely went up next armed with a camera and then descended to join the other officers in celebrations aboard Discovery.138 Edward Wilson, the ship’s assistant surgeon, declined the chance to take a flight after lunch, before deteriorating weather (and a rip in the balloon) put a stop to operations. Writing in his private journal later that evening, he doubted the general sanity of polar ballooning: ‘I must say I think it is perfect madness to allow novices to risk their lives in this silly way, merely for the sake of a novel sensation, when so much depends on the life of each of us for the success of the expedition . . . if some of these experts don’t come to grief over it out here, it will only be because God has pity on the foolish’.139 This was a reasonable assessment: Shackleton had merely three days instruction, Scott none at all. It was later discovered that the balloon’s valve was faulty, and had either man used it that morning ‘nothing could have prevented the whole show from dropping to earth like a stone’. Here was a new technology that brought the promise of new horizons. But, so too, came the chance of a fatal result. With so much danger already on offer in this wilderness of ice, there was no need to contrive additional hazard. But there it is; a small episode, rarely mentioned, and yet the history of polar exploration could have been 236

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rewritten in a flash, and all in the ‘inadequate basket’ of a balloon. No further ascents were made during Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition. The risk was too great. Compared to Scott and Shackleton, Cheyne was no ballooning novice, yet his vision of polar flight was grounded by similar misgivings: unreliability, its ongoing reputation as a frivolous sensation, its considerable expense, and, not to forget, the very real possibility of a gruesome death. Bearing all this in mind, you might think it surprising that anyone would want to ride in a balloon at all. Some people feel this way, even today. And so, we shouldn’t read too much into the establishment’s rejection of Cheyne’s innovative plans and the continuation of laborious man hauling as modus operandi for future polar endeavour. It is true this new technology was too much for the old guard and for those men, like Markham, who were wedded to a vision of the naval past. Some modern writers have been quick to compare Scandinavian successes in adapting techniques of travel with the more obvious British struggles, as proof of a sort of national conceptual inflexibility. The Brits loved noble failures, so the story goes, but that’s absurd if you think about it. No one wants to suffer needlessly, however strong the appeal of running about like a mythical Nelson, chasing bears against all the odds. The truth of the matter here is that in his mid-fifties, long inactive and stretched by family commitments, Cheyne was simply not the man for the job. Although the spectacle of an airborne assault of the Pole was undoubtedly appealing, capturing the interest of showgoing audiences, the winds of public favour were fickle.

TO THE LIMITS

It is not a little strange to be floating here above the Polar Sea. To be the first that have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed? I cannot deny that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death, having done what we have done. Isn’t it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?140 237

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In analysing Salomon Andre´e’s failed bid for the Pole in 1897, the historian Urban Wra˚kberg drew attention to the need for a more thorough study of the culture and politics of northern exploration and rightly criticised the presentist tendency in some polar histories, which have condemned early visions of Arctic flight as ‘unscientific’, ‘ill-planned’ and ‘balloonatic’.141 Marred by the benefit of historical hindsight, many recent accounts of Andre´e’s attempt have made the mistake of blaming him for not having considered what he could not have been expected to know, eagerly appropriating the image of the balloon itself ‘as a literary symbol of pride and pompous stupidity’.142 In Per Olof Sundman’s widely read novel Ingenjo¨r Andre´es Luftfa¨rd, to give one example, Andre´e the balloonist is an isolated, quixotic dreamer – the hapless victim of his technological naivete´, a troubled private life, and an irredeemable desire to use sensation as the vehicle to advance his reputation.143 Since 1930, when news of the discovery of the expedition’s last remains on White Island shocked the world, the image of Andre´e as explorer has been endlessly refashioned: as Swedish national hero, both romantic adventurer and inventor, even as an unlikely exemplar of American pulp masculinity.144 Sharing the pages of Ken magazine with a remarkable mix of geopolitical propaganda, sexual health advice, and ‘gripping adventures’ – describing fighter pilots, renegade infantrymen, and guerrilla sharpshooters – the image of the explorer remained unequivocally heroic. ‘For Men Who Want to Know’, retelling this kind of story provided good copy whatever the decade. Considered research tells us that Andre´e was neither ‘mindlessly honour-bound’, inflated by a self-confident chauvinism, nor murderously suicidal, as later writers have proposed. Though there are many aspects of Andre´e’s preparation and equipment, not to mention poor weather and bad luck, that combined to thwart his polar ambitions, his balloon expedition may be considered as an innovative response to the problems of polar logistics in this particular period in the face of widespread technical conservatism. We should approach Cheyne’s balloon proposals with similar caution. For many contemporaries he was little more than a ‘charlatan’, a lunatic whose ‘hair-brained’ scheme had commanded far too much public attention and he probably seems to the rational modern reader 238

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63. The polar balloonist as pulp fiction masculine hero, 1961.

as a man who was somewhat unhinged. Yet, it must also be recorded that his proposals were based upon the latest aeronautical knowledge and were to utilise the most sophisticated equipment then available. His plans were incredible yes, and far fetched too, but maybe, just maybe, parts of it were doable. Distinguished aeronauts such as Coxwell lent 239

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their expertise and experience, even offering to accompany the venture should sufficient funds be collected. This was no mad speculation but an idea with some credit that should be judged in the context of its time. Cheyne was proposing something quite remarkable: the application of modern technologies to the very limits of the known world. Reconstructing the early history of Arctic ballooning offers us a variety of stories no less appealing than the heady assortment you might find in Ken magazine. We have a cast of colourful characters, filled with an intrepid optimism bordering on the foolhardy, each offering new adventurous pathways and daring to go beyond the conventional. Though Andre´e was the first to fly in the Arctic, and none of the earlier plans of balloonists were ever realised, knowledge of these episodes is revealing. The historiography of polar exploration need not be restricted merely to those expeditions that occurred, familiar voyage after familiar voyage, repeated in a sort of metronomic succession. It is useful to look at expeditions that never got off the ground and ask why this was the case. Thinking about unrealised ventures can show us a good deal of the culture and politics of exploration in this period: of hopes and fantasies, of rising enthusiasms and bitter failures. Within a vibrant public culture of performance explorers took to many stages and their different plans were floated before a range of audiences. As imaginations soared, some looked to ballooning as the ideal means of overcoming the difficulties that barred progress to the Pole, yet many more were appalled by the recklessness of such an idea. Appealing visions of the Arctic flickered by limelight in crowded lecture halls on both sides of the Atlantic yet Cheyne was unable to attract the financial support necessary to realise his dream of polar flight.

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5

Exhibiting Things

What a halo of romance encircles those two words Polar Exploration. It has always had a strange fascination to the men of this country ever since, and even prior to, the time that England became a great maritime nation. In our childhood we loved to peruse books containing exciting accounts of Arctic travel, and we were never tired of listening to the doughty deeds and perilous adventures of our forefathers in the regions of thick ribb’d ice; and in our manhood we were ever ready, when opportunities offered, to enrol ourselves among those specially selected few, who were despatched with the object of exploring those mysterious, because unknown, regions situated in high latitudes.1

Throughout the nineteenth century the Arctic was a stage for naval endeavour, sometimes tragic, often misguided, yet frequently compelling. Admiral Sir Albert Hastings Markham had secured his fame sledging to a farthest north of 83820’, while a young member of the British Arctic Expedition under Nares in 1876, and so was an obvious candidate to compose a chapter on ‘Arctic Heroism’ for an exhibition catalogue in 1905. His rhetoric drew attention to the intimate and complicated connections between hagiography, the notion of duty and the justification of exploration in an age of empire. But, of course, times were changing. Public interests moved like quicksilver; each day brought a new discovery. In just a few years the North Pole was reached and then the South Pole too. Aircraft were taking to the skies. Old empires were crumbling, new nations were forming, and identities were being challenged at every step. New myths emerged. It would not be long before the world started slipping into war. Polar exploration would be the last thing on anyone’s mind.

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64. ‘The Search for Sir John Franklin’, in Frank Mundell’s Stories of North Pole Adventure, 1895.

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But all this was yet to come. That Markham’s romantic convictions accompanied a polar exhibit at an imperial show provides an entry point into the main focus of this chapter: the Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891. Contemporary reviews of the RNE were fulsome: ‘it affords to the student of naval antiquities opportunities which are not likely to occur again . . . it is scarcely too much to say that its bringing together renders the historian able for the first time to deal adequately with certain aspects of great naval events’.2 Though the RNE has fallen far below the horizon for most historians, the benefits of revisiting this exhibition are clear, in the context of political negotiations surrounding the ‘New Navalism’ of the 1890s, as a key event in the genealogy of a national naval museum, and in thinking more about the relationship between naval needs and the utility of imperial myths.3 Bearing in mind recent scholarship on exhibitions and ‘things’ in this period, it is interesting to explore the dialogue that existed between the RNE and its considerable audience.4 It belongs to a broader tradition of spectacular display through which the achievements of the crown, the nation, and the empire were consumed at home in a bevy of plays, pageants and panoramas. Whilst it certainly wasn’t the first naval exhibition in the nineteenth century – collections had been displayed in a ‘Naval Gallery’ in Greenwich and in a small museum at Somerset House – it was undoubtedly the most comprehensive celebration of naval activity ever presented.5 Scrutinising its aims and achievements can show the ways that navalist sentiments were articulated, drawing attention to the instrumental role of display and performance in reinvigorating naval reputations. As we have seen, there were many spectacles during the nineteenth century to feed the public appetite for the latest thrilling adventure. The Arctic was a prime landscape for this kind of newsworthy popular imagining. It was space to be encountered, to be survived and overcome, and, in many senses, a region to be brought home as a commodity for cultural consumption. A panorama of Spitsbergen impressed the crowds of Leicester Square in 1819, and grand views of Boothia and the Franklin search expeditions proved sensational in the mid-century; Laplanders and ‘Esquimaux’ were paraded in show-halls; ‘perilous moving dioramas’, ‘superb and fascinating illuminated lectures’, ‘sublime scenic spectaculars’, and countless other Arctic entertainments delighted London and provincial audiences alike.6 243

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65. ‘Franklin Relics Brought by Dr Rae’, from Walter May’s A Series of Fourteen Sketches Made During the Voyage up Wellington Channel in Search of Sir John Franklin, chromo-lithograph by Day, London, 1855.

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But what should make the RNE of especial interest to polar historians is that the relics and images of a whole century of Arctic endeavour were displayed here with unparalleled ceremony. Artworks, portraits, charts and equipment – not to mention a tableau on a stage of ice and a ‘monster berg’ housing an optical show – provided an iconographical spectacular and retrospective of exploration achievement that had never before been attempted.7 Using materials relating to the polar collections gathered at the RNE, housed in the ‘Franklin Gallery’, this chapter records the impact these displays made on late-Victorian maritime hagiography. It addresses the ways that the RNE influenced the re-creation of myths surrounding Sir John Franklin, the most famous ‘polar hero’ of the century. In the hands of influential lobbyists the RNE also began the call for a return to polar exploration. It shows that Albert Markham and his elder cousin Clements Markham – historian and president of the Royal Geographical Society for twelve years from 1893 – were chiefly responsible for reinvigorating, mythologising, and propagating these romantic polar narratives in this period. Both Markhams were central figures on the RNE Arctic organisational committee. The exhibition marked the starting point of a decade of increased interest in Britain’s past and future goals in the polar regions, which culminated in the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century. It was one of many efforts to resurrect those narratives of history and mythology that were intimate to the memory of polar effort. Displaying explorers as heroes in the heart of London was not just a case of hanging pictures on the wall; much was at stake. The record of past voyages provided the heroic visions necessary to serve the interests of naval propagandists and those petitioning for a renewal of exploration.

THE NEW NAVALISM

The closing decade of the nineteenth century, and the years preceding World War I, was an age of imperial naval rivalries, fleet expansion and far-reaching technological advance. By the 1880s Britain had begun to fear that her supremacy at sea, taken largely for granted in the 245

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mid-century, was being seriously challenged by France, Russia, and, after 1900, by Germany too. The poet Algernon Swinburne articulated this public concern in A Word for the Navy: Smooth France, as a serpent for rancour, Dark Muscovy, girded with guile, Lay wait for thee, riding at anchor On waters that whisper and smile.8

Although successive British governments were to remain anxious about the Franco-Russian naval challenge the dangers from this direction were overestimated. The French Navy, impressive on paper, suffered from constant political interferences and strategic mistakes and its ineffectiveness was fully exposed during the Fashoda confrontation in 1898. The Russian Navy, far from ‘girded with guile’, was in an appalling state, its fleets lacking consistency in speed and size, and its sailors chronically under-skilled; failings fully revealed in its humiliating performance in the war with Japan in 1904–5.9 Yet the threat to supremacy, both imaginary and real, was enough to gird the British into activity. A reaction to this climate of fear and distrust was a deliberate and sustained navalist political campaign aimed at raising awareness in, and reforming, the perceived weaknesses of the Royal Navy. The Naval Defence Act of 1889, which expressly formalised the ‘two-power standard’ – by which the Fleet was to be maintained at a strength equal to that of any two powers combined – can be read as the first major legislative reform of this ‘new navalism’. It inaugurated a programme of shipbuilding, strategic debate and technical development. With £21.5 million providing for 70 new warships in four years, the Act initiated a modern ‘race’ for armaments in which Britain would set the pace for extravagant naval construction, and which reached a height in 1906 with the launch of the first of Admiral Fisher’s revolutionary new battleships, the Dreadnought.10 In the spring of 1889 The Pall Mall Gazette carried a series of articles entitled, ‘What should be done about the Navy’, written by William Stead, which alerted readers to the prospect of an ‘Imperial calamity’ if naval strength be allowed to fall.11 Deploying a brand of crusading journalism that he had made his own, Stead constructed a bleak picture of the state of the Navy’s materiel and manpower that caused 246

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considerable public anxiety. This was familiar territory for Stead – he had been running articles on the state of the Navy since 1884 – and he won influential supporters. His first editorial inspired the ageing Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson to write to The Times, invoking Nelson and the Fleet as the exemplars of English greatness: ‘You – you – if you have fail’d to understand – The Fleet of England is her all in all – On you will come the curse of all the land, If that Old England fall, Which Nelson left so great’.12 His poem reflected the national mood and the Government listened. Within weeks a supplementary naval estimate, the ‘Northbrook Programme’, was placed before Parliament and passed swiftly into law. The potentiality of a challenge provided a catalyst for naval reformers to increase their spending, despite considerable political opposition over the mounting costs of maintaining, not least expanding, the Fleet.13 Another illustration of the revival in interest in the Royal Navy was the founding of a number of groups to educate the public about maritime affairs. In 1893 the Naval Records Society was established to ‘promote a more serious and scientific study of naval history’. While its primary ambition was the publication of critical editions of rare works, its wider objectives ‘were based on the belief that naval policy had to be guided by the scientific study of the past and that the Society could provide the historical material for those involved in policy-making’.14 The foundation of the Navy League in December 1894 also created an influential non-governmental focus of information and propaganda, crucially among the middle and professional classes. Its purpose was to publicise a ‘Big Navy’ policy and to raise public awareness and support for this programme at home and in the Empire. The League deployed populist history in its meetings and school visits, constructing a patriotic version of the past to fuel a desire for increased naval expenditure and enlistment. Within this kind of romantic revival, the British Empire and the Royal Navy became twin symbols in the popular mind; an empire vital to Britain’s prosperity and her world role, and a navy as the key link in imperial defence. All of the myths and realities of British sea power were marshalled to confront the changing times, a world in which the British nation actually felt increasingly less secure. Although the new navalism was shaped and contested by many people, and at many levels, the League continued to be its most important public forum up 247

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to World War I.15 From 1896 mass meetings of the League were being regularly held in Trafalgar Square, just as the climax of half a century of naval supremacy was presented at the Diamond Jubilee Review.16 Over 165 British warships, including 21 first-class battleships and 54 cruisers, steamed past the Royal Yacht off Spithead to anchor in five lines, each over five miles long, with not a single ship needing to be recalled from foreign service to join the impressive demonstration. Few were inclined to dispute the boast of The Times that ‘it is at once the most powerful and far-reaching weapon which the world has ever seen’.17 But at the start of the decade the naval image was not so assured. Throughout 1891 Review of Reviews contained alarming notices of increases in the tonnage and horsepower of armoured additions made to continental fleets. While Britain continued to enjoy an unparalleled hegemony with un-armoured vessels – some 88 ships compared to France with 17, and Spain and Japan with 12 each – and having 28 ships in the new armoured classes, it was still reported widely that foreign navies posed a grave threat. The Italian fleet had grown to include 18 armoured ships; the French had 26 armoured vessels fresh from their yards.18 An article appeared in Alfred Austin’s conservative National Review in 1891 calling for the immediate cultivation of patriotism among Englishmen. Juvenile education, public celebrations, historical presentations, and ‘new national ballads’ were the vital ingredients of this plan. The nation had for too long been on its knees before the ‘practical idols of commercial prosperity’: ‘It is time that we turned our minds to the cultivation, for the most practical uses, of sentiment, enthusiasm, and devotion’.19 The naval celebrations of this era were hugely important for the promotion of peacetime reputations. Like the Navy League, the RNE served an explicit navalist purpose and the visual iconography of exploration was a useful component of an official narration of real and imagined service success. We can think of British nineteenth-century exploration in the Arctic as a grand publicity exercise for the construction and restatement of potent naval images. Narratives were circulated in so many different forms: in popular exhibitions and lectures funded by the Admiralty, in rousing newspaper editorials based upon Admiralty memoranda, in celebratory banquets hosted by the Admiralty, in striking magic lantern shows endorsed by the Admiralty, and all offered in a language of patriotism to suppress 248

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competing readings. There is no clearer realisation of the intimacy between the image of exploration and exigent naval needs than the displays at the RNE of 1891. A fleet of the most compelling Arctic visions were relaunched in the service of peacetime naval propaganda.

REVISITING THE ROYAL NAVAL EXHIBITION OF 1891

It seems to me, Sir, considering the part the English Navy has played in the English Story, that it has hardly been adequately sung by our Bards or set forth by our Statesmen. Truly this Big Show is something – by way of a beginning.20

Held in the grounds of the Chelsea Royal Hospital from 2 May to 24 October 1891, the RNE was an extravagant and immensely successful event. It was two years in the planning and expectation was intense. Publishers competed with each other to issue the first glimpses of the displays during April, with the illustrated newspapers carrying sketches of imaginary exhibits just as the real construction works attracted an almost constant coverage.21 Many of the more reputable broadsheets carried editorials, leading articles, and commentary accompanied by patriotic naval panegyrics. ‘There is no danger in prophesying that it will be the lion of the season’, ran one such article.22 First Lord of the Admiralty George Hamilton delivered the address as RNE Chairman on the opening day, in which he reinforced its aims ‘to present a complete chronological series of exhibitions which shall enable the public to follow the development of the Navy from its earliest existence as an organised service . . . and to bring home to a great mass of people the glorious history of the Navy’.23 As Patron and President of the RNE Council, the Prince of Wales officially opened the show, declaring that the public would take ‘the keenest interest’ in an exhibition that had now ‘assumed a national character’. Indeed, it had been decided from the outset that the RNE should be restricted to purely national objects; foreign exhibits were not permitted. The sheer magnitude and variety of the ‘national’ collections on display at the RNE, the mass of shipbuilding materiel, war munitions, engines and machinery, exploration relics, and portraits of officers past and present,

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the Prince confidently predicted, ‘could not fail to be a source of the highest interest’.24 The press agreed: The Times claimed it to be ‘by far the most complete naval exhibition that has ever been seen’, as well as being the ‘fullest and most comprehensive technical exhibition of any kind attempted in England’. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘delightful’, while The Daily Chronicle maintained it was ‘the most interesting English exhibition since 1851’. 25 Superlative praise, certainly matched by the numbers of visitors to the RNE published each week as a running total in The Times. It is estimated some 2,351,683 people attended.26 Foremost among the high-profile visitors was Queen Victoria, who paid a visit on 7 May, and on several occasions the RNE was attended by other members of the British royal family, by the German Kaiser and Kaiserin, and by many of the royal families of Europe.27 But it was in every sense a national demonstration of naval achievements. The Official Catalogue and Guide of this maritime exposition ran to 570 pages and 5,354 numbered entries.28 Part historical celebration and part modern armaments and shipping industry fair, it was a wellplanned and effective spectacle of propaganda. The visitor was bombarded with navalist publications too.29 70,298 Official Catalogues were sold at the price of one shilling, in addition to 305,730 Daily Programmes and 7,036 Illustrated Souvenirs and an array of pamphlets, postcards and other keepsakes.30 The RNE promised an ‘exhaustive’, somewhat bewildering, array of attractive ‘things’: ROYAL NAVAL EXHIBITION, Chelsea, S.W. – Close to Grosvenorroad Station on the L.B. and S.C. and L.C. and D. lines. Unrivalled Attractions. The Exhibition buildings and grounds cover an area of over 15 acres, and the following are some of the principal features: – Arctic Relics, Arts Gallery containing one of the finest collections ever got together – Historical Collections of Models of Ships of War and Mercantile Marine – Full-size Models of H.M.S. VICTORY and Eddystone Lighthouse, on which will be burning the most powerful light in the world – MONSTER Ordnance (guns of 57 and 110 tons) – Machine Gun Firing – Torpedoes – Exhibition of Diving, &c – Lake 250ft. long by 150ft. wide on which Mimic Combats between Models of two Modern Battle Ships will take place, and illustrations 250

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of Submarine Mining, &c, will be given – Nautical displays in the arena – Performances by the Sons of Neptune Opera Company – Aquatic FIREWORKS – Balloon Ascents – Monster Iceberg, containing realistic ARCTIC Scenery, and Panorama of TRAFALGAR – Grounds Magnificently Illuminated (thousands of coloured lights), Decoratic Lighting by James Pain and Son.31

With so much to see, the official guides were vital in providing the correct interpretations of the naval visions amid competing readings. While Punch and other satirists were quick to mock the high-minded seriousness of ‘the official patriotism’ on show, criticisms were generally muted by a mass of navalist literature designed to reinforce the RNE mission statement. Review of Reviews published a two-penny handbook entitled ‘How to See the Royal Naval Exhibition’, and in offering a conservative translation of the exhibits, ‘calculated to interest even the most casual sight-seer in the naval glories of our race’, it toed the party line perfectly.32 Unsurprisingly, the most popular features of the exhibition were all related to Nelson: the model Victory, the Panorama, the pictures of Nelson’s death and battles, and the array of ‘Nelson Relics’. Visiting these displays became something of a national obligation: Nelson may be regarded as the tutelary genius of the Exhibition. His presence permeates every gallery; his famous signal on the morning of Trafalgar confronts us everywhere. The Exhibition itself is in one sense but a tangible object lesson set forth in material shape before the eyes of all men, of the stern but confident reminder, “England Expects every man to do his duty”.33

An alternative way to ‘see’ the RNE was in a lantern reading. Before cinema has swept all before it, the lantern show was a pervasive medium promising subjects ranging from popular science, history, religious parables, famous landmarks to literary fantasies. In village halls and drawing rooms, for a mere sixpence you could ‘Explore with Stanley’, go ‘Hunting with the Prince of Wales’, float ‘One Thousand Miles up the Congo’, or experience the ‘thrilling dangers’ of the Arctic by joining the ‘Franklin Search Expeditions’.34 The sanctioned ‘Royal Naval Exhibition, 1891’ lantern show contained much of the

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66. Representing the RNE spectacle in magic lantern slides. From top left to bottom right: ‘The Diving Crew’, a ‘Mock Battle’ on the Lake, the ‘Giant Balloon’ ascending, ‘The Mandolin Crew’, the Replica Victory, and the Parade Ground.

boundless optimism that permeated RNE publicity. It was a set of 50 slides and an accompanying lecture and they came with strict instructions on delivery to ensure the ‘brilliance of the whole entertainment’.35 The lantern shows were a dynamic advert for the RNE, a means for organisers to reach a wider public and drive home 252

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the RNE message: ‘we hope this summary of the several sections will serve to imprint the more important items on the memory’.36 Look at the slide inventory and it’s easy to see what RNE organisers thought important. Here was a view of the Navy that was modern, efficient, and vital to the nation’s security and prosperity. At least half of the chosen slides were of armaments and munitions – ‘monster ordnance’, torpedo drills, the battery of an ironclad – the trappings of a modern fighting force. There were four slides devoted to the ‘110-Ton Gun’, ‘fifty times more powerful than any gun that Nelson ever saw’. Reaching a crescendo, and ‘having said and seen so much of our deeds of valour, and our determination to maintain our position as Sovereign of the seas’, the RNE lantern show finished in a fanfare flourish with the words of Rule, Britannia! thrown upon the screen. While the RNE could be viewed in a number of ways – through visits, special gala evenings, in literature, pamphlets, guidebooks, or in this case, a display in your home – organisers were at pains to ensure that it was seen in the way intended. As an effective catalyst of naval propaganda, image was everything. It was power projection with a purpose.

APPEALING VISIONS

The RNE was to be viewed and understood in the sequence of four main sections: arts, navigation, models, and ordnance, with gallery ranges encircling a man-made lake, parade square and grounds containing a host of supporting amusements. Arrows marked the recommended path on the exhibition map; signposts and uniformed guides ushered visitors along the predetermined route. On first entering, attention was drawn to diagrams on the wall of the main entrance lobby. Prepared by the politician Captain John Colomb, the two images graphically illustrated British sea commerce and naval expenditure from Trafalgar to 1891 and compared British naval expenditure with that of her major foreign competitors.37 Presenting these charts, diagrammatic justification for past and future spending, the message was clear: the spiralling costs of the Fleet were essential in order to protect the interests of her growing empire.38 A trophy 253

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depicting Britannia accompanied by a lion and standing on dais of modern and ancient weaponry faced the visitor, and scrolling around her, inscribed in gold, were the words of the RNE motto: ‘IT IS ON THE NAVY, UNDER THE GOOD PROVIDENCE OF GOD, THAT OUR WEALTH, PROSPERITY, AND PEACE DEPEND’.39 ‘It would be difficult to frame anything more appropriate to the Exhibition itself, or more in accordance with the glorious traditions and history of that great Service which has called the Exhibition into existence’ the Official Catalogue chimed. The Admiralty was the principal force in the promotion of this naval spectacle and the impressions that the general public might take away became the major consideration. The United Service Magazine carried a full description of the RNE by Admiral George Elliott in May that sang this tune perfectly. ‘By enlightening the public as to the enormously increased cost of naval armaments’, he asserted, the RNE would become the means of ‘restoring naval supremacy and averting the ruin which at present awaits us by neglecting the naval condition’. The RNE was the material articulation of British technological pre-eminence to allay this kind of fear. Only by the ‘most vigorous and constant efforts’ to maintain naval supremacy could the ‘inheritance’ of peace and prosperity secured by Nelson at Trafalgar be sustained. The impressive buildings, the mass of armaments, and the ‘resounding optimism’ of the RNE was certain, Elliot concluded, to ‘bring such pressure to bear on the governing powers as will rouse them to a true sense of their responsibilities’.40 And the collections were impressive: the Cook Gallery related to the several branches of the science of navigation; models of marine engines and a complete history of naval architecture could be found in the Seppings Gallery; and the Blake and Nelson galleries were filled to the rafters with portraiture and grand canvases of famous naval actions. Large oils of the celebrated Nelson engagements featured prominently: St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, by Westall, George Jones, Turner, and countless more. There were scores of Nelson portraits, idealised profiles in crayon, engravings, sketches, watercolours, embroidery, medallions, busts in black Wedgwood, and figures cast in gunmetal. In all, it was an unprecedented and remarkable visual cornucopia.41 The public could be wowed by a vision of future naval engagements too. The St Vincent and Camperdown Galleries were devoted to naval 254

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ordnance, torpedoes, electrical machinery and diving apparatus. The Armstrong Gallery, some 230 feet long and occupied entirely by the exhibits of the great Elswick firm of William Armstrong, was home to ‘tremendous engines of war’ and prodigious artillery.42 The RNE was explicitly designed as a stage for displaying industrial achievement: a technological exposition brimming with nationalist overtones. Nor were the attractions limited to these ‘edifying arcades’. In the spirit of other contemporary exhibitions, the RNE was to be both instructive and entertaining. ‘We live in a progressive age, and one more or less of advertisement’, observed the RNE Honorary Secretary, ‘and must not cling too closely to tradition if by departing from it we can add to the security of the kingdom by popularising, in no matter how small a degree, the Service on which in time of war so much will depend’.43 On the lake there were 128 engagements between model battleships; within it, some 169 mining and torpedo operations, daily aquatic performances and water polo fixtures; 152 cutlass and field-gun drills; 58 displays of fireworks; 57 balloon ascents (which ‘desirous Gentlemen’ could book in advance at a price of five pounds); gymnastic displays by the Greenwich Boys, and drills by recruits of the Royal Marine. Some heralded the RNE as ‘the perfect exemplar of rational recreation’, combining pleasure and instruction; for others, the unabashed mixture of quasi-historical display, trade fair, and explosive extravaganza fell a little short of the more lofty aspirations. There was a concrete lake, just 4 feet deep, for the display of electrically controlled torpedo boats and sham fights between two miniature battleships (Vernon and Colossus). There were a host of smaller model ships that were moved by men wading about in the water, firing the guns and pitching the vessels in accordance to the programme. Though it was ‘impossible to derive any scientific instruction from these battles on the lake’, said The Times, they proved enormously popular as they ‘supplied the public with plenty of noise and smoke and with very pretty spectacles’.44 There were fashionable promenades and gaily-lit gardens arranged around bandstands, where concerts of specially composed music delighted the audiences, spreading the RNE message yet further. Charles Osborne’s The Naval Exhibition was the music-hall favourite of the summer. ‘Gaily dressed in Sunday togs’, two young rakes took a 255

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jaunt to the pleasure ground, where they promptly got drunk and were arrested: We watched the battle upon the lake, and vowed it certainly ‘took the cake’; Heard the guns that are made to ‘burst’ – got all smothered in smoke and dust. We went on board the ‘Victory’, paid a bob for two cups of tea, Gazed at glorious Nelson’s bunk, chewed tobacco, and tasted ‘junk’, ‘Hoisted our slacks’, and sang ‘Yeo-ho!’, ‘did a guy’ from a torpedo; ‘Rule Britannia!’ we yelled aboard, drank the health of each Naval Lord, Cheered for Charlie Beresford – the sailor-politician. And that’s the way we kept up the day, at the Naval Exhibition.45

Theo Bonheur’s naval hornpipes and marches could be bought for four shillings for piano solo, or versions for a full orchestra too. The marcato refrain ‘England Expects that Every Man will do his Duty’ was played with pride in middle-class parlours and concert rooms across the country.46 In grand kiosks and pavilions there were trade exhibits of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Wilkinson Sword Company, and Messrs Siemens Brothers; some of the biggest commercial enterprises of the age. There were demonstrations of less successful endeavours too, such as Brewster’s ‘Unsinkable Boat’ and Bickley’s ‘Miraculous Life Saving Dress’, and many other business delights for visitors to sample: the ‘George’ pub did a roaring trade, whilst others opted to drink Victory cocoa. Proud parents could dress their children in an endless variety of ‘nautical costumes’; one can picture troupes of excitable ‘little Nelsons’ running amok amongst the bandstands and show-stalls.47 Other exhibits were more impressive. Standing on the shores of the exhibition lake was Mr Webster’s life-size model of the Eddystone Lighthouse. One hundred and seventy feet tall with a passenger lift built into its interior, it was illuminated at night by a five million ‘candle-power’ electric lamp, reputedly the most powerful in the world.48 There was the 300-foot panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar by Chevalier Fleischer depicting the moment when Nelson received his 256

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67. Plan of the Royal Naval Exhibition, The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir, 1891.

fatal wound, whilst the undisputed star attraction of the RNE was a fullsized model of HMS Victory.49 Despite having papier-maˆche´ guns and lacking masts or rigging, it was a ‘triumph of illusion’ whose ‘realism was overpowering’.50 In the belly of the replica was a wax-figure tableau of Nelson’s death throes arranged by Tussaud, which ‘couldn’t fail to be the talk of the town’.51 That a heady mix of historical collections, commerce, and popular amusements was necessary suggests two things: first, that these were the ingredients that would prove appealing to visitors; and second, that the RNE had to remain competitive. This is obvious when you realise that there so many other days out to be had in London during the summer of 1891. Besides mechanical trade demonstrations, travelling fairs, garden shows, and other gallery collections open during that season, the main competition was a ‘German Extravaganza’ held at Earl’s Court, the brainchild of exhibition-veteran John Robinson Whitley.52 Trying to best the RNE, it was predictably strong on industrial manufactures and military heritage, and 257

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amusements too. A switchback railway took its passengers along the banks of the Rhine; the ‘Kaiser Panorama’ transported its viewers to the ‘heart of the German Empire’. In a blaze of weaponry and massed ranks, the audience were carried from the ‘Barbaric Age of the ancient Teutons’ to ‘Modern Germany rejoicing in its nationalist vigour’.53 The celebrations were equally vigorous in the beer and sausage halls, which for many were always more appealing than any nationalist pageant. While the RNE had its amusements – a shooting gallery, a panorama, and battles on the lake, all reviewed by the boozy satirists of Punch – the prevailing tone was sober and serious. The RNE was undeniably part of the flashy, show business tradition but it was different too: it was a venture for which the public had initially donated, with profit forming a charitable fund; it had backing from members of the government and the priceless validation of Royal patronage; it had a naval mandate which ensured that standards were upheld throughout operations; and, perhaps most important of all, its collections represented a significant part of the national history. It is for these reasons, not forgetting its sheer scale and confidence, that it could rightly call itself ‘The Exhibition’ of 1891. But what can we actually draw from the more immediate imaginative impacts of the RNE? Well, for many visitors, entering Nelson’s ship and admiring the mass of relics became something akin to an act of pilgrimage. The Review of Reviews exhorted its readers to attend the RNE with a respectful, near religious, reverence: ‘the Exhibition is indeed a great temple reared to the memory of the heroes of our Imperial domain’; and in that temple the innermost shrine is that dimly-lighted cockpit of the Victory, where England’s greatest sea-king expired with the watchword of duty upon his lips’.54 The ‘simplicity and heroism’ of naval men, ran the Lady’s Pictorial, makes you ‘feel that it is a good thing in the modern London of ours, with its luxury and its cynicism, to have had this noble story brought home to us with such simple directness’.55 The finest achievement of the RNE was, they declared, that it promised ‘to revive and to stir even the most indifferent into at least a passing spasm of patriotic pride’: It is not easy to persuade an Englishman to admit that sentiment enters into his composition in the most fractional degree. Yet who 258

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will rush to his death leading a forlorn hope and rallying round a torn but sacred flag with the eager heroism of an Englishman? If this is not sentiment of the purest and noblest we are at a loss to define the term. And of all ideas about which the English sentiment clings

68. The display of the Arctic regions provided popular images that were recycled in a number of juvenile picture books, pamphlets and cheap ephemera, and featured prominently in this item A Day at the Royal Naval Exhibition. ‘The Arctic Encampment’, 1891.

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69. ‘Articles used for the equipment of the Arctic expedition, 1875 –6, shown in the Franklin Gallery’. The Graphic, 9 May 1891.

most lovingly, it is that of the sea, and the brave fellows who go down to it in ships . . . to the glory of the nation.56

By capitalising on the renewed interest in Nelson, and enhancing a particular historical representation of his achievements, the RNE could assure its popularity. Though it was only open for 151 days the imaginative imprint of the RNE would prove to be more durable than any other contemporary imperial showcase. But did British polar heroes have a comparable pulling power? Let’s consider the Franklin Gallery. It didn’t show off armour plate, or monster machinery, certainly no 110-ton gun, or impressive canvases of notorious sea fights. But it offered something more special than this; here was promise, history, myth and human potential combined. Here were battles of a different kind, stories that could rise above the clouds of war. If we are to understand the RNE as a sequence of powerful images, we need to look more closely at how these images were constructed. We realise that displaying the naval record in the Arctic regions was a calculated consideration on the part of the RNE organisers; a re-imagining that was expertly manipulated. The dream of bears in the ice would continue. 260

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DISPLAYING THE ARCTIC

Without such heroic spirits England would never have attained her place in the world’s history, and she does well to cherish their memories. No page in her annals is richer in examples of heroic selfsacrifice in the cause of duty than that which records the discovery of the North-West Passage, the barren though glorious realisation of the dream of ages.57

Opening just beyond the main entrance, the Franklin Gallery was the first attraction on the recommended route through the RNE and it ‘could not possibly be missed’. In the ‘Arctic Sub-Division’, to give the show its official title, a comprehensive history of polar endeavour appeared in a material form.58 Whilst the section was organised by a mixed service and civilian committee that included many officers famous for their Arctic exploits – Admirals Albert Markham, Leopold McClintock, George Nares – and others, like Allen Young and Clements Markham, who had some experience of the ice – their shared interests ensured a visual message that was uniformly powerful. The long tradition of Arctic exploration was the theme and the idea of heroic men operating in challenging environments took centre stage. The first object was a full-size representation of the Franklin cairn, ‘erected by the ill-fated survivors of that expedition’ at Victory Point, where members of the Franklin party had landed on 25 April 1848 after abandoning their frozen ships. Immediately beyond the cairn, a trove of relics recovered from the Franklin expedition were arranged upon a large table, in the centre of which stood a trophy of fourteen flags, all banners carried by sledges employed in the Franklin search. The central space of the gallery was occupied by a representation of the surface of an ice field. On this ‘appropriate platform’ visitors could find the ‘model’ of sledgetravelling adopted by many of the mid-century Arctic expeditions and continued by Nares in 1875. It was a technique destined to become the archetype, the model modus operandi for polar explorations, especially those orchestrated under Markham and directed toward the South. The Pall Mall Gazette described the scene: Foremost among the exhibits . . . is a realistic representation of a hummocky ice-pack, along which four wax-work men laboriously 261

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drag a sledge, while a mariner awaits them at the door of the tent which they are about to occupy. The men are all rigged out with snow-goggles, cavernous mittens, and other articles of apparel essential to a locality where the thermometer is often 45 degrees below zero.59

Punch was happy enough to discover the Arctic section with its ‘dummies drawing a sledge through the canvas snow of a corded-off North Pole’ but spent much more time sampling the virtues of icedtipples in the grounds.60 Down each side of the gallery were hung portraits in large numbers of Arctic explorers, beginning with Hugh Willoughby and continuing through James Cook and Constantine Phipps to William Parry and John Franklin. The portrait of Admiral Sir Edward Inglefield, chairman of the RNE Arts Section, took its place among the naval heroes. There were large three-quarter length paintings of Robert McClure, William Penny, McClintock, and Nares against a distinctive Arctic background. There were small formal half-lengths of almost all the key exploration figures, both naval and civilian: James Clark Ross, John Richardson, James Weddell, Edward Sabine, and John Rae. In the middle of this sea of portraits hung Stephen Pearce’s celebrated canvas ‘The Arctic Council’, with the ‘foremost Arcticists of the day planning a search for their fallen comrade’.61 The significance of the image lay in its patriotic and rhetorical power: here was a noble vision of a community of actors united toward a common cause. The painting was shown extensively in the middle of the century, reproductions from engravings were widely distributed, and it was used as a prop to apply pressure on the government and stir up sentiment and support for more searches. The council never existed; the image was an advert, and a good one at that. And in the hands of RNE organisers keen to resurrect this resolve and create an historic show of unity, Pearce’s ‘Arctic Council’ regained much of its mid-century instrumentality.62 As historians have often used Pearce’s paintings to illustrate their writings – these remain the enduring images of nineteenth-century naval explorers – it is interesting that nearly all of Pearce’s polar works were exhibited here alongside each other for the first and, possibly, the only time.63 The display of art throughout the RNE, and in the Franklin Gallery in particular, had a power and utility beyond the aesthetic. 262

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As indicated, Pearce’s ‘Arctic Council’ brought to the RNE an iconography of historic naval resolve that matched Markham’s hopes to encourage public and governmental support for new explorations. Richard Westall’s ‘Nelson’s Adventure with a Bear’ provided RNE organisers with a useful visual link between the Arctic and wellestablished heroes, a plucky example of naval courage that could resonate in the present. In their consistent lobbying for a renewal of exploration, both Markhams were quick to flag the benefits of polar service in providing a school for ‘future Nelsons’.64 Polar charts, cartoons, and large canvases of Arctic and Antarctic scenery ‘in the tradition of the sublime’ covered another wall; in a large glass case, on the right of the gallery, were shown the sledge banners used by the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–6, including the Union Jack carried by Albert Markham to the farthest north then attained. On either side were counters upon which Arctic birds and animals, Inuit implements, kayaks and curiosities, Greenland woodcuts, Antarctic sketches, geological specimens, and meteorological instruments jostled

70. ‘The Arctic Council’, a souvenir print after the celebrated oil painting by Stephen Pearce, which currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery collection in North Wales. From left to right: George Back, William Parry, Edward Bird, James Clark Ross, Francis Beaufort (seated), John Barrow junior, Edward Sabine, William Hamilton, John Richardson and William Beechey (seated).

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for space. From the roof was suspended a message balloon, similar to those used in the Franklin search to scatter coloured papers in the hope a survivor might find them. High above the portraits, the heads and horns of Arctic animals provided a ‘crown of natural trophies’; and throughout ‘The Polar Spirit was omnipresent’, or in other words a ‘somewhat dishevelled lady reclining on the back of a white bear’, the spirit of Arctic research personified in plaster-cast, her arms outstretched cradling a compass.65 Continuing the Arctic journey in the RNE grounds, visitors could voyage inside an ‘Iceberg Exhibit’ and gaze upon a model construction of HMS Investigator, abandoned by McClure in his search expedition of 1850 –4. The interior was ‘ingeniously fitted with electric light’ so the visitor could get some idea of ‘the fitful flashes of the Aurora Borealis which illuminate the long night, and of the welcome dawn’.66 ‘There is an Arctic Pavilion’ noted The Times wryly, ‘which conveys a good idea of an ice hummock!’67 It was reported that Queen Victoria even ventured inside ‘to see the Arctic exploration ships nipped in the ice’, and she later returned to the galleries to inspect the Nelson relics and admire the Arctic sledge party.68 In their ‘First Visit to the Naveries’ the journalists of Punch enjoyed a champagne-fuelled ‘cruise’ at the RNE. Entering a ‘shed, declared to be an Arctic scene’, they were amused by the model ship that reminded them of ‘those happy boyhood days spent in the toy-shops of Lowther Arcade’.69 The following month Punch came again. Its fanciful review, ‘Horatio Larkins Visits The Naval Exhibition’, pictured a merry outing: frolicking in the shooting gallery and the Sons of Neptune Theatre; marvelling at the Trafalgar Panorama; scaling the Lighthouse by rope to avoid the queues and admission charges; hitching a ride upon the sledge of a team of Arctic heroes; and, at day’s end, relaxing upon the Iceberg, at once a glorious refrigerator for the ubiquitous bottles of Exhibition ‘grog’.70 As well as being a ‘jolly good day out’, the RNE clearly played an important role in displaying the image of Nelson and reintroducing the stories of brave sailors to eager audiences in the summer months of 1891. But when the RNE closed late in October, and hangovers cleared, what was remembered? One risks over-emphasising the importance of this ‘Arctic spectacular’ unless we can gauge its durable relevance. While the RNE capitalised on the renewed interest in 264

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Nelson to refashion a vision of his achievements, what of its longterm influence in the business of remaking other naval icons? Let’s now consider more closely the century’s most enduring polar hero: John Franklin.

PROPAGATING HEROIC MYTHS

Franklin and his companions are among the Dii Majores of geographers and of sailors. They are examples, which we hold up for imitation; their deeds incite successive generations to go forth and do likewise.71

If there is to be a history of naval hagiography, and in particular a history of the making and maintenance of the legend surrounding John Franklin, the RNE must stand as an important part of this story. While re-affirming the domestic and international reputation of the Royal Navy, the RNE re-engaged public interest in the polar regions. In presenting a heady iconographical display of a century’s worth of exploration, the exhibition introduced a new generation to the achievements and imagery of Britain’s Arctic heroes of which Franklin, despite his failures, provided a compelling example. In his highly regarded analysis of the ingredients of late-Victorian heroism, John MacKenzie drew an analogy between military hagiography and Catholicism, which ‘sees the canonisation of new saints in each generation as a vital way of maintaining the energy of the Church, solidifying the loyalty of old adherents and inspiring the faith of the new’.72 One can suggest that heroic myths of empire operated in a similar way, true both of the Army and the Navy. Certainly, the formation of iconic myths, that of Nelson the most obvious, was crucial in sustaining public interest and reinforcing the unquestioning duty of naval servicemen. Thomas Davidson’s oil-on-canvas ‘England’s Pride and Glory’ aptly captures this late-century veneration of the nautical hero; a process sustained by a sequence of emotive naval images. It showed a naval cadet of about 1890 gazing at Abbott’s famous portrait of Nelson in the Naval Gallery of the Painted Hall, Greenwich.73 The narrative

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71. ‘English Exploring Expedition To the Arctic Seas’, Gleason’s Pictorial DrawingRoom Companion, 18 October 1851.

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conveyed is much the same as the RNE intended in its many displays. An image of Nelson, the real subject of this picture, offers the patriotic example to a boy at an impressionable age. A young woman, possibly his mother, indicates what is expected of him as a cadet, encouraging the boy, her arm on his shoulder. While the RNE showcase proved to be a fashionable and rational entertainment, clearly the more important hope was to instil in the British people an interest in its Navy, and through Nelson’s example, to ‘spur on coming generations to future deeds of greatness’. In a period in which notions of empire and patriotism were regarded as paramount, and one in which Britain’s longstanding dominance at sea was being challenged by the rise of other naval powers, displaying Nelson had great didactic utility. A.T. Mahan, whose Influence of Sea Power upon History helped strengthen British resolve to continue expanding her Navy in the 1890s, said that heroes were vital to maintaining naval greatness. In his Life of Nelson, the hero became the ‘embodiment’ of British sea power.74 While the RNE shows the continuing ideological profit of preserving the cult of Nelson, Arctic exploration and the canonisation of its officers also provided the Navy, like the Catholic Church, with much rejuvenative potential. The RNE enabled mid-century Arctic visions to be revisited, reaffirmed, and even recreated anew. Beau Riffenburgh’s analysis of heroic myths highlighted their instrumental power: ‘they justified and promoted the expansion of the state in geographical and economic terms, embodied the collective will and hopes of the governing elite, and offered guidelines for personal and national ascendancy to a new generation’.75 The subjects of the major imperial myths were much more than ‘heroes of an hour’; they were enduring figures. In death, a hero’s image could be inflated and manipulated and the full range of media available in the late nineteenth century – books, displays, the press, verse and art – combined to draw out as much as could be taken from the hero’s status. The cult surrounding each hero required mediators to develop, interpret, manipulate, and articulate the myths, and the means of mediation. Carefully edited journals, diaries and letters, poetry and art, and other ‘mediums of iconography’ were all part of this process. Exhibitions, as MacKenzie has shown, were particularly persuasive mediums for these types of narratives.76 Explorers and their adventures 267

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72. ‘England Expects’ every man, woman, and child to visit the RNE. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition, Grand Opening Scene’, Fun, 6 May 1891.

featured in lecture theatres and music halls, venues that maintained such popularity that by 1892 an estimated 14 million seats were sold annually in the 35 music halls of London alone.77 The images created of exploration and the explorers themselves were designed for different 268

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audiences – geographical societies, scientific groups, financial supporters, the general public – and for each of these audiences a varying sentiment: sometimes enlightened, disinterested, scientifically praiseworthy; sometimes triumphalist or mindlessly jingoistic; and, often, a thick narrative mix of all.78 In the hands of his Victorian admirers, Franklin’s career was neatly reconstructed into a narrative lifecycle fitting his ascent from explorer to hero. It was a process of simplification, of course, a paradigm of imagining, and the Franklin that emerges is something of a mythic creation.79 The heroic trajectory goes a little like this. Born in Lincolnshire in 1786, Franklin enters the Navy as a boy in 1800, immediately seeing active service onboard Polyphemus at the hardfought battle of Copenhagen (the call to duty); he joins Investigator under Matthew Flinders on its voyage of discovery to New Holland in 1801 – 4 (exploration apprenticeship); he returns to naval duty showing ‘very conspicuous zeal and activity’ as signal-midshipman on Bellerophon at Trafalgar, in Bedford off New Orleans in 1814, and as diplomat in the Mediterranean in 1830, for which he is awarded the Golden Cross of Greece (continued adventure and duty); his first engagement with the Arctic, in command of the Trent in 1818 (the threshold); two overland journeys exploring the Arctic coast of British North America in 1819 –22 and 1825 –7, enduring severe privation yet returning with rich geographical discoveries (the trials); the exacting Lieutenant-Governorship of Van Diemen’s Land between 1836 and 1843 (limbo); a celebrated return to the Arctic in 1845 commanding the Admiralty expedition in renewed search of this ‘holy grail’, the Northwest Passage (the fateful journey); the death of the entire party (the martyrdom); and finally the piecemeal discovery of relics and other tantalising things (the return). And it is of such stories that heroes were made. As the young signal officer on board the Bellerophon, Franklin was one of the first men to see Nelson’s famous signal at Trafalgar. And for Franklin and later generations there could be no doubt: ‘ENGLAND EXPECTS’. In 1844, he would respond to the Navy’s call for another Arctic expedition with the words, ‘ . . . the highest object of my desire is faithfully to perform my DUTY’. The message, and the obligation, was clear. Like Nelson, Franklin would do or die trying. His ships were last seen moored to an iceberg in Lancaster Sound. Over the next fifteen 269

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years more than thirty expeditions were sent out to try and find them. Glory would soon be replaced by the spectre of tragedy, horror, cannibalism and butchery. The honest truth of the Franklin disaster would not make for pleasant reading. His reputation would come to attract a close scrutiny, with elements of his successes picked over in what seems like an endless historical post-mortem. In a ongoing round of books, reviews, commentary and debate, Franklin has been as much maligned as adored ever since he left our shores.

THE END OF AN EPIC

Many years of interest and agonising about the whereabouts of the missing men ensured an emotional investment in the expedition that ran deeper than any other before or since. ‘The constant and neverfailing efforts of Lady Franklin in her endeavours to send succour to her distant husband’, eulogised a typical commentary, ‘has clothed the whole subject in a romantic garb’.80 Traces of the expedition’s first winter camp on Beechey Island were found in 1850 but its route in the years following remained unclear. In 1854 John Rae brought back clues to their demise, with relics and Inuit stories that the expedition had fallen apart somewhere to the west of the Back River. In 1859, all hopes were dashed with Leopold McClintock’s return from King William Island in the steam-yacht Fox, bearing terrible news. He went ashore at Portsmouth and took the train to London ‘carrying with him his report, the record found at Point Victory, and two cases filled with objects’ belonging to members of the lost expedition.81 McClintock wanted to call first upon Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane, but she was away in the south of France. The next day, on 22 September, he presented himself at the Admiralty. Within two hours information was sent direct to the Editor of The Times, and a leading article broke the news the following morning.82 Within a few days the weeklies picked up the story and word spread across the world. Here at last was the proof of what most had long feared: Franklin and all his men had perished. The Franklin saga found its way into homes on both sides of the Atlantic, and into the hearts of the public who had followed the search expeditions in the newspapers, in illustrated lectures, and in the books 270

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they bought. It had assumed such proportions of national disaster, that Sharpe’s London Magazine tearfully declared the news as ‘The End of an Epic’.83 Voices from all sorts of journals added to the clamour of commentary within a vibrant print culture. ‘The ephemeral at a penny and the portly quarterly up to six shillings all alike joined in the general exultation’, as one hack put it. The reading public for the disaster now swelled to include ‘millions of sympathizing souls’, according to The Illustrated London News and editors scrambled to profit from the sensation. Once a Week imagined Franklin’s final moments: ‘. . . then the shout of victory, which cheered the last hour of Nelson and of Wolfe, rang not the less heartily round the bed of the gallant Franklin, and lit up that kind eye with its last gleam of triumph. Like them, his last thought must have been of his country’s glory’.84 ‘At last the mystery of FRANKLIN’S fate is solved’ ran The Times: . . . we know the very day of his death . . . Alas! There can be no longer those sad wailings from an imaginary Tintagel to persuade the credulous that an ARTHUR still lives . . . The dauntless soul dies out amid frost and snow; the spirit is never quenched though the body

73. ‘Discovery of the Franklin Expedition Boat of King William’s Land, by Lieutenant Hobson’, engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, 29 October 1859.

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may perish . . . We retire now from the contest with honour, if with grief, and we leave the name of FRANKLIN engraved on the furthest pillars which the energy of mankind has dared to erect as the landmark of its research in the dull and lifeless region that guards the axis of the world.85

Yet, Arctic heroics insisted on staying in fashion. John Murray released McClintock’s narrative of the expedition, The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas, in late December. The first edition – 10,000 copies, a considerable printing – sold out within a month.86 The volume was published in lavish octavo priced at sixteen shillings. It was expensive, a luxury item, but demand was high. Mudie’s Circulating Library took 3,000 copies. The book was both a bestseller and a ‘most-borrowed’, even surpassing the latest Dickens novel. Work began on a second edition immediately and it appeared in March 1860. By way of comparison, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, also published by Murray that winter, had by the same time sold about 5,000 copies. Darwin’s fame would soon eclipse all, of course, but for the moment there seemed to be no end to the public interest in the Franklin drama. The evolution of his posthumous reputation, however, was just beginning. The mystery surrounding Franklin’s voyage stirred balladeers and novelists to their own expressions of loss. Many turned to poetry as an outlet for their grief, whilst others responded to public interest in an effort to sell their work. We can follow the footprints of this tragedy in almost all of the periodicals of this period, from Dickens’ Household Words to the illustrated newspapers. Most rejoiced that McClintock had returned safely: Among all the brilliant deeds of our countrymen by sea and land, from the days of Elizabeth to those of Victoria, the achievements of such men as Ross, Parry, Franklin, and last of all, McClintock stand out pre-eminent for unselfish heroism, and for almost epical grandeur. Many a mythological hero and demi-god who looms out largely through the haze and fire-mist of antiquity was a smaller and less useful personage in his day than these and other navigators of the Polar Ocean. And though we live in a prosaic age . . . there is virtue enough left among us to do befitting honour to the memory of the dead and the names of the living, when they have deserved it by

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such heroism as a Havelock or a Lawrence exhibited in the East, or as a Franklin exhibited in the less conspicuous but none the less noble field of the North.87

Polar poetry contests were held in schools and village halls.88 On 8 February the Guardian announced that the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was offering a £50 prize for ‘the best English poem on “The Life, the Character and the Death of the heroic Sir John Franklin”, with special reference to the time, place, and discovery of his death’. The winning verse would be recited during the meeting of the peripatetic British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was landing in Oxford that year. A Canadian undergraduate, Owen Vidal, took the prize but far better was a poem that didn’t win, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Death of Sir John Franklin. In actual fact, it was his first major poem and his first inspired by the sea, a theme for which he would later become well known: This is the end. There is no nobler word, In the large writing and scored marge of time, Than such endurance is . . . So long the record of these men shall stand, Because they chose not life but rather death, Each side being weighed with a most equal hand, Because the gift they had of English breath, They did give back to England for her sake, Like those dead seamen of Elizabeth, And those who wrought with Nelson and with Blake, To do great England service their lives long – High honour shall they have; their deeds shall make, Their spoken names sound sweeter than all song . . . These chose the best; therefore their name shall be, Part of all noble things that shall be done, Part of the royal record of the sea.89

For journalists, aspiring poets, and the public alike, exploration remained appealing despite the obvious horrors that came with it. And

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the reason for this, The Illustrated London News concluded, ‘is that the love of maritime adventure lies deep in the heart of our population; at the very root, as it were, of our British nature . . . to brave hunger as well as cold, to bear cheerfully every form and variety of peril and hardship, that they might seize, if possible, the gloomy secrets of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, not for considerations of profit, but all for honour and glory, and pure love of adventure’.90 Death in the Arctic, the noble sacrifice so necessary to imperial hagiography, elevated Franklin to iconic status as a mid-Victorian national hero. Few nineteenth-century heroes actually reached this final mythic stage, the apotheosis, as Franklin did. Men such as Gordon, Havelock, Livingstone, and Nelson were canonised in this way, while the example of lesser heroes could still be pressed into personifying the perceived national greatness and as useful symbols for those interested in ‘justifying imperial or scientific progress’.91

HEROIC SAILOR-SOUL

At the same time, Franklin’s widow was doing her very best to preserve his enduring reputation.92 A key component of McClintock’s homecoming had been his assertion, urged by Jane Franklin, that the Northwest Passage had been ‘discovered’. On 14 November 1859, before a huge meeting of RGS members, McClintock read a memoir of his Fox voyage that helped to construct this idea of Franklin’s lasting achievement. Although McClure ‘was worthily rewarded for making a North-West Passage’, RGS President Sir Roderick Murchison concluded, ‘Franklin was the man who had made the North-West Passage’.93 In her dogged insistence that her husband be immortalized in this way, Lady Franklin turned failure into triumph by creating a legend. She quickly moved to set his legacy in stone. In 1861 a statue was erected in Hobart, for which the Tasmanian Legislature voted one thousand pounds; later that year another statue, executed under Lady Franklin’s supervision, was placed in the market place at Spilsby, the Lincolnshire town where he was born.94 Its pedestal bears the inscription that Franklin was ‘Discoverer’ of the Passage. Lady Franklin, it seems, had been unsatisfied by the first 274

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74. ‘Relic of the Franklin Expedition’, reproduced in The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859.95

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75. The Hero Immortalised. ‘Statue of Sir John Franklin, to be erected at Spilsby, Lincolnshire’, The Illustrated London News, 5 October 1861; ‘Statue of The Late Sir John Franklin, in Waterloo Place’, The Illustrated London News, 22 September 1866.

memorial ordered by the Admiralty in July 1855 at the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich. It was intended to honour the fallen, to provide closure: a chance for the Navy to reflect but also to move on from the tragedy. Westmacott’s monument was duly approved, but Jane was furious that the official search would not continue. In 1858, Westmacott carved the memory of Rear Admiral Franklin into stone, only for the returning hero McClintock, the following year, to demote him to Captain by discovering his death had occurred before his promotion. The marble slab has forever been inaccurate, just one of many half-truths about the tragedy borne forward by the passage of time.96 On 15 November 1866, in the heart of London and just a short walk from Trafalgar Square, an eight-foot bronze statue was unveiled in Waterloo Place before the First Lord of the Admiralty. Lady Franklin watched on approvingly from the upper windows of her husband’s old 276

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club, the Athenaeum. The ceremony was widely covered in the papers. The Spectator, for example, gave its tribute: ‘In the Arctic Seas Sir John Franklin’s name is that of the first martyr, at Trafalgar – Nelson’s. Franklin will always be remembered for his victory over the elements, and not over men’.97 He was memorialised in a heroic pose, ‘addressing his officers and crew, and telling them that the North-West Passage had at last been discovered’.98 Yet, however deeply felt the mid-century fascination with Franklin’s tale, press attentions soon moved to other stages, with public interest drawn to new heroes and exciting new types of colonial warfare. The official search effort had cost over £600,000 and it is estimated the total amount spent by 1860 was nearly £2 million. In 1865 Sherard Osborn attempted to kick-start a new Arctic campaign by delivering a rousing paper at the RGS. This time the North Pole would be the prize. Echoing the arguments of that great expedition spin-doctor, the late John Barrow, Osborn declared: ‘The Navy needs some action to wake it up from the sloth of routine, and save it from the canker of prolonged peace. Arctic exploration is more wholesome for it, in a moral as well as a sanitary point of view, than any more Ashantee or Japanese wars’.99 A heroic return to the fray was necessary, not least, to suppress the lingering truths, the doubts and fears, about the cannibalistic demise of the Franklin party – those ‘hobgoblin tales of the fate of the survivors’.100 It was time to go back, time to start anew. That RGS meeting on 23 January was one of the largest ever assembled. ‘We are no more prepared to turn our backs upon the Arctic Regions because Sir John Franklin died off King William Island’, he continued, ‘than to do so to an enemy’s fleet because Nelson fell at Trafalgar’.101 The audience, with RGS Gold Medallist Jane Franklin among them, offered cheers in support. Yet, while the promise of a return to the Arctic was met with approval here, the project was soon forestalled. Exploration in central Africa, naval engagement in southeast Asia, and the suppression of a mutinous Indian sub-continent all provided a new crop of dutiful champions ready to die in the name of empire. On 31 July 1875, shortly after Lady Franklin’s death, a memorial was unveiled in Westminster Abbey, which further enshrined Franklin’s claim as discoverer of the Northwest Passage. A bust in white Carrara marble sits beneath a canopy of ‘rich gothic foliage’ by Sir George 277

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Gilbert Scott. An inscription details Franklin’s achievement, accompanied by a bas-relief of a ship beset in mountainous ice. The epitaph is by Tennyson, his nephew by marriage, and it elegantly captures his posthumous apotheosis: Not here: the white North has thy bones; and thou, Heroic Sailor-Soul Art passing on thine happier voyage now, Toward no earthly Pole.102

Lady Franklin had campaigned vigorously to protect her husband’s legacy by developing a series of official fictions that would endure, as if etched in stone. Though many approved of her proprietary zeal, an equal number thought the whole debate an unnecessary one; the Passage itself long revealed to be ‘utterly worthless’. The Franklin expedition was a disaster – perhaps the most consummate tragedy of the nineteenth century – and he had neither discovered, nor completed, a Northwest Passage. Nevertheless his image as naval hero, an explorer without equal, would be passed on to the next generation. In the last decade of the nineteenth century Markham engineered a position for himself as presiding guardian of the historical legacy of British polar exploration and as the authoritative promoter of future endeavour, particularly for a re-entry into the Antarctic.103 Roderick Murchison’s sponsorship of African exploration through the RGS, whilst a vehicle for his own intellectual and institutional ambitions, can be read in close comparison to Markham’s own promotion and mediation of exploration: as a manipulator of information Murchison constantly helped promote public interest and vitalise the heroic stature of explorers, whilst continually reinforcing his own exploration ideology.104 With a conviction like Murchison’s that proved unassailable, Markham perpetuated a notion of the infallibility of man-hauling, a sledging technique central to the ennobling spirit of naval exploration in the past. The Nares tableau at the RNE is an obvious articulation of this commitment. ‘Failure’ was manipulated into a new narrative of historical, romanticised achievement that had immediate coercive instrumentality. The most enduring image of Markham himself is the grand oil portrait by George Henry that still hangs above the fireplace 278

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in the RGS today. The portrait beautifully combines Markham’s ruling passions: high on the facing wall is a framed picture of the cinchona plant, which he collected in Peru for the relief of malaria in India; close by his right hand, on a stand of oak from Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery, is a silver model of a man-hauled sledge.105 Ironically, Markham’s proprietary commitment to past traditions and techniques, heroic myths in themselves, and British hubris more generally in this field, can be seen as one of many factors that contributed to Scott’s eventual failure. But this is the benefit of historical hindsight and one must not be too quick to condemn him.106 Markham can certainly be credited for, almost single-handedly, revitalising the institutional interest in polar exploration in Britain; for capturing, perhaps even recreating, a public polar fascination through the RGS; for creating a particular culture of polar imperialism; and for incubating a grand scheme of exploration, first realised with Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1901–4 and that reached its apogee with the failure and apotheosis of his party on the polar plateau in 1912.

INSCRIPTIONS

Looking closely at the RNE raises interesting questions about the power of relics themselves as inscriptions: piecemeal, but crucial building blocks in the formation of heroic myths. As relics filtered their way back to England over the course of the Franklin searches they offered tantalising clues to the fate of the lost explorers. The endless shelves and cases of these things might seem ridiculous to the modern observer: broken bottles, fragments of leather and wood, a dip circle and sextant, a medicine chest, a pair of snow spectacles, buttons and bunting, silver spoons, a small prayer book, an empty tea canister – some important, but most individually pathetic. Yet for a public eager for any information relating to their fate these things became sacred artefacts, the sole remains of Franklin and his companions: the ‘departure’, ‘initiation’, and ‘return’ of a century’s worth of polar exploration revealed in its images and artefacts. ‘Franklin sowed himself like treasure amid the polar ice’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine mused, ‘and it was the ceaseless endeavour to 279

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discover him that made our knowledge of the Arctic what it is’.107 The Cornhill Magazine pointed to the ‘heroism displayed’ in the ‘relics of the Franklin Expedition’ and Review of Reviews suggested they provided ‘a tangible object lesson set forth in material shape’.108 It was a story tapping an emotional core that touched men and women alike.109 A small two-penny juvenile book sold at the RNE, entitled The Story of the Franklin Search Illustrative of the Franklin Relics and authored by Lady

76. ‘Relics of Arctic Exploration in the Franklin Gallery’, The Daily Graphic, 8 May 1891.

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McClintock, guided visitors through the material manifestations of this heroism.110 Through the relics, a story was pieced together: ‘a story of courage, discipline, and devotion to duty, and a story of woman’s faithful love inspiring strong men to perform acts of daring, which will live for ever’. Decoding the relics offered morally uplifting lessons, for ‘inspired by such facts as we have here to tell, we are sure that whenever an Englishman falls in the discharge of his duty, his countrymen will never rest, until they have verified his fate, and brought light to his achievements’.111 Continuing, ‘the story is a tragedy complete enough in itself; but illuminated by such high qualities as may well make us proud of our race and our country; for, as General Charles Gordon told us, “England was made by her adventurers”. And England will never decay as long as Courage, Discipline, and Endurance survive among us, such as kept Franklin’s party a united band, even in their doomed and hopeless march’.112 Beyond the RNE stage popular histories and juvenile works provided further ways for images of exploration to circulate and they sustained the renewed vogue of naval polar exploration successes.113 Albert Markham’s Life of Sir John Franklin, published in 1891 as the latest instalment of the ‘World’s Great Explorers’ series, sold well and enjoyed a number of reissues through to 1906.114 His account obviously closely echoed the prevailing RNE vision: we know he was a member of the Arctic committee which had organised the Franklin Gallery; Colonel Barrow had offered access to his Arctic artefacts and Pearce portraits, all of which had found their way into the gallery and many of which were reproduced for the first time as plates in Markham’s book; he enlisted the help of Sophia Cracroft, Lady Franklin’s niece, and she placed at his disposal a wealth of material, as she had also done for the show; and McClintock, also a central member of the RNE committee, offered his hand by editing the whole.115 Reviews from provincial papers and obscure foreign periodicals, saved for posterity in his private scrapbook, help us track the book’s reception and Franklin’s posthumous reputation too. ‘The Naval Exhibition is reminding us of our naval heroes’, ran the City Press review, and ‘the record is a brilliant one’.116 The Exeter Gazette read in Markham’s work ‘a thrilling life of one of the most remarkable men England has ever produced’. The Bristol Times suggested that ‘it should 281

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be in every lending and parochial library’, for Markham had recaptured a story of ‘special fascination for boys, who will be taught by it the lessons of many noble lives’. ‘Happy the country which in its most difficult enterprises can count on such single-minded devotion as that shown throughout the life of Franklin’, The Athenaeum rejoiced.117 Many miles away, the New York Critic agreed that ‘it was most appropriate that Franklin’s fame should still be sounded and the inspiring story of his life retold’. Having ‘enjoyed the book unequivocally’ the Buffalo Courier proclaimed Franklin’s history ‘the most thrilling’ of any Arctic discoverer: ‘his is the most impressive image of an explorer yet known’.118 Albert, at least, applied an even hand in saving these reviews, as he kept the critical ones too. The Scots Observer was unsentimental. ‘It is hard for the lay mind to imagine wherein the honour and glory of such a foolhardy and costly exploit would consist . . . truly it is a marvellous infatuation that draws the Arctic explorer back to the chance of horrible privations and a ghastly death’.119 Their shrewd review was unique in dismissing the scientific pretence of previous expeditions: The magnetic pole has been determined and visited; the discovery of the ‘northern terrestrial pole of the earth’ (not to say the North Pole) has no more scientific value than the ascent of Primrose Hill. Yet Captain Markham is as keen as any school-boy that the present record of a little less than four hundred miles should be cut without delay. ‘For such a consummation’ cries he, ‘let all true geographers devoutly pray’. Possibly it is galling to him that this record is held by Lieutenant Greely, an American and (horrible dictu) a soldier, who in 1883 beat the previous ‘best’ made by our Captain Nares, RN, by some three miles.120

Yet, Franklin escapes censure. ‘Britain should rejoice in at last possessing a good account of a man she counts among her best-loved heroes. It would be invidious to suggest that had Franklin’s ship returned in safety, her work accomplished, the public would never have been stirred as it was by the ten years’ anxiety as to her fate; or to lay stress on the fact that the search expeditions did far more than the hero himself in the way of geographical research’. Invidious perhaps, but it was true. A condensed account of Markham’s biography also appeared in James Knowles’s Nineteenth Century and he explained its 282

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continuing popularity because of the strength of Franklin’s religious and moral character and the attraction of his example to a ‘naval nation’.121 Echoing this praise, the Dublin Review declared, ‘without such spirits England would never have attained her place in the world’s history, and she does well to cherish their memories’.122 That the RNE had been central in displaying and enshrining these memories is now pretty clear. Cochrane’s English Explorers, which had previously met with success in detailing the ‘famous travels of Mandeville, Bruce, Park and Livingstone’, was republished late in 1891 and a chapter on Arctic exploration was spliced to the front of the book.123 In perhaps the clearest indication of Franklin’s ascension to the pantheon of exploring heroes he supplanted the legendary John Mandeville on the volume’s frontispiece, taking his place alongside Livingstone and wreathed in gold. Likewise, in Frank Mundell’s Stories of North Pole Adventure, a ‘narration of the most thrilling incidents’, Franklin was represented as the ‘knight errant of the northern seas’, immediately the modern Mandeville, and evidently ‘among the most truly noble that ever left the shores of England’.124 Barnett Smith’s Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the North-West Passage painted Franklin’s history in bold and heroic colours: ‘for there is no name which exercises such a strange fascination over Englishmen’ and whose ‘fate invested him with a halo of immortality’.125 The Realm of the Ice King, another popular work by the Religious Tract Society, appeared in 1891 in a new edition offering a distilled chronology of the century’s foremost explorations and, predictably, it was quick to recite naval achievements.126 It made particular reference to the ‘relics of Franklin’ as reassuring material evidence of his ‘steadfast faith’. The value of polar voyages lay in the opportunity they offered to test and to prove the devout heroism of officers and men: ‘a place for nautical skill, physical courage, earnest piety and a great sense of religious responsibility’.127

REMEMBERING FRANKLIN

In 1895 the fiftieth anniversary of the departure of the Franklin expedition presented another opportunity to celebrate past glories. 283

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The Royal Scottish Geographical Society commemorated the anniversary with a symposium and exhibition in Edinburgh, whilst in London the RGS organised a gala meeting and a dinner attended by a host of Arctic veterans.128 Two steamers were chartered on 19 May to take members of the public and more than three hundred RGS Fellows downstream to Greenwich to view the Franklin relics and the Painted Hall stocked ‘with so many portraits of England’s naval heroes’.129 Commandant Le Clerc, representing the Paris Geographical Society, placed a wreath on the obelisk erected there to Lieutenant Bellot. Clements Markham, now President of the RGS, justified the celebration in customary terms: A commemoration, such as that which we now celebrate, serves more than one useful purpose. It recalls the memory of brave men who did their duty well and nobly in their generation. It revives and freshens our knowledge of their work, and of what we owe to them for the examples they have set us, and for the credit their labours have secured for our country. It enforces on our minds the lessons to be derived from the past, in our efforts to work for the present and for the future. Above all, the renewal of an interest in former achievements has a tendency to incite among our younger associates a feeling of admiration, which is a direct incentive to emulation in the same glorious field of geographical research.130

Lithograph images of Franklin were featured widely in the penny weeklies and juvenile literature, and other Arctic heroes enjoyed a brief revisit; a beautiful coloured frontispiece of Thomas Collier’s ‘The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson’ graced The Boy’s Own Paper and John Millais’s symbolic ‘The North West Passage’ reappeared in the illustrated press.131 It was painted in 1874 with the subtitle ‘It might be done, and England should do it’. Briton Rivie`re’s ‘Beyond Man’s Footsteps’ presented the Arctic in ethereal mystery, to beckon the bold to take up the challenge.132 Markham engineered the commemorations, reconstructing an image of Franklin’s achievements as a promotional exercise for the RGS and as a way to vivify his polar ambitions. ‘We look back then . . . at those two brave ships moving down the river just half a century ago, as the starting-point whence to trace a continuous stream of high-souled 284

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77. Fifty years on from Franklin’s disappearance, Thomas Smith’s oil painting ‘They Forged the Last Link With Their Lives’ divided opinion; harrowing and yet heroic too. A number of publishers issued souvenir prints to meet public demand. The Graphic, 25 July 1896.

effort, and of magnificent results, down to this present day, when we strive to make an Antarctic Expedition the chief and the most practical outcome of our Franklin Commemoration tonight’.133 Before his audience adjourned to a side-hall, which had been set up to contain an exhibition of Arctic relics and naval portraits, the veteran explorer McClintock rose to offer the toast, describing the ‘gallantry’ of Franklin’s ‘heroic band of Christian men’. ‘In laying down their lives at the call of duty, our countrymen bequeathed to us a rich gift’, he declared, ‘one more beacon light to guide our sons to deeds of heroism in the future. These examples of unflinching courage, devotion to duty, and endurance of hardship, are as life-blood to naval enterprise’.134 Later that summer the RGS hosted the International Geographical Congress and it gave Markham another platform to circulate his exploration narrative, whilst lobbying hard for a new Antarctic voyage. On 29 July he presided at the General Meeting, before a crowded hall at the Imperial Institute in London; a gathering that had polar exploration as the main subject of debate. Whilst Andre´e’s ballooning plans were met with scepticism, Albert Markham delivered a rousing pre´cis of naval achievement in the North.135 Adolphus Greely followed with a florid account of the value of polar voyages, skipping past hard 285

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science to praise its ‘Anglo-Saxon’ spirit and its ability to offer the public appealing displays: ‘Patience, courage, fortitude, foresight, selfreliance, helpfulness – these grand characteristics of developed humanity everywhere, but which are inclined to claim as special endowments of the Caucasian races – find expression in the detailed history of Arctic exploration’. ‘If one seeks to learn what extent man’s determination and effort dominate even the most adverse environment’, Greely concluded, ‘the simple narratives of Arctic exploration will not fail to furnish striking examples’.136 Thomas Smith’s harrowing canvas ‘They Forged The Last Link With Their Lives’, painted in 1895, offered a constructed fiction of the Franklin narrative. It reinforced the dark, yet idealised, elements of the disaster and found a receptive audience. Just as Gordon, saintly hero of Khartoum, faced the spears of his Mahdist attackers with stoic grace in many reconstructions of his death, so too Franklin, anointed with a pious resolution, faced his death nobly, surrounded by the men who had followed him to the end.137 Franklin’s obvious failure had been reconstructed into satisfying victory: not only he had ‘forged the last link’ to complete a Northwest Passage, but, more importantly, he had met death in the manner of a Christian hero.138 Franklin could thus become a counterpoint to the worst excesses of the ‘new imperialism’ of the 1890s, with its aggressive triumphalism, of which the brash Stanley proved a controversial symbol. ‘Happily those memories can never really die which are brightened with the fair lustre of noble qualities’.139 While new national heroes would in the future emerge in the Antarctic rather than in the North, this did not greatly erode the Arctic’s appeal, which some historians suggest to have been on the wane.140 It was precisely because of renewed polar interest and the threat of new nations taking part in the ‘race for the south’, that the historical achievements of the Navy in the Arctic burned more brightly. The RNE and the Markhams in particular were responsible for that: the Franklin story, as naval myth and part of polar folklore, had been re-scripted for the times, sanctified and re-energised. Exploration and the Navy made ideal partners, Markham would conclude, in keeping alive ‘that spirit of maritime enterprise which has ever distinguished the English people’.141

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CONJECTURE AND REALITY

The next major biographical treatment of the ‘Heroic Sailor-Soul’ came in 1896 with the publication of Henry Traill’s The Life of Sir John Franklin. It provided the details of Franklin’s life that would form the basis for many subsequent accounts.142 This was very much a lateVictorian Franklin; a figure born at the 1891 exhibition, a publicity image for the Navy undergoing a crisis of confidence, a monument shorn of his humanity and tenderness – redoubtable but not real. Richard Cyriax built on Traill’s narrative to produce a classic account, first published in 1939, making excellent use of primary sources, Parliamentary papers and other surviving records, and it still stands as an accurate narrative of Franklin’s life and career, well used by those historians who follow him.143 Whilst there was a trickle of new information, most notably the publishing of some private correspondence, and new insights into Franklin’s career in Tasmania as a colonial administrator, later retellings stuck to the tragedy or provided increasingly facile adventure narratives.144 A great number of storybooks for children sustained this heroic image, repeating the idea of the ‘virtues’ of Franklin’s failure, providing bright illustrations of his battle in the ice, and by praising his ‘courage’ and ‘faith’.145 A fine account by Roderic Owen, published in 1978, revisited Franklin’s life in a well-illustrated iconography and added new details to Cyriax’s account, yet offered little to explain his imaginative legacy.146 By 1985 Richard Davis, a Canadian academic, recognised the continuing irony of Franklin’s posthumous reputation: ‘The man who charted nearly 3,000 km of the coastline of North America is best remembered as the leader of an expedition that cost the British Admiralty two ships and the lives of 129 men and that made no direct contribution to the geographical unfolding of the Canadian Arctic’.147 Clearly, explorers mean many things to many people. Attitudes range considerably over time, to be re-made and re-imagined by those who look again at the historical record, moving selectively through its cultural detritus. Franklin is chiefly remembered for his failure; cast in sound bite by popular histories as a ‘likeable, but bumbling fool’, ‘the man who ate his boots’, a ‘symbol of British doughtiness’, a ‘gallant loser’ bound by ‘naval hubris’.148 Here’s Chauncey Loomis: 287

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He was essentially a dull man – blandly pious, mildly pleasant, perhaps profoundly incompetent. His incompetence, in fact, is the most interesting thing about him. He tried hard, but everything he did came out wrong, and his name is known today largely because he was the leader of the most disastrous exploratory expedition in history.149

Franklin was a ripe target for modern critiques, elevated as he had been by a host of Victorian admirers, but an endless and reductive antihagiography is inaccurate.150 Nuance and balance is a must when scrutinising the heroes of our past. Not least, most of these uneven polemics forget the main reasons for British Arctic exploration during this period: as an operational training ground for naval men in their ships and genuinely motivated as scientific enterprises, not a mere dash for a Passage, or for the Pole, although often described in this way by lobbyists. Franklin was a man of his time, excellent, limited, ambitious, yet innocent of our standards. In 1984, the body of John Torrington, a seaman on the Franklin expedition, was exhumed from his grave on Beechey Island before the world’s media, and the startling image of his frozen corpse was beamed across the globe.151 The grizzly details of the Franklin story – a dramatic narrative of botulism, man-hauling, cannibalism, and hardihood in the harsh northern landscape – continue to capture public imaginations. There have been beautiful poetic tributes; popular songs; a great number of disaster novels and other less successful fictional re-creations; innumerable Internet sites; and some engaging television documentaries.152 One recent feature, The Lost Expedition, revelled in the rumours of cannibalism and suffering to advertise its programme. Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, provided some wellneeded rigour to the account.153 More satisfying of course was his elegant Franklin biography. He recognised that popular authors and novelists have done wonders to reinvigorate general interest in Arctic exploration history but he also warned of the risks of sound bite and simplification. One recurring notion seems to be that Franklin’s expedition was simply doomed from the start. This thinking usually recycles a theme that these naval men were all crippled by an overwhelming ‘cultural 288

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arrogance’, seen in inadequate supplies and equipment, and were uniformly unwilling to adapt to their surroundings. What Terrible Eurocentric Victorians they must have been. Though there may well be elements of truth here, a modern narrative of this kind is as biased in its presentism as the many nineteenth-century accounts were blind to the causes of the tragedy. I feel that British explorers have suffered for too long in this re-interpretative gaze. As Lambert noted, ‘behind every bronze hero is a human being, an urgent, flawed life in pursuit of some fragment of immortality. We should listen, not judge, because our ancestors were human, and in seeing their humanity we might recall our own before the lights go out for ever’.154 In 2009 a special memorial service, once again in the Chapel in Greenwich, rightly refocused attention back to Franklin’s scientific and geographical achievements, whilst also celebrating the efforts of the many brave men who went in search of him. The service of thanksgiving was attended by descendants of the explorers and also saw the re-dedication of the restored and re-sited Monument there.155 Though it may be fairly said that the expedition was the worst disaster in the history of British naval exploration, conserving the Monument offered a suitable moment to reflect upon their sacrifice. It was also a time to acknowledge British contributions to the discovery and exploration of the Canadian Arctic, an area now the focus of considerable geopolitical attention – over trade routes, access to resource riches and other sovereignty issues.156 The project to conserve the Monument also neatly coincided with renewed efforts to find the remains of Franklin’s ships, a series of surveys that was then being led by Robert Grenier, Chief Underwater Archaeologist at Parks Canada. After the service Grenier gave a speech in the Painted Hall, a place where many of the Franklin relics were displayed in the past and where toasts to the lost explorers were frequently offered in the years after McClintock’s return. Canadian High Commissioner James Wright read this in tribute: . . . cryptic marks, latitudes, signatures, journals, diaries of despair, official reports 289

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Nobody needs to read. I’ve seen the real journals You left us, you Franklin, you Crozier. I’ve seen the skulls of your men in the snow, their sterile bones Arranged around cairns like compasses, Marking out all the latitudes and longitudes Of men. Now the great passage is open, The one you dreamed of, Franklin, And great white ships plough through it Over and over again, Packed with cargo and carefree men. It is as though no one had to prove it Because the passage was always there. Or . . . is it that the way was invented, Franklin? that you cracked the passage open With the forces of sheer certainty? – or is it that you cannot know, Can never know, Where the passage lies Between conjecture and reality . . .157

I was happy to have played my part in organising this service and choosing its readings, particularly these enigmatic lines by Gwendolyn MacEwen. We were all left with the hope that future expeditions might reveal some significant new insights into the factors that led to the deaths of the men of Erebus and Terror, though it was equally possible then that nothing new would be discovered.158 Though it may still prove impossible to unravel all the secrets of their demise, the Franklin tragedy remains one of the most beguiling mysteries of polar history. It is a story still defined by invention and imagining; the passage a meeting place of memory and myth.

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78. ‘Monument to Sir John Franklin and his companions in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital’. Engraving in The Illustrated London News, 8 January 1859.

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IMAGINATIVE RESOURCE

In 1905 Earl’s Court hosted a new naval exhibition to ‘arouse patriotic sentiments and to re-tell the tales of nautical derring-do’, exploiting the commercial possibilities of the exhibition format both as sober showcase and funfair. The sprawling complex was home to Burton’s ‘Canadian Indian Village’, a switchback railway, a submarine, a shooting gallery, a ‘gigantic wheel’, ‘Distorting Mirrors’, Burn’s ‘Ants and Bees’, and a ‘Lager Beer Hall’. Amid this unusual mix exhibits of naval history and of polar exploration were celebrated once more. Clements Markham was centrally involved again as a member of the Sub-Committee for this part of the show. Though smaller in conception, his display contained much of what was seen in 1891, yet with new Antarctic additions too. There were photographic enlargements of polar scenes; large displays of equipment used by Scott in his Discovery expedition of 1901 –4; a tableaux celebrating Albert Markham’s ‘Farthest North’ with figures clad in fur suits and Jaeger caps; the Union Jack that James Clark Ross had ‘hoisted at the Magnetic North Pole in 1831’; and a number of works of art, including portraits of Franklin, offered for sale.159 ‘The history of Polar Research is, and always has been, of absorbing interest in this country’, wrote Albert Markham in typical style for the Official Guide. ‘There are, even in this twentieth century, many thousands of square miles situated at the north and south extremes of our terrestrial sphere, still wrapped in the veil of obscurity, illustrated on our charts and on our globes by unseemly blank spaces’. Celebrating the recent Antarctic success of Scott, and lamenting that ‘Norway and Italy have succeeded in wresting Northern honour from our grasp’, Markham again tried to rally the ‘munificence of patriotic Englishmen’, who shared his desire ‘in seeing their country maintain its lead in the race for geographical discovery’. The fundamental benefit and virtue of polar exploration, he concluded, was its ability to ‘animate the heart and mind’ of the nation.160 Naval exhibitions, the RNE particularly, provide clear examples of when narratives such as these find a material form. Displaying collections of naval history had dual utility. The 1905 showcase, albeit an unashamedly commercial venture, took the opportunity offered by the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar to celebrate the maritime 292

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heritage of the British Isles. The Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891 likewise sought to profit from the political and domestic potential of celebrating Britain’s long history of naval achievement. Before, during, and after the RNE, Clements Markham was centrally involved. He had delivered a lecture, ‘On the Advantage of Forming Collections’, early in 1891 at the Royal United Service Institution. Illustrated by notable episodes of naval history, his paper was couched in the form of a proposal to bring together a collection of historic navigational instruments, maps and charts, in order to provide instructive materials for the officers at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.161 For Markham – then President of the Hakluyt Society, a post he would hold for twenty years, and the undisputed historian in

79. ‘Sir John Franklin is well represented’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 16 May 1891.

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charge of exploration hagiography – the collections also promised essential imaginative possibilities. The display of heroism captured a naval history that had a modern usefulness, a story to help maintain naval narratives of progress.162 The record of exploration in the Arctic provided the Navy with a rich instructive and imaginative resource. The conduct of individual officers in the ‘regions of thick ribb’d ice’ gave a display of naval heroism that could have enduring popular appeal. These acts were extended to the public through published journals, were reported widely in the press, and recycled in popular histories and children’s books. The RNE was clearly another medium that propagated this particular naval history of the Arctic – nostalgic, patriotic, and ennobling – and Markham saw the potential of exhibitions for this didactic purpose. The RNE must now be thought of as a key episode in the history and promotion of British exploration ideologies and as the first step, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, toward a new programme of naval polar discovery, the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration, at the beginning of the twentieth. It is clear too that the RNE was a ritual component of John Franklin’s martyrdom: just as were the erection of statues and memorials, a fiftyyear commemoration, heroic odes and yet more books. The Barrow family and Franklin’s niece Sophia Cracroft, as Lady Franklin would have approved, offered their full polar collections for the displays in 1891. In time, these emotive things would form a part of the national collections – in the National Maritime Museum and National Portrait Gallery – ensuring that the image of the explorer as naval hero was passed down to the next generation. Studying exhibitions can give us valuable insights. We have the rare opportunity to prise underneath the ‘official mind’ of patriotism and gauge public feelings through press reports, letters and articles. Exhibitions also leave behind a thick deposit of pamphlets and ephemera that illustrate the variety of narratives – imperial, racial, or in this instance naval – created for public consumption. Some illusions were quickly discarded; others were embraced. The RNE celebration of exploration, gilt in flags, charts, portraiture and relics – the visible trophies of such an enterprise – had a currency that was real as well as rhetorical. While it might be hard to detail its precise role in culturing that most nebulous of things, the ‘public consciousness’, we can claim 294

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for the RNE the achievement, at least, in putting a vision of Arctic exploration firmly back in the public domain. But what made heroic myths so appealing in the late-Victorian period? Britain at the time was facing unprecedented political, economic, and diplomatic competition from other nations and it was felt that her supremacy at sea would soon be challenged. British navalism was a direct manifestation of the alarm surrounding her ‘great power’ status and the RNE was mounted to advance a feel-good brand of propaganda. Retelling a story that sung of the qualities that shaped historical success helped Britain reinforce confidence in herself and her dominions. Thinking about the displays of the RNE shows us how the myths and realities of British sea power were marshalled for this purpose. It is no overstatement to suggest that the RNE was a foundational moment for the collective mythology of a naval nation. The end of the century loomed and new technologies threatened to change the order of things. It was inevitable that many would turn to Nelson as a personification of the national spirit and to the Navy as the symbol of its greatness. Polar explorers, John Franklin most notably, had played their part too by providing attractive images of resolve and heroic vitality, which could reassure the nation as it entered this brave new world.

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Franklin’s Ghost

Ah Franklin! I would like to find you Now, your body spread-eagled like a star, A human constellation in the snow. The earth insists There is but one geography, but then There is another still – The complex, crushed geography of men.1

Sir John Franklin was the first. The sun was high. Adjusting his cocked hat, bound with black silk, he gathered up his telescope and tried to smile but he wasn’t feeling well. He sat uncomfortably in his chair, positioned on the deck of the stout ship Erebus as she wallowed at her moorings in the London docks. It was 1845. The photographer Richard Beard urged the explorer to stay still for just a moment longer. He removed the lens cap; he waited, another minute, and then swiftly slotted it back in place. The first photograph of the explorer was secured.2 In fact, it was the first photograph of an explorer, ever. Other officers of the expedition then had their portraits taken that day, optimistically submitting themselves to the photographer’s eye.3 They appear to us now as if frozen in time. So, too, they joined Franklin in search of a navigable northwest passage, deep into the maze of islands and straits that form the northern shores of a nation we now know as Canada. At Franklin’s request, Beard supplied them with a complete photographic apparatus, which was safely stowed aboard ship alongside other technological marvels: portable barrel-organs, tinned meat and soups, an inflatable rubber boat, scientific equipment, the twenty-horse-power engines loaned from the Greenwich railway

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80. Sir John Franklin, daguerreotype by Richard Beard, London, 1845. Some originals are safely housed in collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. A second set made at the same time is now presumed lost. For a long while it was supposed to be in the collections of the National Maritime Museum, or the Derbyshire Record Office, but they have only print reproductions.

and a library of over twelve hundred volumes. The camera became part of the kit thought useful for exploring at the limits of the known world. It’s possible they created images in the Arctic but nothing has been found. Weighed down with stores, yet buoyant with Victorian confidence, the expedition sailed from the Thames on 19 May. 297

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The ships were last seen in late July making their way northward in Baffin Bay before vanishing without a trace.

CRUSHED GEOGRAPHIES

It is now 9 September 2014. Journalists are sent a one-sentence email and asked to gather in an hour. Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, has something to show them. And there he is wearing a broad smile and sitting at the head of a table of some fellow Canadians, framed by their national flag. Behind him, a map on the wall with the words Un Canada Fort imprinted across its northern borders: A Strong Canada. And the star of the show? A photograph appears on a screen. It’s a digital composite, a rendering from a field of sonar scans, the result of a search that has lasted almost 170 years. This is the first photograph. We can see the ghostly outline of a ship resting on the sea floor; an image of magic like a bootprint on the moon. Franklin and his men had left London at the beginning of the industrial age. Over the course of the next century, as mankind embraced coal-fired power, internal combustion engines and all manner of remarkable new technologies, the Arctic would also be changing as a result of these developments. Since 1979, when scientists began using satellites to chart the shifting extent of the Arctic Ocean sea ice, the annual minimum extent of coverage has fallen by more than ten percent each decade. The effects of human activity many thousands of miles away are witnessed here, whilst geopolitical pressures are also converging. The search for clues about the demise of these lost explorers has continued through these dramatic changes, from daguerreotypes and hand-painted panoramic shows to highresolution digital cameras, autonomous underwater craft and instant news reporting, with data speeding round the world along optical fibers as fast as light itself. In many ways, the Arctic has come to represent the future even more than the past.4 Up in the North some things will remain hidden, at least for now. The precise location of Franklin’s ship has not been revealed in an effort to deter would-be archaeologists from mounting their own treasure hunts. We know it was found in just eleven metres of water, 298

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81. With old-fashioned theatricality, Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveils a television screen showing an image of the Franklin shipwreck, Ottawa Citizen, 9 September 2014.

somewhere in Queen Maud Gulf west of O’Reilly Island, lying on the seabed in the heart of the fabled ‘Northwest Passage’. The initial discovery was made by side-scan sonar towed from the Parks Canada research vessel Investigator and then confirmed on 7 September 2014 using a remotely operated vehicle. The press were summoned in Ottawa two days after this. Later that month, once the team had matched up the sonar images with old ship’s plans in London, it was confirmed that the wreck was indeed HMS Erebus. ‘I am delighted to announce that this year’s Victoria Strait Expedition has solved one of Canada’s greatest mysteries’, Harper beamed. ‘We do have enough information to confirm its authenticity’. He spoke in the language of a partner, a participant – a ‘we’ – and as an enthusiast. Though offered to the world at a tightly controlled press conference, for Harper the news transcends politics and a brilliant photo opportunity. It was said to be a genuine reflection of his interest in both Canada’s North and in the historical mystery of the Franklin expedition. We have no way of telling how genuine that interest is, and 299

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that doesn’t really matter for now. What matters is that a lost ship has been found. That itself is enough.5 I eagerly listen to many of the things that are written and said in the days and weeks that follow. ‘This is a Great Canadian Story’, Harper declares, ‘an important moment in mapping together the history of our country’. ‘The Franklin Expedition laid the Foundations of Canada’s Claims to Arctic Sovereignty’, ran the official press release, and then, as surely as night follows day, ‘The New Discovery is an Affirmation of Canadian Sovereignty’.6 This is a bit of a stretch, given that Canada didn’t even exist as a country until 1867, yet others are even more effusive. Titanic discoverer Bob Ballard calls it the most ‘significant undiscovered shipwreck on earth’. It is ‘the biggest find since the opening of Tutankhamun’s Tomb’, ‘Canada’s Moon Shot’, ‘the Discovery that Changed Everything’.7 This kind of summary is typical of the whole: The sight of one of John Franklin’s ships lying upright at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, nearly 170 years after the captain, his two vessels and all his men vanished, marks one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of our generation. This has become an almost mythical story, featuring tragedy, love, cannibalism, heroism and endurance – but not many facts . . . Franklin’s story, full of empire, heroism and science, has long fascinated historians and armchair explorers. Climate change now gives it new potency to politicians too. The North West Passage is about to open up to globalization.8

Others have suggested the Franklin story to be a kind of ‘origin myth of disaster’ in the Canadian experience, a sort of founding legend. Writing in The New Yorker, with tongue somewhat in his cheek, Adam Gopnik explains: ‘To translate it from Canadian to American terms, it is as if someone had found, in a single moment, the hull of the Titanic, the solution to the mystery of the lost colony at Roanoke, the original flag of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, and the menu for the Donner Party’s last meal’.9 In hundreds of press reports, and hundreds of thousands of words, the story travels across many nations. The find is billed as a consummate technological triumph, not a stroke of luck or the product of dogged 300

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perseverance, but an inevitability. It becomes an advert for operational capability. You’d be forgiven for beginning to think it has nothing to do with history, but everything to do with identity politics in the present. And you’d be right. The Government of Canada was doing its best to recast the Franklin expedition as a founding myth of Canadian nationhood. This is a bold kind of statement, but it’s worth exploring some more in this chapter. When Harper took up the Franklin quest it looked more like a quixotic gesture of a new Government keen to burnish its Arctic credentials, and it seems at least for now its efforts have been rewarded. The Queen sent her congratulations. Later, Harper had chance to reflect on the find: I will never forget, and I don’t think Canadians – nor anyone in history anywhere in the world – will ever forget those first ghostly images of Erebus preserved on the bottom, nearly whole, in icy perfection as if by an act of God.10

These words of reminiscence come from a gala reception at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. The party, hosted by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, was a moment for the Official Partners of the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition to celebrate their success. Among the 200-plus attendees were the Federal Finance Minister and the British and US Consul Generals. A Canadian folksinger was on hand to perform Lady Franklin’s Lament and Stan Rogers’ infamous Northwest Passage. Paul Ruest, President of the RCGS, and John Geiger, the Society’s CEO, presented the first of its newly minted ‘Erebus Medals’ to the Prime Minister and his wife. ‘We recognize the find as a great moment’, said Geiger, ‘not only in underwater archeology, or in Arctic science, or even in exploration history – but a great moment for Canada’.11 Alongside the happy hullaballoo were voices that expressed an alternative view. Many shrugged, the cynical yawned, but at least people were talking about history again.12 Editorial cartoonists across Canada took aim in caricature. Harper’s critics led the charge and the counter current goes a little like this. What a lot of fuss over a pile of old wood. There is nothing particularly ‘Canadian’ about this stuff anyhow. Why are we wasting our time on dead explorers, and British ones at that? Besides, it has cost way too much money. Six years and 301

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millions of dollars later and all we get is a grainy photo of a ship? What about our schools and hospitals? It’s about time Harper dealt with the real problems of the North – food security, water quality, education, child welfare. Playing with icebergs in an economic crisis, go figure! And so on. Regardless of politics, and withstanding your feelings for Harper’s record in Government, the finding of a lost ship is a fascinating event. Most can appreciate that even if they don’t have the slightest interest in maritime history. It’s a human story, or, at least, it’s what we have left of a very human struggle. It’s the story of a modern struggle too. We can admire the efforts and the persistence of the many people – from navigators, helicopter pilots, archaeologists, scientific technicians, and more – whose expertise made this ‘finding’ a reality, with tools at their disposal that the Victorian searchers could not have even dreamed possible. We can be amazed at the fulfilment of a search that had baffled so many others, and for so long.

82. ‘In the News: Putin stakes claim to North Pole’, The Hamilton Spectator, 26 July 2007.

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83. ‘Try to Stop Me!’ President Harper rides a polar bear, The Hamilton Spectator, 19 March 2014.

But if we are to think of this event as a ‘ground-breaking’ or ‘gamechanging’ discovery what might its real impact be? Time will give us the distance we need to try and sort out an answer to this kind of question, but we can add some nuance to this idea of impact. Did photographing a wreck improve our understanding of the story? Well, a resounding yes, and yet a fairly basic no too. Did the finding of the wreck really change anything in the historical sense? Well, not really, in that the end result is still the same. No matter how much we reinvent, or reinterpret the story, Franklin and his men are not coming back to life. What is the impact on the Arctic? Well, that is yet to be fully seen, but certainly the find has triggered another cycle of obvious on-the-ground activity in the North, justifying some new policies, and distracting attention from some others. It will certainly impact the way that money is spent on projects here. How is the story now being told? And why? That’s the point I feel. Though the fate of the men is well known, the wreck inevitably raises more questions than it answers. How did 303

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Erebus get there? Where is Terror? Where is John Franklin? More important still, what does this all mean? And, why should we care? For me, this is the soul of ‘crushed geography’. In her sublime poem, Gwendolyn MacEwen spoke of the real and metaphorical bones of dead explorers scattered across a white landscape, symbols of the ambitions that led them to their destruction. Her words can be read as a cautionary tale against placing too much trust in science and technology and it’s a message that speaks ever more clearly today. But I would also suggest that we imprint too many of our current concerns into texts of the past. Bones and equipment lie broken about the land, just as a ship lies injured on the sea floor. They all in time become part of that land, in its soil and in its stories. Broken, irreparable, subdued, haunted, awaiting rediscovery. The wooden skeletons of vessels of all kinds, and from many cultures, are everywhere in the Arctic; symbols of hubris and pride, perhaps, failed hopes and shattered dreams. But, they are also sacred sites, testament to courage and human endeavour, very real symbols of endurance and enterprise. Inuit boats made from actual skeletons lie here too. Not just failure then, but achievement and spirit, despite their submerged state. All of this depends on the way we think and remember them; the way their histories are told; the way their ghosts are brought up to the surface. There is undoubted violence and terror in the notion of a crushed geography. But might it also be a creative act too? As a word, it can certainly mean the act of changing the shape of an object – or an idea – through an external force, as much the result of that force. The writing of exploration histories is then a crushed and crushing process, and the geography of where, when, and how stories are made can be explored as a subject in its own right. Histories are manipulated. Narratives are constructed just as reputations are destroyed. The statues of the past are as violently dismantled as they were energetically raised to the sky in the first place. But why Canada, and why now? ‘Perhaps’, as Margaret Atwood once said, ‘it’s because – as they say in china shops – if you break it, you own it. Canada’s North broke Franklin, a fact that appears to have conferred an ownership title of sorts’.13 Though long dead, Franklin still lives. The complex, crushed geography of the Arctic can be seen in the creation of historic narratives and the refashioning of history into a 304

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useful artefact for the present. Clearly the status of national heroes relies less on what they achieve than on what they come to represent. Heroes are made and then broken, and then gathered up once more. Canada is right in the throes of this kind of activity: crafting, rescripting, stage-managing. Canada crushed Franklin and now she claims his expedition as her own. It is history as product and perception: exploration as show business or a well-timed photoop. Much of it is nonsense, yet it’s rather important nonsense too. The silence that had surrounded the Franklin story, the absence of the ships, the grisly, desperate demise of his men unaware of the efforts of others to reach them; these details had long haunted the edges of the imagination and this is why this story never quite went away. Franklin’s voyage was the nineteenth century’s most notorious and arguably most significant expedition, not just because of its tragic end but because the dozens of ships that searched for him mapped vast new areas of the Arctic Archipelago. That is the real achievement of the Franklin saga yet it is a simple truth that is often overlooked. And the value of doing things in the Arctic at all still divides opinion. Fanfare and frustration go hand in hand. And that’s where we began this book, with the crowds on the beach in Portsmouth in 1875, waving farewell to a bunch of new explorers as they set their sights on the North. ‘It went out like a rocket, and has come back like the stick’.14 Franklin’s search for a northwest passage, for The Northwest Passage, is transformed in our own unending search for meaning. As MacEwen so well suggested, the passage comes to represent an imaginary divide between ‘conjecture and reality’. Is it possible to establish some order from the chaos, to control a space that is so challenging to body and mind, so difficult to move through and so hard to describe? It’s a landscape of the imagination, a terrain of memory, danger, and unanticipated delight. Hopes and thwarted ambition gather here like layers of drifting snow. Lingering questions remain. This is true of most stories, and histories, that have been passed down. Every age needs to know more: it’s the desire to dig a little deeper, and not accept the first things we are told. We want to question a consensus that had built up over time, and reject the accepted view. That’s a natural kind of reaction. The philosophical scepticism we have about so many things, expresses itself in the Arctic with quite reasonable regularity. What on earth would 305

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encourage people to want to go to such places? Why risk so much for so illusory a goal? Surely, there are more important things that must be done in life?

HALF-TRUTHS

As to the other tales contained in this work, and indeed, to my tales generally, I can make but one observation. I am an old traveller. I have read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more than all. My brain is filled, therefore, with all kinds of odds and ends. In travelling, these heterogeneous matters have become shaken up in my mind, as the articles are apt to be in an ill-packed travellingtrunk; so that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it; and I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.15

So, what of Nelson’s Bear? Well, it’s a story that also shows us the nature of storytelling. It’s an anecdote that grew into a myth. Explorer’s tales get bigger with each retelling, like an angler’s big fish. The bear is a fish. There you go. Does that make sense? Much of exploration writing is like this. The boy and the bear become a metaphor of challenge: the Navy engaging the Arctic, man versus nature, a conflict, an encounter, insuperable odds. My hope has been to think more about how stories like this reach us. How stories are passed on, shared, altered, and passed down. This whole book is all about how these bears came back to Britain. And by bears I mean the stories, the tall tales, and the images that are brought home. That is the meat and drink of exploration: the dramatic yarn, the struggle against overwhelming odds, to battle and overcome. It’s conceptual baggage. It’s what many Brits still take with them as they haul their heavy sledges over the ice. It’s part of the lexicon used to describe adventure now: the challenge, facing up to your fears, overcoming impossibilities. It is sound bite and cliche´, but what else would you expect? Whether it is 1830 or 2015, the story is much the same. It might be fair to say this: boil your journey down to the juicy bits, both good and bad, if you want anyone to listen. Leave the long footnotes – and the science – to those that care for these details and 306

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84. The first public lecture on the Scott tragedy was given by Commander Evans on 4 June 1913, with First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill presiding.

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don’t let too much hard fact get in the way of the story. And thus, the Top Gear team ‘conquer the top of the world’ and race to the ‘North Pole’, except in actual fact they don’t, they make a film about a journey to a place where the Magnetic North Pole once was. Another television presenter ‘cycles unsupported all the way to the South Pole’, but again she doesn’t; she rides a fat-bike a few times for the cameras, mostly gets too hot, or too cold, and then is flown home. Another adventurer ‘completes what Captain Scott could never do’ by walking unsupported to and from the Pole. Well, at least that one’s true, in a sense. They did return safely and did something Scott could never do: they called up an aircraft to drop off food to save them. This detail didn’t get mentioned too often in their press releases when they came home to applause. Without that plane, these fellows would have gone exactly the way of Scott and his companions. They would have died in their tent. As exploration of the world increased so its language evolved. But what have we learnt? Men of science and geographers alike based their emerging disciplines on detailed observation; on the power of truth. For the explorer in the field this meant charting and collecting, advancing the frontier of knowledge with courage, yes, but wielding an armoury of precision instruments too. And yet, there would be no escaping half-truths and the opinions of others. Try as they might, every explorer lost full control of the way their achievements were understood as soon as news was broken. Let loose to run in the wild, truths are distorted. Nelson never fought a huge beast with his bare hands, of that we can be fairly sure. Ross didn’t reach the North Pole in 1831 as much as he’d have liked it to be true; Cheyne never flew in the Arctic, even though he travelled there each night in his lecture shows; and Franklin didn’t discover a northwest passage even though this achievement was many times set in stone. And, what of a passage anyhow? Surely that’s the best half-truth of the lot. There are many passages and none are as navigable as those Victorian lobbyists would have you believe. Here’s a truth. There’s an American base at the South Pole now. You can wear a t-shirt in the Arctic summer. People actually live here and, believe it or not, have thrived here for thousands of years. I once met an Inuit break-dancer on the west coast of Greenland, and a hairdresser, 308

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a fireman, a town planner, and a pool lifeguard too. All Inuit. On the shores of the Bering Strait I watched American wrestling on a plasma screen with a bear-hunter whose mother had been born out on the tundra during a snowstorm. His father had bought his first television set to watch a man walk on the moon. ‘We went from stone age to space age in a generation’, he told me. He now goes on vacation to Hawaii. Travel further north still, across hundreds of miles of ice, and you can go swimming at the North Pole for your holidays. You can share your photos instantly online and, after a few flights, be back at home the very same day. This is a reality of today’s world, but is this progress? It’s too easy to bemoan the loss of exploring romance. The same adventurers who complain about the passing of a heroic age of travel rely by necessity on the latest technologies, not only in the field, but also in forging their careers as authors, speakers, bloggers and pundits. It sometimes feels as if many adventurers don’t do anything these days without filming themselves at the same time. That I suppose is the world in which they ply their trade. The real explorers have gone, this is true, but everything changes. Had Scott the chance to hitch a ride home of course he would have done so. Shackleton really wanted to drive a motor sledge to the Pole, though few remember this. Given an iPhone and he would have instagrammed and tweeted furiously, of that I have no doubt. If he were venturing south today you might follow his daily inspirational quotes; and pity his poor tent-mates. Read their original journals and you discover that’s actually what they got. Each night a smattering of Robert Service, Browning or Kipling, or a quick photo edit of some of Frank Hurley’s prints, as the penguin stew bubbled away on the stove. Today modern expeditions are not the committed journeys they once were. That goes without saying, but that’s not to say things aren’t difficult. There is danger and adventure everywhere if you want to search it out. But it’s also fair to say that it’s not true exploration to discover ‘new human boundaries’ or to be the fastest to the Pole; that’s just expedition marketing jargon. It’s not exploring; it’s sport. With polar adventures it’s very easy for a cynic to say, ‘well they’re just doing it for the sake of doing it and calling it a record because they want sponsorship. Why bother, anyway?’ These doubts have been there since the beginning; explorers have always been encircled by their critics as much as their fans. 309

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85. Cadbury’s ensures an explorer’s ‘endurance and hardihood’. Nansen took about 1,500lbs of Cadbury’s chocolate and cocoa powder on his Arctic expedition, so this advert tells us, as it is ‘especially suitable for men requiring all the vitality and strength necessary for the work’. The Graphic, 22 February 1896.

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LONDON STORIES

We’re now in London in the summer of 1891. What could be gained by invoking the mid-century? Amid the pomp of modern guns and ironclad armaments, the Franklin Gallery took visitors back to a nontechnological era, to the non-confrontational and disinterested record of peacetime, a period when British power was less problematic and British naval and economic supremacy still unchallenged. Nostalgia allowed visitors to look with distance: the Franklin tragedy could actually be comforting. Through Franklin’s record the RNE could be a celebration of something much more than mechanised prowess. It was a visual display of essential naval qualities more fundamental than armoury and battleships. We remember that Carlyle turned to heroes in response to traumas some felt with progress, and by the late-century heroes acted for many in a similar way; as romantic figures that promised reassuring alternatives in the world. Displaying heroism that was chivalric and dutiful – a particular set of appeals to another era, yet Victorian values at their most solid – a narrative was spun that could allay concerns about the morality of an increasingly industrialised state. Heroes promised action amid the anonymity and upheaval that this wave of change brought about: a celebration of brave individualism, if you like, to counter a nation’s status anxiety. So, imagine that Franklin faced his death nobly, or that Nelson went out alone across the ice. Like many Victorians, most of us also feel we don’t want to be just another cog in the machine. We want to be individuals, masters of our own destiny. We long to break free, to stand out, to escape ‘off grid’. Some choose to exercise these dreams by lazing on a sun-lounger, some put on a backpack and head into the wild. Each has its merits of course. The RNE provided an opportunity to revisit traditional heroes – Cook, Nelson, and Franklin chief among others – and celebrate a vision of their lives, achievements, and deaths. The blood-soaked shore of a Pacific island, the deck of Victory at the height of battle, the crushed geography of a frozen wasteland, all of these sites were visualised in the process of affirming the mythic legacy of heroes central to narratives of naval hagiography. And crucially all three died, as other men had and continued to do so, doing their duty. Rallying to the suggestion that 311

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86. ‘Nelson’s Encounter with the Bear’, souvenir card published by Tuck for the Trafalgar Centenary, 1905.

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‘nothing remained’ of Franklin’s expedition, The Pall Mall Gazette declared, ‘yes, there is something – something which, perhaps, after all is worth more than the glory of scientific discovery, more even than the winning of battles. There remains the imperishable record of the heroism and endurance of men who were English in heart and in limb and strong with the strength of the race to command, to obey, to endure’.16 By placing the RNE in the sequence of events that led to the return to polar exploration at the beginning of the twentieth century, it can be seen as the introduction to the ‘Heroic Age’, the means of reviving a British commitment to the exploration of the polar regions. The Arctic display at the RNE tapped that rising public interest of individual action and the heroic, and Clements Markham, as Hakluyt historian and arch-imperial myth maker, is where this all met. The endeavours of explorers travelled widely; their stories were shaped and mediated after their deaths, and the public responded warmly. The RNE of 1891 served as a foundation for nostalgic visions of the polar past, which were carefully shaped by Markham in advancing his Antarctic aspirations. He would create persuasive and durable illusions. That was then, but what of now? Let’s consider a few other days in London when people were again looking to the ice: here are two episodes from an array of recent polar imaginings. The first is from 6 February 1997. With a Union Jack tied around his shoulders, the English adventurer David Hempleman-Adams reaches up to take a firm grip on the foot of his childhood idol. It’s not a date of any significance, other than the fact that he is soon to leave London in the hope of becoming the first Briton to walk unsupported to the North Pole.17 He had already become the first man to reach three Poles within a year – the South Pole, the South Magnetic Pole, and the North Magnetic Pole – but getting to the North Pole itself is proving a little more difficult. Heaving himself higher, his boating shoes offering little purchase against the stone, he eventually comes eye to eye with Robert Falcon Scott. Climbing up onto the explorer’s back, he turns to face a crowd of smiling journalists, to cheers, and to the flash of their cameras. This is a snapshot of the cycle of representation sustaining modern exploration, a swirl of publicity and sponsorship, which we now realise 313

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87. ‘Magnetic North: David Hempleman-Adams and Rune Gjeldnes climbing the statue of the explorer Scott in Waterloo Place in anticipation of their 75-day Arctic expedition next month’. The Independent, 7 February 1997.

has a long history. It is a glimpse too of that maritime nostalgia, given birth in the nineteenth century, which enabled audiences to climb upon the shoulders of their heroes, to define their Britishness, to imagine, to aspire, to aim high. The image of the nation’s explorers continues to influence new generations as they dream of the polar regions. They ally themselves with the myths of the past in an effort to 314

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attract support, to explain their ambition, to stiffen their resolve, to secure a timely photo opportunity.18 David Hempleman-Adams is a perfect fellow when we think about this world. A businessman by profession, and an explorer in spirit, he describes himself as a ‘lucky adventurer’. He finally managed to reach the North Pole on 29 April 1998, becoming the first to achieve the ‘Magnificent Eleven’: the four Poles and the ‘Seven Summits’, the highest peak on each continent. Remember too he is the man who, on 1 June 2000, became the first to fly to the North Pole in a balloon, completing Commander Cheyne’s ‘balloonatic dreams’ of all those years ago. I once joined David on a voyage to an island off the Siberian coast. Mindful of history, we planted our flag on a deserted shore, drank vodka with our Russian companions, found some woolly mammoth tusks, and got chased off by some curious bears. It was not exploration in its truest sense, but it was an enjoyable expedition that improves in the retelling. We talked for a while about ballooning the English Channel, and crossing Asia on horseback, and both are things we may do someday. David is a man who acts out his dreams in the daylight. When sharing a drink with him you need to be careful what you wish for. In 2003, he became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon with an open wicker basket; on 23 March 2004 he piloted The Mears Challenger, a traditional open basket Roziere, to a height of over 40,000 feet; and on 23 June 2005, as pilot of the Champagne Altitude Challenge, he broke a record for the ‘Highest Formal Dinner Party’ at 24,262 feet in the skies above Salisbury Plain. Dressed in a tuxedo and parachute, Bear Grylls was there too and, as is his style, he jumped from the table after sinking the toast. You may wonder what was the point of these adventures – David would admit this last one was little more than a fun stunt – but they offer tangible value to their sponsors and promise much in their inspirational potential too: the Prince’s Trust, for example, has been a positive supporter of his endeavours. Showmanship has always been a crucial part of the exploration game. We’ve seen that Cheyne, as the first explorer turned professional lecturer, realised this early on. I hope that more people now come to appreciate his efforts, beyond the nineteenth-century portrayals of his plans as crazy, suicidal even. Compared to today’s world of adventure 315

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‘firsts’ we can look back at men like Cheyne and realise he was actually proposing something remarkable: to be the very first in history to reach the Pole. And now, a second recollection. It is 29 March 2012, one hundred years since Captain Scott and his companions died amid the polar snows. Two thousand people are gathering in St Paul’s Cathedral. Descendants of these men have come to honour the dead and a range of admirers join them; members of the Royal Family, Admiralty Lords, foreign ambassadors, politicians, broadcasters, celebrated polar scientists, and all manner of folks like me who have a foot in this world. Well-known British adventurers Ran Fiennes and HemplemanAdams have come too. David Attenborough delivers a eulogy, with a catch in his voice as he recalls the famous line from Scott’s diary: ‘These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale’. The Bishop of London gives the sermon. Let’s not dwell on heroic failure, he suggests, but rather let’s cherish their role in ‘bringing to light the scientific significance’ of this great continent: The example of Scott and his team helped inspire the Antarctic treaty, which guaranteed the integrity of the continent as a place of peace and scientific research, as far as possible uncontaminated by the rubbish we have made of so much of the rest of the natural world.19

He touches on Scott’s enduring reputation too and is glad that understanding has moved on a little from the idea of it merely being a ‘race’ to the Pole. ‘How did so many people become so cynical that they could not recognise genuine heroism and scientific curiosity, and instead wasted their time in a search for clay feet?’ St Paul’s was also the scene of the first memorial service to Scott and his four companions. On Valentine’s Day in 1913 it is said over ten thousand came to offer their respects. In an unprecedented gesture King George joined the grieving mass, dressed in his uniform as Admiral of the Fleet.20 In the darkening quiet, he knelt down in prayer in the heart of the very space where Nelson had been laid to rest after the storm of Trafalgar more than one hundred years before. In the absence of bodies, the King became the focal point and as he left the Cathedral after the service the crowds outside took up the National 316

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88. News of the Scott disaster was cabled around the world. Every newspaper in London devoted many pages to the tragedy and on 14 February there was a national memorial in St Paul’s. Scott’s apotheosis as a hero explorer rested on the manner in which he faced death, not to forget the beauty of his writing, and he is seen here passing on the record of his struggle, a victory in death. The Sphere, 24 May 1913.

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Anthem and sang through their tears. The Manchester Guardian described the moment: ‘Nothing in our own time, scarcely even the foundering of the Titanic, has touched the whole nation so instantly and so deeply as the loss of these men’.21 The Daily Mirror was moved to declare, ‘out of that sorrow and out of that anguish will be born a new patriotism, and from it will spring a new desire for service to the nation’.22 A hundred years on, across town on a sunny afternoon in March, we come to stand at the foot of Scott’s statue. Under a rich blue sky we gather, a naval band beats the retreat, relatives and enthusiasts mingle. Among old friends and new, we talk a little about that morning’s service. Though so far removed in years, it was a moving experience, not so much for the promise of science, but in remembering the loss of life, and in imagining the hardships they must have faced. The idea of courage is another part of the legacy they leave behind. The courage of men like Scott was the courage to confront death, to realise they were just a very small part of the bigger drama of life, and to hope that others might find some value in what they had done. The wilderness is a great searcher of souls. As Scott wrote in his journal in January 1911, ‘here the outward show is nothing; it is the inward purpose that counts. So the gods dwindle and the humble supplant them’. I remember chatting that afternoon with two soldiers, both war veterans who had lost limbs clearing roadside bombs in Afghanistan. They tell me about their plans to ski to the South Pole and I wish them well. Scott is their hero, but Shackleton ranks high in their estimations. And Nelson too, he ‘gave an arm for his country’. And John Franklin, I ask? ‘Who?’ is the reply. Of course, now that Franklin’s ship has been found, all this has changed. When I’m up in London I’ll often wander along to say hello to Scott and Franklin in that smart square just off Pall Mall. I rarely see anyone giving the statues the least bit of notice, but that’s usual for London; we all rush about paying little attention to what’s around us, heads swimming with the day’s demands or buried in our phones. I think of the wounded veterans again, overcoming what life has dealt them to reach their personal goals. They made it to the Pole in the end and raised a lot of money for charity in the process. But they also proved that you don’t need to go all the way to Antarctica to find a worthy challenge. To lose your legs but still want to get up and struggle across 318

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the ice is determination of a different order, and yet I admire even more the effort that so many servicemen and women show every day of their lives with injuries like that. That is courage. I was back in the square a few months ago. Seeing me, as some odd fellow staring up at a statue, an English gent walking his dog stops to chat. His Hungarian Vizsla cocks its leg on the plinth. We laugh. Poor Scott. The old man smiles. ‘He was pretty useless that Captain Scott, wasn’t he? But I do like him. I remember, we read his book at school. Not that Norwegian rotter Amundsen though. You could never trust a man who eats his dog.’

FOLLOW AFTER

Hear now the Song of the Dead – in the North by the torn bergedges, They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges. Follow after – we are waiting, by the trails that we lost, For the sounds of many footsteps, for the tread of a host. Follow after – follow after – for the harvest is sown: By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own!23

It could be said that this history is one long fable of storytelling. Explorer’s tales are plentiful, a deep drift of stories fallen snow on snow, endlessly retold. For explorers themselves they satisfy a range of needs in the retelling, maybe it’s for funding, acclaim, for nation and navy, for ego or for pleasure, for profit and, of course, many other reasons too. A good report might encourage support or enable a future dream. Maybe a tale of tough odds will explain away a failure, but what if it sends others off in the wrong direction? What if that narrative makes us poorly equipped, both with the gear in our bags and the visions in our heads? Perhaps a disaster might cause another? Or maybe, just maybe, the knowledge won will avert this kind of fate. Let us learn from Captain Scott. There is clearly more to exploration than meets the eye. As geographer Felix Driver reminds us, we ought to think about exploration as a many layered, cultural event:

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Amid the media circus which accompanies the business of adventure in our own time – a solitary walk to the South Pole, an unaided ascent of Everest, a circumnavigation of the globe by balloon – one frequently finds laments for the passing of an age of innocent exploration. True explorers, the argument goes, had no need for either lucrative sponsorship or instant publicity; they simply went fearlessly into the unknown, in search of truth. Yet such paeans to the heroism of the lone explorer are utterly partial, not least because the accomplishments of figures such as Captain Cook or David Livingstone depended on far more than their own resourcefulness and courage.24

The successes of explorers depended – not forgetting the efforts of many others in the field with them – on the support of so many back at home, if not as ‘sponsors and patrons’, then as reporters, songsters, authors, artists, panoramists and entrepreneurs, publishers and imagemakers, circulating the story and presenting the best angle to a public whose interest was not always assured. Newspapers, books, theatre, spectacles, art and more; all fuelled an energetic domestic culture of exploration. In fact, the very image of the lone individual overcoming great odds, or planting a flag invariably somewhere, or on something, very remote, is proof enough of the power of these types of media to repackage and narrate the experience of exploration. In the case of Captain Ross we see that he worked hard to manage the ‘media event’ for himself, but others also took his image as their own. From print sellers looking to make a quick profit, to clergymen sensing uplifting matter for their Sunday sermons, there was much that could be gained by imagining heroes. In this way, individuals were able to remake the symbolic geographies they were sold, providing their own definitions of the heroic, and satisfying the images of heroes that they needed for themselves. This is the culture of exploration – the visual and textual context in which exploration achievements were presented, celebrated, and debated – and, moreover, both the business and theatre of exploration. There were many actors, but none more conspicuous than the explorer himself. Ross was ‘the Hero of the Arctic’, a ‘Lion of the Season’, London’s newest ‘celebrity’. His considerable renown in the 1830s was a manifestation of a new commercial culture, rapid technological change and a revolution of 320

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print culture. He manipulated the mechanisms of publicity and selfpromotion, using the full range of late-Regency visual media to circulate his public image and advertise his achievements. Why would he put himself in the spotlight? He needed the weight of public support to buttress his claims for official reward, and to vindicate his contributions to exploration. When we look at the various ways that images of Ross were circulated in 1833 – many of which he created himself, the earliest example of this sort of intervention – it certainly raises larger questions about the nature of spectacle and representation. By closely considering the visual and textual rituals of homecoming we can recapture a central feature of the culture of exploration: public performance. The intimate links between celebrity and media are now so obvious, not least if today’s incarnation of public renown is anything to go by. The ubiquity of rapidly transmitted forms of representation – the internet, social media, satellite news reporting, and the glossy magazine all dominant parts of this chaotic cultural engine – has enabled almost anyone to become a celebrity overnight and often, it seems, for no substantial reason. Some have a fair claim to the public attention, others are famous simply for being famous, and their images are made, sustained, and consumed in a voracious cycle of reporting. From overpaid sportsmen and cinema starlets, through the legion of television chefs and lifestyle gurus, baking contests and jungle game shows, a host of new celebrities are constantly manufactured, propelled ignominiously into the popular domain, before fading into irrelevance; disappearing like bright comets back into darkness. The nineteenth century had its fair share of this too, both the thirst for watching the famous, as much as the frustration voiced in seeing this was the direction in which public life might be heading. Explorers hoping to carve a career from their experiences in the ice would have to suffer in this public gaze. Manufactured profiles and propaganda go hand in hand. Exploration was a useful public-relations exercise, though the stakes were high. Ross wanted to restore his reputation; Lady Jane was determined to ensure Franklin’s legacy; Cheyne longed to improve his fortunes and escape the everyday. In the 1870s, the Admiralty were keen to promote a new Arctic expedition to draw public attention away from its catastrophic ship reforms. In idealising a ‘Farthest North’ the Admiralty 321

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made a throne for their efforts. Histories of discovery were re-written. There was real bravery too of course it’s just that in the cycle of public attention mediation was required if genuine achievements were to last. It was a risky business, this reputational game. Nares’ crews were beset by scurvy and we know that many explorers did not manage to return to tell their tale. Yet Scott’s sacrifice promised far more heroic potential than Amundsen’s clinical, competent triumph. The key to the story was death, preferably a noble death, but death all the same – and plenty of it. Nothing sells newspapers like bad news. In the words of Emerson, ‘a hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer’.

DURABLE ILLUSIONS

The North Pole has now been reached hundreds of times: on foot and dog sledge, by airship, submarine, aeroplane, helium balloon and nuclear icebreaker. From the earliest encounters with the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean through to modern times, when you follow the trail that expeditions leave behind you discover the Pole as an enduring cultural icon. People of many nations have been drawn to this inhospitable blank on the map, which remains a stage for ambition and adventure, dreams and desire. A region of enduring media attention and public speculation, the history behind this is interesting in itself yet it has considerable modern resonance too. The Arctic as a space is more relevant now than ever. This is not a figment of the imagination, but a hard fact. As the planet warms, and the sea ice retreats, there is an overwhelming international interest in the region as a future resource, which clearly raises difficult questions of security, sovereignty and environmental protection. Who actually owns the trillions of dollars of oil and gas beneath the Arctic Ocean? Which territorial claims will prevail?25 There must be a vision for the Arctic in which cooperation, not conflict, prevails; where the ‘sovereignty of individual nations is exercised for the benefit of all’.26 Is this hope as much an illusion as an elusive northwest passage? Renewed attention shows us that we can’t ignore the importance of the Arctic to its five bordering states. It also encourages us to look to the 322

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past and think more about how nations have connected themselves to this region.27 Many nations with an interest in Arctic affairs look to their histories to support their claims for the Pole. It’s part of a longer story of countries, overtime, dragging remote places into their national histories: an intellectual occupation as much as a real one, a chance, say, to claim the frozen waters and what lies beneath as their own. Traditions are reinvented and illusions can be long lasting. The Arctic Ocean is a beautiful and hostile place. It’s a polar desert of ice, constantly moving, splitting, and buckling into towering pressure ridges. There is no surface on earth that is more unstable. At its heart is the Geographic North Pole: an elusive spot, clearly with no visual marker to indicate its existence, but which has nevertheless drawn to it some of history’s greatest explorers and scientists. This is the North Pole as irresistible prize, with the ‘North’ itself existing as a goal rather than a destination, a region of revelation that is always somewhere ultimate and removed from our experience; an imagined place.28 Early visitors were stunned by the precariousness of life in the Arctic, recording in their journals, letters and published accounts the extraordinary creatures inhabiting this alien world, and the physical and mental strain of the experience. Those that followed later discovered a place that could not only be harsh and unforgiving, but also a place of breathtaking beauty, with its crystalline icebergs and the trembling auroral light. Today, however, the North Pole is attracting a very different kind of attention. Below the ice and permafrost of the High Arctic lie roughly thirty percent of the world’s known, but untapped oil and gas reserves as well as other mineral riches. With energy reserves under pressure, and demand seemingly insatiable, the region is the focus for very real disputes over sovereignty and control, with Russia even going so far as to planting a rust-proof titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole in 2007, in the perpetual darkness some 14,000 feet beneath the surface of the ice. On hearing the news, the Canadian Foreign Minister was said to remark that ‘This isn’t the fifteenth century’, dismissing this kind of symbolism as something from a different age. But as a symbol of publicity it had already done its work, drawing attention to Russian claims of that swathe of sea floor. The politics of statement and power projection are as relevant today as they have been in the past.29 323

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The explorers that rode the mini-submarines that delivered their flag into the abyss eventually resurfaced in Moscow to face a media scrum. As the press captured the moment, Artur Chilingarov held aloft the evidence of his feat: a small photograph of the flag installed on the seabed, signed, as if a double proof.30 Antics like this should not be ignored too easily. It was a genuine statement of intent and an impressive achievement when you think of sending a humanoccupied craft under the polar ice to such depth. It’s a projection of capability. They also collected soil samples from the Lomonosov Ridge to strengthen their claims on the Pole. But the real problems at play are far away to the south; they lie with us. Our appetite for energy could well tip the balance of this already rapidly changing, fragile environment. In 2013 the Olympic torch was carried to the North Pole on the nuclear-powered 50 Years of Victory, as part of the torch relay to the upcoming Sochi Winter Games. The icebreaker left Russia’s Arctic port of Murmansk and made the journey in just 91 hours. A little later Vasily Yelagin led a team that drove Yemelya amphibious trucks from Siberia over the sea ice to the Pole. Perhaps this truly is the beginning of the end? When British explorer Wally Herbert reached the North Pole in 1969 he wrote that trying to fix its position was as difficult as stepping on the shadow of a bird hovering overhead. Ever since this historic moment, when a man crossed the Arctic Ocean for the first time, the idea of the North has shifted endlessly too, bound in a cycle of history and aspiration. This is a landscape of continual reimagining, a place for mankind to act out its dreams, but also a place from which some never return. Therein lies the confusing, the complex, crushed geography of men.

NATIONAL DIVERSIONS

This book demonstrates that the Arctic became a stage for the performance of strident patriotisms. Britain bowed out long ago, though still clings on in Antarctica; in the Arctic other nations are leading the way in bringing the region into hearts and homes. 324

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Performing at the Poles. It’s clearly not just a peculiar English obsession. Every nation with an interest here is creating histories for themselves, imagining a past to help write a future. You see this in Antarctica too, where countries like China are now building bases in rapid time, increasing their dots on the map in an expensive game of numbers, and giving themselves a place at the table when future treaties are renegotiated. Nations are cultivating their own histories, asserting their territorial rights and aspirations, and heroes are still a major part of it. Myth is alive. Every time you visit an Antarctic base – in the last couple of years, I’ve dropped in on Russia, Britain, Ukraine, Australia, America, Korea, Germany, Argentina and New Zealand – you experience this in real time, in actions and in objects; histories on the walls, hard science and old jumpers, regulations and safety briefings, flag-raising, hand-shaking, photographs and passport stamps, ceremonies and official souvenirs, artefacts, invented traditions. That’s the reality of living and working in Antarctica. Acts of sovereignty and socialising, formality and friendship. A brew, maybe a beer, and stories. Always stories. How else can we occupy so large a place, if not with words? Reimagining is ongoing, a rejuvenative loop. Truth is up for grabs and it can be shaped for many uses. Like quicksilver, the truth moves fast. Storytelling clearly has the power to frame debate, influence opinion, shape the way history is written. It is important to remember, stating the obvious, that when thinking about the Arctic people are also free to make up their own minds. And it’s important to recognise too that at almost every step other people are on hand to shape and influence opinion. In today’s world it has come to be known as spin, or ‘public relations’, ‘managing expectations’, ‘damage control’, or ‘speaking bullshit’; it all depends on your point of view. In Georgian London people were as sceptical about explorer’s antics as they are now. Politicians fared much, much worse. Yet the serious point is that over time the official histories always win out. Propaganda prevails and the small voices are lost. So, as many have argued, it is our job as historians to try to recover these neglected voices, to listen to all sides of a debate, and to not be too distracted by the news that shouts loudest. Right now it’s Canada who is making the polar headlines and expeditions of the past are press-ganged into service. Actually, if you like, ‘press-released’ into service. It has been fascinating, from this side 325

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of the Atlantic, to follow this process online. For someone, someday, it will make a interesting PhD, wading through the digital reams of modern ‘print culture’, the online blogs, the official statements, the social media fashions that ebb and flow like the tides. Just looking at the sequence of releases from the Office of the Prime Minister, for example, offers a telling narrative. As its own rolling news feed, it presents to the world a well-choreographed chain of events: 23 August 2014: PM Launches Construction of the New Canadian High Arctic Research Station.31 25 August 2014: PM Sails the Northwest Passage with the Franklin Expedition Search Team. 25 August 2014: PM Announces Important Investment to Boost High-Speed Internet in Nunavut and Nunavik. 9 September 2014: PM Statement Announcing the Discovery of one of the Ill-Fated Franklin Expedition Ships Lost in 1846. 12 September 2014: Governments of Canada and Nunavut celebrate Franklin Expedition Discoveries in Gjoa Haven. 1 October 2014: PM Announces HMS Erebus as the Discovered Franklin Expedition ship. 6 November 2014: Harper Government Announces the Recovery of the HMS Erebus Bell. 18 December 2014: Harper Government and Royal Ontario Museum Formalize Partnership. 16 April 2015: Harper Government Uses Cutting Edge Canadian Technology to Provide First-Ever Live Video Feed and Tour of HMS Erebus.

. . . and so forth. It begins with Building Things in the North, whilst on the Annual Trip to the North, with a good news Technology story of Indigenous Development and internet connectivity in the North, then The Discovery, then a celebration of The Discovery up in the North, then a confirmation of The Discovery, and then a New Discovery within The Discovery, then a plan to display the New Discovery from The Discovery, and finally another Technology story coupled with a New Approach to The Discovery. And so on. It’s a relentless cycle of information. My capitalisations are deliberate. For the real history buffs it might have felt like just a trickle of tantalising insights; but for the vast majority of people it probably 326

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seemed that all they ever heard about on the news was the history stuff. Anyhow, what we can be sure of is that, almost immediately, the narrative of the whole event was tightened into a series of official ‘quick facts’. Once it was remembered that Inuit histories had talked of a ship being in that region all along, a strong indigenous knowledge thread was woven in; and the same with technology, which has now grown to become an important, and unarguable part of the narrative creation. So, modern science know-how and Inuit understanding combined to make it all possible. Here’s another recent press release: 1. Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history as the expedition laid the foundation of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty. Until the discovery of HMS Erebus in September 2014, the fate of the Franklin expedition was one of Canada’s great mysteries. 2. Since 2008, the Government of Canada has conducted six major Parks Canada-led searches for the lost Franklin Expedition ships, working closely with public, private, academic and Inuit partners, painstakingly covering hundreds of square kilometres of the Arctic seabed. 3. In April 2014, Parks Canada and the Royal Canadian Navy joined together with National Defense’s Joint Task Force (North) on their annual Operation NUNALIVUT to manage the logistical complexity of conducting underwater archaeological work in such an incredibly challenging environment.32

Let’s picture a few more scenes. At the Canadian Museum of History there’s a ‘flash exhibition’ of relics, followed by a virtual exhibit online, with videos and updated mission briefs. For a few days in May, through the Victoria Day long weekend, there’s a six-pounder cannon, brass tunic buttons, a Whampoa pattern earthenware plate, a medicine bottle filled with ‘viscous goo’.33 Many years of work now lie ahead for those studying the Erebus and what lies inside; it’s a marine archaeologist’s dream. The wreck is ‘perfectly preserved’ in the icy waters and well within reach, and there is some speculation that there might be ship’s logs, written records, or even photographs inside. ‘We hope research will help illuminate the last days of Franklin and his men: Who were the final survivors? Did they return to the icebound 327

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ships before the ships sank? What were they trying to accomplish? We don’t exactly know yet what were the factors that caused the expedition to come apart’, lead diver Ryan Harris explains. At the Royal Ontario Museum, a ‘Franklin Outreach Project’ is announced which promises to share the story and all the unfolding discoveries over the next three years. It will include more pop-up displays, school lectures and ‘incorporate contemporary research, technology, and Inuit traditional knowledge to bring the Franklin story to life’.34 What this actually means, in the first instance, is a travelling display of the Erebus bell. A bell is the centre of life aboard ship, Canadian Rear-Admiral John Newton informs the press on launch day. ‘It ties sailors to the ships they service. Here we have a great artifact that tells the story of real men in Canada’s history’.35 Only, that we don’t. The ship’s bell is tucked safely away in a seawater tank as it undergoes stabilising conservation.36 What you have instead is a plastic bell, on a plastic stand, in an airtight case; coupled with an ‘Arctic exploration activity zone and interactive photo booth’.37 In case you missed it, there’s a small

89. ‘The Franklin Relics at Greenwich Hospital’, from Thomas Frost’s Realm of the Ice King, published by the Religious Tract Society in 1891.

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90. ‘Discovery of a Boat of the Franklin Expedition’, from Thomas Knox’s To the North Pole and Beyond, published by Harper in 1885.

electronic button to deliver the vital noise: ‘press it yourself and discover what a ship’s bell might have sounded like, some time ago’. So, there you go. An ‘iconic 3D-printed full-size polymer resin replica’. ‘And, the only one in the world!’ And, I’d bet, the only one ever with its own news conference, gala launch and nationwide tour. Is this not all getting a bit ridiculous? Honouring a plastic bell? Like men dressed up as polar bears running amok in Vauxhall Gardens in the summer of 1834, or vast papier maˆche´ icebergs wheeled on from the wings, it’s fun but to what end? Exploration as relayed at home has always been an act of show business contrivance, I suppose. The Franklin industry is up and running once more, and you can see it in documentaries, official education programmes, memorabilia, online blogs and coffee-table books. With new myths emerging, new national stories being written, and more products on sale, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the 1890s, or the 1850s, all over again. Meanwhile, polar history as a subject has been given a resuscitation. It’s a boost to welcome. In archives and libraries old accounts are being scoured for Inuit wisdom, while in the Arctic itself oral histories are reexamined by indigenous community groups, searching for more clues as to the whereabouts of HMS Terror. In metropolitan laboratories 329

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bones are re-analysed to feed more tales of cannibalism and skulls found twenty years ago are being facially reconstructed to better ‘imagine what the sailors might have been like’.38 Others have made high-precision 3D printed models of the ship, which will be used in future dives for plotting operations.39 Perhaps, you show your support by buying souvenir sheets of commemorative stamps? With another round of civic functions, Canadian awards are created.40 ‘Together, they have rewritten the history books’, ran the blurb for the newly minted Erebus Medal. ‘It all underscores the importance of the geography of Canada’s Arctic’.41 For me, the highlight of all of this stuff was a live video tour of wreck itself, when Parks Canada returned north in the spring of 2015. It was 16 April, Franklin’s birthday, and with holes cut through twometre thick ice, cameras in hand, down the divers went. This surpassed most of the nineteenth-century Arctic spectacles for insight and immediacy but also in its use of the latest available technology. Narrating the wonder of what he could see through a microphone feed tucked inside his diving mask, Ryan Harris sounded like an astronaut as he swam round the wreck, gesturing to brass sixpounders and surveying the shattered stern.42 Even in our seen-it-all times it was a wonderful performance.

ON THE USE OF SHIPS

A few months on, and back safely on land, another round of public dinners and press conferences. Yet the plastic bells and baubles are small beer compared to the latest developments. On 1 June the ‘Canadian High Arctic Research Station Act’ came into force establishing Polar Knowledge Canada, a new federal research organisation that ‘combines the mandate and functions of the Canadian Polar Commission and the Canadian High Arctic Research Station program at Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada’. The new body is charged with ‘advancing Canada’s knowledge of the Arctic and strengthening Canadian leadership in polar science and technology’.43 In August, Harper flew up north for the groundbreaking ceremony of the new research base in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.44 330

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As I write this, a new Canadian icebreaker is being built in a Vancouver shipyard. As the official jargon goes, it’s the first OFSV of the NSPS – an ‘Offshore Fisheries Science Vessel’ constructed within the new ‘National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy’ – and it will be iceready in 2017. It has just been announced that this first ship will be named the CCGS Sir John Franklin. The press release lands in my inbox with a shot of various officials at a ceremonial steel cutting event wearing smart suits and big smiles, giving their thumbs up to the cameras. ‘The ship is named in honour of the Arctic explorer whose expeditions, nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s claim of Arctic sovereignty’.45 In fact, there are to be three OFSVs, which carry a $514 million price tag, and all are expected to be on the water by the end of 2017. They will be followed by an Offshore Oceanographic Science Vessel (OOSV), the Canadian Navy’s two Joint Support Ships (JSS) and a Polar Icebreaker (PIB), as well as up to ten Medium Endurance Multi-Tasked Vessels (MEMTVs) and Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) for the Coast Guard. It’s an unprecedented shipbuilding programme, an activity more akin to the run up to war than these uncertain economic times, and, lest we forget, these times of peace. Acronyms aside, the intention is clear. The projection is unsubtle and that’s exactly the point; it’s a statement. In the new geopolitics, new ships and icebreakers are power. They are symbols of capability and vital bits of kit. They allow access to any part of the Arctic, whether inland waterway or High Seas. The issue for Canada is whether the ‘Northwest Passage’ – in fact a series of passages linking Davis Strait in the east to the Bering Sea in the west – currently is, or as a result of increased traffic by foreign vessels, could actually become an ‘international strait’ under international law, which is the current position of the United States. The Government of Canada maintains that these are ‘internal waters’ over which it should enjoy full jurisdiction, which inevitably could include the right to deny access to foreign-flagged ships. As the saying goes ‘you’ve got to be in it, to win it’, and in the Arctic establishing a presence is key. Canada and Russia are taking the lead, with America not far behind. On his whirlwind tour of Alaska this summer, President Obama spoke of acquiring new ships, with the US Coast Guard having just two ‘fully functional’ heavy icebreakers at its disposal, down from seven 331

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during World War II. Russia, by contrast, has 40 of the vessels, with plans for 11 more.46 China unveiled a new icebreaker in 2012 and is building another. Obama’s words were music to the ears of the many in America who would like the US to take a larger foothold in the Arctic, but with lawmakers still to approve the funding it will be a few years yet before their new ships emerge.47 Alaska’s junior senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican, cheered the step, saying it was long overdue: ‘The highways of the Arctic are paved by icebreakers’, he declared. ‘Right now, the Russians have superhighways, and we have dirt roads with potholes’.48 As for the Royal Navy, well, it’s no longer even in the running. Britain has just one operational icebreaker, HMS Protector, bought in by the Admiralty after HMS Endurance nearly sank off Chile when her engine room flooded.49 We have two polar research ships, the RRS James Clark Ross, launched by the Queen in 1990, and the RRS Ernest Shackleton, which is actually on a short lease from Norway. It has been reported that our scientists may yet get a new icebreaker sometime in 2019. The jury is still out on what it will be called.50 Historic shipwrecks and ships not yet built are hugely important elements of the new narration. Back in Canada now, it’s 1 July 2015, and in downtown Ottawa the party is in full swing. It’s ‘Canada Day’, a public holiday, and across the country people are celebrating. It’s a day that ends with fireworks and starts with pancake breakfasts. Carnivals and pop concerts, Mounties and marching bands, plaid shirts and faces daubed in red and white. There are ceremonies for new citizens, O Canada! playing on loop, games of street hockey, block-wide BBQs. It’s real life and fantasy too; a ‘Canadia’ of selfies and thick syrup.51 Another round of the anthem – let’s say those lines again, ‘With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North, strong and free!’ – and it must be time for lunch.52 In Toronto, the Blue Jays beat the Red Sox, could it get any better? In Ottawa, through sunshine and showers, they’re catering to most tastes. In Major’s Hill Park, the HMS Erebus Revealed exhibition promises ‘one of John Franklin’s expedition vessels’ with ‘real and replica’ artefacts: come ‘learn what’s been lost underwater for 160 years’.53 There’s a tent for the Hudson’s Bay Company, miniature golf and synchronised swimmers, outdoor Zumba and the Canadian Coast Guard, a photo display for fifty years of the Maple Leaf 332

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Flag and a chance to build your own in LEGO. A little more Franklin, a cheese tasting, rhythmic gymnastics, an Arctic quiz. On Parliament Hill, where there’s a giant screen of digital ice, cheerleaders dance and flags wave. A flypast of Snowbirds and fighter jets, a changing of the guard, speeches and music, teen pop and reggae fusion. Iqaluit band ‘The Jerry Cans’ bring their mix of Inuktitut altcountry and throat singing and then there’s another rendition of the folksong Lady Franklin’s Lament with its perfect words: ‘I dreamed a dream and I thought it true, Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew’. Harper speaks of happiness and strength, of the energy and confidence of a country maturing on the world stage, of resolution in the face of threats to security, of ‘Russian aggression’ in turbulent times.54 It’s a message to the cameras, for future voters, and for anyone listening overseas.55 ‘We stand unique among the nations’, he says, ‘an island of stability. At this moment in our history, there is no better place in the world to live . . . no better place in the world than this blessed country, Canada!’ Flags are waved and the crowd cheers, though some groan at the empty rhetoric as the rain falls. If many had already felt that the splicing of history and politics in Harper’s Canada was unsubtle, well, all this now verges on the surreal. On television that night the Government is running its latest ad campaign. In 2017, Canada celebrates 150 years of Federation and they’re planning an even bigger bash. Considering the lengths that many have now gone to in grafting Arctic exploration onto Canadian identity it’s worth remembering that when Franklin disappeared into the ice Canada as a nation didn’t even exist.56 But, don’t let footnotes like that get in the way of a good story, least of all on television. ‘The Great Canadian North’ is here to stay. It’s official. The transcript says so: NARRATOR: 170 years ago, the inhabitants of the Arctic encountered explorers from another world [who had] embarked on a quest to find the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin’s expedition was lost. But his disappearance launched an era of exploration unparalleled in Arctic history. Franklin’s legacy is one of perseverance, discovery and innovation that lives on today and has helped to keep our True North strong, proud and free. As we prepare to mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation, join us in celebrating Canada’s North and our great legacy of discovery. 333

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[Text on screen: Strong, Proud and Free] [The Canada 150 logo appears on a white background] NARRATOR: A message from the Government of Canada.57

So, what are we told? An Arctic explorer has left a ‘legacy of perseverance, discovery and innovation’. It’s nice to hear Franklin mentioned in a positive way, not least in Canada, where so often in the past his reputation had been maligned, somehow representative of the larger failings of the ‘British way’. Yet, the Franklin story is clearly again part of a larger myth. The revision of Franklin’s story now, as a kind of Governmental expression of national self-importance, ignores the counter claims within much Canadian literature in the past and the many who rejected Franklin and all they imagined his expedition stood for. That his story is now accommodated into a new national story, just in time for an anniversary, brings more than an echo of the past. This kind of narrative imagining is opportunism and myth combined and it is playing out in the context of this new Arctic energy frontier. It is timely to think more about who is telling the story, and why. For the ‘British Arctic’ of the nineteenth century the main spin-doctor of endeavour was Barrow, as we have seen. In later years, Markham looked to Antarctica as a new continent ripe for a renewed kind of emotional investment. Now, it’s a Prime Minister who undoubtedly loves Arctic history but who also has his own legacy to think about. With an election battle on his hands, the scripting of more adventure in the North is attractive but it’s unlikely to save his skin.

GLIMPSES OF A MARVEL

In our day we don’t allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.58

Franklin’s reputation fluctuates under pressure, a barometer to the weather of public feeling. He has become the most notorious of the 334

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Arctic explorers, though certainly not the most loved. Yet today he’s the most important of all. Canadian academics in particular have absolutely hated him for decades, or at least the idea of him, disparaging his contributions and confusing him with Empire and a whole host of other demons. So it’s curious to watch how the climate of opinion has improved. From the Harper Government’s point of view, it’s rather useful for them to say that he’s interesting, the good guy again, or, at least, that his expedition was a significant one. After all, they’ve spent so much money in trying to find him. Remember too that ‘Finding Franklin’, as Margaret Atwood has said many times, is something of a long-running joke.59 It’s a metaphor of absence and of folly. It’s an apology, a gentle tease, a polite way of saying you’re going to get lost for a while: ‘Where are you going Stephen? Trying to Find Franklin again?’ It’s a little like the English nod to poor old Captain Oates, whenever you have to go and do something unheroic like putting the bins out in the pouring rain: ‘I’m just going outside and may be some time’. Canada’s activity proves that narrative is still alive in the polar regions. In afterlife, Nelson had his bear. In other words, the Navy won its Arctic. In death, Franklin claimed a northwest passage. In a modern era of muscular nationalism, a new Conservative Government found a project of sovereignty amongst the ice. Harper had his flagship and now Erebus is found! It’s easy to be cynical but it’s actually hugely important. Geopolitics is pageantry, a power play.60 It’s not subtle. But Arctic spectacles never were, that’s the point of spectacle. So, a shipwreck has been discovered. This is a significant thing yet in telling their story they have also appropriated a British naval expedition within the makings of a recast Canadian national history. The act replaces complex histories with a sort of single master narrative of nation that is as unsatisfying as those British dreams that fed an empire. In the 1890s some in Britain exhibited the detritus of Arctic endeavour to meet their future needs; the Canada of a Harper Government is doing much the same now, using a shipwreck as the fuel for a vision that speaks of a destined Arctic sovereignty. Or, does this read too much into a pile of submerged wood, just eleven metres deep? The find has also been used to suggest again how hapless Franklin and his generation were when wandering in the North.61 The Canadians know this land the best. The irony with this kind of thinking, 335

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as several commentators have wryly noted, is that the ‘Inuit had known where the ships had sunk all along’ but British and Canadian alike had ignored them. To begin with, much of the modern coverage also ignored this fact, preferring to construct the story as a scientific triumph.62 So, the discovery was a natural end result of an innate Canadian mindset and modern equipment: a double mastery. You can see this in the level of attention in the press given to the equipment used to scour the ocean floor. Some say that this kind of scientific story was pushed by the Government precisely because of its anti-science approach; a story to divert attention from its ‘rejection of scientific inquiry, its cuts to funding for scientific research, and its active muzzling of government scientists’, who have been pointing to increased militarisation and raising questions about the huge environmental and social impacts that are being felt in the Arctic.63 A neat counterpoint to the triumph-of-modern-technology story, going back to where we started, is that many still insist that it was the hubris and the poor preparation, their technological inadequacies, that did for Franklin and his men. They were doomed from the start, or so it goes. The environment had nothing to do with it. Is this not just hindsight, a view of the British imperialists imprinted on the past? And, what’s more, was it Franklin’s fault or the society from which he came? The Navy’s fault? John Barrow’s fault? Yes, he’ll do, he’s Victorian enough to be the evil villain of this piece, omnipresent enough surely to have been up to no good? And besides, we still don’t really know that much about him, so he must have been doing something bad, or at the very least keeping a dark secret. Is Harper the new Barrow, the mastermind of a propaganda campaign, pulling all the strings, crafting the press releases, cloaked in secrecy and yet so visible when in front of the cameras? There is clearly power and misinformation at play, now as much as there was then. The Victorians may be guilty of countless things – ‘ethnocentric’, ‘imperialist’, ‘repressed’, and many other labels we might like to attach – but let’s not imagine for a moment they were all the same. As I write this, it seems that Harper will not survive another election. Today is 5 October 2015 and in two weeks’ time the nation votes. If Harper doesn’t get back in history will surely prove that this had little to do with his grandstanding in the North, but everything to do with his record closer to home. Win or lose in the polls, will Harper’s polar 336

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dreams survive? As for the Arctic itself, in terms of its development and the future, there will clearly be major winners and losers. And you can be fairly sure that it will be the environment and indigenous people who will still face the brunt of the pressures wrought here, and in many other nations too, not just Canada. There is something unseemly in the way that many politicians wheel out the Inuit when they need them, as a central part of the occupancy component that might sustain the legality of future claims to larger parts of the Arctic space, while also allowing the same people to suffer so badly. It also says something about unbalanced priorities when so much has been spent on a missing object and comparatively little is committed to the living. Arctic peoples need to be given a greater share, and a greater say, in the future of their lands. That seems obvious and yet this principle is so often ignored. The Arctic has always been a place that challenged the abilities of people, plants, and animals to survive and flourish. Resilience and vulnerability, that is the heart of it, and people’s lives, and our children’s future, are in the balance. And what fate for the memory of old naval explorers? Well, with so much at stake, perhaps they don’t really matter that much. When it comes to environmental change, there’s little room for nostalgia out there in the last wild areas of our planet. Yet missing objects and lost explorers still have great power. When it comes to legacies, of course, you can believe what you want to believe. Franklin doesn’t mind. The Arctic crushed him. He’s been dead for ages.

WHO NEEDS HEROES?

We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, ‘followed the sea’ with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the

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men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled – the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure . . . to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests, and that never returned.64

Masculinities are lived in the flesh but fashioned in the imagination. Heroes are made not just by their deeds but in the stories that are told about them. So, what can a bunch of dead heroes actually teach us? Among the many and varied narratives of imagining that gave shape, purpose, and direction to the lives of men and women, in the nineteenth century, I have focussed my efforts on one in particular: the naval explorer-hero. Of course, there were many types of hero and there was never a blanket imagining, no united vision, or single national consciousness. That’s a specious notion and we know ‘collective identity’ is an impossible thing to pin down, let alone explain. So much influences the way we think, from the lives in which we find ourselves, the books we read, the opportunities we have, the futures that we face. My hope has been to try and show a range of imaginations, thoughts in flux, ideas challenged by debate. That’s why the imagination is what it is – it’s free to run loose, to run riot, to escape off in directions that you might least expect. Looking to history, can we search out shared assumptions, shared aspirations? Things that might have touched the imagination in potent ways? Certainly, by thinking about heroes we can learn more about the culture that creates them. Invested with lasting significance, and endowed with a ‘venerable stream’ of meaning far beyond actual achievement, the polar explorer has become a quintessential figure of overcoming the odds, despite a historical record that can speak as much of failure as it can of success. Joseph Conrad, quoted above, clearly wasn’t the only person to be inspired by the naval heroes of an idealised past.65 In France, Jules Verne based the hero of his polar Voyages Extraordinaires on the figure of Franklin and across America many authors mined the Arctic for material fit for the newly popular dime novels, with pluck, luck, and peril the order of the day. In the real world of adventure, Shackleton confessed that he had devoured exploration books as a boy, particularly those of 338

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the Franklin searches. Livingstone claimed that the examples of polar explorers had given him inspiration as he headed into the unknown, and other explorers would say the same: ‘Thus in this prosaic age went forth again John Franklin, in true knightly mood, to endure, to labour and accomplish much’.66 The day before Carsten Borchgrevink left on his Southern Cross voyage to Antarctica, which would be the first expedition to overwinter on the continent, he honoured the past by placing a large wreath of laurel and white lilies at the foot of Franklin’s statue in Hobart.67 A new chapter of exploration was beginning. Or consider, Roald Amundsen, the man who was actually the first to complete a northwest passage in 1905; the man who discovered the South Pole in 1911, and who, in 1926, was probably the first to see the North Pole too, gazing down at the ice from the window of an Italian airship. He declared in his autobiography that he had been driven to a life of adventure by the stories of past heroes. They ‘thrilled me as nothing I have ever read before. What appealed to me most were the sufferings that Sir John and his men had to endure. A strange ambition burned within me, to endure the same privations . . . I decided to be an explorer’.68 Cherished tales of polar chivalry would continue to encourage Amundsen, who saw himself ‘as a kind of Crusader in Arctic exploration. I wanted to suffer for a cause – not in the burning desert on the way to Jerusalem – but in the frosty North’. His rival Scott, who had no idealised moment that called him to the Pole, was honest enough to admit that he had only begun reading histories with gusto when preparing for his first command, the Discovery expedition of 1901 – 4. But he would be quick to acknowledge the appeal of the past, declaring his admiration for the long line of naval explorer-heroes who had gone before him. He would please his supporters by recalling the names of Cook, Nelson, Franklin, and Nares as he carried the imaginations of his country once more into the ice. Does the cultural life of London in the 1890s really matter when thinking about the Antarctic? Probably not, but, reading closely and exploring the social context, it is possible to begin to perceive how the legend of the ‘Heroic Age’ came to be created. The period was a renascent one, marked by a great quickening of the imagination. It was an era of action and technological progress, and the hunger for vicarious sensation, for romance by proxy. This was a feeling that the 339

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91. A bestseller in France, Jules Verne’s Voyages et Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras was published in London in 1876 in two parts: as The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice. The hero is eventually driven mad by his Arctic ambitions.

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authors of adventure stories, exhibition showmen, and journalists too all stimulated, exploited, and fulfilled. In literature popular needs were met by a flood of adventurous fiction; the wonderful works of Stevenson, Haggard, Stables, Kingston, Ballantyne, Doyle, and Kipling, whose panegyrics of the British pioneer, pitting himself against nature or against barbarism at the ends of the earth, recalled to those suffering from the stresses of fin de sie`cle the comfortingly chivalrous spirit of Elizabethan days.69 Success spawned imitations, begetting archetype. Polar explorers fit this formula perfectly. Glamorised, romanticised, and it would seem, to some degree, legitimised in these fictions, explorers travelled to the heart of what people wanted to imagine for themselves. As energising myth, adventure helped renew the imaginaries of empire and the historical forms of ‘English’ national identity and masculinity figured in them. Yet even more important, particularly in the development of exploration, was the way in which this demand for sensation was catered for by cheap newspapers which, because of a nation-wide circulation never before attempted or achieved, could now bring romance to every corner of an increasingly urbanised and bureaucratic land; a land in which the personality of the individual man was in daily danger of becoming submerged in the dreariness of a industrial uniformity. Fuelled by newspapers, and sustained on platforms like the RGS, illustrated lectures, and imperial exhibitions, the bold representation of the heroic personality was an inevitable result of this renewed cycle of publicity. The polar leader could become a ‘national person’ in an instant, a symbol at once of national achievement and personal enterprise, a dream figure that the thousands condemned to a monotonous city life could aspire to. When I think more about Captain Ross, I inevitably think of Shackleton. There are obvious parallels. Ross’s Victory expedition was an abject failure – he never reaches his intended goal, loses his ship, suffers extreme hardship – but he manages to pull off a miraculous escape and then tell the world about it. It becomes an incredible success. This is the 1830s but it sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood script, and in its narration we find an echo of the language that Shackleton brought to the story of his life too. He was a man who courted the limelight, coveted success, a man who dreamed big. He was driven by a desire to redeem his reputation after being sent home sick 341

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from his first foray, under Scott. His failed business schemes just encouraged him to try even harder amongst the ice. He would rise again to create his own expeditions. With good storytelling and the right kind of patter on stage – plus an able ghost-writer to help with the books, and a brilliant photographer in Hurley – Shackleton was able to turn his many defeats into epics of survival. In a way, it was Ross reincarnate. Shackleton dedicated his narrative of the Endurance voyage both to his country and his fellow man – ‘my comrades who fell in the White Warfare of the South and on the Red Fields of France and Flanders’ – inscribing his achievements as an explorer in that familiar rhetoric of patriotism and service.70 But, like Scott, it’s complicated. Look closely and you can make out Tennyson’s troubled Ulysses, an ambitious selfseeker who saw in Antarctic exploration a short cut to fame and fortune, or a gambler, forever dabbling in doubtful financial schemes. No wonder that the Admiralty and many at the RGS mistrusted him, though they didn’t seem to mind basking in his glory. Since 1932 his statue has graced the wall of the RGS buildings in Kensington. Today, in the reworking of his expeditionary life, Shackleton emerges as a kind of mythic superhero for a modern age. And, once you strip away all the earnest appeals and worthy talk, it was heroic adventure not sober research that the public really wanted. In search of funds, many would emphasise the record-breaking journeys, the dashes to the Pole, rather than the less sensational scientific work. Delivering a paper at the RGS, late in 1874, the Austrian naval officer Karl Weyprecht voiced his frustrations: The key to many secrets of Nature . . . is certainly to be sought for near the Poles. But as long as Polar Expeditions are looked upon merely as a sort of international steeple-chase, which is primarily to confer honour upon this flag or the other, and their main object is to exceed by a few miles the latitude reached by a predecessor, those mysteries will remain unsolved. Discovery and topography, which have hitherto constituted the main objects of Arctic Expeditions, must yield precedence in the future to great scientific problems. But no solution can be looked for until the several nations, which claim to participate in the scientific efforts of our age, agree to lay aside their rivalries, and combine for the common good of mankind.71 342

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Weyprecht’s rallying call marked the first step on a journey that would unite members of the European scientific community to found a global programme of research: the ‘International Polar Year’ of 1882 –3. Yet Britain, and the RGS in particular, did not respond to his Arctic appeal.72 For the moment at least, the Government had lost interest in funding expensive polar jaunts, and in time the nation’s attentions would turn toward a new stage, the beckoning, and uncomplicated, emptiness of the South. Science still needs a good story to inspire the public. For most, data alone is not compelling, however important it might be. Narratives of historical exploration in the polar regions continue to exert a strong influence. Just as a new generation of scientists are charting, mapping, and analysing all aspects of the Arctic world, native anthropologists are writing their own histories, biologists are campaigning to protect the remarkable fauna, and there seems little that will not be reduced to hard fact. And yet, while the Arctic is no longer a realm of unadulterated exploration fantasies, it is still a region that is subject to an ongoing narrative of imagining. The explorer-hero is not merely an image of the past.

LOOK AGAIN

One of my favourite things in the museum of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge is often overlooked. With Scott’s emotive last letters, impressive Inuit artworks, and all manner of other great objects on display it’s perhaps no surprise. It doesn’t look like much. It’s a telescope. It’s as vital to an explorer as a chart or a compass, though perfectly useless if it breaks. New discoveries and new lands were concentrated in its gaze. Explorers held it in their hands. It went everywhere with them and rarely left their side. So, it’s special. It’s also arguably one of the most widely travelled objects in any museum in the world. Look again and you can just make out some lettering on its leather case, hold it closely and you’ll discover an inscription on its tube. You might find old fingerprints too; it has been well used, and well loved, yet it is destined now just to live inside a glass case. Its exploring life began in the Arctic in 1875 aboard HMS Discovery on the voyage led by George Strong Nares, reaching a record farthest north. 343

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It was then with Captain Scott on the RRS Discovery during the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–4, spending two winters trapped in the ice at a record farthest south on the shores of the Ross Sea. In 1976 the telescope returned to the Arctic in the submarine HMS Sovereign, being ferried under the ice to the location that sledging parties had reached in 1876 when they had man-hauled their way over the sea ice, and it also surfaced for the first time at the North Pole. And finally, in 1984, the telescope joined the space shuttle Discovery, completing 96 low Earth orbits, a distance of some two and a half million miles. Clearly objects can travel huge distances and sometimes the least significant things become the most impressive. Relics assume an emotive power that defies simple wood, brass, leather and glass. We give meaning to objects in the stories we tell about them. Without the connections we make for them they are lost; unlabelled in stores they are forgotten, until for whatever reason, or luck, they find a new home in our thoughts. In the 1850s when traces of Franklin’s party started returning to England – buttons, spectacles, bits of tin and cloth, books, an old boot – these little objects inherited a sacred significance and it is the same the world over. Museums are built around special things like this. For followers of the latest Franklin searches, beyond the real excitement of seeing pictures of the ship lying on the sea floor, the next wave of dives to the wreck brings new riches.73 You may watch online as artifacts are brought to the surface: a chunk of the ship’s wheel, a dinner plate, a belt buckle, a sword hilt.74 If exploration interests you, these things emerge as if presents at Christmas, or a pirate’s treasure. To others, of course, they are ‘just junk’, and a waste of effort too. Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. I think of that telescope again, blasted into orbit on the shuttle Discovery, as I’m always struck by the ways that polar exploration in the nineteenth century might be likened to the space race of the twentieth. Awe and wonder attend; the boundaries of the unknown are pushed back. There is the similar fascination with new fangled technologies, the intense public interest and yet the same kind of public criticism too, the same expense, the same deadly risks. All of us will never go into space but we can imagine the delights, and the potential horrors, that such a journey would bring. We can admire those men who walked on the moon for achieving something that is beyond anything that we will ever know. I’ve been lucky to have travelled across the Arctic, to 344

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92. In 1911, with the North Pole ‘conquered’, polar explorers turned their attentions to ever more remote parts of the globe. Mother Earth: ‘I think, I have worms; it tickles me so at the South Pole’.

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have driven small boats among towering icebergs, to have spent time inside the historic huts of the Antarctic explorers, even weathered cruel seas and blizzards waiting for storms to pass, so know a little of what this world might have been like for the expeditions of the past. But, it will only ever be a glimpse. For others, many questions remain. How might someone who has never been to the Arctic fall in love with the place? Equally, how could someone who has neither been, nor ever will, hate it with a passion or, worse still, kill the fantasy with indifference and think nothing of it at all? Who cares about the Arctic? It’s just all ice and snow, isn’t it? I’m encouraged to think more about the idea of the North and how these visions touch us. How might two people come to such opposite points of view; how are these destinations reached? And this how all depends on the images we see and the stories we are told. When considering the legacy of Roald Amundsen, Stephen Bown made a profound observation when he asked: ‘what do we really know about past events – and hence the present – when our understanding of those events, and the people involved in them, has been shaped, perhaps manipulated, by the political and social agendas of vested interests and longstanding prejudices?’75 The answer, of course, is that we can never know the whole story, but it is right to think more about the way stories are made. A closer reading of exploration, and its visual footprint, makes us realise that few places are untouched by the crushed geographies of our minds. Amundsen’s greatest skill was his ability to reinvent himself as an explorer, moving with the times to devise new techniques for new goals. From sailing ships to skis and dogsleds, to open-cockpit airplanes and prototype airships, Amundsen refused to dwell on past glories. And it was this insatiable urge to go forward that propelled him to the South Pole ahead of the competition. When he finally reached that spot on 14 December 1911, there was no great song and dance, no press conference. It was a day of precision measurement with his companions, carefully determining that they really were there. There was nothing of course to reassure them, just an endless terrain in an endless day. They gathered together in a group – five fur-clad men on skis, three wooden sledges and seventeen exhausted dogs – and quietly shook hands. Amundsen unwrapped the Norwegian flag he’d brought from home and ‘five roughened, frostbitten fists’ gripped the post and planted it in the 346

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93. Rival explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook fight for the glory of being the first to the North Pole. Le Petit Journal, 19 September 1909.

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94 ‘Explore. What’s in a Word?’ Adventurer Pen Hadow enjoys a photo opportunity on the ice of Resolute Bay before attempting to walk alone to the North Pole, Geographical, November 2005.

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snow together. As the sun travelled overhead in a cloudless sky, now snug in their reindeer-skin bags, they had a celebration dinner: a ‘small piece of seal meat each’ followed by a cigar.76 Amundsen later wrote of the experience: ‘the goal was reached, the journey ended. I cannot say . . . that the objective of my life was attained. That would be romancing too bare-facedly. I had better be honest and admit straight out that I have never known any man to be placed in such a diametrically opposite position to the goal of his desires as I was at that moment’. It was the idea of the North Pole that had filled youthful dreams and yet, ‘here I was at the South Pole. Can anything more topsy-turvy be imagined’.77 Exploration lives in its storytelling potential. Both struggle and success can become a truth, and that truth is often just a memory of an event. We all believe what we want to believe. Scott might be your man, Nelson a hero, and Franklin a fool: Amundsen, stubborn but professional, Shackleton a charlatan or a god among men. Of course, most things need not be so black and white, so arbitrary. As if watching a rugby match, we cheer for different sides, but can’t we love the game at the same time too? Loyalties are fierce; we have our favourites; we imprint our own ideals. We become obsessed with imagined rivalries, a ‘race’, the precise margins of error, or their differences in skill, temperament, and luck. Look again. The ways explorers are remembered often has little to do with what happened on the ice, but everything to do with us – the biases we have, the books we choose to read, and the images we want to see. You have your heroes and I have mine. We all have our ‘Nelson bears’ too, the unlikely goals we set ourselves, the dreams we pursue but rarely reach, the half-truths we might tell as we try to get to some place else. Cheyne’s balloons and Harper’s Arctic folly are Nelson bears, one and the same. But be careful. Always chasing dreams might prove your undoing. When Scott finally reached the Pole, the merest sign of a human presence here was a rude shock, a fatal blow, with some eight hundred miles of ‘solid dragging’ still to go if safety was to be won. ‘Great God! This is an awful place’, he despaired that night, writing in his journal as his companions cooked up a warm hoosh of pemmican and biscuit. He nibbled on some chocolate and they shared a cigarette. ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle’, he continued. ‘I wonder if we can do it?’ 349

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Like sea ice, the imaginative landscape is not frozen for all time but is always on the move. The more we learn the less we know; a truism, yes, but it fits. With the lives of explorers some questions will always remain unanswerable. What were their real motivations? Did they honestly have nothing left to eat but old leather boots? As the blizzard tore at the tent, was there really no hope? Why on earth did they not take better clothing? How cold was it, exactly? And, does any of this really matter, anyhow? As historians we can never find the full truth behind the story. That’s even more elusive than the Pole.

CHASING BEARS

The ‘days of heroic travel are gone’, wrote Conrad, soon after the return of Shackleton’s Endurance voyage. ‘We are condemned to make discoveries on beaten tracks’.78 And yet, still the polar regions attract a cohort of suitors. A century ago the dream of ardent men trying to make their place in the world, now anyone with enough money can go, and they do so each spring in crowds. At this very moment, private expeditions are being planned. A queue of post-modern publicity seekers, on what sometimes seem like extended gap-years, vie with each other to carve out their place in polar history by completing ‘remarkable new firsts’, or ‘travelling in the footsteps of their heroes’. Others will try faster or boast of longer journeys, anything to claim the label of originality or lever some cash from sponsors. But, this is not true exploration. The dangers are still real but they are also contrived. The cycle of imagining continues. People will keep on chasing their own bears in the ice. A few years ago, one would-be explorer described his plans to recreate Peary’s rush for the North Pole as ‘solving the greatest mystery of all time’. Did he really believe a modern sledge trip could provide that truth, or was it just spin and puff? Was it overconfidence on his part or just plain ignorance? The press decided that it was probably both. Another talks today of trying to mount an expedition to the ‘Pole of Inaccessibility’, while many think the middle of nowhere is exactly the best place for a man like him to go and get lost. The confidence of this new breed, some say madness, is of course nothing new as the experiences of Captain Ross and Commander Cheyne show us so well. 350

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And so, the performance continues. Returning home to book deals, they re-enact their trips at motivational seminars and corporate events. Explorers have always had to sing for their supper. Antarctica is home to the scientific bases of a range of nations; luxury camps, blue ice runways, and cruise ships like floating hotels. You can ride a nuclear-powered icebreaker all the way to the North Pole and instantly tell the world about it via satellite, and there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe I’ll do it too, or better still just drink in the view. The ice, the endless sky, the sheer nothingness that is, for me at least, the everything. The Arctic remains a landscape of the imagination, just in new ways. For an increasing number of people it exists as a sort of adventure playground, for personal glories, or extravagant team building: an unusual challenge for all types and all abilities, all nations. In their hundreds they strap on skis, pull on branded jackets, and point their sledges North and South in the name of charity and advertisement. They grimace and growl and film every step, tweeting their breakfast or describing their bowel movements in intricate detail. With all this grunting, agony, and suffering for the cameras you’d be forgiven for thinking that most modern adventure types don’t enjoy it at all. Though their sponsors want metaphors of challenge, one hopes that they also remember to have fun: out in the wild, these are the best days of their lives. For Franklin’s men the Arctic meant death and for the public, tragedy and disaster; many now see the wilderness as somewhere that you can find something of life. It must surely be a place of renewal and reflection, rather than merely a place for competition and posturing. For many people like me, much more important, and more troubling, is a different kind of crushed geography, a new kind of tragedy. The Arctic wilderness has become an icon for everything that we stand to lose as our climate warms. The way we reconcile our human failings here, the way we resist the temptation of its abundant resources, could well determine the future of the planet. The Arctic is no longer a place apart, to exist only in the mind’s eye, a land of ghosts, flickering like a mirage somewhere in our imaginations. Whether the subject of public attention, intrigue, fascination, or simply bemusement, these remarkable regions endure. North and South, barren lands but not featureless. The Poles are intractable and the pursuit of them essentially worthless, and yet, not altogether 351

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meaningless. Covered with a rich blanket of narrative imaginings, they continue to be the stage upon which we act out our daydreams, creating new fictions for ourselves. They have been much written about and yet, when you are there, they still seem to defy adequate description. The Poles are imaginary points in a highly unimaginable landscape. They are ever moving in a terrain of shattered dreams, burst balloons, fading hopes, and endlessly chased bears. They are a mathematical conception, meridians for memory and national fantasy, zones of both failure and freedom. They lend themselves well to mixed metaphor too. Call them what you will, these remote spots at the edges of our charts, where scientific curiosity and romantic imaginations meet, continue to call out from the wilderness to summon the brave and the foolish, jaded by our cynical world, to discover them, whilst also discovering something about themselves. For it is ourselves that we’re really searching for amid this crushed geography of broken ice, not the bones of lost explorers, or the skeletons of ships. And all the while the Poles remain, impervious to each round of reimagining, silent, cold, timeless. In our search for meaning we’ve written about them, charted them, measured them, photographed and painted them, raised them up in verse or song, condemned them to hard fact, ruined them perhaps, and exploited them too. Yet as invisible thrones, the Poles are still waiting to be won. A world away, yet connected in imaginative space, we return to London, the heart of an Empire that once spanned the globe and which now exists merely in language, in traditions, and in the stories that are told: in the memory of deeds that could inspire as much as they could horrify. There is triumph and tragedy in this narration, a cliche´ but also a truth. It is all there in the polar world; the cycle of life and death. In the small square where Captain Scott stands his nineteenth-century counterpart Franklin has his feet in the garden of the Travellers Club. Resplendent in his full naval uniform, he presents a heroic pose to those who might trundle by and care to look up at him, the ‘conqueror of the Northwest Passage’. From Franklin’s statue, down the steps into the Mall, James Cook appears with a chart of his discoveries in hand and just beyond him, atop a column sailing high above the capital, Nelson turns his face toward the sea.

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SAIL, sail, adventurous Barks! go fearless forth, Storm on his glacier-seat the misty North, Give to mankind the inhospitable zone, And Britain’s trident plant in seas unknown.1 Eleanor Anne Porden, 1818 Plan with great care and never rely on gizmos working, or count on immediate rescue, since storms can keep search planes away for days, even weeks, so play safe. If you aim to join the ‘way-out’ section by bicycling across Ellesmere Island or ‘collecting’ different poles – geomagnetic, magnospheric, lesser accessibility, and so on – then plan accordingly. For example, if you intend doing the South Pole on a pogo-stick, don’t forget lots of low-temperature grease and your haemorrhoid cream. Have fun and stay cool.2 Ranulph Fiennes, 2007

Notes

PRELIMS 1. John Ross, private letter to Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer of the Navy, 1 January 1833. See also Clive Holland and James Savelle, ‘My Dear Beaufort’, Arctic, 40:1 (1987), 66 – 77. 2. Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem, in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal (London: Dodsley, 1738), pp. 25 – 6. 3. Charles Dickens, ‘Prologue’ in Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep (London: Hesperus, 2004). As this study is concerned with the performative aspects of exploration, and the ways in which heroic images were constructed, it is appropriate to begin with The Frozen Deep, arguably the most well known of the many nineteenth-century polar theatricals. Produced jointly by Collins and Dickens, it was first performed on 6 January 1857 in his London home. It was shown before Queen Victoria and toured to Manchester that summer. The play reflects Dickens’ desire to create positive images of exploration heroics to lend support to the Franklin search effort. He urged his audiences to draw inspiration from an explorer’s ‘fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their religion’. See Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens, ed. by Robert Brannan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 97; The Letters of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman, 1880), i, pp. 522 – 3. 4. ‘Farewell’, a poem by Robert Whitby, read on 25 May 1875 at the Royal Naval College Greenwich, Private Collection. 5. George Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth (London: Murray, 1818), verse 183, lines 1639 – 45. Byron’s magisterial poem expressed the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of war. His famous apostrophe to the ocean captured the sea as an emblem of Britain’s assumed power, as maritime romanticism fuelled new ideas of national ascendancy. Byron also gave voice to a new aesthetic: the sea, like the Arctic, was appealing in its destructiveness. Accompanying this valuation of the sublime in nature came the image of the hero in solitude. A favourite motto in Cooper’s novels, Byron’s address to the sublime power was memorised by generations of school children. One may borrow

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‘Invisible Throne’ to describe the quest for the North Pole during the nineteenth century: a cherished, yet elusive goal, invisible and altogether worthless, yet endowed with historical associations and chivalric values. INTRODUCTION – THE INVISIBLE THRONE 1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 5 – 6. Shelley’s Arctic was a stage for human pride to show its folly in the face of the immensity of nature. The year Frankenstein was published four naval ships left British waters carrying the hopes of the service into the mysterious unknown. Like the imagined explorer Walton, their dreams would also be dashed, the Pole beyond reach. See William St Clair, ‘The Impact of Frankenstein’, in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. by Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 38 – 63; Rudolf Beck, ‘The Region of Beauty and Delight’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 49 (2000), pp. 24 – 9. 2. ‘The Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 31 May 1875, p. 10; ‘Departure of the Arctic Ships’, The Navy, 29 May 1875, p. 521; ‘The Arctic Expedition’, The Daily Telegraph, 31 May 1875, p. 5. 3. William Keppel, ‘Geographical and Scientific Results of the Arctic Expedition’, The Quarterly Review, 143 (1877), pp. 184– 6. 4. ‘The Polar Failure’, The Navy, 4 November 1876, p. 441; ‘A Farewell’, The Navy, 29 May 1875, p. 514. 5. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949); The Mythic Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); The Power of Myth (London: Doubleday, 1988). 6. In this expanding and diverse field, compare Dorothy Norman, The Hero: Myth, Image, Symbol (New York: World, 1969); Walter Reed, Meditations on the Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); The English Hero, 1660 – 1800, ed. by Robert Folkenfilk (London: Associated University Presses, 1982); John Lash, The Hero: Manhood and Power (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). For ‘knightly’ imaginations, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). On children’s literature, see Gillian Avery, Childhood’s Pattern: A Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770 – 1950 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975); Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 1997); Gerard Jones, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (New York: Basic, 2002).

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7. Jenni Calder, Heroes: From Byron to Guevara (London: Hamilton, 1977); Peter Karsten, Patriot-Heroes in England and America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981); Barry Schwarz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (London: Collier Macmillan, 1987); Jay Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Claudia Bushman, America Discovers Columbus (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992); Brian Dippie, Custer’s Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Samantha Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud: Sutton, 2000); Susanne Wallner, The Myth of William Wallace (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2003). 8. For a range of approaches, try H.K. Colebatch, Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Contemporary Culture (Perth: Australian Institute for Public Policy, 1990); Isolde Standish, Myth and Masculinity in Japanese Cinema (Richmond: Curzon, 2000); Susan Mackey-Kallis, The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); John Izod, Myth, Mind, and the Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ashton Trice and Samuel Holland, Heroes, Antiheroes, and Dolts (London: McFarland, 2001); The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. by Martha Driver and Sid Ray (London: McFarland, 2004). 9. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Heroes (London: Fourth Estate, 2004). 10. Consider Deborah Lyons, Gender and Immortality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Lillian Robinson, Wonder Women (London: Routledge, 2004). 11. Cynthia Fansler Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977). 12. Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. by Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 3; Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). My use of the word ‘imaginings’ draws upon Smith’s distinction between ‘images’ and ‘imaginings’. Dawson also used the term ‘cultural imaginaries’ to describe the vast networks of interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs, and narrative forms that are publicly available within a culture at any one time, which articulate its psychic and social dimensions, and furnish ways of seeing and understanding. His conception is clearly influenced by Said’s ‘imaginative geographies’, the cultural theory of Klein, and Young’s ‘invented discourses’. See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 48 – 9; Robert Young, White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990). 13. Memoir of Vice Admiral Sir Jahleel Brenton, ed. by Charles Brenton (London: Longman, 1855). 357

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14. C.I. Hamilton, ‘Naval Hagiography and the Victorian Hero’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 381 – 98. 15. ‘Heads of the Comet’s Tail’, George Cruikshank’s Magazine, 1 (1854), pp. 2– 13; Blanchard Jerrold, The Life of George Cruikshank (London: Chatto and Windus, 1882), ii, pp. 195– 7. 16. The anthropologist Greg Dening drew general attention to the cultural dynamic and theatricality of exploration, demonstrating how images of death, memory, and reputation are constructed and mediated within a range of representations. See Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); The Death of William Gooch (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Reclaiming military history for cultural studies, see Gillian Russell, Theatres of War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 17. Performativity and Performance, ed. by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (London: Routledge, 1995); Theatricality, ed. by Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 18. ‘The Franklin Commemoration’, Geographical Journal, 6 (1895), p. 43. 19. Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, The National Geographic Magazine, 45:3 (1924), p. 239. 20. Among others, see David Stoddart, ‘Geography and its History’, in On Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 1 –5; David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Robert Stafford, Scientist of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Geography and Empire, ed. by Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Visions of Empire, ed. by David Miller and Peter Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Felix Driver, Geography Militant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 21. Geography and Enlightenment, ed. by David Livingstone and Charles Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Felix Driver, ‘Geography, Enlightenment, and Improvement’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 229 – 33; Michael Bravo ‘Geographies of Exploration and Improvement’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32 (2006), pp. 512– 38. 22. A phrase borrowed from Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). See also Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision (London: I.B.Tauris, 2008). 23. Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’; Felix Driver, ‘Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), pp. 134–67; Driver, ‘Geographies Empire’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10:1 (1992), pp. 25–40; Derek Gregory, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 19:4 (1995), pp. 447–85; Driver, ‘Imaginative Geographies’, in Introducing Human Geographies (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 209–16. 358

NOTES TO PAGES 12 – 15

24. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (London: Routledge, 1992); James Clifford, Routes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Narrating the ¨ rlin (Canton: Science History, Arctic, ed. by Michael Bravo and Sverker So 2002). 25. For accessible reviews of work in both fields, see David Livingstone, ‘The Spaces of Knowledge’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (1995), pp. 5– 34; Charles Withers, ‘Towards a History of Geography in the Public Sphere’, History of Science, 34 (1999), pp. 45 – 78; David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 26. Maureen McNeil, ‘Newton as National Hero’, in Let Newton Be!, ed. by John Fauvel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 223; Patricia Fara, Newton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Milo Keynes, The Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton to 1800 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005). 27. Pacific exploration historiography has led the way. Compare Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Marshall Sahlins, How ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On the Cook hagiography also see Bernard Smith, ‘Cook’s Posthumous Reputation’, in Imagining the Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 225– 40; Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, ed. by Glyndwr Williams (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2004). 28. John Cawood, ‘The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Early Victorian Britain’, Isis, 70 (1979), pp. 493– 518; Cawood, ‘Terrestrial Magnetism and the Development of International Collaboration in the early Nineteenth Century’, Annals of Science, 34 (1977), pp. 551– 87. 29. Trevor Levere, ‘The Arctic Crusade: National Pride, International Affairs and Science’, in Science and the Canadian Arctic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 239– 63. 30. For historic and aesthetic appraisals of the mythic image of the northern wilderness, see Chauncey Loomis, ‘The Arctic Sublime’, in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. by U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 95 – 112; Ian MacLaren, ‘The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845 – 1859’, Arctic, 38 (1985), pp. 89 – 103; Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time (London: Faber, 1996). For more recent approaches, see Robert David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818 – 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Sarah Moss, Scott’s Last Biscuit (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005); Michael Robinson, The Coldest Crucible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007); Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Jen Hill, White Horizon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Elizabeth Leane, Antarctica in Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 31. C.O. Sauer, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography, 2:2 (1925), pp. 19 –53 (p. 21). Adventure 359

NOTES TO PAGES 15 – 25

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

stories constructed cultural spaces in which imperial geographies and masculinities were conceived, a process for which the heroic actor was central. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire (London: Routledge, 1997). David Thomas Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 155 – 82; John McCannon, Red Arctic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Martyn Thompson, ‘Reception Theory and the Interpretation of Historical Meaning’, History and Theory, 32 (1993), pp. 248 – 72. Within an expanding field of iconographical analysis and reception theory, which one may loosely draw together as ‘trajectories of commemoration’, a range of historical figures are being exposed to academic scrutiny. Of particular relevance here, Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), pp. 225 –356; Marianne Czisnik, ‘Nelson and the Nile: The Creation of Admiral Nelson’s Public Image’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 88 (2002), pp. 41 – 60; Tim Barringer, ‘Fabricating Africa: Livingstone and the Visual Image 1850 – 1874’, in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, ed. National Portrait Gallery (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), pp. 169 –200. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994); The New Cultural History, ed. by Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Clifford Geertz, Available Light (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). New approaches to photography as a realm of representation are raising important new insights for our understandings of exploration too. See Picturing Place, ed. by Joan Schwartz and James Ryan (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003); Ryan, Picturing Empire (London: Reaktion, 1997). For the Arctic, see Peter Geller, Northern Exposures (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004); Imaging the Arctic, ed. by J.C.H. King and Henrietta Lidchi (London: British Museum, 1998). Though Clements Markham was to become a ‘giant of the Age’ – as one contemporary reviewer put it – there is yet to be a definitive critical history of his contributions to the culture of exploration. The most useful evaluation is Ann Savours, ‘Clements Markham: Longest Serving Officer, Most Prolific Editor’, in Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth, ed. by R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996), pp. 164 – 88.

CHAPTER 1 – ON NAVAL HEROES 1. John Barrow, ‘Preface’, in James Kingston Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire (London: Murray, 1818), p. ii. 2. John Barrow, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions (London: Murray, 1818). 3. Andrew Lambert, ‘The Shield of Empire, 1815 –1895’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. by J.R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford 360

NOTES TO PAGES 25 – 30

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

University Press, 1995), pp. 161– 99; Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814 – 1864 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976), pp. 177– 202. Three ‘phases’ of Arctic exploration may be broadly brushed in a century crowded with expeditions. The first, from 1818 to 1845, was primarily concerned with the discovery and mapping of a navigable passage. From about 1845 to about 1860 Arctic activity was dominated by the disaster of the Franklin expedition and the resulting searches, initially for survivors and ultimately for relics. During this period a northwest passage was found, though not completed until Amundsen’s Gjøa voyage of 1903 – 6, the mapping of the Canadian Arctic archipelago was largely completed and scientific enquiry expanded. The final period, for sake of demarcation, was from about 1860 to the early 1900s and saw a general decline in British involvement in the Arctic, despite short periods of intense activity, in particular the British Arctic Expedition under George Nares in 1875 – 6. John Barrow, ‘Review of Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson’s Bay, by Lieut William Chappell, RN’, The Quarterly Review, 18 (1817), pp. 199 –223 (pp. 219– 20); ‘Franklin’s Journey to the Polar Sea’, The Quarterly Review, 28 (1823), pp. 372 – 409. Though a detailed history of Barrow’s role in creating a cult of exploration in the first half of the nineteenth century is still wanting, useful accounts are Christopher Lloyd, Mr. Barrow of the Admiralty (London: Collins, 1970) and Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (London: Granta, 1998). Barry Gough, ‘British-Russian Rivalry and the Search for the Northwest Passage in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Polar Record, 23:144 (1984), pp. 301 – 17; Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Bering’s Straits, etc (London: Longman, 1821). John Barrow, ‘Review of Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson’s Bay’, p. 204. Review of Barrow’s narrative by Francis Egerton, ‘Voyages of Discovery’, The Quarterly Review, 78 (1846), p. 46; ‘Voyages of Discovery’, The Athenaeum, 31 January 1846, p. 116; John Barrow, Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions (London: Murray, 1846). For useful introductions, see The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); J.A. Mangan, ‘The Grit of our Forefathers: Invented Traditions, Propaganda and Imperialism’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. by John MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 113– 39. Francis Egerton, ‘Voyages of Discovery’, pp. 47 –8. Margaret Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). John Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866 – 1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Roger Morriss, Naval Power and British Culture, 1760 – 1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Marshall Bastable, Arms and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For the decline of the sailing fleet and the evolution of the modern battleship, see David 361

NOTES TO PAGES 30 – 33

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Brown, Warrior to Dreadnought (London: Chatham, 1997); John Beeler, Birth of the Battleship (London: Chatham, 2001); David Evans, Building the Steam Navy (London: Conway Maritime, 2004). For popular responses to naval reforms, see Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘The Hero Packs a Punch: Presenting Nelson in the London Charivari’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 91:2 (2005), pp. 329– 57. ‘The French Invade Us, Indeed!’, Punch, 14 (1848), pp. 16 – 17, and many articles throughout 1848. ‘Naval Morbid Anatomy’, Punch, 9 (1845), p. 126. ‘Nomenclature for the Steam Navy’, Punch, 17 (1849), p. 261. ‘A Farewell to the Old Fleet’, Punch, 26 April 1862, p. 170. The Iron-Clad Tar (London: Willey, 1878), Verse 1: I belong to the Navy, lads – But I am sad – because – Things isn’t how they ought to be Or how they used to was – On Victory’s gale we used to sail, An’ feared no foeman’s frown, But now we blows each other up Or runs each other down.

See also Mark Philp, ‘“I’ll Sing of Fam’d Trafalgar if You’ll Listen Unto Me”: Nelson in Popular Song’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 15 (2005), pp. 65 – 81; Robert Giddings, ‘Delusive Seduction: Pride, Pomp, Circumstance and Military Music’, in Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850 – 1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 25 – 49. 19. For public anxiety and the Navy’s image in this period, compare Spencer Robinson, On the State of the British Navy (London: Harrison, 1874); Henry Watt, The State of the Navy (London: Chapman, 1874); Gardiner Fishbourne, A Letter Addressed to G. Ward Hunt, First Lord of the Admiralty, on the Condition of Ships of the Fleet (London: Spon, 1874); The Navy of To-Day (London: Simpkin, 1878); Henry Watt, The State of the Navy (Liverpool: Potter, 1878). 20. ‘At Sea’, Punch, 18 March 1871, p. 107; ‘The Ugly Duckling’, Punch, 3 May 1873, p. 183; ‘Neptune’s Warning’, Punch, 30 October 1875, p. 177; ‘Throw Him Over’, Punch, 4 December 1875, p. 233; ‘Over-Weighted’, Punch, 6 May 1876; ‘Salts and Stokers’, Punch, 17 March 1877, p. 115; ‘Will She Swim?’, Punch, 7 July 1877, p. 307. 21. On 1 September 1875, during the squadron’s summer cruise, Iron Duke was en route with several other ships between Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) and Queenstown (Cobh). In thick fog she accidentally rammed her sister ship Vanguard off Kish Bank, Dublin Bay. Although Iron Duke sustained minor damage, a large hole was torn in Vanguard. Her engine room was flooded which prevented her from using her pumps and she sunk in a little over an hour. The loss of Vanguard was felt dearly. Its namesake had proud connections: it was Nelson’s flagship at the Battle 362

NOTES TO PAGES 33 – 38

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

of the Nile. Thunderer, perhaps unfortunately so named, was at Spithead on 14 July 1876 when her boiler exploded causing a devastating rent in her hull. See J.G. Jeffs, HMS Vanguard, 1586 – 1946 (Dumfries: Robert Dinwiddie, 1947); HMS Vanguard at the Nile (London: Nelson Society, 1998). Coles’ experimental ship Captain also had illustrious connections. Her namesake was Nelson’s ship at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. See Arthur Hawkey, HMS Captain (London: Bell, 1963); Stanley Sandler, ‘In Deference to Public Opinion: The Loss of HMS Captain’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 59 (1973), pp. 57 – 68. ‘Our Poor Navy’, The Saturday Review, 7 October 1876, p. 439; ‘Naval Mismanagement’, The Saturday Review, 2 December 1876, pp. 683 – 4; ‘More About the Navy’, The Saturday Review, 20 January 1877, pp. 70 – 1; ‘Naval Bungling’, The Saturday Review, 3 March 1877, pp. 255 – 6. Benjamin Disraeli to Henry Rawlinson, 17 November 1875, RGS. See also ‘The Arctic Expedition of 1875’, The Navy, 22 May 1875, p. 482; Freda Harcourt, ‘Disraeli’s Imperialism: A Question of Timing, 1866 –68’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 87 – 109; Hugh Cunningham, ‘Jingoism in 1877 – 78’, Victorian Studies, 14 (1971), pp. 429 – 53. ‘God Speed! To Our Departing Arctic Explorers’, by James Orton, 1875, Private Collection; ‘The Arctic Expedition of 1875’, The Navy, 22 May 1875, p. 483. For useful appraisals, see Geoffrey Hattersley-Smith, ‘The British Arctic Expedition, 1875 – 76’, Polar Record, 18:113 (1976), pp. 117 – 26; Margaret Deacon and Ann Savours, ‘Sir George Strong Nares (1831 – 1915)’, Polar Record, 18:113 (1976), pp. 127 – 41; John Edwards Caswell, ‘The RGS and the British Arctic Expedition, 1875 – 76’, Geographical Journal, 143:2 (1977), pp. 200 – 10. ‘A Voyage to the Polar Sea’, The Times, 13 June 1878, p. 4. ‘The Return from the Silent Land’, lines 7 – 14. Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘Displaying Nelson: Navalism and ‘The Exhibition’ of 1891’, International Journal of Maritime History, 17:1 (2005), pp. 29 – 67. Robert Bridges, The Chivalry of the Sea (London: Novello, 1916), set to music by Sir Hubert Parry, his last choral work. Henry Newbolt, Admirals All, And Other Verses (London: Mathews, 1897), lines 1– 8. Cut out by the hand of an unknown nineteenth-century admirer, the ‘Sea Kings’ of the past join ranks in a rich historical iconography. Nelson is pre-eminent, surrounded by the faces of illustrious comrades, including Cuthbert Collingwood and Thomas Hardy, and joined by Howard of Effingham, Francis Drake, Robert Blake, John Benbow, Augustus Keppel, Edward Vernon, and George Byng, notable among many others. Nelson’s image is a fine engraving after John Hoppner’s famous portrait. An engraving after Drummond’s popular canvas of 1820 provides Parry’s image, whilst the engraving of Ross is based upon his favourite portrait, completed by Faulkner in 1834. Franklin’s lasting image is an engraving by Thomson and printed by Derby in 1840, and the engraving of Cook is a 363

NOTES TO PAGES 38 – 43

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

reproduction of Sherwin’s 1784 print of the celebrated canvas by Nathaniel Dance completed in 1775. George Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Canto the Fourth (London: Murray, 1818). See also William Hazlitt, ‘Byron: The Spirit of the Age, 1825’, in Miscellaneous Works (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), v, pp. 101 – 103; Peter Thorslev, The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962). Edmund Gosse, ‘The Agony of the Victorian Age’, The Edinburgh Review, 228 (1918), p. 295. See also Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830 – 1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 305 – 40. Alison Yarrington, ‘Popular and Imaginary Pantheons in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in Pantheons (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 107 – 21 (p. 108). For an entry into dynamic military iconography, see Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in MidVictorian Britain’, English Historical Review, 86 (1971), pp. 46 – 72; Joseph Kestner, ‘Victorian Military Painting and the Construction of Masculinity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 24 (1996), pp. 51 – 97; Kenneth Hendrickson, Making Saints (London: Associated University Presses, 1998); John Springhall, ‘Up Guards and at Them!: British Imperialism and Popular Art, 1880 – 1914’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, pp. 49 – 72. For useful examinations of the funeral as a powerful, yet sometimes problematic, ritual of ‘official’ nationalism, see Timothy Jenks, ‘Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson’, The Journal of British Studies, 39:4 (2000), pp. 422 – 53; John Wolffe, Great Deaths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 28 – 55; James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), pp. 194 – 248. Gerald Jordan, ‘Admiral Nelson as Popular Hero’, in New Aspects of Naval History (Baltimore: US Naval Academy, 1985), pp. 109– 19; Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics in Hanoverian England: The Case of Admiral Vernon’, Past and Present, 121 (1988), pp. 74 – 109; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England’, The Journal of British Studies, 28:3 (1989), pp. 201 –24; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 137– 205. James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B.: From His Lordship’s Manuscripts (London: Cadell and Davies, 1809); Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Murray, 1813), i, pp. 11 – 12. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dodsley, 1790). William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. by Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), act 2, scene 1, lines 39 – 54. See also Adam Nicholson, Men of Honour (London: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 122– 3. There has been renewed academic attention to the rituals of Nelsonian memorial and the path of his posthumous reputation. Among others, see Lambert, ‘Death and Transfiguration’, in Nelson: Britannia’s God of War 364

NOTES TO PAGES 43 – 50

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

(London: Faber and Faber, 2004), pp. 311– 38; Colin White, ‘Nelson Apotheosised: The Creation of the Nelson Legend’, in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. by David Cannadine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 93 – 114; John MacKenzie, ‘Nelson Goes Global: The Nelson Myth in Britain and Beyond’, in Admiral Lord Nelson, pp. 144– 65; Marianne Czisnik, ‘The Uses and Abuses of a Controversial Hero’, in Horatio Nelson (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), pp. 97 – 157; Andrew Lambert, ‘Making a Victorian Nelson: Albert, Nicolas and the Arts’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 15 (2005), pp. 192 – 216. See also Alison Yarrington, ‘Nelson and the Citizen Hero’, Art History, 6:3 (1983), pp. 315 – 29. Timothy Jenks, ‘Contesting the Hero’, pp. 422– 53; David Cannadine, ‘Splendour out of Court’, in Rites of Power, ed. by Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 206 – 11; Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), pp. 94 – 129. David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism Personified: Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson Reconsidered’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 77 (1991), pp. 143– 9; Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism’, The Journal of British Studies, 31:3 (1992), pp. 265– 87; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 – 1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Becoming National, ed. by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Southey, pp. 230 – 1. John Cartwright, The Trident; or, The National Policy of Naval Celebration (London: Johnson, 1802). The Gentleman’s Magazine, 94 (1803), p. 804; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes’, p. 224. Southey, ‘Life of Marlborough’, The Quarterly Review, 23 (1820), p. 71. Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism’, p. 282. William Wordsworth, ‘The Waggoner’, canto 2, lines 423 – 4, in Benjamin the Waggoner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 77. Southey, ii, p. 275. Jack Simmons, Southey (London: Collins, 1945), p. 142. See also Grosvenor Bedford to Southey, December 1828, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Charles Southey (London: Longmans, 1849 – 50), v, p. 355. Southey, ii, p. 272. Ibid., p. 231. John Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. vii. The Times, 14 May 1842, pp. 6 – 7; Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 130. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Ward, 1896), p. 205; Lambert, ‘Making a Victorian Nelson’, p. 192. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 19. Ibid., p. 227. 365

NOTES TO PAGES 51 – 54

59. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Nelson’ in Montaigne and Other Essays, ed. by S.R. Crockett (London: Gowans, 1897), pp. 68 – 91 (pp. 88 – 9). 60. Ibid., pp. 89 –91. 61. James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects (London: Longmans, 1867), ii, p. 235; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (London: Fraser, 1841), for which Carlyle provided a preface; Emerson, Representative Men (London: Routledge, 1850); Emerson, The Twenty Essays (London: Bell, 1875). 62. Lambert, ‘Making a Victorian Nelson’, p. 193. 63. See George Alexander Macfarren, The World’s Age (London: Novello, 1869), a popular ballad for which Kingsley provided the rousing libretto. 64. For the evolving realm of heroic representation in adventure literature, on changing audiences, constructed ideals, and publisher’s strategies, compare Imperialism and Juvenile Literature, ed. by Jeffrey Richards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys (London: Hyman, 1991); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes (London: Routledge, 1994); Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire (London: Routledge, 1997); Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boy’s Story Paper in Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003). 65. Lambert, ‘Making a Victorian Nelson’, pp. 197 –8. 66. Quoted in Oliver Warner, Captain Marryat (London: Constable, 1953), p. 87. See also Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (London: Longmans, 1939); Tom Pocock, Captain Marryat (London: Chatham, 2000). For a wonderful examination of Marryat’s contribution to this new maritime romanticism, see Tim Fulford, ‘Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen and Marryat’, Modern Language Quarterly, 60 (1999), pp. 161 –96 (pp. 193 – 4). See also Tim Fulford, ‘Romantic Nelsons Rule the Waves: The Naval Hero in Literature’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 15 (2005), pp. 180– 91. 67. Life and Letters of Captain Marryat, ed. by Florence Marryat (London: Bentley, 1872), ii, p. 107. 68. Ibid., i, pp. 160– 1. For some of his most well-known novels, see Frederick Marryat, The Naval Officer (London: Henry Colburn, 1829); The King’s Own (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830); Mr. Midshipman Easy (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836). 69. Robert L. Stevenson, ‘The English Admirals’, The Cornhill Magazine, 38 (1878), pp. 36 – 43 (p. 41), and reprinted in Virginibus Puerisque (London: Kegan, 1881), pp. 179– 204. 70. Stevenson, ‘The English Admirals’, p. 38. 71. Christopher Lloyd, Captain Marryat and the Old Navy (London: Longmans, 1939), p. vii. Conrad described how his imagination had been fired by his boyhood reading of Hugo’s Travailleurs de la Mer, whilst the sea novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Marryat had ‘shaped’ his life. See Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (London: Dent, 1923), p. 72. 72. ‘Palman Qui Meruit Ferat’, The Standard, 21 October 1905; Joseph Conrad, ‘The Heroic Age’, in The Mirror of the Sea (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. 310 – 29 (p. 316): ‘. . . the Navy surrendered to him their devoted affection, trust, and admiration. In return he gave them no less than his 366

NOTES TO PAGES 54 – 56

73. 74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

exulted soul. He breathed into them his own ardour and his own ambition. In a few short years he revolutionised, not the strategy or tactics of sea-warfare, but the very conception of victory itself. And this is genius. In that alone, through the fidelity of his fortune and the power of his inspiration, he stands unique among the leaders of fleets and sailors. He brought heroism into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible ancestor’. See The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. by Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 – 2005), iii, p. 275. Joseph Conrad, ‘The Heroic Age’, in The Mirror of the Sea (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. 310– 29 (p. 312). See also Letters and Papers of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Thomas Byam Martin, ed. by Richard Vesey Hamilton (London: Navy Records Society, 1903), i, pp. 65 – 73. Conrad’s conception of heroism was, of course, complicated. The Mirror of the Sea, he assured his publishers, would be a ‘record of a phase, now nearly vanished, of a certain kind of activity sympathetic to the inhabitants of this island’, whilst it was also certainly an attempt to insert himself into an English tradition in an effort to escape charges of Slavonicism. Tim Fulford, ‘Romanticizing the Empire’, p. 196. Samuel Smiles, Duty: with Illustrations of Courage, Patience, and Endurance (London: Murray, 1880), pp. 170– 208. See also Smiles, Duty, ed. by Asa Briggs (London: Routledge, 1997); Smiles, Self-Help (London: Murray, 1859), pp. 473– 4, for Edward Parry’s comments on John Franklin; Adrian Jarvis, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). It is hard to underestimate the influence of Smiles’ work. By 1908, Self-Help has passed through no fewer than fifty-six reprints. In its centennial edition, Asa Briggs would estimate that it had sold 250,000 copies before the end of the century, outranking most other books of the period. Charlotte Yonge, A Book of Golden Deeds of All Times and All Lands (London: Blackie, 1864), pp. 336 – 42; ‘Literary Notices’, The Ladies’ Repository, 25:6 (1865), pp. 379– 80: ‘This is a charming book, got up in excellent style, a treasury of some of the noblest deeds of the world, examples that may inspire the spirit of heroism and self-devotion. This book is worthy of a place in every family, immeasurably preferable to much of the trash that finds its way into our households’. The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: Allen, 1905), xx, pp. 41 – 3. As John MacKenzie so ably demonstrated, Ruskin’s lecture may be read as a moment upon a broad canvas of cultural negotiation. The pervasiveness of imperialism as an ‘ideological cluster’ would enable the invention of traditions which could conform to a new pattern of nationalist imagining, and these ideals exhibited extraordinary staying power. See Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). For debate, compare Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); John MacKenzie, ‘Another Little Patch of Red’, History Today, August (2005), pp. 20–6. See also Dinah Birch, ‘Ruskin and Carlyle’, 367

NOTES TO PAGES 56 – 59

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. by Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 178 – 91. Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (London: Lock, 1855); The Heroes (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856). Joseph Kestner, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Imperialism’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 4 (1995), pp. 51 – 66. Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson, ed. by Henry Newbolt (London: Constable, 1916). Studies of nineteenth-century masculinity now range widely, from sports, school curriculum, advertising, juvenile literature, to military portraiture. Within this extensive genre of ‘gender studies’ that focus on men, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995); Imperialism and Gender, ed. by C.E. Gittings (New Lambton: Dangaroo, 1996); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male (London: Reaktion, 1996); Angus MacLaren, The Trials of Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); John Tosh, A Man’s Place (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 317; Edward Dramin, ‘Work of Noble Note: Tennyson’s Ulysses and Victorian Heroic Ideals’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 20 (1992), pp. 117 –39; James Gray, Man and Myth in Victorian England (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1969). Edwin Hodder, Heroes of Britain in Peace and War (London: Cassell, 1878), p. 1. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Frederick Whymper, The Heroes of the Arctic and Their Adventures (London: SPCK, 1875). By 1901, the year he died, Heroes of the Arctic had been reissued more than ten times. See also The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, and Heroism (London: Cassell, 1882 – 5); The Romance of the Sea (London: SPCK, 1896) and Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska (London: Murray, 1869). See, for example, W.H. Davenport Adams, Famous Ships of the British Navy (London: Virtue, 1868); The Boy Makes the Man (London: Nelson, 1872); The Mariner’s of England (Edinburgh: EPC, 1879); Some Heroes of Travel (London: SPCK, 1880); Eminent Sailors (London: Routledge, 1882); Heroes of Maritime Discovery (London: Gall and Inglis, 1882). W.H. Davenport Adams, The Sea-Kings of England (London: Griffith and Farran, 1861), p. vi. George Byron, Don Juan (London: Davison, 1819), canto 1, stanza 4; Nicholson, Men of Honour, pp. 314 –15. Though recognising the potential of maritime exploration to rouse imaginations, Byron was sceptical about the benefits of a voyage to the Pole (canto 1, stanza 132): This is the patent age of new inventions For killing bodies and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions. 368

NOTES TO PAGES 59 – 63

Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions, Timbuctoo travels, voyages to the poles Are always to benefit mankind, as true Perhaps as shooting them at Waterloo. 92. See, for example, W.H. Davenport Adams, The Arctic World (London: Nelson, 1876) and its reissue Recent Polar Voyages (London: Nelson, 1880). 93. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, p. 332. 94. George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876). See also Frederick Karl, ‘Beauchamp’s Career: An English Ordeal’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16:2 (1961), pp. 117 – 31. 95. Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer (London: Belhaven, 1993). 96. A classic analysis of the controversy surrounding the discovery of the North Pole, and of Robert Peary’s obsession with cultivating his own celebrity, is Wally Herbert, The Noose of Laurels (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989). Herbert’s own polar career spanned forty-five years during which he travelled extensively throughout Antarctica and the Arctic and led the first crossing of the Arctic Ocean in 1968 – 9. 97. Besides precious ores, indigenous artefacts, and gripping narratives, there were also human trophies to impress Elizabethan audiences. See N. Cheshire and others, ‘Frobisher’s Eskimos in England’, Archivaria, 10 (1980), pp. 23 – 50; William Sturtevant and David Quinn, ‘This New Prey: Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576 and 1577’, in Indians and Europe, ed. by Christian Feest (Aachen: Herodot, 1987), pp. 61 – 140. 98. Of course, it is impossible to verify the accuracy of Frobisher’s declaration of exploration intent, although a great number of Victorian historians would retell the episode. Compare, for example, ‘The Arctic Expeditions’, Littell’s Living Age, 248:20 (1849), pp. 289 – 97; William Hepworth Dixon, ‘Arctic Expeditions’, Athenaeum, 1167 (9 March 1850), p. 259. For modern readings, see Martin Frobisher’s Northwest Venture, ed. by D.D. Hogarth and others (Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilisation, 1994); Meta Incognita, ed. by Thomas Symons and Stephen Alsford (Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilisation, 1999); Robert Ruby, Unknown Shore (London: Holt, 2001); James McDermott, Martin Frobisher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Robert McGhee, The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher (London: British Museum, 2002). 99. Clements Markham, The Lands of Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 205: ‘Sir Edward Parry was one of the greatest of Arctic discoverers. Without an equal as an organiser and administrator, unsurpassed as a leader of men, he was a bold and resolute navigator, a very perfect navigator, thoroughly well read in all that concerned his enterprises; thoughtful and level headed. While promoting hilarity and good-fellowship, he was, through life, deeply yet unostentatiously religious. He was the beau ideal of an Arctic officer’. See also Edward

369

NOTES TO PAGES 63 – 67

100.

101. 102.

103. 104.

105.

106.

107. 108.

Parry, Memoirs of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Parry (London: Longman, 1859); Ann Parry, Parry of the Arctic (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963); A.G.E. Jones, ‘A Different View’, Musk-Ox, 21 (1978), pp. 3 – 10. There is no space here to offer a detailed iconography of Parry as explorerhero, although a few details are useful. The basis of most representations during his lifetime was a fine oil by Samuel Drummond, painted in 1820 after his celebrated return from over-wintering, now in the collections of the NPG, 5053. The portrait was circulated widely in popular prints: engraved by J. Thompson in 1820; published in the European Magazine on 1 March 1821; and offered as a souvenir plate by many London printsellers, such as Smeeton, Limbird, William Wright, and Jacques in the years that followed. William Beechey also painted a fine full-length portrait in 1820, reproduced by a number of artists including John Jackson in 1820, and Thomas Phillips in 1827. An elegant oil study by Stephen Pearce, c. 1850, also survives (NPG 912). Harlequin and Cock Robin; or, Vulcan and Venus, Playbill for 26 December 1829, Guildhall Library, London. See, for example, Playbill for 22 June 1818, Theatre Museum, London; Playbills for 16 and 17 July 1818, University of Bristol Theatre Collection; Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 6– 40. North Pole; or, A Tale of the Frozen Regions, Playbill for 23 April 1829, Private Collection. This was even the case for Parry, whose long polar career may be characterised as much by failure as it can by real achievement. This satire was published on the return of Parry in Hecla from his voyage in search of a northwest passage, 1824 – 5. Both ships were forced ashore in Prince Regent Inlet on 30 July 1825 and he had to abandon Fury, for which he was later court-martialled. Max Jones, The Last Great Quest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jones, ‘“Our King Upon His Knees”: The Public Commemoration of Captain Scott’s Last Antarctic Expedition’, in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. by Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 105– 22. The Scott historiography is still dominated by the rather jaundiced account, Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979). David Crane, Scott of the Antarctic (London: HarperCollins, 2005). This is perhaps the most complete picture of Scott to have yet emerged, offering glimpses of his fears, his jealousies, his courage, and most of all, his humanity. Charles Withers, ‘Memory and the History of Geographical Knowledge: The Commemoration of Mungo Park, African Explorer’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30 (2004), pp. 316 – 39 (p. 317). Nicolaas Rupke, ‘A Geography of Enlightenment: The Critical Reception of Alexander von Humboldt’s Mexico Work’, in Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 319 – 43. 370

NOTES TO PAGES 67 – 73

109. John MacKenzie, ‘David Livingstone and the Worldly After-Life’, in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), pp. 201 – 19; MacKenzie, ‘The Iconography of the Exemplary Life: The Case of David Livingstone’, in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 84 – 104. 110. Joseph Thomson, Mungo Park and the Niger (London: Philip, 1890); Harry Johnston, Livingstone and the Exploration of Central Africa (London: Philip, 1891). Owing to his status as a martyr, it would be a long time before Livingstone’s reputation was challenged. Yet as decolonisation proceeded, and with it the wholesale questioning of received values, the statues of imperialists were pulled down. Soon popular historians would smash monolithic stereotypes, dethroning explorers as agents of expansion. Tim Jeal’s biography exploded the myth of the martyred saint. See George Seaver, David Livingstone (London: Lutterworth, 1957); George Martelli, Livingstone’s River (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970); Africa and its Explorers, ed. by Robert Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Tim Jeal, Livingstone (London: Heinemann, 1973); Judith Listowel, The Other Livingstone (Lewes: Friedmann, 1974); Dorothy Helly, Livingstone’s Legacy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). 111. Felix Driver, ‘Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), pp. 134 – 67 (p. 134). See also Frank McLynn, Stanley (London: Constable, 1989); Thomas Richards, ‘Selling Darkest Africa’, in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 119– 67; Driver, Geography Militant, pp. 117– 45. 112. The Horns Kennington, Playbill for 6 October 1875, Private Collection. 113. The Royal Victoria Coffee Hall, One Penny Programme for 30 June 1883, Private Collection. 114. The Royal Victoria Coffee Hall, Synopsis of Lecture and Views, Private Collection. 115. Markham’s naval career was short, yet he made great capital out of it. He entered the Navy in 1844 and was on Collingwood, the flagship of Sir George Seymour in the Pacific. He was midshipman on Assistance under Ommanney in 1850 – 1 and had some limited experience sledge travelling with the parties of McDougall and May. He left the service in 1852. Compare, Clements Markham, The Arctic Navy List (London: Griffin, 1875), p. 35; Albert Markham, The Life of Sir Clements Markham (London: Murray, 1917); C.S. Mackinnon, ‘The British Man-Hauled Sledging Tradition’, in The Franklin Era in Canadian Arctic History, ed. by P.D. Sutherland (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1985), pp. 129– 40. 116. ‘James Fitzjames’, pp. iii-iv, unpublished manuscript, c. 1899, RGS CRM/42. 117. Huntford, Scott and Amundsen, pp. 125 – 7. 118. See ‘Voyages and Discoveries’, in William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy (London: Sampson, 1897–1907), i, pp. 57–70 and pp. 93–8; iv, pp. 181–4 and pp. 507–37 (quote p. 517, and p. 537); vii, pp. 562–8: ‘Only those who have experienced such service can realise the amount of endurance, suffering, and hardship it entails. There is no better nursery to bring out the best and noblest traits in the character of a British seaman’. 371

NOTES TO PAGES 75 – 78

CHAPTER 2 – NELSON’S BEAR 1. George Meredith, The Adventures of Harry Richmond (London: Smith, 1871), i, p. 22. 2. Mohammad Shaheen, ‘The Adventures of Harry Richmond’, in George Meredith (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 30 – 52; Mervyn Jones, The Amazing Victorian (London: Constable, 1999). For contemporary reviews, see The Athenaeum, 4 November 1871, pp. 590– 1; The Daily Telegraph, 20 November 1871, p. 3; The Westminster Review, January 1872, pp. 274 – 5; The Spectator, 20 January 1872, pp. 79 – 80. 3. Meredith, Harry Richmond, i, pp. 21 – 2. 4. R. Hudson, ‘Meredith’s Autobiography’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 9 (1954), pp. 38 – 49. 5. Clements Markham, The Lands of Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 174. 6. Ernle Bradford, Nelson: The Essential Hero (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 33 – 5; Terry Coleman, Nelson: The Man and the Legend (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), pp. 13 – 14; Richard Holmes, Southey on Nelson (London: Harper, 2004). 7. David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, Nelson: The Immortal Memory (London: Dent, 1988), p. 12. 8. John Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory (London: Cape, 2004), pp. 63 –81. 9. Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), pp. 225 – 356 (p. 227). 10. Glyn Williams, Voyages of Delusion: The Northwest Passage in The Age of Reason (London: Harper Collins, 2002), p. 278; Ann Savours, ‘“A very interesting point in geography”: The 1773 Phipps Expedition towards the North Pole’, Arctic, 37 (1984), pp. 402– 28. 11. The term ‘myth’ itself is, of course, problematic. A defining framework suggests a ‘fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology; a popular belief or story that has become associated with a person, institution, or occurrence, especially one considered to illustrate an ideal’. Anthony Smith draws attention to the potency of mythic images, which encapsulate elements of ‘historical fact’ and ‘legendary elaboration’. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I refer to myth also with Roland Barthes’s usage of the concept to mind: myths as everyday signals, textual and visual, that carry multiple levels of meaning. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 12. Cynthia Fansler Behrman, ‘Heroism and the Myth of Nelson’, in Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), pp. 91 –107; C.I. Hamilton, ‘Naval Hagiography and the Victorian Hero’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 381 – 98. 13. Colin White, ‘Nelson Apotheosised: The Creation of the Nelson Legend’, in Admiral Lord Nelson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 93–114; Marianne Czisnik, ‘The Uses and Abuses of a Controversial Hero’, in Horatio Nelson (London: Hodder, 2005), pp. 97–157.

372

NOTES TO PAGES 78 – 84

14. John MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’, in Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850 – 1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 109 – 37. 15. Tim Barringer, ‘Fabricating Africa: Livingstone and the Visual Image 1850 – 1874’, in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), pp. 169 – 200. 16. Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer (London: Belhaven, 1993). 17. Williams, Voyages of Delusion, p. xv. 18. Savours, ‘A very interesting point in geography’, pp. 402– 28. 19. [Anon] Journal of a Voyage Undertaken by Order of His Present Majesty, for Making Discoveries Towards the North Pole (London: Newbery, 1773 –4), pp. 60 – 2; see also James Allen, Master’s log of the Carcass, PRO, ADM 52/1639[7]. Lutwidge’s journal can be found at PRO, ADM 55/12. 20. Sugden, Nelson: A Dream of Glory, p. 73. 21. Written at Port Mahon and dated 15 October 1799. Over thirty years later, in 1844, a version of the ‘Sketch’ was reproduced in Nicolas’ formidable Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson and as an appendix in subsequent editions of Southey’s Life of Nelson. Colin White, ‘Nelson’s Sketch’, Trafalgar Chronicle, 14 (2004), pp. 15 – 21. 22. Constantine John Phipps, A Voyage Towards the North Pole Undertaken by His Majesty’s Command in 1773 (London: Nourse, 1774). 23. Phipps, A Voyage Towards the North Pole (Dublin: Sleater, 1775); John Pinkerton, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World (London: Longman, 1808), i, pp. 538 – 94. 24. Cecil Harcourt-Smith, The Society of Dilettanti (London: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 69 – 75; Lionel Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 221 – 3. 25. John Wright, ‘The Open Polar Sea’, Geographical Review, 43:3 (1953), pp. 338 – 65; Constance Martin, ‘William Scoresby, Jr. (1789 – 1857) and the Open Polar Sea – Myth and Reality’, Arctic, 41 (1988), pp. 39 –47. 26. Phipps, A Voyage Towards the North Pole, pp. 183 –5. 27. ‘A Voyage Towards the North Pole’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 44 (1774), pp. 420 – 4 (p. 424). 28. R.N. Rudmose Brown, ‘British Work in Spitsbergen: Some Historical Notes’, The Scottish Geographical Magazine, 27 (1911), pp. 180 –7 (p. 184); Brown, Spitsbergen (London: Seeley, 1920), pp. 131– 2. 29. Savours, ‘A very interesting point in geography’, p. 402. 30. 4 August 1773, James Allen’s log, PRO, ADM 52/1639[7]. 31. ‘Biographical Memoir of the Right Honourable Lord Nelson of the Nile, K.B.’, The Naval Chronicle, 3 (1800), pp. 157–89 (p. 161). 32. John Fairburn, Life of Admiral Lord Nelson (London: Fairburn, 1806), p. 5. 33. Joshua White, Memoirs of the Professional Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Cundee, 1806), pp. 22 – 4 34. Archibald Duncan, The Life of the Most Noble Lord Horatio Nelson (London: Milner, 1806), pp. 13 – 14. 35. James Harrison, The Life of Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Chapple, 1806), i, p. 33. 373

NOTES TO PAGES 84 – 91

36. The first plate was produced by Edward Orme and dated 20 February 1806. 37. Francis William Blagdon, Graphic History of the Life, Exploits, and Death of Horatio Nelson (London: Orme, 1806), p. 7. 38. Ibid., p. 6. 39. J. Hardy, Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Horatio, Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Crosby, 1806), p. 9. 40. Frederick Lloyd, An Accurate and Impartial Life of the Late Lord Viscount Nelson (Ormskirk: Fowler, 1806), pp. 2 – 3. 41. Adam Collingwood, Anecdotes of the Late Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Stratford, 1806), p. 1. 42. ‘Pursuit of the Bear, Young Nelson in The Arctic Regions after killing a Bear’, painted by William Bromley, engraved by William Henry Worthington, and published by Robert Bowyer on 1 March 1808. 43. James Stanier Clarke and John McArthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K.B.: From His Lordship’s Manuscripts (London: Cadell and Davies, 1809). 44. Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson, ed. by Geoffrey Callender (London: Dent, 1922), p. xxiv. 45. Clarke and McArthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, p. 12. 46. ‘Nelson’s Adventure with a Bear’ by Richard Westall, oil on canvas, 368.3 x 558.8 mm, BHC2907, NMM London. A fashionable painter of historical subjects, Westall was also drawing master to Princess Victoria. For his artistic life, see Richard Westall, ‘The Westall Brothers’, Turner Studies, 4 (1984), pp. 23 – 38. 47. The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. by Kathryn Cave (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), vii, pp. 268– 9. 48. Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, p. 7. 49. Annette Peach, ‘Portraits of Byron’, Walpole Society, 62 (2000), pp. 40 – 6; Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, pp. 225 –356. 50. New Monthly Magazine, 3 (1825), p. 253. 51. ‘Obituary – Richard Westall, Esq. R.A.’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, (1837), pp. 213– 14. 52. John Charnock, Biographical Memoirs of Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Symonds, 1806); T.O. Churchill, The Life of Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Boyer, 1808); James Harrison, The Life of Lord Viscount Nelson (London: Chapple, 1806). 53. Robert Southey, ‘Lives of Nelson’, The Quarterly Review, 5 (1810), pp. 218–62. 54. Ibid., p. 222. 55. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Murray, 1813); The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. by Charles Southey (London: Longmans, 1849 – 50), iv, pp. 6– 7. 56. Critical Review, 4 (1813), pp. 11 – 26 (p. 11). 57. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, 1922), p. xxvi. 58. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Murray, 1813). In 1828 Southey’s life-long friend Charles Bedford, then a senior civil servant, told him he still believed that The Life of Nelson ‘ought to be in the chest of every seaman, from the admiral to the cabin boy’. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, v, p. 335. 59. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Murray, 1813), pp. 11 – 22. 374

NOTES TO PAGES 91 – 96

60. Southey to Rev. Herbert Hill, 1 February 1813. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iv, p. 17. 61. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, 1922), p. xxxi. 62. Southey, ‘Lives of Nelson’, The Quarterly Review, 5 (1810), pp. 218–62 (p. 223). 63. Southey to Walter Savage Landor, 17 December 1817. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iv, pp. 286 – 7. 64. Southey to Rev. Herbert Hill, 1 February 1813. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, iv, p. 17. 65. Eclectic Review, June (1814), pp. 606 – 22. 66. Playbills, various dates for June to August 1818, Theatre Museum, London; Playbill for 16 July 1818, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. Barrymore’s ‘entirely New Interesting Local Melo-drama’ The North Pole! opened at the Royal Coburg on 22 June 1818. 67. For additional information regarding this striking panorama, the first of many polar spectacles to capture the imaginations of audiences in this century, see Henry Aston Barker, Description of A View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen (London: Adlard, 1819); Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! (London: Trefoil, 1988); Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007). 68. William James, The Naval History of Great Britain (London: Baldwin, 1822 – 4); Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Admiral Lord Collingwood, ed. by G.L.N. Collingwood (London: Ridgway, 1828); James Ralfe, The Naval Biography of Great Britain (London: Fenn, 1828). 69. Southey to Charles Watkin Wynn, 4 June 1833, in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. by Kenneth Curry (London: Columbia University Press, 1965) ii, p. 399; Mark Storey, Robert Southey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 330. 70. ‘Colloquies on Society’, The Edinburgh Review, (1830), p. 530. 71. Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Murray, 1830), p. 11. 72. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 73. Tim Fulford, ‘Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen and Marryat’, Modern Language Quarterly, 60:2 (1999), pp. 161–96 (p. 178); Fulford, ‘Romantic Nelsons Rule the Waves: The Naval Hero in Literature’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 15 (2005), pp. 180–91. 74. In 1840 William saw action in Princess Charlotte off the Syrian Coast and described the fight in a report his father showed to that other military hero, the Duke of Wellington. Wellington approved of the account, praising the boy’s zeal and ‘youthful intrepidity’. Norman Gash, Sir Robert Peel (London: Longman, 1972), pp. 178 – 9. 75. ‘Mr Burford’s Panorama of the Battle of Navarino’, The Times, 21 January 1828, p. 3; ‘Panorama, Baker Street, Portman Square’, The Times, 10 March 1828, p. 3. 76. Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘Tar Triumphant; or, Thomas Potter Cooke and Nautical Melodrama’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 17 (2007), pp. 118– 45. 375

NOTES TO PAGES 96 – 102

77. Playbill for 19 November 1827, Special Collections, Museum of London. 78. Playbill for 3 December 1827, Special Collections, Museum of London. 79. Southey, The Life of Nelson, ed. by Alan Palmer (London: Constable, 1999), p. 16. 80. Jack Simmons, Southey (London: Collins, 1945), p. 143. 81. A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson, the Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson, 1897), pp. 12 – 13. 82. Clark Russell, Pictures from the Life of Nelson (London: Bowden, 1897), p. 27. 83. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, 1922), p. xxxviii. 84. The number of expeditions that participated in the search for Sir John Franklin stands at thirty-six. Figures published in a countless number of books during the last one hundred and forty years had set the figure from seventeen to more than seventy. Gillies Ross, ‘The Type and Number of Expeditions in the Franklin Search 1847 – 59’, Arctic, 55:1 (2002), pp. 57 – 69. 85. The History of the King’s Works, Vol. 6, 1782 – 1851, ed. by J. Mordaunt Crook (London: HMSO, 1973), pp. 491 – 4; Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square (London: Wishart, 1976), pp. 48 – 110. On popular representations of this ‘construction debacle’, see Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘The Hero Packs a Punch: Presenting Nelson in the London Charivari’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 91:2 (2005), pp. 329– 57. 86. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Bogue, 1854); John Montmorency Tucker, The Life and Naval Memoirs of Lord Nelson (London: Willoughby, 1859), pp. 7– 8. 87. Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal (London: Longmans, 1852), pp. 47 –9. 88. Ibid., p. 78. 89. John Barrow, Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions (London: Murray, 1846), p. viii. 90. Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time (London: Faber, 1996), p. 184; J.A. Mangan, ‘Muscular, Militaristic and Manly: The British Middle-Class Hero as Moral Messenger’, in European Heroes, ed. by Richard Holt (London: Cass, 1996), pp. 28 – 47. 91. Linda Colley, ‘Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830’, Past and Present, 113 (1986), pp. 97–117 (pp. 105–107). 92. A. Jephson, ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition 1891’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 36 (1892), p. 554. Trevor Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 37 – 9. 93. Francis Egerton, ‘Sir James Ross’s Voyage to the Antarctic Regions’, The Quarterly Review, 81 (1847), pp. 166 – 87 (pp. 166 – 7). 94. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Bell, 1870); ‘Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 17 December 1872, p. 8; Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Bell, 1877), p. 10; ‘Nelson: A Polar Hero’, The Navy, 29 May 1875, p. 519. 95. D. Murray Smith, Arctic Expeditions from British and Foreign Shores (Southampton: Calvert, 1877), pp. 1 – 2. 96. A.L. Baldry, Sir John Everett Millais (London: Bell, 1899), p. 55. For contemporary reviews, compare ‘Exhibition at the Royal Academy’, 376

NOTES TO PAGES 102 – 116

97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

The Times, 2 May 1874, p. 12; ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, Fun, 9 May 1874, p. 190. Souvenir reproductions of the work were widely circulated. Whilst hunting in the Great Karoo, Millais’ son even recounted discovering a print adorning the wall of a Hottentot shepherd’s hut. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (London: Methuen, 1899), ii, pp. 48 – 51. For Ruskin’s critique of the value of polar exploration in 1886, see The Works of John Ruskin (London: Allen, 1904), xiv, p. 496. The Illustrated London News, 7 May 1864, p. 455; The Times, 30 April 1864, p. 146; The Examiner, 30 April 1864, p. 280; Spectator, 14 May 1864, p. 564. Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘Displaying Nelson: Navalism and ‘The Exhibition’ of 1891’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 14 (2004), pp. 53 – 86; The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 1891, p. 7. ‘Trafalgar Day’, The Illustrated London News, 24 October 1896, p. 531. The Naval Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition, Official Guide and Catalogue (London: Gale and Polden, 1905), p. 56. Albert Markham, Northward Ho! (London: Macmillan, 1879). Ibid., pp. x– xi. Ibid., p. xiii. The Athenaeum, 2 August 1879, clipping in Markham’s scrapbook, NMM MRK/31. The Daily Telegraph, 14 August 1879. The Graphic, 12 July 1879. ‘A Plea for Another Arctic Expedition’, Daily Review, 12 August 1879. ‘Review’, Sketch, 15 July 1879. ‘A Plea for Another Arctic Expedition’, Daily Review, 12 August 1879. Literary Churchman, 9 August 1879, pp. 312– 13. Ibid., p. 313; Glasgow Herald, 16 August 1879. The Scotsman, 1 August 1879. Southey, The Life of Nelson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1883); The Life of Nelson (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1891); The Life of Nelson (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1896); The Life of Nelson (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1911). Lathom Browne, Nelson: The Public and Private Life (London: Unwin, 1891), p. 8. Coleman, Nelson, p. 410. Richard Holmes, Horatio Nelson (London: Scott, 1905), p. 12. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, 1922), p. 6. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Folio Society, 1956), p. 32. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Constable, 1999), p. 21. A Voyage to the North Pole by Benjamin Bragg, accompanied by his Friend Captain Slapperwhack (London: Walker, 1817). Ibid., pp. 102– 3. Frederick Innes-Lillingston, The Land of the White Bear (London: Marshall, 1876), pp. 77 – 8. John Tillotson, Adventures in the Ice (London: Hogg, 1869), pp. 70 – 1. ‘Polar Bear Stories by an Old Traveller’, The Boy’s Own Paper, 15 March 1879, pp. 131– 3. 377

NOTES TO PAGES 117 – 134

126. Thomas Frost, The Realm of the Ice King (London: RTS, 1891), p. 5. 127. Ibid., pp. 82 – 7. 128. H.W.G. Hyrst, Adventures in the Arctic Regions (London: Seeley, 1910), pp. 81 – 4. 129. Jay Henry Mowbray, The Marvellous Wonders of the Polar World (New York: Bertron, 1909). 130. Stuart Hannabuss, ‘Ballantyne’s Message of Empire’, in Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 53 – 71 131. Robert Ballantyne, Fast in the Ice (London: Nisbet, 1891), pp. 55 – 66. 132. Frank Shaw, First at the Pole (London: Cassell, 1909), pp. 78 –92. 133. William Kingston, Arctic Adventures (London: Routledge, 1882), p. 104. 134. William Kingston, The Story of Nelson (London: Groombridge, 1873); Gordon Stables, Hearts of Oak (London: Shaw, 1892), p. 113. 135. Florence Tapsell, I Want to be a Sailor (Leeds: Arnold, 1920), pp. 19 – 27. 136. Laurence du Garde Peach, The Story of Nelson (Loughborough: Hepworth, 1957), p. 10. Peach was a prolific author in the incredibly successful ‘Ladybird’ series, producing King Alfred the Great (1956), Sir Walter Raleigh (1957), The Story of Captain Cook (1958), Florence Nightingale (1959), David Livingstone (1960), Marco Polo (1962), Henry V (1962), Alexander the Great (1963), Captain Scott (1963), Richard the Lion Heart (1965), and The Story of Napoleon (1968), among countless others. 137. ‘The Great Sailor: The Life Story of Horatio Nelson’ ran in The Eagle from 6 July 1956 to 15 March 1957. 138. Frank Humphris, Nelson (Loughborough: Ladybird, 1980), pp. 6 – 7. Nelson was part of the ‘Great Men Series’ that included the usual favourites and some new visions such as Queen Victoria (1976), Elizabeth Gaskell (1977), John Wesley (1977), Sir Francis Drake (1977), Captain Cook (1980), Sir Walter Raleigh (1980), and Marco Polo (1980). 139. Philip Reeve, Horatio Nelson and His Victory (London: Scholastic, 2003), pp. 33 – 8. 140. What Have We Here? by Andrew Motion. He read the poem on the BBC R4 programme ‘Nelson, the Latest’ on 17 October 2005. 141. Southey, The Life of Nelson (London: Dent, 1922), p. xxxix. 142. Ibid., p. 323. CHAPTER 3 – THE NORTH STAR 1. ‘Captain Ross’, Montreal Gazette, 31 December 1833, p. 1. 2. James Savelle and Clive Holland, ‘John Ross and Bellot Strait: Personality Versus Discovery’, Polar Record, 23:145 (1987), pp. 411 – 17; Holland and Savelle, ‘My Dear Beaufort: A Personal Letter from John Ross’s Arctic Expedition of 1829 – 33’, Arctic, 40:1 (1987), pp. 66 – 77. 3. Ernest Dodge, The Polar Rosses (London: Faber, 1973). 4. M.J. Ross, Polar Pioneers (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).

378

NOTES TO PAGES 134 – 137

5. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail (London: Viking, 1988), p. 212; Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (London: Granta, 1998), pp. 305– 18; Ray Edinger, Fury Beach (New York: Berkley, 2003). 6. It is now broadly accepted that the term ‘celebrity’ first gained currency in the eighteenth century, when heroes and heroines were no longer saints, monarchs, or remote historical figures but recognisable icons of a newer, brasher climate, fuelled by an expanding print industry. For distinctions between fame and celebrity, see Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2003); Shearer West, The Image of the Actor (London: Pinter, 1991); The Creation of Celebrity, ed. by Martin Postle (London: Tate, 2005). 7. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); David Marshall, Celebrity and Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Neal Gabler, Life the Movie (New York: Vintage, 1998); Marjorie Garber, ‘Greatness’, in Symptoms of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 17 – 43; David Giles, Illusions of Immortality (London: Macmillan, 2000); David Gritten, Fame (London: Lane, 2002). 8. Two pioneering collections are Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, ed. by Geoffrey Cubitt and Allen Warren (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) and Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660 – 2000, ed. by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (London: Macmillan, 2005). 9. Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Atheneum, 1961); Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 17 – 20. 11. The pioneering study that gave birth to this expanding field of research, loosely labelled ‘the history of the book’, is Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). See also Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Encounters in the Victorian Press, ed. by Laurel Brake and Julie Codell (London: Macmillan, 2005); 12. Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism During the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland, 1988); Richard Altick, Punch (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997); Richard Noakes, ‘Punch and Comic Journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, ed. by Geoffrey Cantor and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 91 – 122. 13. The peripatetic British Association held its first gathering at York in 1831 and its annual performance of meetings and lavish dinners thrived throughout the 1830s. The classic study is Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). The Geographical Society of London was founded in 1830, under the patronage of the new King, William IV, and was given a Royal Charter by Victoria in 1859. See Hugh Robert Mill, The Record of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830 – 1930 (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1930); Felix Driver, Geography Militant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 24 – 48; Max Jones, ‘Measuring the World’, in The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. by Martin Daunton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 313 – 36. 379

NOTES TO PAGES 137 – 142

14. Compare Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson, 1973) and Edward Pearce, Reform!: The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (London: Cape, 2003). 15. Richard Stein, Victoria’s Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 16. ‘Editorial’, The Times, 13 November 1818, p. 2; ‘Northern Voyage of Discovery’, The Times, 10 April 1819, p. 3; ‘Northern Voyage of Discovery’, The Times, 16 April 1819, p. 2. 17. ‘A Voyage of Discovery’, The Quarterly Review, 21 (1819), pp. 213 – 62 (p. 252). 18. Compare, John Ross, A Voyage of Discovery (London: Murray, 1819); Edward Sabine, Remarks on the Account of the Late Voyage of Discovery to Baffin’s Bay (London: Booth, 1819); John Ross, An Explanation of Captain Sabine’s Remarks (London: Murray, 1819). 19. Munchausen at the Pole (London: Johnston, 1819). 20. Dodge, The Polar Rosses, p. 119. For Felix Booth, see Patrick Balfour Kinross, The Kindred Spirit (London: Newman Neame, 1959). 21. ‘Return of Captain Ross’, The Edinburgh Observer, 15 October 1833. 22. ‘Return of Captain Ross from his Voyage of Discovery’, The Edinburgh Evening Courant, 17 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’, The Edinburgh Observer, 18 October 1833, p. 2. 23. ‘Return of Captain Ross’, The Glasgow Free Press, 16 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’s Arctic Expedition’, Caledonian Mercury, 17 October 1833; ‘Return of Captain Ross and His Crew’, Glasgow Herald, 18 October 1833, p. 1; ‘The Arctic Regions’, Glasgow Herald, 23 October 1833, p. 3; ‘Captain Ross’, The Edinburgh Observer, 18 October 1833, p. 2; ‘My Dear Sir’, The Edinburgh Observer, 22 October 1833, p. 3. 24. ‘Return of Captain Ross from his Voyage of Discovery’, The Edinburgh Evening Courant, 17 October 1833; also quoted in ‘Captain Ross’, The Edinburgh Observer, 18 October 1833, p. 2. 25. ‘News of Captain Ross’, The Morning Herald, 17 October 1833; ‘Return of Captain Ross and His Brave Companions’, The Morning Herald, 18 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’, The Morning Herald, 22 October 1833; ‘Arrival of Captain Ross in Davis’s Straits’, The Times, 17 October 1833, p. 2; ‘Captain Ross’, The Times, 18 October 1833, p. 2; ‘Captain Ross’, The Times, 19 October 1833, p. 3. 26. ‘Captain Ross’, The Birmingham Advertiser, 17 October 1833. 27. ‘Safety of Captain Ross and the Crew of the Discovery’, The Bristol Mirror, 19 October 1833. 28. ‘Discovery of Captain Ross and His Brave Associates’, The Dublin Evening Mail, 16 October 1833; ‘Discovery of Captain Ross and His Brave Associates’, The Dublin Observer, 19 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’, The Dublin Observer, 26 October 1833. 29. ‘Return of Captain Ross’, The York Herald and General Advertiser, 19 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’, The York Herald and General Advertiser, 26 October 1833. 380

NOTES TO PAGES 142 – 146

30. ‘The Northern Expedition’, Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, 20 October 1833, p. 495. 31. ‘Arrival of Captain Ross’, The Manchester Herald, 23 October 1833; ‘Arctic Expedition-Captain Ross’, The Manchester Times and Gazette, 26 October 1833. 32. Among many accounts compare, ‘Arrival of Captain Ross’, The Times, 21 October 1833, p. 3; ‘Arrival of Captain Ross at Hull’, The Edinburgh Evening Courant, 21 October 1833; ‘Safe Arrival of Captain Ross, and Autograph Narrative of his Voyage’, The Sunday Herald, 27 October 1833, p. 74. 33. ‘Northern Expedition’, The Comet, 21 October 1833; ‘Captain Ross’, The Comet, 21 October 1833. 34. ‘Reception of Captain Ross in Hull’, The Star, 21 October 1833; ‘The Guernsey Star’, The Quarterly Review of the Guernsey Society, 21:4 (1965), pp. 87 – 8. 35. ‘Captain Ross’, The Comet, 25 October 1833. 36. Compare, ‘Expedition of Captain Ross’, The Times, 24 October 1833, p. 3; ‘Expedition of Captain Ross’, The Edinburgh Observer, 29 October 1833, p. 1. 37. ‘Expedition of Captain Ross’, The Comet, 1 November 1833. 38. ‘Spirit of Discovery’, The Mirror, 22 (1833), pp. 281– 3. 39. ‘The Arctic Expedition Under Captain Ross’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 102 (1833), pp. 322 – 5 (p. 322). 40. ‘Arctic Expeditions’, The Nautical Magazine, 21 (1833), pp. 665–75 (p. 666). 41. ‘Risk and General Policy of Arctic Expeditions’, The Nautical Magazine, 22 (1833), pp. 704– 5. 42. For improving magazines, see Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Jonathan Topham, ‘The Mirror of Literature’, in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 37 –66. 43. ‘The Pioneer of Cheap Literature’, The Bookseller, 20 November 1859, pp. 1326 – 7. 44. The Mirror, 3 (1824), iii; The Mirror, 22 (1833), iii-iv; ‘General Index’, The Mirror, 13 (1834), pp. 433 – 9. 45. ‘The Pioneer of Cheap Literature’, The Bookseller, 20 November 1859, p. 1326; The Mirror, 5 (1825), iii-iv. 46. The Mirror, 4 (1824), p. 208; Jonathan Topham, ‘John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the Production of Cheap Periodicals in the 1820s’, Book History, 8 (2005), pp. 75 – 106. 47. ‘Captain John Franklin’, The Mirror, 5 (1825), pp. 417– 22 (p. 417). 48. ‘Outline of the Public Services of Captain John Ross’, The Mirror, 22 (1833), v-viii; ‘Captain Ross’, The Mirror, 23 (1834), pp. 33 – 5; ‘Spirit of Discovery’, The Mirror, 22 (1833), pp. 281 –3; and ‘Notes of a Reader: Early English Navigators to the North West Regions’, The Mirror, 22 (1833), pp. 299 – 302. 49. ‘Some Account of the Arctic Regions’, The Saturday Magazine, 3:91 (1833), pp. 209 – 16 (p. 209). 50. The Story of the SPCK (London: Baber, 1928), p. 5. 381

NOTES TO PAGES 147 – 155

51. ‘A Further Account of the Arctic Regions’, The Saturday Magazine, 3:96 (1833), pp. 249– 56 (p. 255). 52. Ibid., p. 256. 53. Louis Billington, ‘The Religious and Newspaper Press, 1770 – 1870’, in The Press in English Society (London: Associated Universities Press, 1986), pp. 113 –32; Jonathan Topham, ‘Periodicals and the Making of Reading Audiences’, in Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 57 – 69. 54. ‘Spirit of Discovery’, The Mirror, 12 (1833), pp. 281– 3; ‘Unexpected Meeting with Captain Ross’, Youth’s Magazine, 94:8 (1835), pp. 336 – 9; ‘The North Magnetic Pole’, Youth’s Magazine, 91:8 (1835), pp. 232 –6. 55. ‘To our Readers and the Public’, Pinnock’s Guide to Knowledge, 83 (1833), p. 648. 56. Ibid., p. 651. 57. ‘Gallery of Literary Characters: Captain Ross’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 9:49 (1834), p. 64. 58. Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Joseph Roach, ‘It’, Theatre Journal, 56:4 (2004), pp. 555 – 68. 59. ‘Social Zoology’, George Cruikshank’s Table Book (London: Punch Office, 1845), pp. 141– 3. 60. ‘Rossiana’, The Age, 3 November 1833, p. 351; ‘Rossiana’, The Nautical Magazine, 22 (1833), p. 747. 61. ‘Arrival of Captain Ross’, The Age, 20 October 1833, p. 336; ‘Captain Ross’s Greatest Discovery’, The Age, 10 November 1833, p. 354; ‘Intrepid Explorer’, The Age, 10 November 1833, p. 355. 62. ‘Shabby Work’, Figaro in London, 30 November 1833, p. 190. 63. ‘Gallery of Literary Characters’ Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 9:49 (1834), p. 64. 64. ‘Shabby Work’, Figaro in London, 30 November 1833, p. 190. 65. ‘The Royal Astronomical Society’, The Times, 11 November 1833, p. 1. 66. ‘Royal Geographical Society, Captain Ross’, The Nautical Magazine, 22 (1833), pp. 740 –1 (p. 741). The citation for Ross’s medal, only the third yet awarded: ‘for his discovery of Boothia Felix and King William Land and for his famous sojourn of four winters in the Arctic’. 67. ‘Royal Human Society’, The Times, 18 April 1834, p. 6. 68. ‘Sons of the Scottish Clergy’, The Times, 7 December 1833, p. 4. 69. ‘Merchant Seaman’s Orphan Asylum’, The Times, 6 December 1833, p. 3. 70. The Cold Reception; or, Captain Ross’s Visit to the Pole (London: Collard, 1834), p. 5, verse 9. 71. David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2004). Playbill for 20 December 1819, Theatre Museum, London; Playbill for 17 February 1820, Guildhall Library, London. The Drury Lane Christmas Pantomime for 1820 was The North West Passage; or, Harlequin Esquimaux and starred Charles Dibdin cavorting amongst ‘The Frozen Sea and Icebergs with the Discovery Ships’. Playbill for 2 January 1821, Theatre Museum, London. 72. Playbill for 26 December 1829, Guildhall Library, London. 382

NOTES TO PAGES 157 – 162

73. Playbill for 2 January 1829, and various dates through to 18 March 1829, Item PN2596H9T3, Brynmor Jones Library Archives, University of Hull. 74. ‘Covent-Garden Theatre’, The Times, 27 December 1833, p. 3; ‘Old Mother Hubbard’, The Age, 29 December 1833, p. 454. 75. Playbill for 26 December 1833, Guildhall Library, London. As far as I am aware, the only known image of a polar pantomime set survives in the theatre collections of the University of Bristol. See sketch, Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog, painted by J.H. Grieve, c. 1835, Item RS/064/0078. 76. ‘Royal Pavilion Theatre’, The Times, 28 October 1833, p. 2. See also ‘Theatricals’, Figaro in London, 11 January 1834, p. 8. 77. For their diverse audiences, see A.E. Wilson, East End Entertainment (London: Baker, 1954), pp. 68 – 92; Victorian Theatre, ed. by Russell Jackson (London: Black, 1989), pp. 75 –7; Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp. 55 – 72; ‘New Royal Pavilion Theatre’, The Illustrated London News, 6 November 1858, pp. 429 – 30. 78. Charles Rice, The London Theatre in the Eighteen-Thirties (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1950); Jacky Bratton, ‘Theatre in London in 1832: A New Overview’, in New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 36 – 66. 79. Review of The Mariner’s Dream; or, The Jew of Plymouth, cited in East End Entertainment, p. 73. 80. Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), pp. 93 – 117; Peter Brookes, The Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Jim Davis, ‘Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama’, New Theatre Quarterly, 4:14 (1988), pp. 122 – 43; Jacky Bratton, ‘British Heroism and the Structure of Melodrama’, in Acts of Supremacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 18 – 61. 81. See Playbill for 13 March 1834, Item TCPB/000329, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. 82. Captain Ross; or, The Hero of the Arctic Regions, A Drama, in Three Acts (London: Skelt, 1834), pp. 11 – 12. 83. R.J. Broadbent, Annals of the Liverpool Stage (Liverpool: Howell, 1908), p. 147. 84. The Bristol Mirror, 15 March 1834; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 22 March 1834, p. 5; The Bristol Mercury, 8 March 1833, p. 5. Playbill for 13 March 1834, Item TCPB/000329, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. 85. The definitive study remains George Speaight, The History of the English Toy Theatre (London; Studio Vista, 1969). Another ardent fan was Robert Louis Stevenson who saved his pocket money as a boy to buy Skelt’s latest nautical dramas. See ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’, The Magazine of Art, 7 (1884), pp. 227 – 32. 86. ‘Characters and Scenes in Captain Ross; or, the Hero of the Arctic Regions – As Performed at the Royal Pavilion Theatre’, Items 99.7/472a-99.7/472t, Special Collections, Museum of London; ‘Skelt’s Scenes in Captain Ross’, Items 99.7/94y-99.7/94ab; ‘Webb’s Miniature Portraits in Captain Ross’, Item 99.132/597; and Private Collections. 383

NOTES TO PAGES 162 – 170

87. For the power of this medium, see Joanna Woodall, Portraiture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Andreas Beyer, Portraits, trans. by Steven Lindberg (New York: Abrams, 2003); Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 88. Among many others, see Joseph Kestner, ‘Victorian Military Painting and the Construction of Masculinity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 24 (1996), pp. 51 – 97; Richard Walker, The Nelson Portraits (Portsmouth: Royal Naval Museum, 1998); John Walker, Art and Celebrity (London: Pluto, 2002); Milo Keynes, The Iconography of Sir Isaac Newton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). 89. ‘Captain Ross’s Interview With the Natives in Felix Harbour’, The Times, 10 December 1833, p. 1. There were various printings by Charles Joseph Hullmandel, compare NPG D19367 and NMM PAD3607. 90. ‘Portrait of Captain Ross’, The Sunday Herald and United Kingdom, 19 January 1834, p. 20. 91. The Sunday Herald and United Kingdom, 23 February 1834, p. 60. 92. For Croquis’s satire, see ‘Gallery of Literary Characters: No. XLIV, Captain Ross’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 9:49 (1834), p. 64. 93. There are copies by Tallis, engraved by Robert Hart, and circulated by the printers Gaywood and Longworth. See also NPG D21781. 94. ‘Appendix to the Narrative of Sir John Ross’s Voyage’, The Literary Gazette, 28 November 1835, p. 755. 95. For this popular mass medium, see Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion, 1999); Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama (New York: Zone, 1997); William Galperin, ‘The Panorama and the Diorama: Aids to Distraction’, in The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 34 – 71; Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! (London: Trefoil, 1988). 96. ‘Panorama of Boothia’, The Times, 14 January 1834, p. 5. 97. Henry Selous’s private journal, first attributed by Carol Cronquist, is in the collections of the National Art Library, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, MSL/1979/5117. 98. Robert Barker had started the tradition of implicit celebrity ‘endorsements’ by inviting Nelson to view his ‘Panorama of Copenhagen’. This was something that benefited both the individual and proprietor: when they had met in 1799 at Palermo, Nelson thanked Barker for ‘prolonging’ the fame of the Battle of the Nile. Barker’s son Henry painted a new naval panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1806 and it was so popular that it was displayed for over a year, longer than any other of its type. 99. ‘Narrative of a Second Voyage’, The Quarterly Review, 54 (1835), pp. 1 –39 (p. 2); Robert Huish, The Last Voyage of Captain Sir John Ross, etc (London: Saunders, 1835). 100. Description of a View of the Continent of Boothia, etc (London: Nichols, 1834). 101. ‘Panorama of Boothia’, The Times, 14 January 1834, p. 5; The Times, 29 January 1834, p. 2. 102. ‘Burford’s Panorama of Boothia’, The Sunday Herald and United Kingdom, 19 January 1834, p. 19. 384

NOTES TO PAGES 170 – 178

103. ‘Fine Arts’, The Literary Gazette, 18 January 1834, pp. 42 – 3. 104. Queen’s Bazaar Programme, December 1833, Archival Collections, Museum of London; Queen’s Bazaar Handbill, January 1834, John Johnson Collection, Oxford. Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 163 –72. 105. ‘Captain Ross’s Interview With the Natives in Felix Harbour’, The Times, 10 December 1833, p. 1; ‘Physiorama and Diorama’, The Times, 19 March 1834, p. 5. 106. ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, The Times, 19 May 1835, p. 5; ‘Conflagration of the Firework Tower at Vauxhall-Gardens’, The Times, 1 July 1837, p. 5. Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 319– 22. 107. ‘Royal Gardens Vauxhall’, The Times, 26 May 1834, p. 4; ‘Royal Gardens’, The Times, 29 May 1834, p. 2. 108. ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, The Times, 31 May 1834, p. 3. Handbill for the Royal Gardens, Vauxhall, 30 May 1834, Private Collection; Playbill for the Royal Gardens, ‘Grand Festival Galas’, 27 and 30 June 1834, Private Collection. 109. ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, The Times, 31 May 1834, p. 3; ‘Royal Gardens, Vauxhall’, The Age, 1 June 1834; ‘Royal Gardens, Vauxhall’, The Age, 8 June 1834; ‘Royal Gardens, Vauxhall’, The Age, 13 July 1834; ‘Royal Gardens, Vauxhall’, The Age, 24 August 1834. 110. ‘Vauxhall’, The Age, 8 June 1834, p. 178; ‘Royal Gardens’, The Age, 29 June 1834, p. 206: ‘Captain Ross to the North Pole is a very entertaining exhibition and is rightly admired by the visitors of this enchanting place of entertainment’. 111. ‘The Boarding House’, Dickens’ Journalism, ed. by Michael Slater (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), pp. 299 – 300. 112. ‘Vauxhall Gardens’, The Times, 31 May 1834, p. 3. 113. Playbill for the Royal Gardens, ‘Grand Festival Galas’, 27 and 30 June 1834, Private Collection. For a number of advertisements, compare The Times, 2 July 1834, p. 4; The Times, 8 August 1834, p. 2; The Times, 26 September 1834, p. 2. 114. ‘Vauxhall’, The Times, 27 September 1834, p. 3; ‘Royal Gardens, Vauxhall’, The Age, 21 September 1834, p. 239. 115. Parliament had abolished the Board of Longitude in 1828, withdrawing the graduated prize system that would reward those navigators who penetrated ever closer to the Pole or further westward along the illusory passage. This, in fact, had provided a stimulus to the Ross voyage: his patron Booth had initially been unwilling to finance the venture in fear of appearing to chase such a reward, but as soon as the Longitude Act had been repealed he committed himself fully to the project. See ‘House of Commons’, The Times, 28 June 1828, p. 1. Booth put up £10,000 (an additional £8,000 was later added), to which Ross added £3,000 of his own. 116. PRO, ADM 1/2435. 117. Ibid. 118. ‘House of Commons’, The Times, 11 March 1834, p. 1. See SPRI, MS 581/1. 119. ‘Ross in Difficulty’, Figaro in London, 15 March 1834, p. 42. 120. ‘Parliamentary Intelligence-Captain Ross’, The Times, 18 March 1834, p. 1; ‘Grant to Captain Ross’, The Times, 12 March 1834, p. 6; ‘Grant to Captain Ross’, The Times, 2 May 1834, p. 6. 385

NOTES TO PAGES 179 – 185

121. ‘Arctic Sea Expedition’, The Times, 22 March 1834, p. 4. 122. Narrative of the Second Voyage of Captain Ross to the Arctic Regions etc (London: Renshaw, 1834). 123. ‘House of Commons’, The Times, 22 July 1834, p. 4; Ross, Polar Pioneers, pp. 172 – 3. 124. ‘Ross and Royalty’, Figaro in London, 12 April 1834, p. 58; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 18 September 1834, p. 2; The Times, 10 January 1835, p. 2; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 3 September 1835, p. 5. 125. ‘Gallery of Literary Characters’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 9:49 (1834), 64. 126. For subscription advertisements, see The Times, 15 April 1835, p. 7; The Times, 26 June 1835, p. 7. 127. John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, etc (London: Webster, 1835); ‘Editorial’, The Times, 14 March 1835, p. 5. 128. ‘Sir John Ross’s Narrative of his Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 13 May 1835, p. 6. 129. Ibid., p. 6. 130. ‘Review of New Books’, The Literary Gazette, 9 May 1835, pp. 289– 92. 131. ‘New Books’, The Mirror, 25 (1835), pp. 313– 17; ‘Voyages and Travels’, The Mirror, 25 (1833), pp. 337– 46; ‘Second Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions’, The Athenaeum, 2 May 1835, pp. 329– 34. 132. ‘Scientific and Literary’, The Athenaeum, June 1835, p. 497. 133. John Ross, Appendix to the Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a NorthWest Passage (London: Webster, 1835); The Times, 7 September 1835, p. 7; The Times, 24 November 1835, p. 7. 134. Edward Parry, Memoirs of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Parry (London: Longman, 1859); Ann Parry, Parry of the Arctic (London: Chatto, 1963), p. 187. 135. James Clark Ross, ‘On the Position of the North Magnetic Pole’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, (1834), pp. 47 – 51 (p. 51); ‘150 years of the North Magnetic Pole’, Nature, 291 (1981), p. 377; Paul Serson, ‘Tracking the North Magnetic Pole’, New Scientist, 4 June 1981, pp. 616 – 18; Anita McConnell, ‘A Day at the North Magnetic Pole’, New Scientist, 4 June 1981, p. 617. 136. Ross, Narrative, pp. 558 –9; ‘Review of New Books’, The Literary Gazette, 9 May 1835, pp. 289 – 92; ‘The North Magnetic Pole’, Youth’s Magazine, 91:8 (1835), pp. 232 – 6. 137. ‘Appendix’, The Literary Gazette, 28 November 1835, pp. 755– 7 (p. 755); ‘Appendix’, The Athenaeum, 21 November 1835, pp. 865 – 6 (p. 865). 138. ‘Narrative of a Second Voyage’, The Edinburgh Review, June (1835), pp. 417 – 53 (p. 418). 139. Ibid., p. 447. 140. Ibid., p. 447. 141. ‘Narrative of a Second Voyage’, The Quarterly Review, 54 (1835), pp. 1 – 39. 142. Ibid., pp. 37 – 8. 143. John Barrow, Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions (London: Murray, 1846), p. 46. ‘Voyages of Discovery’, The Quarterly 386

NOTES TO PAGES 185 – 192

144.

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

Review, 78 (1846), pp. 45 – 8 (p. 46); ‘Voyages of Discovery’, The Athenaeum, 31 January 1846, p. 116. John Ross, Observations on a Work Entitled ‘Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions’ by Sir John Barrow (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1846); Ross, Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin (London: Longmans, 1855), p. 30, and pp. 93 – 4. John Ross, Observations, p. 62. Ibid., p. 61. ‘The Late Rear-Admiral Sir John Ross’, The Illustrated London News, 13 September 1856, p. 275. ‘Review of New Books’, The Literary Gazette, 9 May 1835, p. 292. Elisha Kent Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (London: Sampson, 1854), p. 153. ‘Sir John Franklin’, The Times, 16 February 1850, p. 8. Charlotte Yonge, A Book of Golden Deeds (London: Blackie, 1864), p. 342. For configurations of the Kane hagiography, compare Samuel Smucker, The Life of Elisha Kent Kane (Philadelphia: Bradley, 1860) and Mark Sawin, Raising Kane (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007). For American spectacles, see Russell Potter and Douglas Wamsley, ‘The Sublime yet Awful Grandeur: The Arctic Panoramas of Elisha Kent Kane’, Polar Record, 35:194 (1999), pp. 193 –206. CHAPTER 4 – A FLIGHT OF FANCY

1. Nellis Crouse, The Search for the North Pole (New York: Smith, 1947), p. 239. 2. On 1 June 2000 Hempleman-Adams piloted Britannic Challenger to within twelve miles of the Pole; a remarkable feat made possible by the technical expertise of Bristol-based manufacturer Cameron Balloons and the ‘meteorological genius’ of Luc Trullemans who identified poleward wind-tracks and guided the balloon by radio and satellite phone. Hempleman-Adams returned to Spitsbergen having completed a journey of 1,400 miles in just 132 hours. See At the Mercy of the Winds (London: Bantam, 2001). 3. ‘Whatever one man is capable of imagining’, Verne once said, ‘other men will prove themselves capable of realizing’. Russell Freedman, Jules Verne: A Portrait of a Prophet (New York: Holiday, 1965), p. 11. 4. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, ‘Introduction to the Cheyne Articles’, The Bulletin of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, 33:4 (1935), pp. 97 – 8. 5. Carolyn Ward, ‘Early Arctic Ballooning and Further Light on Cheyne’s Proposal’, The Bulletin, 33:4 (1935), pp. 106– 24; Rupert Gould, ‘Cheyne’s Proposed Arctic Expedition, 1880’, The Bulletin, 33:4 (1935), pp. 99 – 105. 6. Louis Segal, The Conquest of the Arctic (London: Harrap, 1939), pp. 227 – 44; Lawrence Kirwan, The White Road (London: Hollis, 1959), p. 210; Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail (London: Viking, 1988).

387

NOTES TO PAGES 192 – 195

7. John Grierson, Challenge to the Poles (London: Foulis, 1964). See also Basil Clarke, Polar Flight (London: Allan, 1964); K.C. Tessendorf, Over the Edge (New York: Atheneum, 1998); P.J. Capelotti, By Airship to the North Pole (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 8. On ballooning and the changing nature of ‘discovery’, see Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Ballooning and the Taste for Discovery’, in The Balloon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), pp. 34 – 51; Richard Gillespie, ‘Ballooning in France and Great Britain, 1783 – 1786: Aerostation and Adventure’, Isis, 75 (1984), pp. 249 – 68; Jennifer Tucker, ‘Voyages of Discovery on Oceans of Air: Scientific Observation and the Image of Science in an Age of “Balloonacy”’, Osiris, 11 (1996), pp. 144 –76. On the state of Victorian aeronautics, see John Alexander, The Conquest of the Air (London: Partridge, 1902); Charles Vivian, A History of Aeronautics (London: Collins, 1921); J.E. Hodgson, The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924); L.T.C. Rolt, The Aeronauts (New York: Walker, 1966). 9. Richard Gillespie, ‘Ballooning in France and Great Britain, 1783 – 1786’, Isis, 75 (1984), pp. 249– 68 (p. 262). 10. For an emerging historiography, compare Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960); Angela Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005). 11. Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, First Crossing of the Polar Sea (New York: Doran, 1927), pp. 16 – 17; Air Pioneering in the Arctic (New York: Americana, 1929), p. 14. For the polar lecturing of Scott, Ponting and Shackleton, see Max Jones, The Last Great Quest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); for Peary and Nansen, see Robert David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818 –1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 73 – 8. 12. P.R. Dawes, ‘Lauge Koch: Pioneer Geo-Explorer of Greenland’s Far North’, Earth Sciences Technology, 10:2 (1991), pp. 130– 53; Christopher Ries, ‘Lauge Koch and the Mapping of North East Greenland: Tradition and Modernity in Danish Arctic Research, 1920 – 1940’, in Narrating the Arctic (Canton: Science History, 2002), pp. 199– 231. 13. Laurence Goldstein, The Flying Machine and Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Henry Cord Meyer, Airshipmen, Businessmen, and Politics, 1890 – 1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Flyers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 14. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Bowdoin Van Riper, Imagining Flight (College Station: Texas University Press, 2004); Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); David Courtwright, Sky as Frontier (College Station: Texas University Press, 2005). 15. Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007), pp. 157 – 9. 16. ‘The North Pole’, The New York Herald, 18 November 1881, p. 5.

388

NOTES TO PAGES 195 – 198

17. Carte-de-visite, ‘Maull & Co’, c. 1876, Private Collection. On the creation of the Arctic Medal, see London Gazette, 5 May 1857; Neville Poulsom, The White Ribbon (London: Seaby, 1968), p. 9. 18. Biographical details relating to Cheyne’s birth, childhood, and early naval career have been difficult to obtain. There are few surviving family records. See W.D. Cheyne-MacPherson, The Cheynes of Inverugie (Kirkwall: Kirkwall, 1943), pp. 32 – 4; Clements Markham, The Arctic Navy List (London: Griffin, 1875), p. 9. In tracing some family details I acknowledge the assistance of Jim Cheyne in Arizona and the Catto family in Toronto. 19. The Cheynes of Inverugie, p. 34. 20. John Franklin Cheyne entered the Merchant Marine and was Captain of a P&O Royal Mail steamer running to Australia. 21. The Times, 9 April 1860, p. 3; National Archives, RG10/1230, Crookham and Fleet Parish, Folio 68, p. 4. 22. Advertisement, Cannon Street Hotel, North Pole Lecture, 2 November 1877, Private Collection. For details on the family at Westgate Terrace see National Archives, RG11/Kensington, St Mary Parish, Folio 118, p. 16. 23. On the dissolution of the Order of Naval Knights of Windsor in 1892, money was reallocated into a special Travers Pension fund, payable to ‘deserving elderly officers’. See Rupert Gould, ‘Cheyne’s Proposed Arctic Expedition, 1880’, p. 105; Peter Clissold, ‘Samuel Travers and the Naval Knights of Windsor’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 60:1 (1974), pp. 41 – 61. 24. A city directory lists him as ‘John P. Cheyne, Sea Captain’ living at 109 Pleasant Street, a main street alongside the quay. McAlpine’s Halifax City Directory for 1898 – 99 (Halifax: McAlpine Directory Company, 1899), p. 167; Nova Scotia Archives, ‘Register of Burial Permits in the City of Halifax’, February 1902, p. 285; The Times, 11 February 1902, p. 10. Cheyne is buried in the shade of a large oak tree: there is no grave marker, just a lawn of grass. Features on the Arctic chart may serve as a memorial to his contribution to exploration. Cheyne Islands lie off the north-east coast of Bathurst Island and to the east end of Griffith Island in Barrow Strait can be found Cheyne Point. 25. Richard Cyriax, ‘Sir James Clark Ross and the Franklin Search Expedition’, Polar Record, 3:24 (1942), pp. 528– 40; A.G.E. Jones, ‘Sir James Clark Ross and the Voyage of the Enterprise and Investigator, 1848 – 49’, Geographical Journal, 137:2 (1971), pp. 165 – 79. 26. ‘Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin’, The Illustrated London News, 13 May 1848, p. 318; ‘British Adventure’, The Illustrated London News, 13 October 1849, pp. 241 – 2; ‘Pictures of the Polar Regions’, The Illustrated London News, 13 October 1849, pp. 248 – 50; ‘Sir James Ross’ Arctic Expedition’, The Illustrated London News, 17 November 1849, pp. 323 – 4. 27. Burford’s Arctic panorama opened on 11 February 1850. There was also an ‘Arctic Room’ in which portraits of naval officers, sledges and equipment were displayed: Description of Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (London: Golbourn, 1850); The Times, 29 December 1849, p. 7; The Illustrated London News, 5 January 1850, p. 10; ‘Burford’s Arctic Panorama’, The Illustrated London News, 16 February 1850, p. 114; 389

NOTES TO PAGES 198 – 203

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

‘Burford’s Panorama of the Polar Regions’, The Illustrated London News, 23 February 1850, p. 133. ‘New Panoramic Exhibitions’, The Illustrated London News, 29 December 1849, p. 438. He was appointed Mate on 29 April 1850. The Navy List (London: Murray, 1850), p. 154. Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal (London: Longman, 1852), pp. 170– 1; Arctic Miscellanies (London: Colburn, 1852), p. 127. Arctic Miscellanies, p. 203. ‘The only Lady in this piece has been engaged at an Enormous Sacrifice; it being her first appearance on any Stage!’ A playbill for this performance appears in the Illustrated Arctic News for 31 December 1850. Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, pp. 172 –6. Markham provided a wonderful drawing in his private journal, now in archives of the Royal Geographical Society: ‘Despatches leaving HMS Assistance by balloon and fox’; Ann Savours, The Search for the North West Passage (London: Chatham, 1999), p. 212. Illustrated Arctic News, 30 November 1850, p. 12; ‘Fatal Accident’, Illustrated Arctic News, 31 October 1850, p. 8. Hydrogen gas was generated by pouring sulphuric acid on granulated zinc, a relatively simple task that could ‘be done by any Officer with common attention’. SPRI MS 879/2; D, Sherard Osborn papers, ‘Statement Respecting Paper Messenger Balloons’, 5 April 1850. ‘Naval Intelligence’, The Times, 19 March 1850, p. 8; G. Shepherd to the Admiralty, 12 March 1850 (ADM 1/5606:287, Public Record Office) and 9 October 1851 (ADM 1/5610:231 PRO). Peter Wordie, ‘Franklin’s Balloon Messages’, Polar Post, 30 (1998), pp. 75 – 9. Arctic Miscellanies, p. 246. Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, p. 174. The ‘Melville Island Division’ consisted of five sledges. McClintock’s main party hauled the Perseverance (motto ‘Persevere to the End’); Ship Surgeon A.R. Bradford with Resolute (‘St George and Merry England Onward to the Rescue’) accompanied McClintock to Melville Island and made a complete circuit of Byam Martin Island; Mate W.M. May with sledge Excellent (‘Respice, Prospice’) and Master W.B. Shellabear with Dasher (‘Faithful and Intrepid’) also provided support to the main party. Additional Papers Relative to the Arctic Expedition (London: Eyre, 1852), p. 24; ‘Naval Intelligence’, The Times, 6 December 1851, p. 6. George McDougall, The Eventful Voyage of ‘Resolute’ to the Arctic Regions (London: Longman, 1857), p. 127. Edward Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, etc (London: Reeve, 1855), pp. 152 – 3; Elaine Hoag, ‘Caxtons of the North: Mid-NineteenthCentury Arctic Shipboard Printing’, Book History, 4 (2001), pp. 81 – 114 (pp. 98 – 100). Cheyne has his own polar bear anecdote, rather like Skeffington Lutwidge’s account of the young Nelson, which has lasted in the family: ‘On one of his trips north he captured and tamed a young polar bear which he used to ride. As the animal grew older, however, it became 390

NOTES TO PAGES 203 – 206

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

dangerous, and Cheyne had to shoot it. He stuffed it and presented it to Queen Victoria, who afterwards presented it to the South Kensington Museum’. The Cheynes of Inverugie, p. 34. ‘The Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 12 April 1852, p. 5. Surviving balloon messages are highly coveted items amongst collectors of polar ephemera. In the collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge there are a number of silk messages, as well as a paper fireballoon of the type used on the voyage. SPRI N:1056 – 1058; Y:62/16; MS 1333;D. ‘Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition’, The Times, 23 September 1859, p. 7; ‘Proceedings of the Yacht Fox’, The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859, pp. 327 – 9, including a facsimile of the paper found in the cairn on Point Victory; ‘Captain McClintock’, The Illustrated London News, 8 October 1859, p. 355; ‘Opening of the Cairn on Point Victory’, The Illustrated London News, 15 October 1859, p. 364, which also carries a series of illustrations of the relics. Founded in 1831, the museum of the Royal United Service Institution was an appropriate place for the Franklin relics, within its eclectic paraphernalia of past military glories: ancient weaponry and armour; a model of Waterloo by Siborne, exhibiting some 190,000 figures; a model of Trafalgar arranged on a table made from old planks taken from the deck of Victory; the swords worn by Cromwell at Drogheda and Wolfe at Quebec; Francis Drake’s walking-stick; Captain Cook’s chronometer; and the skeleton of Marengo, Napoleon’s battle-worn horse. See Cruchley’s London (London: Cruchley, 1865); ‘United Service Institution’, The Times, 12 March 1858, p. 8; ‘Royal United Service Institution’, The Times, 16 January 1864, p. 5. John Cheyne, Descriptive Catalogue of Fourteen Stereoscopic Slides of the Relics of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition (London: United Service, [1860]). Clements Markham, ‘Discoveries of the Polaris and Voyage of the Arctic’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 18:1 (1873), pp. 12 – 18, discussion pp. 18 – 21. ‘The Arctic Regions’, The Times, 15 November 1875, p. 12 ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Scotsman, 15 November 1875, p. 5. ‘The Arctic Expedition’, The Scotsman, 20 January 1876, p. 6. Arctic Regions (London: York, 1876), courtesy Magic Lantern Society (MLS) Slide Readings Library, 91047. For more, see Realms of Light, ed. by Richard Crangle (London: MLS, 2005); David Robinson, The Lantern Image (Nutley: MLS, 1993); Magic Images, ed. by Dennis Crompton (London: MLS, 1990); Eyes, Lies and Illusions, ed. by Laurent Mannoni (Aldershot: Humphries, 2004). ‘Commander Cheyne’, The Scotsman, 20 November 1876, p. 6. Edward Daniel Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa (London: Cadell, 1816 – 24), ix, pp. 468 – 95. As a Fellow of Jesus College, Clarke had embarked on an extended tour of Scandinavia with one of his wealthy pupils. In 1790, when still a student, he devoted his last full term at Cambridge to the construction of a large 391

NOTES TO PAGES 206 – 212

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

balloon, which he released from the college cloisters with a kitten as its cargo. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Scandinavia (London: Cadell, 1838), i, p. 494. Jules Francois Dupuis-Delcourt, De L’Art Ae´rostatique (Paris: Bureau des Longitudes, 1847), p. 14. Fulgence Marion, Wonderful Balloon Ascents (London: Cassell, 1870), pp. 202– 4. ‘Accident to an Aeronaut’, The Times, 22 June 1842, p. 6; Wilfred de Fonvielle, Adventures in the Air (London: Stanford, 1877), p. 147; John Bacon, The Dominion of the Air (London: Cassell, 1902), pp. 205 – 6. Printed handbill for Gale’s balloon ascent in Kent, 17 August 1847. ‘Balloon Experiments with Model Parachutes’, The Times, 27 June 1848, p. 8; ‘Cremorne Gardens’, The Times, 2 May 1851, p. 8. ‘A Strong Gale’, Punch, 17 (1849), p. 123. ‘Death of Lieutenant Gale’, The Times, 16 September 1850, p. 6; ‘Mr. Gale’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 34 (1850), p. 668. The Times, 16 September 1850, p. 4; ‘Balloon News’, Punch, 23 (1852), p. 143: ‘Balloon ascents are now so numerous that we expect the air will, before long, be navigated as much as the sea . . . we have lunatic expectations of seeing, some day, a line of balloons which will start every quarter of an hour from Paddington to Bank’. The Times, 16 September 1850, p. 4. George Waltz, Jules Verne (New York: Holt, 1943), pp. 47 – 8; Russell Freedman, Jules Verne (New York: Holiday House, 1965), pp. 91 – 107. Jules Verne, ‘A Voyage in a Balloon’, Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, 10:5 (1852), pp. 389 – 95. This early work exhibits many of those ingredients that would make his later Voyages Extraordinaires so popular: colourful characters thrown together to journey afar, miraculous inventions and perilous escapes. Ibid., p. 395. Jules Verne, Cinq Semaines en Ballon (Paris: Hetzel, 1863). One of Verne’s last novels Robur le Conque´rant is a more elaborately contrived ballooning adventure, yet deals with similar themes. Robur, in his giant helicopter-ship Albatros, rescues the unlucky occupants of the balloon Go Ahead, leaving little doubt as to which type of craft would eventually rule the air: ‘Progress is not with balloons, but with machines whether you call them airplanes, helicopters, or orthopters’. Robur le Conquerant (Paris: Hetzel, 1886); The Clipper of the Clouds, ed. by I.O. Evans (London: Granada, 1979). Gustave Lambert, Projet de Voyage au Poˆle Nord (Paris: Martinet, 1866). ‘Rapport de la Commission Charge´e d’Appre´cier le Projet D’Exploration du Pole Nord’, L’Ae´ronaute, 5:9 (1872), pp. 137 – 57; Lucien Huard, Le Monde Industriel (Paris: Boulanger, 1884), p. 260. ‘The Fatal Balloon Ascent’, The Times, 19 April 1875, p. 7; ‘The Fatal Balloon Experiment’, The Times, 28 April 1875, p. 7; ‘Fatal Ballooning’, The New York Times, 2 May 1875, p. 1. 392

NOTES TO PAGES 212 – 221

73. ‘Editorial’, The Times, 8 January 1880, p. 9. 74. ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Scotsman, 30 November 1876, p. 6. 75. ‘Music Hall’, The Scotsman, 3 February 1877, p. 1; ‘Commander Cheyne in the Music Hall’, The Scotsman, 10 February 1877, p. 6. Advertisement, Cannon Street Hotel, North Pole Lecture, 2 November 1877, Private Collection. 76. ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace’, The Illustrated London News, 8 May 1875, p. 450. 77. ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Times, 21 September 1877, p. 8; Advert for ‘On Balloons and How to Use Them in the Arctic Regions’, The Times, 19 Sept 1877, p. 1. 78. ‘How to Reach the Pole by Balloons’, The Graphic, 6 October 1877, p. 317, and ‘How to Reach the Pole’, p. 318; William Pole, ‘Balloons and Voyages in the Air’, The Quarterly Review, 139 (1875), pp. 105 – 38; ‘Aerial Navigation’, The Fortnightly Review, 29 (1881), pp. 77 – 92. 79. ‘How to Reach the Pole’, The Graphic, 6 October 1877, p. 318; ‘Arctic Exploration and Balloons’, The Times, 7 September 1877, p. 9. 80. Ibid., p. 318; ‘Proposed Balloon Voyage to the North Pole’, Scientific American, 15 December 1877, p. 375. 81. ‘How to Reach the Pole’, The Graphic, 9 December 1876, p. 566; ‘How to Reach the Pole: A Suggestive Sketch’, p. 572. 82. ‘Langham Hall’, The Times, 20 October 1877, p. 8; ‘Indian Famine Relief Fund’, The Times, 1 November 1877, p. 6; Advertisement, Cannon Street Hotel, North Pole Lecture, 2 November 1877, Private Collection. 83. Letter William Stokes to George Reeves-Smith, 14 March 1879, Private Collection; ‘Commander Cheyne’s Popular Pictorial Lectures’ Pamphlet, Private Collection; clippings in the archives of the Royal Aeronautical Society, London. 84. ‘Commander Cheyne’s Popular Pictorial Lectures’ Pamphlet, Private Collection; The Scotsman, 13 November 1878, p. 7; ‘The North Pole’, The Times, 3 December 1878, p. 7. 85. ‘New British Expedition to the North Pole’, The Times, 3 July 1879, p. 8. 86. ‘New Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 9 August 1879, p. 9. 87. ‘Commander Cheyne’s Plan for Reaching the North Pole’, The Graphic, 2 August 1879, p. 100; ‘Arctic Ballooning’, The Times, 19 August 1879, p. 8; ‘Current Foreign Topics’, The New York Times, 2 August 1879, p. 1. 88. ‘British Association’, The Times, 27 August 1879, p. 8. 89. The Scotsman, 27 August 1879, p. 5; The Times, 30 August 1879, p. 4. 90. ‘British Association’, The Times, 27 August 1879, p. 8. 91. ‘Arctic Ae¨ronautics’, Punch, 24 January 1880, p. 36. 92. ‘Alhambra Theatre’, The Times, 24 December 1879, p. 5. 93. Letter John Cheyne to J. Glaisher, 21 May 1879, Royal Aeronautical Society; ‘The British Association’, The Times, 22 August 1877, p. 11. 94. ‘Arctic Exploration by Balloons’, The Times, 29 September 1879, p. 11. 95. ‘The New Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 3 January 1880, p. 11. 96. Northward Ho!; or, Baffled Not Beaten! (London: Cramer, 1879). 97. ‘Arctic Ae¨ronautics’, Punch, 24 January 1880, p. 36. 98. ‘The Proposed Polar Expedition’, The Times, 4 February 1880, p. 10. 393

NOTES TO PAGES 221 – 230

99. ‘Arctic Ballooning’, The Times, 9 February 1880, p. 11. 100. ‘Arctic Ballooning’, The Times, 11 March 1880, p. 4; The Times, 9 February 1880, p. 11. 101. ‘The Balloon Society of Great Britain’, The Times, 24 August 1880, p. 8. 102. ‘The Arctic Exhibition’, The Times, 19 July 1880, p. 6. 103. Among many notices, see The Times, 8 July 1880, p. 1; 13 July 1880, p. 1; 14 July 1880, p. 1; 15 July 1880, p. 1. 104. ‘Arctic Ballooning’, The Times, 19 July 1880, p. 6; ‘Arctic Ballooning’, The New York Times, 30 July 1880, p. 3. 105. ‘The Balloon Society of Great Britain’, The Times, 24 August 1880, p. 8. 106. ‘The Balloon Contest’, The Times, 6 September 1880, p. 6. 107. ‘The Balloon Society of Great Britain’, The Times, 27 September 1880, p. 10. 108. ‘International Balloon Contest’, The Times, 22 October 1880, p. 4; ‘Crystal Palace’, The Times, 21 October 1880, p. 6; ‘The International Balloon Contest’, The Illustrated London News, 30 October 1880, p. 434; The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 6 November 1880, p. 188. 109. ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Times, 12 October 1880, p. 5; ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Times, 13 October 1880, p. 10. 110. ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Times, 6 December 1880, p. 11; ‘House of Commons’, The Times, 16 August 1881, p. 6; ‘Cheyne’s Polarexpedition’, Geografisk Tidskrit, 5 (1881), p. 177. 111. ‘Arctic Exploration’, The Times, 3 January 1881, p. 10; F.W.G. Baker, ‘The First International Polar Year, 1882 – 83’, Polar Record, 21:132 (1982), pp. 275 – 85. 112. ‘Arctic Exploration for 1882’, The New York Times, 9 January 1881, p. 4. 113. William Coutts Keppel, ‘Recent and Future Arctic Voyages’, The Quarterly Review, 150 (1880), pp. 111 –40 (pp. 125– 6). 114. ‘Disasters at Sea’, The Times, 29 November 1881, p. 6; ‘The Victoria’s Rough Voyage’, The New York Herald, 17 November 1881, p. 4. 115. ‘The North Pole’, The New York Herald, 18 November 1881, p. 5. 116. ‘Ballooning Towards the North Pole’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 17 December 1881, p. 269. 117. On the ill-fated voyage, see Lieutenant Danenhower’s Narrative of the Jeannette (Boston: Osgood, 1882); George Melville, In the Lena Delta (London: Longmans, 1884); Leonard Guttridge, Icebound (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1987); Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice (London: Oneworld, 2015). 118. ‘The Jeannette Wrecked’, The New York Times, 21 December 1881, p. 1; ‘The Jeannette’s Long Cruise’, The New York Times, 21 December 1881, p. 2; ‘The Tragedies of Arctic Exploration’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 20 May 1882, pp. 200 – 201. 119. ‘Commander Cheyne’, The New York Herald, 21 December 1881, p. 5. 120. ‘Will Balloons Do It?’, The New York Herald, 23 December 1881, p. 3; ‘The Balloon Route to the Pole’, The New York Times, 23 December 1881, p. 2. 121. ‘Ballooning to the Pole’, The New York Herald, 28 December 1881, p. 6. For Cheyne’s letter, see The New York Herald, 28 December 1881, p. 3. 122. Ibid., p. 4. 394

NOTES TO PAGES 230 – 238

123. ‘Commander Cheyne’s Project’, The New York Times, 22 April 1882, p. 1; ‘General Notes’, The New York Times, 15 December 1883, p. 4. 124. Gordon Stables, Wild Adventures ‘Round the Pole (New York: Armstrong, 1885) and serial publication in The Boy’s Own Paper from 1 October 1881 to 27 May 1882. 125. Victor Patrice, Au Poˆle en Ballon (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 172; G.L. Pesce, ‘Des Divers Projets d’Exploration Ae´rostatique du Pole Nord’, L’Ae´rophile, 7:5 (1899), pp. 51 – 5. 126. Harry Sayler, The Airship Boys Due North (Chicago: Reilly, 1910). 127. Victor Appleton, Don Sturdy Across the North Pole (New York: Grosset, 1925). 128. Frank Sheridan, The Boy Balloonists (New York: Street, 1903). 129. Pierre Mae¨l, Under the Sea to the North Pole (London: Sampson, 1893), p. 7. 130. Ibid., pp. 122– 3. 131. ‘To the North Pole by Balloon’, The Times, 1 October 1895, p. 4. 132. Guy Tomel, ‘Voyage au Pole Nord en Ballon’, L’Illustration, 1 November 1890, p. 375; ‘Ballooning to the Pole’, The New York Times, 6 December 1890, p. 4; ‘Divers Projets d’Exploration Ae´rostatique du Pole Nord’, L’Ae´rophile, 7:6 (1899), pp. 63 – 5. 133. ‘To Paris in a Balloon’, The New York Times, 24 August 1895, p. 16. 134. ‘Andre´e and his Expedition’, The New York Times, 1 September 1895, p. 3. 135. ‘The Route to the Pole’, Hamilton Daily Republican, 20 February 1891; ‘By Balloon’, Hamilton Daily Republican, 19 December 1892. 136. ‘Ballooning in the Antarctic’, The South Polar Times, June 1902, pp. 2 – 9. Joseph Hooker had first suggested using a military balloon ‘for obtaining a view over the great southern ice-wall’. See SPRI MS 1453/112;D, Hooker to Sir Clements Markham, 21 December 1900; SPRI MS 1453/113/1 – 2;D, Hooker to Robert Falcon Scott, 18 May and 17 July 1901. 137. Robert Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (London: Smith, 1905), i, pp. 198– 9. Edward Wilson thought less of Scott’s ballooning heroics: ‘The Captain, knowing nothing whatever about the business, insisted on going up first and through no fault of his own came down safely’. See SPRI MS 232/1 BJ, 4 February 1902; Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic Regions (London: Blandford, 1966), p. 111. 138. Shackleton’s account of the ‘novel sensation’ can be found in SPRI MS 758/4;D Shackleton to William Speirs Bruce, 19 November 1903; SPRI MS 758/2;D Shackleton to William Speirs Bruce, 21 November 1903; and SPRI MS 758/5;D Shackleton to William Speirs Bruce, 21 June 1904. 139. SPRI MS 232/1 BJ, 4 February 1902. Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition, p. 111. ¨ rnen mot Polen (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1930), pp. 392 – 3. 140. Med O A scribbled entry in Andre´e’s journal at 08.11am captures the moment: ‘We jumped out. . .’ 141. Urban Wra˚kberg, ‘Andre´e’s Folly: Time for Reappraisal’, in The Centennial of SA Andre´e’s North Pole Expedition (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1999), pp. 56 – 99. 395

NOTES TO PAGES 238 – 246

142. Ibid., p. 56. Compare Henri Lachambre and Alexis Machuron, Andre´e and his Balloon (Westminster: Constable, 1898); The Andre´e Diaries (London: Lane, 1931); George Palmer Putnam, Andre´e (New York: Brewer, 1930); Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon (London: Fourth Estate, 2012). 143. Per Olof Sundman, Ingenjo¨r Andre´es Luftfa¨rd (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1967). 144. ‘Salomon Andre´e’s 1,000-Mile Balloon Bid for the North Pole’, Ken, 4:1 (1961), pp. 36 – 9 and pp. 68 – 73. CHAPTER 5 – EXHIBITING THINGS 1. The Naval Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition, Illustrated Catalogue of the Historic and Loan Relic Section (London: Gale, 1905), p. 32. 2. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 2 May 1891, p. 9. 3. Kevin Littlewood and Beverley Butler, Of Ships and Stars (London: Athlone, 1998), pp. 1– 32. See also Mark Hamilton, The Nation and the Navy (London: Garland, 1986); Pieter Van der Merwe, ‘Views of the Royal Naval Exhibition, 1891’, Journal of Maritime Research (2001); Album 1386, NMM ZBA0249. 4. For the emergence of consumer society and the politics of display, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (London: Batsford, 1988), which explored everything from exhibitions to stamps, photography and the telegraph; also Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (London: Verso, 1991). The historiography of exhibition culture is a rich field, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); John MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (London: Continuum, 2002), among many others. 5. There were collections in the Royal Naval Museum in the Queen Anne block of the Royal Naval College; naval portraiture and grand oils presided in the Naval Gallery in the Painted Hall, Greenwich Hospital; items were also held in collections of the Royal United Service Institution. There is a fine engraving, ‘Royal Naval Museum, Somerset House. Exhibition of Models’, from a study by Thomas Shepherd produced in 1842 for London Interiors: A Grand National Exhibition (London: Joseph Mead, 1844). 6. Robert David, The Arctic in the British Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007). 7. Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘Displaying Nelson: Navalism and ‘The Exhibition’ of 1891’, International Journal of Maritime History, 17:1 (2005), pp. 29 –67. For a detailed list of Franklin Gallery artefacts, see ‘Appendix 3’ in Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘The Invisible Throne: The Royal Navy, Polar Exploration, and Imagining Heroes in the Nineteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2006), pp. 407 – 11. 8. Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Word for the Navy (London: Ottley, 1887). 396

NOTES TO PAGES 246 – 248

9. John Beeler, ‘In the Shadow of Biggs: A New Perspective on British Naval Administration and W.T. Stead’s 1884 “The Truth about the Navy” Campaign’, International Journal of Naval History, 1 (2002), pp. 1 – 10; J.H. Briggs, Naval Administrations 1827 to 1892 (London: Low, 1897). For the alarm over naval affairs, see Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power (New York: Knopf, 1940), p. 120; Nicholas Rodger, ‘The Dark Ages of the Admiralty, Part III: Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, 1880 – 1885’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 62 (1976), pp. 121– 8. 10. On warship construction and reform, see Technical Change and British Naval Policy, ed. by Bryan Ranft (London: Hodder, 1977); David Brown, Warrior to Dreadnought (London: Chatham, 1997); Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); John Beeler, Birth of the Battleship (London: Chatham, 2001); David Evans, Building the Steam Navy (London: Conway, 2004). 11. The Pall Mall Gazette, 20 March 1889. William Stead’s ‘Truth about the Navy’ articles painted a bleak picture of the state of the Navy’s materiel and manpower in the face of foreign competition. His articles succeed in creating considerable public furore, based on a combination of inflated continental estimates and scandal mongering. It was his business after all to sell newspapers. Frederic Whyte, The Life of W.T. Stead (London: Cape, 1925), i, pp. 145 – 58; Raymond Schults, Crusader in Babylon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972). 12. ‘The Fleet’, The Times, 23 April 1885, p. 8; Tennyson to Stead, 14 March 1885, in The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), iii, pp. 311 – 12. 13. For commentary on the strength of the Fleet, compare ‘The State of the Navy’, The Times, 23 September 1884, p. 7; ‘The State of the Navy’, The Times, 27 September 1884, p. 4; ‘Armourclads and Cruisers’, The Times, 22 October 1884, p. 2; ‘The Navy Question’, The Times, 1 December 1884, p. 8. 14. Littlewood and Butler, Of Ships and Stars, p. 17. 15. Mark Hamilton, ‘The New Navalism and the British Navy League, 1895 – 1914’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 64:1 (1978), pp. 37 – 44; Anne Summers, ‘The Character of Edwardian Nationalism: Three Popular Leagues’, in Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 68 – 87; Gerald Jordan, ‘Admiral Nelson and the Concept of Patriotism: The Trafalgar Centenary, 1905’, in Naval History (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1988), pp. 143– 55; Marianne Czisnik, ‘The Navy League’s Invention of Trafalgar Day’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 15 (2005), pp. 217 – 29. 16. H.W. Wilson, Guide to the Naval Review (London: Navy League, 1897). For the 1897 review, see Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London: Chatto, 1921), pp. 308 – 13. 17. ‘The Diamond Jubilee’, The Times, 25 June 1897, p. 5; W.L. Clowes, ‘The Great Naval Review’, The Illustrated London News, 3 July 1897, p. 10. 18. ‘Ten Year’s Increase in the Navies of the World’, Review of Reviews, 4:24 (1891), p. 606. 19. ‘Training in Patriotism’, The National Review, 100 (1891), pp. 565 – 70. 397

NOTES TO PAGES 249 – 254

20. ‘Tutelary deity of the Naval Exhibition’, the ghost of Nelson speaks to the nation, Punch, 27 June 1891, p. iii. 21. ‘The Coming Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 27 March 1891, p. 7; ‘Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 16 April 1891, p. 6; ‘Royal Naval Exhibition: Sketches of Works’, The Pictorial World, 2 May 1891, pp. 551– 2. 22. ‘At the Naval Exhibition’, The Pall Mall Budget, 30 April 1891, p. 12. 23. For a range of contemporary coverage, compare ‘Opening of the Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 4 May 1891, p. 8; The Daily Chronicle, 2 May 1891, p. 2; The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1891, p. 5; The Daily Graphic, 4 May 1891, pp. 4 – 5; The Illustrated London News, 9 May 1891, p. 614; The Pictorial World, 9 May 1891, p. 573. 24. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 2 May 1891, p. 9; ‘Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Graphic, 9 May 1891, p. 1. 25. The Daily Telegraph, 4 May 1891, p. 4; The Daily Chronicle, 8 May 1891, p. 5. 26. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 26 October 1891, p. 6. The average daily attendance was 15,574; the greatest number on one day was 50,795 on 18 May, the Whit Monday Bank Holiday. 27. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 16 May 1891, p. 631. 28. Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Catalogue and Guide (London: Griffith, 1891). 29. Among many accounts sold at the RNE, see William Laird Clowes, All About the Navy (London: Cassell, 1891); W.J. Gordon, A Chat About the Navy (London: Simpkin, 1891); Rule Britannia! Incidents in the Lives of England’s Naval Heroes (London: Religious Tract Society, 1891); William Russell, Horatio Nelson and the Naval Supremacy of England (London: Putnam, 1891). 30. ‘Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Graphic, 9 May 1891, pp. 1 – 4. 31. Advertisements, The Times, 6 May 1891, p. 1. 32. ‘How to See the Royal Naval Exhibition’, Review of Reviews, 3:18 (1891), pp. 612 – 13; Gowan Dawson, ‘The Review of Reviews and the New Journalism in late-Victorian Britain’, in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 172– 95. 33. ‘What to See, and How to See It’, The Pall Mall Budget, 7 May 1891, p. 4; ‘Imposing Pageant’, The Daily Graphic, 4 May 1891, p. 5. 34. Optical Lantern Readings: Royal Naval Exhibition, London, 1891 (London: Tamblyn, 1891), courtesy Magic Lantern Society Slide Readings Library, 90030/1; Advertisements, Private Collections. 35. Lantern Readings: Royal Naval Exhibition, p. 4. 36. Ibid., p. 7. 37. Royal Naval Exhibition, The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir (London: Griffith, 1891), p. 4. 38. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 23 July 1891, p. 7. 39. Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Catalogue and Guide, p. 1. The sentence itself was adapted from the preamble to the Naval Discipline Act, better known as ‘The Articles of War’. 40. G. Elliot, ‘The Naval Exhibition, 1891’, United Service Magazine, 741 (1891), pp. 182– 92. 398

NOTES TO PAGES 254 – 262

41. Of innumerable Nelson portraits and engravings, there were fine examples by Hoppner, Beechey, deKoster, Guzzardi, Scriven, Bromley, Bell, Earlom, Bowyer, Young, Barnard, among others. The image of Nelson as the naval hero, a truly bankable iconography, had never before been so consciously cultivated. 42. On the expanding defence industry, see Marshall Bastable, Arms and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 43. A. Jephson, ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition 1891’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 36 (1892), pp. 545 – 55. 44. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 21 August 1891, p. 4; ‘Our Captious Critic’, The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 16 May 1891, p. 363. 45. Charles Osborne, The Naval Exhibition (London: Francis, 1891), verse 2. 46. Theo Bonheur, The Royal Naval Exhibition Polka (London: Cary, 1891); The Royal Navy Polka-Hornpipe (London: Francis, 1891); The Royal Naval Parade March (London: Beal, 1891). 47. Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Daily Programme (London: Griffith, 1891), p. 11; ‘A Cruise Round the Sailories’, Lady’s Pictorial, 9 May 1891, p. 753. For the power of advertisement, see Robert Opie, Rule Britannia (London: Viking, 1985). 48. The press adopted the lighthouse as the icon of the RNE. The Lighthouse is ‘an Eiffel Tower in miniature’, ran the Pall Mall Gazette on 14 May 1891, and it ‘will do for the Naval Exhibition what Monsieur Eiffel’s lofty erection did for the Paris exhibition of 1889’. 49. A rare image of the interior of Fleischer’s panorama survives. Album 1386, NMM P47526. The central viewing platform replicated the poop deck of Victory, with Nelson falling, centre, and Redoutable and Te´me´raire to starboard. ‘The Trafalgar Panorama’, The Times, 13 July 1891, p. 3; ‘The Trafalgar Panorama’, The Times, 15 July 1891, p. 10. 50. Orde Browne and H.J. Webb, HMS Victory (London: Engineer, 1891), pp. 5 – 6. 51. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 2 May 1891, p. 9. 52. Charles Lowe, Four National Exhibitions in London and Their Organiser (London: Fisher, 1892). 53. Ibid., p. 385. 54. ‘How to See the Royal Naval Exhibition’, Review of Reviews, 3:18 (1891), pp. 612 – 13 (p. 612). 55. ‘A Cruise Round the Sailories’, Lady’s Pictorial, 9 May 1891, p. 753 56. Ibid., p. 753. 57. Ellen Clerke, ‘Sir John Franklin and the Far North’, Dublin Review, 109 (1891), pp. 266 – 82 (p. 268). 58. The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir, p. 6; Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Report (London: Griffith, 1892), pp. 44 – 5. 59. The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir, p. 6. 60. ‘A First Visit to the “Naveries”’, Punch, 9 May 1891, p. 217. 61. The Arctic Council (London: Henry Graves, 1853), p. 4. 62. ‘The Arctic Council, Planning a Search for Sir John Franklin’ was completed in July 1851, inspected by Queen Victoria at Buckingham 399

NOTES TO PAGES 262 – 270

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Palace, engraved in mezzotint by James Scott, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1853. Stephen Pearce, Memories of the Past (Edinburgh: [n.p.], 1903), pp. 17 –65; Richard Ormond, Early Victorian Portraits (London: HMSO, 1973), i, pp. 548 – 50; Gillies Ross, ‘The Arctic Council of 1851: Fact or Fancy?’, Polar Record, 40:213 (2004), pp. 135 – 41. Ian Stone, ‘The Arctic Portraits of Stephen Pearce’, Polar Record, 24:148 (1988), pp. 55 – 8. Naval Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition, Official Guide and Catalogue of the Commercial Exhibits (London: Gale, 1905), p. 56; Clements Markham, The Lands of Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), p. 174. G. Elliot, ‘The Naval Exhibition, 1891’, United Service Magazine, 741 (1891), pp. 182– 92 (p. 186). The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir, p. 7; Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Catalogue and Guide, p. 535. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 2 May 1891, p. 9; The Daily Telegraph, 1 May 1891, p. 2; ‘A Cruise Round the Sailories’, Lady’s Pictorial, 9 May 1891, p. 753. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition’, The Illustrated London News, 16 May 1891, p. 631; ‘The Queen’s Visit to the Naval Exhibition’, The Times, 8 May 1891, p. 10; The Daily Graphic, 8 May 1891, p. 8. ‘A First Visit to the “Naveries”’, Punch, 9 May 1891, p. 217. ‘Horatio Larkins Visits the Naval Exhibition’, Punch, 27 June 1891, p. 310. ‘The Franklin Expedition’, The Standard, 21 May 1895, p. 5. Popular Imperialism and the Military, ed. by John MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 15. NMM, BHC1811. The celebrated ‘Nelson’ by Lemuel Abbott (NMM, BHC2889) was presented to the Naval Gallery in 1849, remaining on display there until 1936 when collections were transferred to the care of the new National Maritime Museum. A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson (London: Sampson, 1897). Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer (London: Belhaven, 1993), pp. 6– 7. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Cynthia Behrman, Victorian Myths of the Sea (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 157. Penny Summerfield, ‘Patriotism and Empire: Music-Hall Entertainment, 1870 – 1914’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, pp. 17 – 48; Peter Bailey, Music Hall (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986). Robert Brain, ‘Going to the Exhibition’, in The Physics of Empire (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 1994), pp. 113– 42; Going to the Fair (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 1993). Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer, p. 7. ‘English Exploring Expedition to the Arctic Seas’, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 18 October 1851, p. 397, and a striking front cover, p. 385. David Murphy, The Arctic Fox (Cork: Collins, 2004); Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 21.

400

NOTES TO PAGES 270 – 276

82. ‘Fate of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition’, The Times, 23 September 1859, p. 7; ‘Proceedings of the Yacht Fox’, The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859, pp. 327 – 9, including a facsimile of the paper found in the cairn on Point Victory; ‘Captain McClintock and the Franklin Expedition’, The Times, 15 November 1859, p. 7. 83. ‘The End of an Epic’, Sharpe’s London Magazine, 15 (1859), pp. 242 – 6. 84. ‘The Last Voyage of Sir John Franklin’, Once a Week, 20 October 1859, p. 366. 85. ‘Editorial’, The Times, 23 September 1859, p. 6. 86. Advertisement in the Saturday Review, 31 December 1860. 87. ‘Editorial’, The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859, p. 316. 88. The 1850’s saw a great number of works in verse, including George Boker’s A Ballad of Sir John Franklin (1850), Chandos Hoskyns Abrahall’s Arctic Enterprise (1856), James Parsons’ Reflections on the Mysterious Fate of Sir John Franklin (1857), Joseph Addison Turner’s The Discovery of Sir John Franklin (1858), Walter White’s Erebus and Terror (1859), and Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s The Fate of Franklin (1860). 89. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems (London: Chatto, 1904). 90. ‘Editorial’, The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859, p. 317. 91. Compare, Douglas Johnson, ‘The Death of Gordon: A Victorian Myth’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 10 (1982), pp. 285– 310; Dorothy Helly, Livingstone’s Legacy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); John Wolffe, ‘Martyrs of Empire: Livingstone and Gordon’, in Great Deaths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 136 – 54. 92. ‘Lady Franklin’, The Times, 19 July 1875, p. 5; Frances Woodward, Portrait of Jane (London: Hodder, 1951). 93. ‘Captain McClintock and the Franklin Expedition’, The Times, 15 November 1859, p. 7. 94. ‘The Late Sir John Franklin’, The Times, 30 August 1860, p. 5; ‘The Franklin Memorial at Spilsby’, The Times, 28 November 1861, p. 8. 95. In 1859 explorers found the only surviving account of the Franklin Expedition sealed in a can under a stone cairn on King William Island. Scribbled on a sheet of official paper were two messages, essentially status updates: the first, from May 1847, recorded that the ships had become icebound, but that all was well. The second, from April 1848, however added that Erebus and Terror had been stuck there for more than a year. Twentyfour crewmen had already died, including Franklin on 11 June 1847. Crozier, now in command, planned to set off on foot with 105 survivors in search of help. The original is now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the message was reproduced many times as a print in the years following. 96. The Monument was transferred to the Chapel in 1938 and it has recently been moved again and rededicated. A skeleton recovered by American explorer Charles Francis Hall was identified by family members as Lieutenant Henry Le Vesconte of HMS Erebus though it is possible it could have been surgeon Harry Goodsir. The bones were returned for entombment in 1873, the only remains that ever made it home to England. See Huw Lewis-Jones, ‘Nelsons of Discovery: Notes on the 401

NOTES TO PAGES 276 – 281

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108.

109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

Franklin Monument in Greenwich’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 19 (2009), pp. 78 –105; Simon Mays, ‘New Light on the Personal Identification of a Skeleton of a Member of Sir John Franklin’s Last Expedition to the Arctic, 1845’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 38 (2011), pp. 1571 – 82. ‘Sir John Franklin’, The Spectator, 17 November 1866, p. 1271. ‘Monument of Sir John Franklin’, The Illustrated London News, 22 September 1866, p. 279. Sherard Osborn, ‘On the Exploration of the North Polar Region’, Proceedings of the RGS, 9 (1865), pp. 42 – 71 (p. 52). Osborn to Roderick Murchison, 14 October 1867. BM Add. 46,217, f. 314; Andrew Lambert, Franklin (London: Faber, 2009), p. 297. ‘The Franklin Commemoration’, Geographical Journal, 6:1 (1895), pp. 31 – 44 (p. 41). ‘Sir John Franklin’, The Times, 31 July 1875, p. 12; ‘Sir John Franklin’, The Times, 2 August 1875, p. 9; ‘The Church’, The Illustrated London News, 7 August 1875, p. 143. Clements Markham, Antarctic Obsession, ed. by Clive Holland (Alburgh: Erskine, 1986). James Secord, ‘King of Siluria’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), pp. 413– 43; Robert Stafford, Scientist of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). George Henry’s portrait was reproduced as a frontispiece to Markham’s final history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, The Lands of Silence, published in 1921. The officers of the Discovery and Morning presented the model to Markham on 7 November 1904 at Scott’s lecture in the Royal Albert Hall. Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979). F. Guillemard, ‘Franklin and the Arctic’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 161 (1897), pp. 238 – 56. A. Drew, ‘Our Arctic Heroes’, Cornhill Magazine, 67 (1893), pp. 405– 17; ‘Imposing Pageant’, The Daily Graphic, 4 May 1891, p. 5: ‘there are pictures, relics, tokens of all sorts to remind one of the glorious past’; ‘Sketches at the Naval Exhibition’, The Daily Graphic, 5 May 1891, p. 4. Many found in Jane Franklin a living example of piety and devotion, which matched the fortitude of her husband and magazines covered the RNE as the fashionable resort of the season. ‘Can Women Be Navigators?’, The Gentlewoman, 27 June 1891, p. 857: ‘It yet remains for a lady Jack Tar to impress the world with her seamanship in mid-ocean, and spin a yarn to an admiring male audience ashore’. Times would soon change. A. McClintock, The Story of the Franklin Search Illustrative of the Franklin Relics (London: Sidders, 1891); Royal Naval Exhibition, Official Report, p. 101. McClintock, The Story of the Franklin Search, p. 3. Ibid., p. 12. Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Juvenile Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

402

NOTES TO PAGES 281 – 286

114. Albert Markham, Life of Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage (London: Philip, 1891); George Philip to Albert Markham, 23 February 1891, Albert Markham’s letterbook, NMM, MRK/47. 115. Markham, Life of Sir John Franklin, p. viii; Sophia Cracroft to Markham, 25 July 1889; 25 November 1890; 27 November 1890. Unpublished correspondence in Markham’s letterbook, NMM, MRK/47. 116. Markham’s book of press clippings, NMM, MRK/31. 117. The Athenaeum, 1 Aug 1891, p. 149. 118. Assorted clippings, c. 1891, MRK/31. 119. ‘To Do and To Die’, Scots Observer, unidentified c. 1891, MRK/31. 120. Ibid. 121. Henry Elliot, ‘Sir John Franklin’, The Nineteenth Century, 32 (1892), pp. 118 – 29. 122. Ellen Clerke, ‘Sir John Franklin and the Far North’, Dublin Review, 109 (1891), pp. 266– 82. 123. Robert Cochrane, The English Explorers (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1891). 124. Frank Mundell, Stories of North Pole Adventure (London: Sunday School Union, 1893), p. 68. 125. George Barnett Smith, Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the North-West Passage (London: Partridge, 1895). 126. Thomas Frost, The Realm of the Ice King (London: Religious Tract Society, 1891), p. 5. 127. Ibid., p. 370. A series of contributions were carried in The Boy’s Own Paper throughout 1883 under the title ‘The Thrones of the Ice-King’, accompanied by prints of many mid-century Arctic plates. A large portrait of Franklin appeared on 9 June, some relics on 14 July, and on 4 August an image of a Franklin monument in a thick blanket of snow. 128. ‘Franklin Commemoration in Edinburgh’, The Times, 5 June 1895, p. 11; The Scotsman, 5 June 1895, p. 5. 129. ‘The Franklin Commemoration’, The Times, 21 May 1895, p. 10; Geographical Journal, 6 (1895), pp. 31 – 44; Scottish Geographical Magazine, 11 (1895), pp. 329 – 35, 410– 16. 130. ‘Franklin Commemoration’, Geographical Journal, p. 33. 131. ‘The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson’, The Boy’s Own Paper, 19 January 1895, pp. 270– 1; The Illustrated London News, 22 August 1896, p. 239. 132. Briton Rivie`re is perhaps best known for his sentimental portraits and other classical subjects. His Arctic canvas, now largely forgotten, is in the collections of Tate Britain; Tate Store, N01577. 133. ‘Franklin Commemoration’, Geographical Journal, p. 42; John Murray, ‘The Renewal of Antarctic Exploration’, Geographical Journal, 3 (1894), pp. 1–42; ‘Projects for Antarctic Exploration’, Nature, 54 (1896), pp. 29–31. 134. ‘Franklin Commemoration’, Geographical Journal, p. 43. 135. ‘Arctic Exploration’, in Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress (London: Murray, 1896), pp. 211–24 with comments on pp. 177–201. 136. ‘The Scope and Value of Arctic Exploration’, in Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, p. 204. 137. Hero of the fall of Khartoum in January 1885, Charles Gordon’s martyrdom had multiple instrumentality. His legend was used to extend British power 403

NOTES TO PAGES 286 – 288

138.

139. 140. 141. 142.

143. 144.

145.

146.

147. 148. 149. 150.

into Central Africa and his death as moral justification for the conquest of the Sudan. Compare, Lytton Strachey, ‘The End of General Gordon’, in Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto, 1918); Fergus Nicoll, The Mahdi of Sudan and the Death of General Gordon (Stroud: Sutton, 2005). Perhaps the most well known image is ‘General Gordon’s Last Stand’ by George William Joy, now hanging in the Leeds City Art Gallery. On reconstruction of failure into glorious victory, see John Wolffe, ‘Martyrs of Empire’, pp. 136 –54; Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’, English Historical Review, 86 (1971), pp. 46 – 72. ‘Glimpses of Some Vanished Celebrities’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 158 (1895), pp. 1 – 15. ‘Franklin and the Arctic’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 161 (1897), pp. 238 – 56. Clements Markham, ‘The Need for an Antarctic Expedition’, The Nineteenth Century, 38 (1895), pp. 706– 12. Henry Traill, The Life of Sir John Franklin (London: Murray, 1896). Among other accounts, see Augustus Henry Beesly, Sir John Franklin (London: Ward, 1894); Henry Harbour, Arctic Explorers (London: Collins, 1904); Kennedy MacLean, Heroes of the Farthest North and Farthest South (London: Chambers, 1913), pp. 46 – 56, which also featured a whimsical re-interpretation of Smith’s ‘They Forged the Last Link’. Richard Cyriax, Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition (London: Methuen, 1939). Some Private Correspondence of Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, ed. by George Mackaness (Sydney: Ford, 1947); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Sir John Franklin in Tasmania (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1949); Noel Wright, Quest for Franklin (London: Heinemann, 1959); Leslie Neatby, The Search for Franklin (London: Barker, 1970). Kathleen Fidler, To the White North (London: Lutterworth, 1952); Neville Syme, Ice Fighter (London: Hodder, 1956); Ann Sutton, The Endless Quest (London: Constable, 1966). For other reinterpretations, compare John Wilson, Across Frozen Seas (Vancouver: Holme, 1997); Elizabeth McGregor, The Ice Child (London: Bantam, 2001); John Wilson, John Franklin (Montreal: XYZ, 2001). Roderic Owen, The Fate of Franklin (London: Hutchinson, 1978). Franklin’s journals from both overland expeditions have been published and are freely available on the Internet. See The First Arctic Land Expedition, 1819 – 1822, ed. by Richard Davis (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1995); The Second Arctic Land Expedition, 1825 – 1827, ed. by Richard Davis (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1998). Richard Davis, ‘John Franklin (1786–1847)’, Arctic, 38:4 (1985), pp. 338–9. Among many others, see Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (London: Granta, 1998). Chauncey Loomis, ‘Review of Owen’s Fate of Franklin’, Victorian Studies, 23:1 (1979), pp. 139 – 41. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail (London: Viking, 1988), an elegant account but marred by an unfailing criticism of British efforts; Catherine Wilson, 404

NOTES TO PAGES 288 – 296

151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

The Man Who Ate His Boots (Lincoln: Lincolnshire, 1994); Scott Cookman, Iceblink (New York: Wiley, 2000); Martyn Beardsley, Deadly Winter (London: Chatham, 2002); Anthony Brandt, The Man Who Ate His Books (New York: Knopf, 2010). Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Frozen in Time (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). For novelists, see Nancy Cato, North-West by South (London: Heinemann, 1965); Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness, trans. by Ralph Freedman (London: Viking, 1987); Rudy Wiebe, A Discovery of Strangers (Toronto: Knopf, 1994); Andrea Barrett, Voyage of the Narwhal (New York: Norton, 1998); Robert Edric, The Broken Lands (New York: St Martin’s, 2002). The Search for the Northwest Passage aired on C4 in the UK and PBS in the US in February 2006. Though visually stunning, it subjected the Navy to another round of unsophisticated ‘Empire bashing’; Meacham, ‘Freeze Fame’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 September 2005, p. 10. The Lost Expedition showed in the UK during November 2005 in the sixpart Revealed documentary series. Lambert cast Franklin’s heroism in terms of his leadership qualities and his humanity. Andrew Lambert, Franklin (London: Faber, 2009), p. 351. For the monument’s online listing, see: http://blogs.rmg.co.uk/memori als/m2370/. For an introduction to these contested geopolitics, see ‘The Emerging Arctic’, Council on Foreign Relations, released 25 March 2014, online here: http://www.cfr.org/arctic/emerging-arctic/p32620/. After the effusions of the 1860s Franklin soon faded as a subject of poetry. In 1965 he reemerged in Erebus and Terror, a verse drama written for CBC radio by award-winning Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen. Her text finally appeared in print in 1974, and was later published in Afterworlds (Toronto: McClelland, 1988). Another notable treatment is David Solway’s verse cycle Franklin’s Passage, which won the Grand Prix du Livre in 2004, a first for an Anglophone writer. Consider Russell Potter, ‘Those Wrecked and Stranded Ships’, The Trafalgar Chronicle, 20 (2010), pp. 208–20; Adriana Craciun, ‘The Franklin Relics in the Arctic Archive’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 42 (2014), pp. 1–31. Naval Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition, Illustrated Catalogue, pp. 126–31. Naval Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition, Official Guide, pp. 55 – 6. Clements Markham, ‘On the Advantage of Forming Collections at Greenwich’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, 35 (1891), pp. 281– 98. Ibid., p. 299. CHAPTER 6 – FRANKLIN’S GHOST

1. Gwendolyn MacEwen, ‘Terror and Erebus’, in Afterworlds (Toronto: McClelland, 1988), p. 42. 2. Huw Lewis-Jones, Polar Portraits (London: Conway, 2009), pp. 20 – 43 and pp. 64 – 5; The Illustrated London News, 13 September 1851, p. 329.

405

NOTES TO PAGES 296 – 304

3. There are tantalising glimpses of Erebus. The ship’s wheel appears in the back of a portrait; or, look closely at the polished peak of an officer’s hat and you can just make out some rigging too. For 170 years these were the only photographic images of the ship, until news broke that Erebus had finally been found. See Polar Portraits, pp. 156 – 7. 4. For evolving commentary in print and online, compare ‘Very British Cannibals’, Daily Mail, 26 June 2009; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘The Arctic Heart of Darkness’, The Times Literary Supplement, 11 November 2009; ‘Canada Unveils Plan to Find Franklin’s Expedition Ships’, The Telegraph, 1 July 2011; ‘Editorial: Search for the Searchers’, The New York Times, 8 September 2011; Adriana Craciun, ‘The Franklin Mystery’, Literary Review of Canada, May 2012; Terry Fenge, ‘Northwest Passage Hold’Em’, Literary Review of Canada, April 2013; Ken Coates, ‘Polar Diplomacy’, Literary Review of Canada, March 2014; ‘Biggest Search Party Yet for Franklin’s Lost Ships’, The Toronto Star, 27 July 2014. 5. For this modern polar sensation, compare ‘Stephen Harper’s Arctic Ship Comes In’, National Post, 9 September 2014; Ian Austen, ‘Canada Chases Down an Arctic Mystery’, The New York Times, 9 September 2014; ‘Out of the Darkness: Franklin’s Lost Ships’, The Economist, 10 September 2014; Neil Tweedie, ‘The Arctic’s British Cannibals’, Daily Mail, 10 September 2014; Ken McGoogan, ‘The Franklin Discovery’s Not About What, but Where’, The Globe and Mail, 10 September 2014; Tom Spears, ‘The Gargoyle: Franklin Discovery Helps Harper’s Northern Vision’, Ottawa Citizen, 11 September 2014; ‘Franklin Shipwreck is HMS Erebus, Stephen Harper Says’, National Post, 1 October 2014; Robin McKie, ‘Uncovering the Secrets of John Franklin’s Doomed Voyage’, The Guardian, 2 November 2014. 6. ‘Press Release: Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada Announcing the Discovery’, from the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada, 9 September 2014. 7. ‘Sir John Franklin: Fabled Arctic Ship Found’, BBC News, 9 September 2014; ‘Franklin Discovery is Canada’s Moon Shot’, Toronto Star, 13 September 2014; ‘The Discovery of the Century’, Canadian Geographic, ‘Special Collector’s Edition’, December (2014), p. 17. 8. ‘Tragic Secret of John Franklin May Soon Be Raised from the Deep’, The Telegraph, 12 September 2014; ‘John Franklin’s Expedition was the Flight MH370 of its time’, National Post, 16 September 2014. 9. Adam Gopnik, ‘The Franklin Ship Myth, Verified’, The New Yorker, 24 September 2014. 10. ‘Your Society: Honouring Erebus’, Canadian Geographic, April 2015. 11. Ibid. 12. ‘Inuit Women’s Group Support Roundtable’, CBC News, 8 September 2014; Kate Heartfield, ‘Canada, Get over Yourself and Enjoy this Moment’, Ottawa Citizen, 9 September 2014; Paul Watson, ‘The Wreck of HMS Erebus: How A Landmark Discovery Triggered A Fight For Canada’s History’, BuzzFeed, 15 September 2015; Chris Sorensen, ‘How Jim Balsillie Plans on Selling the North’, Maclean’s, 1 May 2015. 13. Margaret Atwood, ‘Introduction’, in Frozen in Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 7; ‘Concerning Franklin and His Gallant Crew’, Strange Things: 406

NOTES TO PAGES 304 – 322

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 7 – 34. ‘The Polar Failure’, The Navy, 4 November 1876, p. 441; ‘A Farewell’, The Navy, 29 May 1875, p. 514. Washington Irving, ‘To the Reader’, in Tales of a Traveller (London: Murray, 1824), pp. xii –xiii. The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir (London: Pall Mall Gazette, 1891), p. 6. At the Mercy of the Winds (London: Bantam, 2001); Walking on Thin Ice (London: Orion, 1998). For ongoing polar obsessions and ‘expeditions to nowhere’, see Christopher Pala, The Oddest Place on Earth (Jan Jose: Writer’s Showcase, 2002); Nicholas Johnson, Big Dead Place (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2005). For useful commentary from a range of explorers, see ‘Reflections’, in Across the Arctic Ocean, ed. by Huw Lewis-Jones (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), pp. 187 – 221; Felix Driver, ‘Modern Explorers’, in New Spaces of Exploration, ed. by Simon Naylor and James Ryan (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), pp. 241– 9. Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, ‘St Paul’s Cathedral, Scott Centenary Sermon’, private corres; ‘Captain Scott Centenary’, The Guardian, 30 March 2012. Daily Mirror, 14 February 1913, p. 3; Pall Mall Gazette, 14 February 1913, p. 1; Max Jones, ‘“Our King Upon His Knees”: The Public Commemoration of Captain Scott’s Last Antarctic Expedition’, in Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 105 – 22. Manchester Guardian, 15 February 1913, p. 10. Daily Mirror, 15 February 1913, p. 4. Rudyard Kipling, A Song of the English (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), pp. 36 – 41. Felix Driver, Geography Militant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 200. Climate changes and ongoing demand for oil have thrust the Arctic to the top of the foreign policy agenda. With disputed borders and overlapping sovereignty claims, the geopolitical interests of Arctic states have seen a renewed academic interest too. On this new era of insecurity and opportunity, among others, see Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic (London: Bodley Head, 2010); Michael Byers, International Law and the Arctic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); James Kraska, Arctic Security in an Age of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marlene Laruelle, Russia’s Arctic Strategies and the Future of the Far North (New York: Routledge, 2014); Christian LeMiere and Jeffrey Mazo, Arctic Opening (New York: Routledge, 2014); Jessica Shadian, The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2014); International Law and Politics of the Arctic Ocean, ed. by Suanne Lalonde and Ted McDorman (Boston: Nijhoff, 2015). For a radical geography that imagines the world in 2050, with its political and economic axes shifted toward the Arctic, see Laurence Smith, The New North (London: Profile, 2010). 407

NOTES TO PAGES 323 – 330

27. For a range of Canadian viewpoints, compare Shelagh Grant, Polar Imperative (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2010); Michael Byers, Who Owns the Arctic? (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2010); Peter Pigott, From Far and Wide (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011); John English, Ice and Water (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2014). 28. Peter Davidson, The Idea of the North (London: Reaktion, 2005). Consider too Sherrill Grace, Canada and the Idea of the North (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001), a wonderful post-modern foray, going beyond the build up of stereotypes by rambling through a nation’s literature, art, politics, popular culture and history. The ‘idea of the north’, she relearns, is a crucial element of the Canadian ‘collective imagination’. 29. Terry Fenge, ‘Northwest Passage Hold’Em’, Literary Review of Canada, April 2013. 30. James Ryan, Photography and Exploration (London: Reaktion, 2013), pp. 31–2; Felix Driver, ‘Modern Explorers’, p. 242. 31. ‘Press Release: PM Launches Construction of the New Canadian High Arctic Research Station’, 23 August 2014, from the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. For this release, and the others mentioned, follow the trail here: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2014/08/23/pm-launches-cons truction-new-canadian-high-arctic-research-station. 32. ‘Press Release: Harper Government Unveils Pieces of History’, CNW Newswire, 13 May 2015, from the Office of the Minister of the Environment and Media Relations, Parks Canada. 33. ‘Photos: Franklin Expedition’s HMS Erebus Artifacts Go on Display in Gatineau’, CBC News, 15 May 2015; ‘Artifacts of Doom’, Live Science, 3 June 2015. 34. ‘Press Release: Harper Government and Royal Ontario Museum Formalize Partnership’, Media Room, 18 December 2014, from the Office of the Minister of the Environment and Media Relations, Parks Canada; ‘The Franklin Outreach Project’, 7 August 2015, Parks Canada; ‘Breaking the Ice 2015: HMS Erebus Revealed’, 12 June 2015, Parks Canada; ‘The Franklin Expedition: The Bell Tolls Again’, Royal Ontario Museum Release, 18 December 2014. 35. ‘Doomed Franklin Expedition Featured at ROM’, Toronto Sun, 18 December. 36. The recovered bell was unveiled at a news conference on 6 November. For now, a 3D-printed replica ‘makes it accessible to Canadians while the original is undergoing conservation work’. ‘New ROM Exhibit’, National Post, 19 December 2014; ‘Bronze Bell Recovered from Doomed British Explorer Ship’, Daily Mail, 12 November 2014; ‘3D Printed Replica Bell, Symbolizes Canadian History and Exploration’, 3D Print, 19 December 2014. 37. ‘Mysteries of Ill-Fated Naval Expedition Unlocked’, Inside Toronto, 29 December 2014. 38. ‘Face to Face with Two Doomed Franklin Members’, The Star, 4 June 2015; ‘HMS Erebus’, Sunday Post, 14 June 2015; ‘Face of Ill-fated Polar Sailor is Finally Revealed’, Sunday Express, 15 June 2015; ‘Faces from the Franklin

408

NOTES TO PAGES 330 – 333

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Expedition?’, Polar Record (2015), pp. 1– 6; ‘Franklin Expedition to Arctic Included Cannibalism’, CBC News, 31 July 2015. ‘3D Printed Models, Will Aid Further Investigation, 3D Print, 2 April 2015. ‘First Polar Medals Handed Out’, CBC News, 8 July 2015; ‘News Release: Governor General Announces the Creation of the Polar Medal’, Office of the Governor General of Canada, 23 June 2015. ‘New Medal Recognizes Team That Found HMS Erebus’, Market Wired, 4 March 2015. ‘Video: Franklin Shipwreck Divers Offer Video Tour’, CBC News, 16 April 2015; ‘Franklin Shipwreck Divers Release New Video’, Calgary Herald, 17 April 2015; ‘HMS Erebus Video’, The Independent, 17 April 2015. ‘Press Release: Canadian High Arctic Research Station’, Government of Canada, 1 June 2015’; ‘Polar Knowledge Canada’, Government of Canada, 1 October 2015. ‘Press Release: PM Launches Construction of the New Canadian High Arctic Research Station’, 23 August 2014, from the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada; ‘Canada’s Northern Strategy’, Government of Canada, 13 April 2015. ‘Press Release: Harper Government Celebrates Start of Construction of First OFSV’, Public Works and Government Services Canada, 24 June 2015; ‘Press Release: Seaspan Celebrates Start of Construction’, Seaspan, 24 June 2015; ‘Vancouver Shipyard Cuts Steel’, MarineLog, 25 June 2015. ‘Russia Stakes New Claim to Expanse in the Arctic’, The New York Times, 4 August 2015; ‘Frosty Relations over Future of the Arctic’, BBC News, 4 September 2015. ‘Press Release: President Obama Announces New Investments to Enhance Safety and Security in the Changing Arctic’, 1 September 2015, from the White House Office of the Press Secretary. Julie Davis, ‘Obama Calls for More Icebreakers’, Alaska Dispatch News, 1 September 2015. The Royal Navy’s current ice patrol vessel HMS Protector was built in Norway as MV Polarbjørn in 2001. She was chartered as a temporary replacement for HMS Endurance in 2011 and then purchased outright by the British Ministry of Defence in September 2013. Endurance has been laid up since the calamity in 2008 and is now to be sold for scrap. In July 2015 the MOD released an advance notice of sale of the ship for further use or recycling, wryly noting that ‘parties interested in acquiring the vessel for future use should note it will require considerable investment’. ‘British Polar Scientists to Get New Icebreaker’, The Week, 25 April 2014; Jonathan Amos, ‘Osborne Orders New Icebreaker for UK Polar Science’, BBC News, 25 April 2014; ‘Polar Icebreaker Pledged’, Nature, 25 April 2014. ‘Celebrating #CanadaDay’, CBC News, 1 July 2015. ‘Canada Day 2015’, CBC News, 2 July 2015; ‘National Anthem: O Canada’, Official Government Release, 1 July 2015. ‘Your Guide to Canada Day 2015’, Ottawa Citizen, 30 June 2015; ‘Canada Day in Ottawa’, Ottawa Sun, 1 July 2015. ‘Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on Canada Day’, Official Government Release, 1 July 2015. 409

NOTES TO PAGES 333 – 342

55. Compare, Daniel Schwartz, ‘How Canada is Perceived Around the World’, CBC News, 3 July 2015; ‘How the World Sees Canada’, CBC News, 1 July 2012; ‘Canada Unveiled as Country with Best Reputation in Survey on Global Perceptions’, The Independent, 16 July 2015. 56. A simple search online brings up a whole gamut of ‘Canada 150: Join the Celebration!’ official updates. For significant approaches to the fluid, and rather contested, concept of ‘northern’ identity, see Arnold Itwaru, The Invention of Canada (Toronto: TSAR, 1990); David Lucking, Myth and Identity (Lecce: Milella, 1995); John Morris, Enduring Dreams (Cocord: Anansi, 1996); Rudy Wiebe, Playing Dead (Edmonton: NeWest, 2003); Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Grubisic, National Plots (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010). 57. ‘Great Canadian North (60 second TV ad video)’, 2015. It’s a curious mix of fantasy and politics, ludicrous and rather wonderful in equal measure. See what you think: http://canada.pch.gc.ca/eng/1435319587305. 58. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: Osgood, 1883), p. 29. 59. Margaret Atwood, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1– 8; and her insightful contributions to our documentary Wilderness Explored (Bristol: BBC Natural History Unit, 2008), directed by Jeremy Bristow. 60. Monte Reel, ‘How a 19th Century Shipwreck Could Give Canada Control of the Arctic’, Bloomberg Business, 20 May 2015; Madeline Ashby, ‘Yes, It Matters Who Discovered the Ship’, Ottawa Citizen, 15 September 2015. 61. ‘The Scramble for Franklin’s Grave’, Literary Review of Canada, 20 (2012), pp. 3– 5. Adriana Craciun contends the failure as ‘endemic to the Admiralty’s Eurocentric approach to exploration’. 62. ‘Franklin’s Sobering True Legacy’, Ottawa Citizen, 10 September 2014. 63. Rene´e Hulan, ‘White Technologies and the End of Science’, Nordlit, 35 (2015), pp. 123 – 35 (p. 132). 64. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. by Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 16 – 17. 65. Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, National Geographic, 45:3 (1924), pp. 239– 74 (pp. 251 – 4); Peter Knox-Shaw, ‘The Hidden Man’, in The Explorer in English Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 136– 63. 66. Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal (London: Blackwood, 1865), p. 279. 67. Carsten Borchgrevink, First on the Antarctic Continent (London: Newnes, 1901), p. 51. 68. Ian Cameron, Antarctica (London: Cassell, 1970), p. 160; Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 8. 69. A range of literary narratives constituted ‘representations of imperialist maleness’ during the late nineteenth century, in a fleet of texts ranging from Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Kipling’s Kim, to King Solomon’s Mines and Heart of Darkness. See Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). 70. Shackleton’s reputation and the memory of this expedition has soared to even greater heights in the popular estimation: in television documentaries, award-winning museum exhibitions, endless expeditions and 410

NOTES TO PAGES 342 – 353

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

re-enactments, and a huge digital panorama played out in IMAX theatres in major cities across the globe. Compare ‘Never for Me the Lowered Banner’, The Illustrated London News, 4 February 1922, a well illustrated obituary; Hugh Robert Mill, The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton (London: Heinemann, 1923); Margery Fisher and James Fisher, Shackleton (London: Barrie, 1957); Roland Huntford, Shackleton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985); Caroline Alexander, The Endurance (London: Bloomsbury, 1998); Stephanie Capparell and Margot Morrell, Shackleton’s Way (New York: Viking, 2000); ‘A Hero for our Time’, The Observer, 11 February 2001, p. 29. Karl Weyprect, ‘Scientific Work of the Second Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition, 1872 – 74’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 45 (1875), pp. 19 – 33; Karl Weyprecht, ‘Fundamental Principles of Scientific Arctic Investigation’, Address at Graz, 18 September 1875. William Barr, The Expeditions of the First International Polar Year, 1882–83 (Calgary: Arctic Institute of North America, 1985); F.W.G. Baker, ‘The First International Polar Year, 1882–83’, Polar Record, 21:132 (1982), pp. 275–85. ‘Join Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Team as they continue to unravel the mysteries surrounding the Franklin Expedition’. You can download the latest mission briefs from the Government website, with lists of recovered objects available in an Inuktitut version too: http:// www.pc.gc.ca/eng/culture/franklin/mission2015/mission02.aspx. ‘Mission Brief’, 28 September 2015: ‘Mission Erebus and Terror 2015 has now concluded. The Parks Canada-led search for HMS Terror completed two weeks of productive surveying, but the location of the ship still remains a mystery. Nonetheless, the mission resulted in tangible and timely improvements to marine safety, navigation, and search and rescue in Canada’s North’. Stephen Brown, The Last Viking (London: Aurum, 2012), p. 325. The Roald Amundsen Diaries, ed. by Geir Kløver (Oslo: Fram Museum, 2010), pp. 315 – 19. Roald Amundsen, The South Pole (London: Murray, 1912), ii, p. 121. Joseph Conrad, ‘Geography and Some Explorers’, pp. 239– 74. ENDING QUOTES

1. The Arctic Expeditions: A Poem (London: Murray, 1818), p. 7. See also ‘Captain John Franklin’, The Mirror, 5 (1825), pp. 417 – 22. The author was the young Eleanor Anne Porden. So taken with the romance of exploration, she actually later married Franklin. 2. Ranulph Fiennes, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous To Know (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007), p. 384. See also ‘Introduction: True Exploration’, in Across the Arctic Ocean, ed. by Huw Lewis-Jones (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015), pp. 26 – 37 and ‘Degrees of Uncertainty’, pp. 202 –05.

411

95. Dutch engraver Cornelis van Dalen created this title-page ‘Arctica’ for Joan Blaeu’s prodigious Atlas Maior (1662 –72), the most famous collection of its day. It’s a curious, and early, metaphor of the ‘Frozen North’, with some of its inhabitants, a suggestion of cannibalism, a male god, likely Aeolus, sitting on an air-filed bladder – a kind of whoopee cushion of northern winds – and a range of ferocious beasts to frame the scene. Here is the imagined Arctic: hostile, mysterious, overwhelmingly dreadful, and little understood.

96. Robert Ballantyne’s The World of Ice was first published in 1859 when the mysteries and horrors of the Franklin search gripped audiences. Reimagining the hardships and perils of a voyage in the ‘Frozen North’, it would be reissued many times, for example this new edition by Nelson in 1897.

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece: Imagining the Royal Navy’s explorer-heroes: James Cook, John Ross, John Franklin and George Nares. Plates from Murray Smith, Arctic Expeditions from British and Foreign Shores, 1877. INTRODUCTION – THE INVISIBLE THRONE 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

‘At her feet the Frozen Ocean, round her head the Auroral Lights. Through cycles, chill and changeless, of six-month days and nights. In her bride-veil, fringed with icicles, and of the snow-drift spun. Sits the White Layde of the Pole, still Waiting to be Won’. Punch, 5 June 1875. Author’s Collection. ‘Passing Events; or, The Tail of the Comet of 1853’, etched and designed by George Cruikshank. Private Collection. John Franklin recalled as ‘polar hero’ in the Pictorial Chronicles of the Mighty Deep, published by Warne, 1880. Author’s Collection. ‘The Arctic Regions, showing the North-West Passage of Captain McClure and other Arctic Voyagers’, compiled by Hugh Johnson, 1865. Private Collection. ‘Return of the Arctic Expedition’, The Pictorial World, 4 November 1876. Private Collection. Advertising handbill for Rignold’s ‘Panorama of the Arctic Regions’, 1883. Private Collection. ‘Markham Reaches the Highest Latitude’, in Prescott Holmes, The Story of Exploration and Adventure in the Frozen Seas, published by Altemus in 1896. Author’s Collection.

xiv 6 8 10 13 14 22

CHAPTER 1 – ON NAVAL HEROES 8

‘A Tribute to the Memory of the late Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson’, commemorative print after John Hopkins, 1 January 1806. History records his deeds, Fame crowns him with laurels, while Britannia mourns her loss. Warwick Leadlay Gallery.

24

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

9 The cartographic temptation of the unknown, the alluringly empty chart from John Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, 1818. Private Collection. 10 Satirising naval reform: ‘Britannia and the Admiralty’, Punch, 15 December 1849. St John’s College, Cambridge. 11 The Navy’s changing face: ‘The “British Tar” of the Future’, Punch, 12 April 1862. St John’s College, Cambridge. 12 ‘A Cold Reception and A Warm Welcome’, Punch, 11 November 1876. Private Collection. 13 The sufferings and success of a new generation of Arctic heroes provided ample material for a special edition of The Graphic in November 1876. Author’s Collection. 14 A collage ‘Gallery of Naval Worthies’, 1890. Private Collection. 15 Nelson’s death inspired a cult of hero-worship. ‘The Apotheosis of Nelson’, a concept for a monument to the ‘Immortal Hero’ by Benjamin West, 1807. Yale Center for British Art. 16 The music of exploration, ‘Composed and Dedicated to the Heroic Members of the Arctic Expedition’. Robert Cocks, The Arctic Waltzes, 1876. Private Collection. 17 A library of polar heroes: a montage selection of late-century juvenile literature. Private and Author’s Collection. 18 The apotheosis of the explorer: imagining Parry as polar hero. Souvenir print published 24 November 1823. Private Collection. 19 Imagining polar discovery: ‘A Glory Great as that of Trafalgar’. Playbill for 6 October 1875. Private Collection.

26 29 31 35 37 40 44 60 62 65 71

CHAPTER 2 – NELSON’S BEAR 20 The Arctic as the first act in the adventurous life of a naval hero. Nelson; or, The Life of a Sailor, Playbill for 19 November 1827. Private Collection. 21 ‘Racehorse and Carcass enclosed in the ice, 7 August 1773’, sold at the King’s Arms Pub on Paternoster Row throughout 1774. Author’s Collection. 22 ‘Young Nelson’s Attack and Chase After a Bear’, published by Edward Orme, 20 February 1806. Private Collection. 23 ‘Nelson’s Adventure with a Bear’, a souvenir engraving from 1809 after the cherished canvas by Richard Westall. Author’s Collection. 24 Nelson and his bears: the visual genealogy of an Arctic myth, 1806 – 2003. Montage constructed by the author. Warwick Leadlay Gallery and Private Collection. 25 The image of Nelson, the National Hero, looms large over the mid-century. Over a hundred thousand people visited Edmund Bailey’s colossal statue in the two days it was displayed on ‘terra firma’ in Trafalgar Square before being hoisted to the top of the newly erected column. ‘The Nelson Statue’, The Illustrated London News, 4 November 1843. Private Collection.

416

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

26

The legendary bear encounter redesigned: Birket Foster realised the tale as a new title-page for Southey’s classic biography of Nelson, published by Bogue in 1854. Author’s Collection. 27 A biting satire on the vanity of human effort, Edwin Landseer’s ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ showed bears working their way through the wreckage of the Franklin expedition. The Art Journal praised its ‘pathos and terror’; the public reaction was one of shocked admiration and souvenir prints were soon in high demand. The original oil painting now hangs in Royal Holloway. Private Collection. 28 ‘The North-West Passage’ by John Everett Millais was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1874 with the quotation ‘It might be done, and England should do it’. The public responded warmly to its sentiment and the canvas became widely known, reproduced in the illustrated press and circulated in souvenir prints and postcards apparently available ‘in any part of the world’. Author’s Collection. 29 Disraeli, with Britannia at his feet, looks to the Arctic to provide an appealing stage for patriotism in action. ‘The North-West Passage’, Punch, 5 December 1874. Author’s Collection. 30 The artist Richard Westall reimagined the scenes of Nelson’s life as a series of heroic engagements: Nelson volunteering to board a prize in 1777, in conflict with a Spanish launch, shot through the arm at Santa Cruz in 1797, and in his glorious death at Trafalgar. Westall’s images were reproduced many times throughout the century. The prints shown here were made for a new edition of Southey’s classic Life of Nelson in 1854. Author’s Collection. 31 The encounter as advertisement: Nimmo’s new popular cover for Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, 1891. Warwick Leadlay Gallery. 32a Encountering the brute in the name of science. H.W.G. Hyrst’s Adventures in the Arctic Regions, 1910. Author’s Collection. 32b ‘Marvellous Achievements’ in a fanciful polar world. Jay Henry Mowbray’s Discovery of North Pole by Cook and Peary, 1909. Private Collection. 32c The heroic encounter as enduring trope. Frank Shaw’s First at the Pole, 1909. Private Collection. 33 The encounter narrative stripped to its comic essentials, from Philip Reeve’s Horatio Nelson and His Victory, 2003. Courtesy the Artist, Philip Reeve. 34 ‘What’s His Name?’, a cartoon published in The Eagle, 1953. Warwick Leadlay Gallery.

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CHAPTER 3 – THE NORTH STAR 35

The theatre of exploration. Captain Ross; or, The Hero of the Arctic Regions, playbill for 13 March 1834. University of Bristol Theatre Collection. 417

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36 ‘Hero of the Arctic’: John Ross the explorer celebrity, popular souvenir prints from 1833 – 4. Montage constructed from the Author’s and Private Collections. 37 ‘Captain Ross in his Polar Dress, with a View of Boothia Felix and the Aurora Borealis’, souvenir print by William Wright, 1834. Author’s Collection. 38 Ross the magazine hero: Arctic adventure as inspirational material in the improving journals: The Saturday Magazine, Pinnock’s Guide to Knowledge, The Mirror, and The People’s Magazine. Warwick Leadlay Gallery and Private Collection. 39 ‘Captain Ross at the North Pole’, McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures,1833. Private Collection. 40 A Voyage to the North! Playbill for 30 December 1833. Brynmor Jones Library Archives, University of Hull. 41 A toy theatre Arctic wasteland with characters from the play overlaid. ‘Splendid Tableau, exhibiting the awful situation of Victory, with loss of foremast, in the midst of immense icebergs. Capt. Ross and his crew on deck, looking out for assistance’. Montage constructed by the Author. Private Collection. 42 ‘Boothia’, the circular key from Description of a View of the Continent of Boothia Discovered by Captain Ross in his late Expedition to the Polar Regions, ‘now exhibiting at the Panorama, Leicester Square’, 1834. Private Collection. 43 Hero of the panorama, ‘Captain Ross’, The Mirror, 1834. Private Collection. 44 ‘I Come Here on Business’: Ross ridiculed by Hudson’s popular comic song Captain Ross Versus Jack Frost, 1834. Private Collection. 45 Handbill for the Royal Gardens, Vauxhall, 30 May 1834. Private Collection. 46 ‘Arrival at the North Pole’ by George Cruikshank, engraving by Thomas McLean, 1 August 1835. Private Collection.

133 141

148 153 156

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CHAPTER 4 – A FLIGHT OF FANCY 47 ‘No Thoroughfare?’, Funny Folks, 11 November 1876. Indiana University. 48 Commander John P. Cheyne, showman-explorer, 1876. Private Collection. 49 ‘Royal Panorama, Leicester Square: View of the Polar Regions’, Robert Burford, Description of Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions, 1850. Private Collection. 50 Advertising Shepherd’s Arctic Balloons, supplied to Belcher’s Squadron in 1852. Private Collection. 51 The Nares expedition re-enacted in magic lantern slides, 1876. Private Collection and Magic Lantern Society. 52 ‘Balloon in Winter Quarters, congealed into a Flying Iceberg’. ‘A Strong Gale’, Punch, 1849. Author’s Collection. 418

190 197 199 201 205 209

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

The Folly of Mid-Century Ballooning. Punch, 1851. St John’s College, Cambridge. ‘Ascension du Ballon Le Pole Nord, au Champ de Mars le 27 Juin’, l’Univers Illustre, 1869. Private Collection. ‘The Proposed Polar Expedition – How to Reach the Pole by Balloons’, The Graphic, 6 October 1877. Author’s Collection. Cheyne is star of the provincial lecture circuit, Salisbury, August 1877. Private Collection. Northward Ho!; or, Baffled Not Beaten, released in 1879. ‘Count not the losses we sustain, but bear our colours yet again, this time to Northern Pole!’. Private Collection. ‘Arctic Ae¨ronautics’, Punch, 24 January 1880. Private Collection. ‘Proposed Method of Reaching the North Pole by Balloons’, The Illustrated London News, 6 March 1880. Private Collection. ‘Commander Cheyne: Popular Pictorial Lectures’, Princeton Methodist Church, 6 and 7 December 1881. Private Collection. Imaginations take flight with heroes in juvenile literature. ‘Wild Adventures Round the Pole’, The Boy’s Own Paper, 19 November 1881. Private Collection. ‘Leave Ye All Hope Behind Who Enter Here: The Tragedies of Arctic Exploration’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 20 May 1882. Harvard University Library. The polar balloonist as pulp fiction masculine hero, 1961. Private Collection.

210 211 214 216 220 222 224 227 231 233 239

CHAPTER 5 – EXHIBITING THINGS 64 65

66

67 68

69

‘The Search for Sir John Franklin’, in Frank Mundell’s Stories of North Pole Adventure, 1895. Author’s Collection. 242 ‘Franklin Relics Brought by Dr Rae’, from Walter May’s A Series of Fourteen Sketches Made During the Voyage up Wellington Channel in Search of Sir John Franklin, chromo-lithograph by Day, London, 1855. Private Collection. 244 Representing the RNE spectacle in magic lantern slides. From top left to bottom right: ‘The Diving Crew’, a ‘Mock Battle’ on the Lake, the ‘Giant Balloon’ ascending, ‘The Mandolin Crew’, the Replica Victory, and the Parade Ground. Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth. 252 Plan of the Royal Naval Exhibition, The Illustrated Handbook and Souvenir, 1891. Private Collection. 257 The display of the Arctic regions provided popular images that were recycled in a number of juvenile picture books, pamphlets and cheap ephemera, and featured prominently in this item A Day at the Royal Naval Exhibition. ‘The Arctic Encampment’, 1891. Private Collection. 259 ‘Articles used for the equipment of the Arctic expedition, 1875 – 6, shown in the Franklin Gallery’. The Graphic, 9 May 1891. Author’s Collection. 260 419

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

70 ‘The Arctic Council’, a souvenir print after the celebrated oil painting by Stephen Pearce, which currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery collection in North Wales. From left to right: George Back, William Parry, Edward Bird, James Clark Ross, Francis Beaufort (seated), John Barrow junior, Edward Sabine, William Hamilton, John Richardson and William Beechey (seated). Private Collection. 71 ‘English Exploring Expedition To the Arctic Seas’, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 18 October 1851. Private Collection. 72 ‘England Expects’ every man, woman, and child to visit the RNE. ‘The Royal Naval Exhibition, Grand Opening Scene’, Fun, 6 May 1891. Private Collection. 73 ‘Discovery of the Franklin Expedition Boat of King William’s Land, by Lieutenant Hobson’, engraving published in Harper’s Weekly, 29 October 1859. Private Collection. 74 ‘Relic of the Franklin Expedition’, reproduced in The Illustrated London News, 1 October 1859. Private Collection. 75 The Hero Immortalised. ‘Statue of Sir John Franklin, to be erected at Spilsby, Lincolnshire’, The Illustrated London News, 5 October 1861; ‘Statue of The Late Sir John Franklin, in Waterloo Place’, The Illustrated London News, 22 September 1866. Author’s Collection. 76 ‘Relics of Arctic Exploration in the Franklin Gallery’, The Daily Graphic, 8 May 1891. Author’s Collection. 77 Fifty years on from Franklin’s disappearance, Thomas Smith’s oil painting ‘They Forged the Last Link With Their Lives’ divided opinion; harrowing and yet heroic too. A number of publishers issued souvenir prints to meet public demand. The Graphic, 25 July 1896. Author’s Collection. 78 ‘Monument to Sir John Franklin and his companions in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital’. Engraving in The Illustrated London News, 8 January 1859. Private Collection. 79 ‘Sir John Franklin is well represented’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 16 May 1891. Author’s Collection.

263 266 268 271 275

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285 291 293

CHAPTER 6 – FRANKLIN’S GHOST 80 Sir John Franklin, daguerreotype by Richard Beard, London, 1845. Some originals are safely housed in collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. A second set made at the same time is now presumed lost. For a long while it was supposed to be in the collections of the National Maritime Museum, or the Derbyshire Record Office, but they have only print reproductions. Photograph by Martin Hartley.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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82 83 84 85

86 87

88

89 90 91

92

With old-fashioned theatricality, Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveils a television screen showing an image of the Franklin shipwreck, Ottawa Citizen, 9 September 2014. Photograph by Jean Levac. ‘In the News: Putin stakes claim to North Pole’, The Hamilton Spectator, 26 July 2007. Courtesy the Artist, Graeme MacKay. ‘Try to Stop Me!’. President Harper rides a polar bear, The Hamilton Spectator, 19 March 2014. Courtesy the Artist, Graeme MacKay. The first public lecture on the Scott tragedy was given by Commander Evans on 4 June 1913, with First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill presiding. Private Collection. Cadbury’s ensures an explorer’s ‘endurance and hardihood’. Nansen took about 1,500lbs of Cadbury’s chocolate and cocoa powder on his Arctic expedition, so this advert tells us, as it is ‘especially suitable for men requiring all the vitality and strength necessary for the work’. The Graphic, 22 February 1896. Author’s Collection. ‘Nelson’s Encounter with the Bear’, souvenir card published by Tuck for the Trafalgar Centenary, 1905. Author’s Collection. ‘Magnetic North: David Hempleman-Adams and Rune Gjeldnes climbing the statue of the explorer Scott in Waterloo Place in anticipation of their 75-day Arctic expedition next month’. The Independent, 7 February 1997. Photograph by Andrew Buurman. News of the Scott disaster was cabled around the world. Every newspaper in London devoted many pages to the tragedy and on 14 February there was a national memorial in St Paul’s. Scott’s apotheosis as a hero explorer rested on the manner in which he faced death, not to forget the beauty of his writing, and he is seen here passing on the record of his struggle, a victory in death. The Sphere, 24 May 1913. Private Collection. ‘The Franklin Relics at Greenwich Hospital’, from Thomas Frost’s Realm of the Ice King, published by the Religious Tract Society in 1891. Author’s Collection. ‘Discovery of a Boat of the Franklin Expedition’, from Thomas Knox’s To the North Pole and Beyond, published by Harper in 1885. Private Collection. A bestseller in France, Jules Verne’s Voyages et Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras was published in London in 1876 in two parts: as The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice. The hero is eventually driven mad by his Arctic ambitions. Author’s Collection. In 1911, with the North Pole ‘conquered’, polar explorers turned their attentions to ever more remote parts of the globe. Mother Earth: ‘I think, I have worms; it tickles me so at the South Pole’. Private Collection.

421

299 302 303 307

310 312

314

317 328 329

340

345

IMAGINING THE ARCTIC

93 Rival explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook fight for the glory of being the first to the North Pole. Le Petit Journal, 19 September 1909. Author’s Collection. 94 ‘Explore. What’s in a Word?’ Adventurer Pen Hadow enjoys a photo opportunity on the ice of Resolute Bay before attempting to walk alone to the North Pole, Geographical, November 2005. Photograph by Martin Hartley. 95 Dutch engraver Cornelis van Dalen created this title-page ‘Arctica’ for Joan Blaeu’s prodigious Atlas Maior (1662 –72), the most famous collection of its day. It’s a curious, and early, metaphor of the ‘Frozen North’, with some of its inhabitants, a suggestion of cannibalism, a male god, likely Aeolus, sitting on an air-filed bladder – a kind of whoopee cushion of northern winds – and a range of ferocious beasts to frame the scene. Here is the imagined Arctic: hostile, mysterious, overwhelmingly dreadful, and little understood. 96 Robert Ballantyne’s The World of Ice was first published in 1859 when the mysteries and horrors of the Franklin search gripped audiences. Reimagining the hardships and perils of a voyage in the ‘Frozen North’, it would be reissued many times, for example this new edition by Nelson in 1897. 97 ‘Nelson and the Bear’, lithograph from Murray Smith’s Arctic Expeditions, Southampton, 1877. 98 ‘Did I ever tell you the one about Nelson and the bear . . .’, illustration by Philip Reeve, 2003. Courtesy the Artist, Philip Reeve.

422

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348

412

413 423 433

97. ‘Nelson and the Bear’, lithograph from Murray Smith’s Arctic Expeditions, Southampton, 1877.

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