Arctic Book Review

Cold Front

2011-12-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

Cold Front: Conflict Ahead in Arctic Waters

by David Fairhall

NY: Counterpoint, $26.00

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

In the wake of a new near-record ice minimum in the summer of 2011, there is likely to be an increased flow of portentious, dramatically-titled books warning us about the future of the Arctic -- too many for even the most voracious of concerned readers. Some, such as Shelagh Grant's excellent Polar Imperative, will focus on questions of sovereignty; others, such as Roman Shumenko's Arctic Oil and Gas, will look at these resources (and the environmental hazards of retrieving them); still others will address the impact of warming on indigenous peoples, wildlife, or coastlines. So it is quite natural to feel overwhelmed, the more so at a point where the troubled economies of so many nations around the world have added to the list of urgent concerns already facing us in the more populated temperate zones.

But the problem at the top of the world is very unlikely to go away; indeed, by many measures, we seem to have already passed the tipping point at which catastrophic Arctic meltoff is inevitable. So a more rational question, at this juncture, is the one David Fairhall asks pointedly in Cold Front: given that there is almost certainly going to be less and less Arctic ice coverage, and perhaps at some point none in the summer -- what does this mean for the nations whose shores it touches -- nations which include not only Norway, Denmark, and Canada, but the two old superpowers of the "Cold War" era, Russia and the United States? Fairhall, a writer for the Guardian with extensive experience with geopolitical issues of that era, is well-situated for the task, and indeed the most valuable part of this volume is its sharply-sketched account of the history of the Soviet Union's, and then Russia's, commitment to its northern coasts and ports. The sheer magnitude of these efforts, both in the construction of the largest, nuclear-powered icebreakers, and in terms of the amount of raw materials that could be tapped were the Northeast Passage to be predictably navigable, is dramatically described, and indeed they might well be the largest single economic shifts wrought by an even sometimes-open Polar Sea.

Fairhall has other bases to cover, however, and the book seems just a bit thin in places; the Arctic is a region so vast and complex in its many aspects -- its waters, its coastal shelves, its mineral resources, its fauna -- that there's really no way a book of this length can encompass it. Nevertheless, there are several other sections that offer incisive analogies for the potential of a navigable north, particularly those on the Suez and Panama canals. The economic impact of these massive nineteenth-century undertakings, indeed, provides us with what may be the only modern analogies for the savings in fuel and transportation costs, and the resulting expansion and shifting of global markets, that will be the almost certain result of continued warming (indeed, one might note that it was during the construction of the Panama canal that Peary first met Henson). There's also a brief but lovely overview of the British romance of the Northwest Passage, and a reflection on the profound historical irony that a once-treacherous ice-choked passageway that claimed the lives of some of England's greatest navigators may, in the very near future, be at least a reliable summer waterway, as navigable by a multi-ton freighter or tanker as by an Inuk in a kayak.

There will be, as I've said, many books to come on the subject, but if one wants a strong sense of the overall economic and political impact of the predicted retreat of polar sea ice, Fairhall's book is an excellent place to start.

The First Panoramas

2011-11-10T05:16:00.000-08:00

The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism

by Denise Blake Oleksijczuk

Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press

$29.95 (paper) $90.00 (cloth)

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Those familiar with the earliest Panoramas exhibited by Robert Barker and his son Henry Aston Barker will know why a review of this book appears here, in the Arctic Book Review: the very first panorama of the Arctic, depicting his Majesty's ships "Dorothea" and "Trent" in Spitzbergen, appeared at their London venue in 1819-1820. This places it at the very end of the period covered in this lovely new book, which stretches from 1789 to 1821, and of course also makes this book an ideal introduction to the form, execution, and subject matter of the earliest great circle panoramas that preceded it. Never before have these enormous paintings -- not a one of which survives -- been given this kind of detailed accounting. Too often, in both books and online publications, one sees the same small set of images: Mitchell's aquatint showing a cross-section of the Panorama, along with one or two of the printed keys. Yet here are keys to nearly every one of Barker's early views, and they are far more varied and delightful than many might have assumed. Along with them, a complete set of Well's images of Barker's first panoramic view, of Edinburgh, an array of other period ephemera, and a complete timeline showing both the views in the upper and lower circles, make this quite a fabulous volume before one has even read a word of the text.

Yet if the visual panoply of this volume is truly panoramic in its breadth, the text is far more focussed, zeroing in on just three of Barker père's projects: Edinburgh, London, and Constantinople. The reading of these canvasses is very close indeed; in the case of the Edinburgh view it hinges almost entirely on the Battle of Prestonpans, the site of which occupied just one small patch of a vast canvas, and one paragraph of description. The reading of the view of the Fleet at Spithead is similarly prismed, centering on the response of King George (who peered at it with a spectacle-glass) and Queen Charlotte (who pronounced that it made her sea-sick). The discussion of Barker's depiction of Constantinople is perhaps the broadest, but like the other two it centers on a fairly literalistic reading of the painting's subject, as an embodiment of imperialism and an invitation for the viewer to take up, and share in, the monarchical perspective of the painting.

The final chapter, which looks at the printed keys provided to viewers of these paintings, is to my mind the most fascinating; one can see the Barkers almost fidgeting with the visual space of the key, veering from the abstract lines of the Spithead key, to circles with the subject on their edge and descriptive text within, and finally to the strip-format of opposing views which became the norm for most of the rest of the establishment's life. These keys, many of them never before reproduced, make for a remarkable study in themselves, the more so as the paintings to which they once promised an explanatory gloss are now forever lost. A lovely fold-out, which shows color versions of the aquatints of Constantinople above a graphical timeline of the views shown in the great and smaller circles, is a special treat, and will be a worthy reference in and of itself. In this day when so many such things are only available online, it's a delight to find a resource this rich upon the printed page, where it is most at home.

All in all, I would recommend Oleksijczuk's book to anyone who has picked up the fascination with what Ralph Hyde has dubbed "panoramania" -- and it would be a valuable addition to any library with a commitment to holdings in the history of art, and of mass culture, between and within which the panorama lies.

The Book of Ice

2011-07-16T06:38:00.000-07:00

There's no question that Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a potent and persistent media innovator, ever building new and surprising bridges between sight and sound, dada and data, academic and popular worlds. A typical Spooky project has at least three media arms: a multimedia performance, a musical mixtape, and a graphical interface, whether virtual or concrete; it can be attended as a performance, popped into a pod, and slid onto a shelf.

His Book of Ice is one part of such a project, complementing his remarkable Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica suite. Unfortunately, it's the weaker part; without the visual and musical motion of his performance piece, the book seems strangely static and immobile. There are a couple of brief, somewhat inscrutable introductions by scientists, a typically wide-ranging tour-de-force essay by Spooky himself, and a couple of interviews. There's some interesting stuff in each of them -- I was especially fascinated by Spooky's referencing Georges Méliès's Conquest of the Pole, a clear print of which was only recently discovered (although the text incorrectly gives its date as 1902, not 1912) and Cook's Truth About the North Pole, an amateurish self-promotional film released the same year. But these are, of course, films about the "other" pole; there's not much about Frank Hurley's majestical Antarctic footage, and though the book contains a series of lovely historical photos at its end, there are no captions or comments to even identify their subjects, nothing to put them in context. The most visually striking part of the book, in fact, is a series of posters and logos announcing a "Manifesto for the People's Republic of Antarctica," though such a manifesto doesn't seem to appear in the book, and there's no reference to the (delightful) novel by John Calvin Batchelor which would seem to have anticipated this phrase.

For those who have been able to see and hear Miller's live show, The Book of Ice makes a visually engaging, thought-provoking souvenir. But, on its own, it doesn't really seem to reach a critical mass; what we have here is not so much a berg as a series of icy fragments, enticingly evoking a larger landscape that we never really get to see.

Arctic E-Books

2011-07-01T19:35:00.001-07:00

The world of e-books, in many ways, is as much an unexplored region as was the Arctic a century and a half ago. Will people be willing to pay for a virtual product with cold hard cash? And will electronic "books," so-called, ever be able to do the things that old-fashioned paper books have always done -- be loaned to a friend, donated to a library, or bequeathed to one's offspring?

While the jury is still out on such issues, there is certainly one realm in which the e-book fills a much-needed role: in bringing books back into availability when their original publishers have decided to allow the title to fall out of print. And no such book is more welcome here than John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, which was first reviewed in these virtual pages nearly eleven years ago here. For those who can't readily lay hand on a used copy of the lovely Fitzhenry and Whiteside hardcover, there is an easy alternative, as Wilson's novel is now available via Smashwords, a site which includes both books original to the e-book format as well as out of print books whose rights have reverted to their authors. Smashwords is the friendliest of sites, offering previews and downloads in just about every e-book format around, and its authors enjoy a robust royalty from downloads.

All of which got me to wondering what other Arctic books of note might be available in similar formats. Amazon's Kindle store has a variety of free classics, among them Sherard Osborn's Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal. A mere 99 cents brings you Best's voyages of Frobisher, Back's narrative of his voyage aboard HMS Terror, or Nansen's Farthest North. Recent trade books, such as Andrew Lambert's The Gates of Hell, go for $12-$15. There are a quite a few hard-to-find books (in their physical format at least) that can be had instantly, such as Peter Cappelotti's By Airship to the North Pole, or Robert Edric's novel The Broken Lands. At the high end, you can even get the complete text of Mark Nutall's three-volume Encyclopedia of the Arctic electronically for a mere $364.00 (not too bad, perhaps, when one considers that "hard" copies go for $800+ on abebooks).

There are, of course, a host of polar classics available as free Google books, though these may not necessarily offer the clearest display, or have meaningful search functionality. Yet despite the wealth which beckons, seemingly free or at minimal cost, for me there will never be a substitute for the actual, physical books. My own library includes first editions by Franklin, Elisha Kent Kane, William Edward Parry, and a host of more recent books. Their look on the shelves, their feel in the hand, their ease on the eye are, and always will be, incomparable. Nevertheless, for those who are seeking a quick upload of a hard-to-find book, or planning a vacation where the hunger of reading is great and space is at a premium, the array of e-books in this area is vast, and steadily growing. One wonders, as did Ted Betts, whether some some sort of 19th-century "Kindle for Sir John Franklin" might, at least, have saved a good deal of room in the stores on a certain polar voyage.

As affecting the fate of my absent husband

2011-05-28T11:11:00.001-07:00

As affecting the fate of my absent husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin concerning the search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860.

Edited, and with an introduction and Notes, by Erika Behrisch Elce

Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

$39.95

Lady Jane Franklin was, in many ways, a more public figure -- and a more successful one -- than her famously missing husband Sir John. She deployed so many rhetorical fusillades from her residence in Pall Mall that it became commonly known as "The Battery," and although her quest was, in the end, only partly successful, it was with some justice that The Times could refer to her as "our English Penelope."

The past two decades have seen dozens of books on the final Franklin expedition, but only a very few have focused directly on the woman at whose call more than 36 ships were launched into uncharted Arctic waters. Penny Russell's 2003 book This Errant Lady uses Jane's journals and letters to illuminate a cross-country trip through Australia that she undertook while Sir John was governor of neighboring Van Diemen's Land, and it remains, I feel, the most immediate portrait; from its pages one can imagine, at least for a moment, what an encounter with her Ladyship might have felt like. Kenn McGoogan's 2005 biography, Lady Franklin's Revenge, gives a much fuller portrait, and although its title hints at some criticism of her methods, the book as a whole offers an admiring view. And so it was with great eagerness that I looked forward to Erika Behrisch Elce's As affecting the fate of my absent husband.

Elce's book is a significant landmark; it offers, for the first time, a complete collection of Lady Franklin's public correspondence, the very letters in and through which she masterfully summoned up public and private support for further searches. It's beautifully designed, aptly edited, and accompanied by just the right amount and kind of contextual materials that will aid the ordinary reader's enjoyment of the volume, and yet satisfy the more scrutinizing expert. My only disappointment is that her private correspondence, save for a couple of brief notes to Benjamin Disraeli, is not represented here; while it's true that to include it would have meant a very different, and larger undertaking, I certainly hope that at some point this can be done. I can testify from experience to the difficulty, expressed by many previous scholars, in reading Lady Jane's small and closely-written handwriting, and not all of her letters and diaries are readily available, although the Scott Polar Research library has a substantial collection. If, as I hope, a complete and substantial publication of these materials is undertaken, I certainly can't imagine a more capable editor than Dr. Elce, whose engagement with her subject, and grasp of the rhetorical landscape on which this lone figure stood so tall, are extraordinary.

There are, I am certain, many treasures yet to be found. In one of her most poignant missives, addressed to James Anderson in December of 1854 and reprinted in William Barr's admirable volume for the Hakluyt Society, one can hear the poignant voice of a woman whose range extended from a roar down to a pointed whisper:

You will receive, I am sure, with kindness the earnest wishes of one who is most deeply interested in the important mission with which you are charged. May God strengthen and guide you in the execution of it ... I do not expect my dear husband to be among the survivors --if you should meet with his corpse which I think will be found wherever the ships are found, I beg you to bring me his locks of hair and I also entreat of you to bring me sealed up and directed to myself all of the letters you can find addressed to him or me ... The ordinary journals of the officers must of course be unearthed as they may be able to guide your researches -- but it is the private letters and papers I desire to be kept sacred from every eye but my own.

Ler us hope that we will hear more of this voice again, and soon.

Antarctic Fiction

2011-04-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Although some of us here at the Arctic Book Review take a dim view of the place we like to call "the other pole," there's no denying that this region of the earth, nearly as much as the North, has had a deep and abiding attraction to writers of fiction. The granddaddy of them all, of course, is Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which combines elements of exploration narrative, memoir, and fantasy so effectively that Poe's British publisher initially believed it to be a factual account. Pym ends on a strange, ambiguous note, in a region where the water runs white and a mysterious pale figure appears but does not speak. The apparent lack of resolution is "explained" in an editorial note by Poe, who says that "Pym" unhappily died before being able to complete his narrative, which of course has not prevented others from taking up where Poe left off. H.P. Lovecraft, in his At the Mountains of Madness (1936) imagines an archaeological expedition launched in part to investigate strange inscriptions modelled on (and at one point quoting) those in Pym; after ascending an Antarctic mountain range taller than the Himalayas, the scientists discover a weird, lush tropical world in which "elder things" -- a variety of species with impossible evolutionary features -- lie in wait. Making a film of Lovecraft's novel has been a longtime dream of director Guillermo del Toro, but at present the project appears to be dead in the (icy) water.

The idea that the poles hide secret tropics is far older than Lovecraft; the idea goes back at least to 1888, when an Antarctic jungle featured in American writer James De Mille's Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Jules Verne's Adventures of Captain Hatteras gave the North a tropic as well, complete with an active volcano in its center. But in recent years, these sorts of geographical fancies have given way to more political ones, to tales which project the issues and anxieties of the present onto the one last continent which is not the territory of any nation (albeit it has its zones of influence).

The earliest of these, and one of the best, is John Calvin Batcheolor's 1983 opus, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica. Batchelor, who has since quit writing novels and become a radio talk show host, opens his tale with a sentence worthy of Melville: "I am Grim Fiddle." In other hands, such a phrase might be the start of a luridly overwritten melodrama, but Batchelor weaves a weird yet entirely compelling narrative involving a hippie commune in Stockholm, a Swedish civil war (!), and a vast wave of refugees on boats who create their own uneasy nations on an Antarctic coast newly rendered habitable by global warming. Grim Fiddle becomes, in course, the last great hope against an opposing tide of "New Benthamites" (named after Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism), as well as a sort of accidental Moses to the fractious tribes who find themselves fighting over limited resources at the bottom of this brave new world.

From the viewpoint of today's even more contentious world, Batchelor's neo-Nordic political meditation may seem almost nostalgic; nowadays, the people who claim everything is political are less often progressives who believe in a voyage toward a better tomorrow, but fear-mongers who are looking for things, and people, to throw overboard. Which brings us to our second two novels, both published this year. Mat Johnson, in his Pym, has made the most direct evocation of Poe since Lovecraft, but it's as sociopolitical fodder for wry fancies, not a realistic voyager's tale, while J. Zornado, taking the pulse of today and projecting it 39 years into the future, discovers in the Antarctic wastes an almost-alien planet -- "Little Earth" -- on which will be fought battles between the "gods" of old (avatars, apparently, of old science gone mad) and the scattered tribes of wanderers who populate their domain.

Pym announces itself from the very start as a sharp satire: Chris Jaynes, an African-American professor obsessed with Poe's Pym is denied tenure at an elite private college, his collection of books removed from his office and dumped out in the rain on his front porch. Along with his Little-Debbie-munching Sancho Panza, Garth Frierson, he and a rag-tag band of characters displaced from the blogosphere embark on a collective Quixotic quest, searching the deepest South for the 'heart of whiteness' predicted to be found there by Toni Morrison. They discover a mysterious race all right -- what the narrator dubs "snow honkies" -- but there's very little mystery in the elaborate business that brings them there. There are a few hilarious moments, but for this reader, it's such a self-conscious exercise in over-the-top intellectual parody that all the fizz goes out of the narrative long before journey's end. If what fiction is for is to admire the author's cleverness, let this novel win a prize -- if not, then perhaps there's some other better reason to undertake a journey.

Which brings us to 2050. There is a danger in constant sly irony, and yet another danger in too much seriousness; either can be fatal. J. Zornado begins in the middle register, part Frank Herbert and part Sam Beckett, as, Vladimir-like in his dim futility, Vilb Solenthay lurches back and forth across a desert landscape, carrying water in what we belatedly, horribly, realize are human "skins." In some ways, 2050 harks back to Batchelor's book, painting a dire and dessicated landscape as vast as that of Earthsea or Middle Earth – to the latter of which, indeed, its “Little Earth” is indebted. Its reluctant hero may remind some of Bilbo, though instead of a wise wizard he has only the counsel of a young girl whose sanity and motives are questionable; his journey, like Bilbo’s, involves the crossing of a mountain pass and a trail through a vast and unusually dense forest. Yet the “gods” we meet here are of quite a different sort; unlike Tolkien’s warring forces of good and evil, these gods are asymmetrical and ambiguous, with uncertain and variable powers, motives, and histories. This first volume has the task of introducing us to them.

Zornado does a remarkable job of plunging us headfirst into a richly-imagined world. Of course, we recognize it as Antarctica – but clearly something has happened; there is neither water nor ice, and snow exists only in Vilb’s half-remembered dream- visions; illumination comes from the "arclight" -- an Aurora Australis of sorts, not natural but generated by some strange power source deep beneath the ground, and it's fading. At the same time, in this newly-reissued volume, the first of a trilogy to be brought forth by Iron Diesel Press, we sense a far longer journey, not merely to the present abode of these "gods," but an uncanny recursus which promises to take us at once back to our own past, and forward to a perilous future. The latter part of the first volume brings the reader around via a tightening spiral of past and present that draws ever nearer the centers of power; here we get our first indications that the "gods" of the novel are the embodied forms of an elite group of scientists in whose hands the continent of Antarctica was first transformed. We also see the long shadow of events from before the end of the world, getting glimpses of the ambitions and conflicts between these scientists, as well as of a figure known as Leventhal who, it appears, was the Oppenheimer of them all.

I reviewed the original edition of 2050 at length when it came out a few years ago -- but this is in essence a new book entirely, framed by a new preface, and shaped and shaded throughout by the gravity of the two volumes to come. It's as strong a start to a significant act of world-building as any I know in the realms of fantasy or science fiction; its readers' only frustration will be the wait, but it will not be long: the second volume is to be published just a year from now.

Polar Imperative

2011-02-19T08:30:00.001-08:00

Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America

By Shelagh D. Grant

Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre

$39.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Canada's sovereignty over its Arctic territory has been a hot-button issue of late, the more so under the government of Steven Harper. The sight of live-fire interdiction drills, flag-plantings on Hans Island, and the flying of a government minister for a live video at the site of the rediscovery of HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay are all signs of how central the issue has become. And yet, while willing to put out a good deal of money and resources for such shows of force, the federal government of Canada has shown much less interest in supporting the social and infrastructure needs of its Arctic inhabitants, particularly the Inuit. How did this state of affairs come about?

With her new book, Polar Imperative, Shelagh D. Grant provides an eloquent and well-documented answer. And, as it turns out, the Harper government is far from the first in Canadian history to discover in the issue of sovereignty a convenient, seemingly innocent vehicle for political advantage. First, however, Grant lays out the kinds of legal and political arguments which have evolved in the field of international law, and without which "sovereignty" as such cannot be understood. There are many ways a claim of sovereignty can be made; prominent among them are discovery (I was here first), cession (you can have it, I don't want it), subjugation (I conquered it), and contiguity (it's in the midst of lands I already claim). One might think, given all the flag-plantings, that discovery was the strongest claim, but it practice is can be the weakest; land discovered but not occupied, or without the effective exercise of control, may be deemed "inchoate" -- undeveloped or temporary -- and thus liable to the claims of others who may, in fact, come much later.

Then comes the history; Grant offers both a panoramic view and a number of illustrative episodes of the most significant turning points in Canada's, and other nations, Arctic claims. It turns out that Canada has acquired its northern lands by nearly all of the above means: British explorers discovered it; having done so they then ceded it to Canada; Ellesmere Island, though in parts first discovered by Americans, lost its claims there because Canada both occupied them and exercised control. Indeed, Canada's two most northerly outposts, Resolute and Grise Fiord, were both established in order to cement claims of sovereignty. They were also settled, forcibly, when the Canadian government took a number of Inuit families, urged them on with false promises, and then abandoned them. Grant briefly mentions these "High Arctic Exiles," as well as native groups used in a similar manner, but I was disappointed that the larger dimensions of the injustice -- what a nation will do to people in order to wave its flag -- seemed so briefly passed over.

There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover; Grant's narrative stretches from Frobisher's voyage to the D.E.W. line to the era of Russia's underwater flag-scatterings a few years ago. Along the way, there are some fascinating diplomatic dramas, such as the British government's lengthy attempt to "give" the Arctic sea islands north of Barrow Strait to Canada, a move that bounced back and forth through several governments on both sides of the Atlantic before it finally came to pass. Grant touches on the search for Franklin, as well as the later dash for "farthest north," and how these narratives became part of a perceived claim -- by loss of life, as well as discovery -- of the Arctic as a region with a particular role in Canada's history and identity. Here, alas, there are a few errors of fact: Sir Francis Leopold McClintock was never a "whaling captain," and his 1858-59 expedition, although "private" at its outset, was retroactively deemed to have been a period of active service in Her Majesty's Navy. It's a slight, mistake, though in a narrative where "private" and "public" can make such a difference, it's significant.

Nevertheless, the book as a whole is expertly documented and eminently readable. My personal favourites tend toward the grand delusions, none of them more extravagant than the United States' attempt to create a permanent subterranean settlement, "Camp Tuto," deep inside year-round glacial ice; the station was to be powered by a nuclear power plant, and featured tunnels large enough to drive enormous trucks through them. The plan had to be abandoned when shifts in the glacial ice made it clear it could never be stable. Canada, for its part, attempted to establish its own Arctic fortress at Resolute, connecting the oversize airport to the town and Inuit settlement area with a graded highway, under which ran an enormous "Utilidor" pipe, capable of carrying enough raw materials, electricity, water, and fuel for a settlement twenty times its size. Neither side, ultimately, entirely realized their cold-war era dreams, although Thule AFB was built, and the Inughuit inhabitants displaced -- another injustice which has been found illegal by the world court, but the United States refuses to recognize. And this, in the end, is the problem with sovereignty: it turns out that the body of international law on which it is supposedly founded is often in conflict with the views of various nations, and yet these nations cannot be compelled to accept international judgments.

At the present moment, for instance, Canada's sovereignty is under no real threat; though the U.S. and others may believe the Northwest Passage to be an international waterway, they still go through the motions of asking to use it; though the Russians may scatter little titanium flags on the floor of the Arctic Ocean near the Pole, they as yet have shown no sign of searching for resources there (although contracts are being signed for their Arctic oil reserves closer to the mainland). Canadians, at least, should be able to sleep a bit better at night, the more so if this book is on their nightstand. By showing the long history of the vagaries of Arctic sovereignty, Grant's book makes it clear that these fears and posturings are nothing new, and in this case at least, the more we know about this history, the less likely we are to hit the panic button when next it rears its head.

Just Received: Polar Books of the Season

2010-12-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

The end of the year often brings a series of oversize packages to the offices of the Arctic Book Review - 'tis the season for large-format, illustrated, and definitive tomes, and this year is no exception. And so, although we've not had time to thoroughly read and review all these titles yet, we'd like to draw our readers' attention to some of the most remarkable among these new offerings.

Not all of these books are for everyone -- W.F. Weeks's On Sea Ice is an exhaustive and technical tome, a reference for oceanographers and other scientists whose work involves sea ice (as opposed to land-bound ice and glaciers). Nevertheless, it merits mention for Dr. Weeks's eminently readable and delightful introductory chapter, "Historical Background," which offers a lively survey of the literature of Ice from ancient times, through to legends such as Scorseby and Nansen, through to the present moment.

Our other three volumes are based around photography; even for those to whom lengthy narratives of Arctic expeditions may have limited appeal, the sheer beauty of the region has the capacity to arrest any eye, as our remaining books amply demonstrate. First, we have Jerry Kobalenko's Arctic Eden; readers of the ABR may recall our review of his earlier book, The Horizontal Everest, by David Owen. As with his first volume, the text is a geographical and cultural ramble, recounting journeys from Beechey, Axel Heiberg, and Ellesmere Islands, the last of which Kobalenko has traversed from top to bottom in a series of interlinked journeys. Yet unlike his previous book, here the large format allows the photographs to star, and they do -- from the site of Sverdrup's Fram Haven to the Franklin graves at Beechey; from the remains of a cairn built by Peary and the Inuit at Cape Colgate to a striking view of polar mirages hanging over Jones Sound, there is an abundance of impressive imagery. Croker mountains, anyone?

Yet it's Ragnar Axelsson's Last Days of the Arctic which, to my mind, better captures the rich contradictions of this fascinating region, and the peril in which it presently lies. In some measure, this is simply because of Axelsson's imagery of the Inuit and Inughuit, who are visible only in the margins of Kobalenko's book; here we get a sense both of the profound isolation of many northern hamlets, and yet also their tremendous vitality, their youth, their disarming honesty. Axelsson captures a diverse array of images: a young girl in Kuumiut in East Greenland, in her best summer dress and on her way to church, making what looks like some kind of Hip-hop hand gesture to the photographer; a Inuk toddler fast asleep on a couch, while his father washes up in the adjacent bathroom (northern houses being an endless play on what can be done with less than 750 square feet of space); an old hunter, cigarette in mouth, clutching a husky pup, wearing a knit cap as he gazes out across a settlement. Amidst these, there are extended sequences of hunting trips, where traditional spears mingle with high-powered rifles, and a narwhal head makes for an excellent trophy moment. The greater part of Axelsson's images are in stark, stunning black-and-white; one can only imagine the envy that Ansel Adams and others of the ƒ64 group might feel for a land where the bright snow every day permits a depth of field rarely possible in the temperate zone. The people, and the land, come through with such stark clarity that, as with the Arctic sun itself, it is necessary sometimes to squint.

Our final book is not really an Arctic volume per se, though it includes a fair number of polar figures. Readers of the ABR will recall our notice of Dr Huw Lewis Jones's first volume in this series, Polar Portraits, two years ago; now comes its successor, Face to Face: Ocean Portraits, published (as is Axelsson's) by Polarworld. The format is parallel, as is the richness and newness of every portrait, even those that some of us may have seen before. The quality of the reproductions is magnificent, and the new photos -- many of them by the gifted photographer Nigel Millard -- are every bit their equal. Among the Arctic subjects are Lewis Gordon Pugh, "the human polar bear," seen emerging from the water at the North Pole; Henry Le Vesconte, a lieutenant on the Franklin expedition who was memorialized last year in Greenwich at an event hosted by Polarworld, attended by Robert Grenier, shown here at the rail of a Thames clipper on the evening of his talk; Sir George Nares, last of the great nineteenth-century British polar explorers; Otto Schmidt, explorer of the Soviet Arctic; John Parker, captain of the Truelove; and Sir Edward Inglefield, whose own Arctic pictures were exhibited in London in 1853. Among the other striking portraits are those of Lady Phyllis Sopwith (whose white-gloved hands upon the wheel and aristocratic angled chin practically scream "yachtswoman"); open-water swimmer Lynne Cox, quite literally in her element; rower Alex Bellini channeling the look and beard of a latter-day Rasputin; artist Dorothy Cross holding a dessicated shark's skin; and yacht restorer Elizabth Meyer, her face salted with sawdust from a current project.

As with the earlier Portraits volume, added attractions in this book include a fine essay on ocean photography past by Dr Lewis-Jones, illustrated by a wide array of striking and seldom-seen early photographs, followed by a lively discussion of present-day photography in which he's joined by Millard, Rick Tomlinson, Joni Sternbach, and David Doubilet, and a brief, beautifully-written afterward, "The Heart of the Ocean," by Deborah Cramer.

It won't be easy to choose from among these books at year's end -- and with some of them, you may need to get a bigger stocking! -- but all of us here at the Arctic Book Review wish you the pleasantest of holiday seasons, and the time and space for lots of reading!

Interview with the author, Dominique Fortier

2010-10-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

Russell Potter: I've read that your initial interest in the Franklin story came from the NOVA broadcast, in which I was a presenter. So, as you can imagine, I'm curious as to which scenes or sequences from this program lingered most in your mind?

Dominique Fortier: At first, I was just blown away to see the Terror and the Erebus prisoners of a sea of white and to learn that more than a hundred men had stayed there and managed to survive for almost three years. I remember pausing the TV and calling to my fiancé, asking him if he’d ever heard about that expedition. (He hadn’t either; I gather we are not the only ones in Québec not to have known of it). But there is one image in particular that stuck with me the whole time I was writing the book: that of the men, hungry, thinned and exhausted by the three winters spent in the ice, leaving the ships and starting to walk – towards what they must have known was their death. Nevertheless, they were hauling behind them, in boats weighing more than a ton, all kinds of trinkets: soaps, silver polish, curtain rods, the most ridiculous things … That image told, in a very powerful way, that after all they went through they still were not ready to leave England behind them… It also told both of their arrogance and of their complete ignorance of what the Arctic was like and demanded. It is because of that single image that I started to write their stories.

Russell Potter: Yes, it’s a very compelling image! I was really impressed by the breadth and detail of the historical materials you draw from in your novel. What kind of research did you do, and were there any documents or resources that turned out to be especially valuable?

Dominique Fortier: I started with Pierre Berton’s Artic Grail, about the history of the North-West Passage “conquest”, which offered a good overview, and then went on to read a number of works specifically on the Franklin expedition. I focused on those that presented factual information (log books, list of canned food on board, etc.). Among them: Frozen in Time, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, and Iceblink, by Scott Cookman. I also read a biography of Crozier and one of lady Jane Franklin, so as to have an idea of the important events in their lives, but I didn’t want to know too much about them, because I still wanted to be able to create my own “fictional” characters. More importantly, I read journals and accounts of explorers from the time, among those the one Franklin had written about an earlier expedition (Narrative of a second expedition to the shores of the polar sea in the years 1825, 1826, and 1827), and also lots of science books written in the 1850s (on magnetism, geography, etc.), in order to try to capture the “soul” of that epoch, and hopefully to see the Arctic through nineteenth century eyes. That also helped me to find Francis Crozier’s voice, which I didn’t want to sound modern.

Russell Potter: It certainly doesn’t – in fact it seems to me pitch-perfect for both the man and the times. In fact, I’m struck by the ways in which your novel paints a rather less than complimentary portrait of such typically admired figures as Franklin and Fitzjames, while making Crozier -- who is usually portrayed as dour and disappointed -- into a more complex and compelling figure. Was this a conscious design, or did the characters just come out that way?

Dominique Fortier: It was a very deliberate choice. I didn’t want to make a hero out of Franklin (nor out of Crozier, for that matter). John Franklin is so well known and glorified that today he almost feels like a statue. So I figured it would be more interesting to have someone looking at that “statue” from the outside, in a critical but always very respectful way, since Crozier is a man of honor and he would never dare undermining the authority of his superior. Still, I felt it would make an interesting contrast to oppose Franklin’s unbridled optimism with Crozier’s doubts and uncertainties. And I wanted the reader to learn to know both of them mostly through what they say and do, not so much through analysis of their characters. In the end, Crozier is flawed, but he comes out human. At least, I hope.

Russell Potter: Your portrait of Lady Franklin also seems to me particularly vivid; how did you set about imagining her?

Dominique Fortier: She sort of imposed herself. I didn’t have a specific idea about how I wanted her to be, but as soon as I started writing about her, she was there, and it was very clear what she wanted. I would say Sophia’s character gave me more trouble, because her “motivations” are changing and in the end remain quite a mystery. But Lady Jane was a very strong woman, in a no-nonsense kind of way, she was resourceful, independent, quick to act, so I basically only had to follow her lead.

Russell Potter: I loved the use of the de Bergerac play -- were there other sources in French that you drew from or consulted? I'm curious as to whether you looked at Emile Frédéric de Bray's journals, or Jules Verne's Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras?

Dominique Fortier: I actually don’t know of de Bray’s journals (but now I have to go take a look!) and I must admit I am not a big Jules Verne fan. That may sound strange, but I would say Flaubert was an inspiration, for his irony, as well as Jane Austen (even if she is definitely not French). I chose to adapt Le Voyage dans la Lune de Cyrano de Bergerac because of a sentence found in Berton’s Grail, that I quote in the novel. Eskimos, seeing white people and their ship for the first time, ask them if they have come from the Sun of from the Moon. And I figured that, in a way, the Franklin expedition was in fact, at the time, the equivalent of going to the Moon. (By the way, I love the fact there is a crater named from Crozier on the Moon. I tried to find a way to hint to it in the novel and couldn’t… but I managed to put it in my second book.) These men lose all their bearings and find themselves in a place entirely unknown, that didn’t clearly appear on maps, as foreign as another planet would be. But Cyrano aside, I tried mostly to keep the explicit reference English (Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Austen) so as not to draw attention to the fact that it was a Francophone writing about this very British adventure.

Russell Potter: In her lecture, "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew," Margaret Atwood identifies the Franklin story as a foundational myth of Canadian literature, and points to writers such as Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Now that, thanks to your novel, this story has found a place both in Francophone Canadian letters and in English translation, do you think this will affect the way the Franklin myth functions for Canadians as whole?

Dominique Fortier: I’m afraid I’m not equipped to answer that question. Once I decided I would write about the Franklin expedition, I chose early on to not look at other novels on the same subject, for fear that I would just get discouraged and drop it. For the same reason, I haven’t studied the “resonance” the fiction has had or to the myth it has helped build. The only thing I can say is this: once they learn of it, Quebecers share the fascination Anglo-Canadians already have for that story and the mystery that still surrounds it.

Russell Potter: I was delighted to learn that Jean-Marc Vallée is planning a film of your novel. Will you be involved with the screenplay, and can you tell us anything else about this project?

Dominique Fortier: We are actually working on the script together, and we’re supposed to have a first draft at the end of November. It is pure joy working with him: he is an incredibly gifted screenwriter, and a very good teacher. We immediately agreed on what the movie should be about: it is a tragedy, but it also has to be a bit of a comedy; the “adventure” and discovery part is important, but, in the end, it is love story. As for production, I have no idea! Jean-Marc talked early on of trying to get financing in the UK, but we are still far from there …

Russell Potter: Many of my readers are asking when they can expect a U.S. edition, and since the Arctic Book Review reaches an international audience, I'd be interested to know about this or any foreign editions that may be in the works.

Dominique Fortier: For the moment, the book can be ordered in the U.S. via Amazon.com. I don’t know if there are going to be other editions or translations.

Russell Potter: What's your next project?

Dominique Fortier: My “day job” is to be a translator. I’m just finishing up the French translation of Linden McIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man for a Quebec publishing house. My second novel came out in French this summer; it is called Les larmes de saint Laurent (St. Lawrence Tears). It is about earthquakes, volcanoes... and is also a love story. I am now working on a third novel.

On the Proper Use of Stars

2010-09-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

To the long annals of flights of fancy inspired in whole or part by the last, fatal expedition of Sir John Franklin -- a list whose authors include Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Sten Nadolny -- must now be added another name, that of Dominique Fortier. It might be questioned whether, given the continued recourse to the pen over a century and a half by these and numerous other writers, another tale is called for, or even possible -- but after reading On The Proper Use of Stars, I can only say this: no matter how crowded the firmament, there shines here a new and startlingly brilliant light, yet one which takes its place in a familar constellation as though it had always been there.

Ms. Fortier's novel -- originally published as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008 -- succeeds by refracting the light of its sources into a series of stellar vignettes, each of which captures a glimpse of one of the many figures who were caught up in the launch of, and search for, the Franklin expedition of 1845. Some glimmer darkly -- Crozier is almost a black hole of stellar suspiration -- while others, such as Lady Jane Franklin, take on the full refulgence of an Arctic sky. Sir John himself is cast deep in the shadows of his own expedition, reduced to a few doubtful-seeming journal entries, but we hardly miss him. His crew, on the other hand, is crammed with a variety of colorful characters, some based on its actual officers, some entirely fictional, such as the delightful "Adam Tuesday," who claims to have read every book in the ships' well-stocked libraries. In-between these leaves are folded, specimen-like, the fragments and documents of daily life: a dinner menu, a page from a manual of magnetism, a snippet of Eleanor Porden's poetry, a scribbled note attached to a button, a recipe.

The central portion of the narrative alternates between Crozier, whose dark matter grows in gravity and depth as the expedition progresses, and the lives of Lady Jane and her niece, Sophia Cracroft. Crozier's ineffectual courtship of Miss Cracroft is the connecting thread; in Fortier's version, their relationship seems far less futile than either of them feared, although (alas) neither will ever be the wiser. Crozier eventually must leave his reveries, and his ships behind, while Sophia comes to the realization -- with the help of Lady Franklin -- that perhaps, after all, the companionship of a conventional-minded man is far inferior to the company of a smart and free-spirited woman.

The social history of tea forms another delicate and finely nuanced strand, figuring both in Crozier's rivalry with Fitzjames and Lady Franklin's carefully choreographed social ensembles. And in the end, it's Lady Franklin who shines the brightest; never, in any of the other novels drawn from these histories, has she been so particularly, vividly alive as she is in Fortier's capable hands. She is here, she is there, she is everywhere -- equipped with little dogs named Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, her color-coded maps, her calling cards, and her formidable recipe for Christmas pudding (given at novel's end should anyone wish to embark upon a two-month's journey from first stir to fiery arrival) -- she proves herself again and again a far more intrepid and tireless explorer than her seeming-heroic husband. One must see her, in this light, as the very first to make a fiction out of Franklin, and although here we witness only the first few opening brush-strokes, the reader can little doubt that, in the end, it is her portrait at which after-comers must ever ponder and pry, however various and disparate their ultimate visions.

Of these there have been many. In years past, we have had to content ourselves with a Franklin expedition fractured along stylistic lines -- one had to choose the postmodern crazy-house of Vollmann's The Rifles, the lyrical languidness of Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, or the faithful historical facsimiles of John Wilson's North with Franklin. Now at last, in Fortier's novel, we can partake of the playful, the lyrical, and the faithful all at once, and are led to realize, deep down in our collective Arctic souls, that what has always drawn us to this story is that single, steadfast star at which all those qualities converge.

NOW ONLINE: An interview with the author, Dominique Fortier!

New Franklin Fiction

2010-09-05T09:59:00.001-07:00

We don't usually notice a new book before we've even had a chance to read it -- but Dominique Fortier's On the Proper Use of Stars, which is to to be released this week by McClelland & Stewart, is a very unusual book. For while it will be (by my count) at least the twentieth novel inspired by the career of Sir John Franklin, it is the very first originally written in French by a Canadian Francophone writer. Originally published in Québec as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008, it's been translated into English by Sheila Fischman. The publisher's website describes it thusly: "A sparkling, inventive debut novel inspired by Sir John Franklin's grand — but ultimately failed — quest to discover the Northwest Passage and by his extraordinary wife, Lady Jane." So of course we're keenly looking forward to receiving our copy -- the more so as it turns out that, according to this article in TheSuburban.com, she was first inspired to write it after learning of the Franklin expedition in the 2005 NOVA broadcast, in which your (usually somewhat more humble) editor appeared as a presenter. So watch this space: we'll review it as soon as possible after it's received!

James Fitzjames: Mystery Man

2010-08-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

by William Battersby

Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, £20

ISBN 978-0752455129

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

With the publication of this book, we now have full biographies of all of the chief officers of Sir John Franklin's final Arctic expedition of 1845. Franklin himself, of course, is a man of evidently endless fascination; Francis Crozier, his second-in-command, makes up in fortitude what he apparently lacked in charm, and has been seen by some as the "Last Man Standing." And yet it's Fitzjames, the third in line, who has had, in death as he had in life, the most charmed of reputations, despite the fact that so little was known about him. His lively letters sent home via the last port-of-call in Greenland, his gallant good looks (available in two different daguerreotype images), and his boundless enthusiasm ("I hope that we are forced to stay at least one winter in the ice," as memorably voiced by Thom Fell in 2005's Search for the Northwest Passage), are all part of his attraction. Indeed, he is the only figure from the expedition other than Franklin himself to have inspired a novel (John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, 1999).

But who was this man? By all accounts, a spirited young fellow, with a heroic rescue and a dogged expedition in the Middle East to his credit, but no Arctic experience at all. His service and promotion? Well, there are a few blanks here and there. His parents? Ahem, may we have another question, please? And yet, as William Battersby shows us in this engaging and well-researched volume, his life up until the moment of his departure for the North is recoverable in a remarkable degree of detail.

Except, as it happens, with the matter of his parentage. Not wanting to disclose any trade secrets here, I will simply say that Battersby's solution to this longstanding mystery is, I believe, the correct one, although it is (in part) a very close conjecture. "Fitzjames," after all, means merely "son of James," and had known use before as a patronymic vague enough to both hint at and gently pass over any questions of legitimacy. And yet, though deprived of the privileges he might have had as a legitimate heir, Fitzjames in fact enjoyed in his relations precisely the kind of deep and satisfying intimacies which were so often lacking from natural parents in this era. His foster parents, Robert and Louisa Coningham, raised him with the same kindness and affection with which they did their own son, William, whom Fitzjames referred to as "Willie." The two of them had a brotherly bond which endured throughout Fitzjames's life, and it was to Elizabeth "the wife of him I love best," that he addressed the charming letters sent from Greenland.

And yet, despite their closeness, the destinies of William Coningham and James Fitzjames could hardy have been more different. Coningham, through inheritance, became by degrees a wealthier and wealthier man, while Fitzjames, who first volunteered for the Royal Navy at the age of twelve, had always to seek new assignments, and promotion, by the skin of his teeth. For although his upbringing was a very good one, he lacked the sort of "friends" that were usually required for Naval advancement, particularly in times of peace. The most difficult step of his rise through the ranks was his ascent to Midshipman, and here Fitzjames's determination motivated him to permit an untruth to go unremarked -- that he had not, in fact, served the requisite full year as a first-class volunteer. This was later discovered, but glossed over, as much to avoid embarrassment to the more senior officers involved as to spare Fitzjames, and he soon distinguished himself sufficiently that there was no reason to revisit the lapse.

And his career was in every respect a brilliant one. He cut his explorer's teeth on an expedition down the Eurphrates in 1835-36, a struggle of man, machine, and water of almost mythological proportions. He participated in the naval blockade in Syria in 1839, and then went on to serve in Britain's Chinese conflict, which involved both naval bombardment and hand-to-hand street fighting. It was here that Fitzjames met many of the men whom he would later select for "Erebus" and "Terror," among them Edward Couch and George Hodgson. But perhaps his most important new friend was John Barrow, the son of Sir John Barrow, whose advocacy for Arctic exploration was so powerful and influential that it had already shaped an era.

Still, as Battersby notes, this connection alone would scarcely be sufficient to cause Fitzjames to rise above hundreds of men with similar records to attain a coveted senior post on a vaunted Arctic expedition. In this case, his detective work cannot, ultimately, solve the problem, but it appears to have been some service that Fitzjames performed for John Barrow's brother George, something which caused his friend to feel he was very much in his debt, and to intercede with his father. The results were impressive, and fateful: a promotion to Commander, and a ship which, as Battersby notes, brought him to London "at exactly the right (or wrong) time to be appointed to the Franklin Expedition."

It also goes some way to explain why it was Fitzjames, and not Crozier, who selected the junior officers for that expedition. In his biography of Crozier, Michael Smith makes much of this, seeing it as almost a direct insult to an officer of Crozier's seniority to deny him the privilege traditionally accorded to seconds. Authorities seem divided as to whether this was really so severe a breach of protocol as Smith claims, but there has also, as Battersby notes, been criticism of Fitzjames's choices. And yet, as he demonstrates, his selection was not so anomalous as is often claimed; the small number of men with specific Arctic experience (Ross's Antarctic expedition had been sent with many fewer), the supposed regional prejudices (they were in fact quite a diverse and representative batch), or the preference for former messmates (which would have been expected no matter who was doing the choosing).

And, in any case, they sailed into an oblivion that would have been difficult to avoid, even had every man aboard been a hardened Polar veteran. As Glyn Williams has noted, it was precisely the Franklin expedition's success in reaching an area assumed by those who searched for it to be impassible that delayed -- fatally -- any chance of rescue. Battersby, unlike Smith and other biographers, avoids any speculation about the fate of Fitzjames or any other individual men after the abandonment of "Erebus" and "Terror" in 1848. It's a judicious and understandable caution, although given the remarkable detail he has given us of Fitzjames's earlier life and career, it feels somewhat like jumping off a cliff into the void (and perhaps that is his intent). He instead traces the sense of loss via Fitzjames's foster-brother William Coningham, and thus gives a fresh sense of the admixture of grief and admiration felt by those who knew Franklin and his officers personally. It's a fitting conclusion.

There are some additional thoughts and appendices, including a poignant poem, "A Sailor's Life," penned by Fitzjames, and several excellent maps. The illustrative material is rich and well-reproduced, though I hope I will be forgiven for saying that my favorite plate is that giving both of Fitzjames's photographic poses side by side. For some years, it frustrated me to see one or the other of these images reproduced, without any indication that two existed: here we finally have Fitzjames, with and without telescope, and without and with wry smile. Like this plate, Battersby's book is the first really full depiction that we have had, and it ably fills our previously incomplete portrait of Franklin and his senior officers. It's a book that no one with an interest in this expedition, or this period, will want to miss.

Arctic Labyrinth

2010-05-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage

Glyn Williams

Allen Lane

ISBN 978-1-846-14138-6

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

Anyone wanting an introductory overview of one of the Western world’s most enduring exploratory obsessions would previously have had to consult three or four books at a minimum. Now we can recommend an authoritative and engaging account of the whole sweep of the subject, from soup to nuts, in one volume.

Over the last fifty years Glyn Williams’s writings have ranged widely over maritime and exploration history in the broad context of the development of European empires, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. The Northwest Passage has been a constant theme in his work, from his first monograph, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century, in 1962, through his editions of journals and correspondence from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. The long and complicated search for the passage from the bay, and then from the Pacific coast, resulted in his 2002 overview of the 18th-century phase of that work, Voyages of Delusion, an updating and major expansion of his 1962 book. Now, in Arctic Labyrinth, he has pulled back the focus still further to give us a bird’s-eye view of the whole exploratory effort towards a north-west passage from Frobisher’s first voyage in 1576 to Amundsen’s final accomplishment of it in 1906, with further chapters bringing us through Larsen’s first single-season navigation in the St Roch in 1944 to the present, when the new situations opened up by global warming—both navigational and political—are still very much in flux. As a masterly synthesis of so much of his previous work, Arctic Labyrinth is a fitting capstone to Williams’s authorial career.

As its title makes clear, the focus throughout is on the Northwest Passage, not Arctic exploration in general, and Williams, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, is disciplined in not getting sidetracked into the sixteenth century probing of the Northeast Passage, or the late-19th century moves towards the North Pole. The title also makes clear the central problem of the Northwest Passage: unlike the long and dangerous but ultimately straightforward slog of the Northeast Passage, or the short and dangerous canal of Magellan’s Strait, the Northwest Passage is not one route but a mix-and-match collection of possible routes through a maze of islands that can theoretically be put together in dozens of possible permutations, and the book’s title emphasizes the labyrinthine nature of a passage whose very entrance took more than two centuries to find.

While other writers, especially Pierre Berton and Fergus Fleming, have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the 19th-century phase of exploration, their passion and humour have occasionally been at the expense of a disinterested coolness of judgement in assessing the motives of the explorers and outcomes of their actions. But the depth of knowledge that a professional historian brings to all the related topics in the background of Northwest Passage exploration, from early globes and maps to the fur trade and naval history, all within the overarching context of an unfolding European imperialism, make this a work apart in its breadth of reference and sophistication of outlook, and bring exploration history out of its specialist niche and into the unaccustomed light of the serious historiographic mainstream. All this means it is hard to imagine an author better qualified to write such a book. In terms of the source material with which he is familiar, probably no one has been in a better position to do so since John Barrow himself produced his Chronological History of Voyages into Arctic Regions in 1818—a time when the last and most productive segment of the search was still in the future.

The book is essentially in three parts, underlining the three-act structure of the search: an opening phase from the 1570s to the 1630s, when mythical waterways such as the Strait of Anian led many explorers astray; a renewed though sporadic effort focused on Hudson’s Bay and then the Pacific between 1719 and 1794; and the third and best-known phase beginning with John Ross’s cruise around Baffin Bay in 1818 and concluding with the final Franklin search expeditions in the late 1850s. The last phase is further subdivided, as is appropriate for the period of greatest activity, into Barrow’s systematic attempt to map the coasts and sea lanes both overland and by ship, and the large number of naval and private voyages that, in attempting to save Franklin’s last expedition, virtually finished the job. The intense activity of this later period inevitably makes Amundsen’s final voyage through the passage—the main subject of the book’s fifth section—almost bathetic. Unlike Magellan or even Nordenskjöld, every mile of Amundsen’s route had been mapped by one or another of dozens of previous explorers before he sailed it; only the stringing together by a single crew in a single vessel was missing, and it is to Williams’s credit that he recognizes how much that “only” hides, giving proper weight to Amundsen’s grit and accomplishment.

The author’s breadth of outlook brings some refreshing new angles to familiar stories. For instance, it’s become an almost universal motif to note how the cultural prejudices of the 19th-century Royal Navy prevented them from learning effective means of travel, clothing, or shelter despite the abundant examples of all three the Inuit provided them with. Williams does not demur from the general point at all, but nevertheless makes clear that the Navy’s practice in fact showed significant evolution and signs of learning from experience as one expedition followed another: clothing and rations were improved, daily routines refined, and there was even, before the deadening orthodoxy of man-hauled sledging became established later in the century, enthusiastic and extensive adoption of dog-sledging.

The source materials available for each period vary tremendously: for the earliest voyages very few original materials survive and for blow-by-blow accounts of the voyages the historian is almost completely reliant on the sometimes heavily redacted navigators’ journals published by Richard Hakluyt and his successor, Samuel Purchas. For the 18th-century material, the author’s countless hours in the Hudson’s Bay Company archives over the decades show in his profound knowledge not only of the journals but of the company’s minute books, correspondence, and other administrative papers. And for the 19th century phase a still larger selection of manuscript material is available alongside the often minutely detailed published journals, sometimes from more than one participant of each voyage. Williams shows his experience not just as a historian but as a writer in smoothing out the discontinuities of the sources to present a seamless narrative with a roughly even granularity of detail throughout—a task made easier by the fact that the four-century scope of the book mostly precludes the description of events at a day-to-day level.

Painting with even brushstrokes also brings to the fore the usually more overlooked characters of the story, and particularly those of Williams’s original area of specialism, the 18th century, when the search was at its most unglamorous, circling obsessively around the giant cul-de-sac of Hudson Bay. Christopher Middleton takes his rightful place as a worthy merchant-turned-naval seaman in the mould of Cook, while the loss of James Knight and his entire crew in 1719 continues, in the puzzling absence of human remains, to present even more unanswered questions than that of Franklin. The real advance of the 18th century was on land, when Samuel Hearne trekked from the Bay across the Barrens to the Arctic coast in 1770–72, thus ruling out a temperate-latitude passage across North America and paving the way for the High-Arctic focus of the following century’s exploration. Williams does not give the background of Hearne’s journey in the HBC’s earlier overland expeditions of Henry Kelsey and Anthony Henday, but again this is due to his tight focus on the North West Passage, and land expeditions that went west without travelling significantly north are outside his remit (readers can turn to Company of Adventurers, the first part of Peter Newman’s monumental trilogy on the HBC, to get the full flavour of that other exploratory trajectory).

Williams ends by giving an overview of the Passage in the era of global warming. As it becomes more accessible, offering ice-free navigation for at least brief summer periods, issues of sovereignty and supervision raise their heads, but mineral exploitation seems likely to cause the most intense activity, with Russian assertions of control over undersea resources likely to provoke Canadian and US assertions in response. An oil spill or the rescue of stranded cruise ship passengers are perhaps more likely scenarios of a future crisis in the North West Passage than an armed confrontation over recognition of Canadian sovereignty. Williams marshals the evidence as impressively as ever, but would be the first to admit that in the face of such an unclear and fast-changing future, crystal-ball gazing is likely to be as speculative as mapping the Strait of Anian.

The Man Who Ate His Boots

2010-03-28T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage

By Anthony Brandt

Alfred A. Knopf, 28.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Do we really need another recounting of the quest for the Northwest Passage? After all, the task has been assayed a number of times in recent years, by the likes of James Delgado, Ann Savours, and Martin Sandler; just last year, it was given a magisterial overview by Glyn Williams. It was with this doubt in my mind that, somewhat wearily, I opened Anthony Brandt's The Man Who Ate His Boots, and found that the answer, after all, was a resounding "Yes." Brandt has certainly done his homework, and yet his writing is anything but a term paper; by turns lively, mischievous, and dryly ironic, his prose is an adventure in itself, and deeply satisfying fare for either the neophyte or the traveler who thinks he has been there before. Even Sir John Franklin -- who, as the title implies, provides the dramatic continuity of this book -- seems to step freshly forth from the two-dimensional portraits which were so often made of him.

Part of this is due to Brandt's deft touch with the mood of our times, one in which we both crave heroes and (not to put too fine a point on it) devour them. Remarkably, he manages to satisfy both urges, giving us at once the mythic, Arthurian Franklin with his powers of persistence and kindness to mosquitoes, as well as the overweight bumbler afflicted with an especially bad case of the cultural myopia endemic to his times. He sees these aspects not as contradictory, but complementary; with a Keatsian sense of negative capability, he keeps them both in his eye. Brandt also has a keen nose for just the sort of refulgent details -- those diamonds in the coal-heap of history -- which illuminate the narrative from within. Thus we hear of Franklin's avoidance of Leicester Square, lest someone recognize him from his portrait in the Panorama there; of Sir John Ross's insistence that sunlight altered the motion of the magnetic needle; and of the pseudonymous "Voyageur" who (quite alone among the debates of the day) suggested that the "Esquimaux" rather than the Admiralty offered the truest account of Franklin's fate.

There are no new revelations here. Mr. Brandt freely states that he has drawn entirely from printed sources, and not delved into any handwritten journals or correspondence. He comes, not as would a historian, to sift every particular, but rather to scry out the larger lay of the land, and bring it, along with all its intangibles, back to the armchair explorer. It's a task he undertakes with particular verve and style, and it has rarely been so well done.

Furs and Frontiers in the Far North

2010-02-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade

by John R. Bockstoce

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

xxi plus 472 pp. Illustrations, appendix, glossary, bibliography, and index.

Reviewed by James A. Hanson

While Russian entrepreneurs and American and European maritime traders had opened commerce with Alaska and the Northwest Coast decades earlier, the vast region above Bering Strait remained unknown until 1819, when an American ship, the General San Martin under Captain Eliab Grimes, attempted to open trade with the natives. He quickly discovered that instead of being welcomed as the harbinger of commerce, his arrival was seen as a threat to the voluminous commerce between the Eskimos and the Chuckchis of Asia that had recently developed due to the expansion of trade between Russia and China for furs, ivory, tea, porcelain, and fabrics. Anxious to protect their roles as suppliers and middlemen, the natives were aggressive and bellicose.

The narrative proceeds both chronologically and geographically to explain the recent growth of this commerce, summarizing Russian expansion across Siberia to Alaska, the arrival of American and British competitors, first by sea and then by land via the Mackenzie River. Efforts to find the Northwest Passage and then the Franklin Expedition led to increased contact and exploration. These were followed by commercial whaling fleets, the transfer of Russian America to the United States, chaos from economic competition, destructive exploitation of resources, and starvation and disease. The book ends on the hopeful note of an evolving economy returning to the fur boom of the early twentieth century accompanied by better and more active government supervision.

Bockstoce presents the reader a complete package by discussing the furs and marine mammal products such as baleen and ivory that were important in the trade, how these were procured and in what quantities, and how the products were then transported and marketed. He does the same with trade goods, delineating the products supplied by indigenous traders, then the Russians, the British Hudson’s Bay Company traders, and whalers who wintered along the Bering Sea coast, and finally the goods sold by the Alaska Commercial Company, heir to the Russian American Company mercantile empire. The significant effects of certain introduced goods--- for example, iron for tools and even jewelry, firearms, and circassian tobacco, are wonderfully documented and make the book a real treasure.

In fact, this book is as near perfect as I think any book about the fur trade can be. It sensitively examines its subject from all sides and from top to bottom. The opinions and actions of the traders, the natives, and the politicians are presented; we learn about the goods, the products, the methods of conducting the trade, and the changing nature of commerce. All the issues, from liquor to destruction of food sources, from diseases to cultural dislocation, are discussed with succinctness, clarity, and dispassion. The bibliography and notes are most complete. The glossary and chronology will both prove useful to the reader. The maps are simply exquisite, and the illustrations are perfect accompaniments to the text. The book is a gold mine of information for historians, geographers, ethnologists, and antiquarians. It shows what can be done by a perceptive scholar who has complete command of the subject and of the English language. I am sure that such a combination is an occurrence worthy of our attention.

Editor's note: James A. Hanson is historian and publications editor at the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska

Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Coast

2010-02-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Coast

Sara Wheeler

Jonathan Cape

ISBN 9780224082211

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

Sara Wheeler’s new book combines two of her main interests, travel writing and cold places. Although she has written about road trips in Chile and big game hunters in Kenya, her own magnetic attraction seems to be towards the poles: she was a writer-in-residence in Antarctica in 1994, producing the acclaimed Terra Incognita as a result; she then wrote a superbly accomplished biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, participant in and chronicler of Scott’s last expedition. By her own account she felt the Arctic lacked the grandeur and glamour of Antarctica, but mounting concern about climate change—most noticeable in the far north—and growing interest in the messily imperfect collision of indigenous human societies with a polar climate—absent in the far south—led her to spend some time with reindeer-herding Sámi. Following this trip she conceived a series of visits to each of the Arctic countries in turn, starting in far eastern Siberia and working eastwards through North America, Greenland, and back to Lapland and the western Russian Arctic. For unexplained reasons she omits Iceland, which although it sits just below the Arctic Circle is, in climate and landscape, a true piece of the Arctic nonetheless. It’s also home to the only indigenous Arctic culture with an ancient literature, a resource that would surely have helped us grasp not just the wildlife and icescapes of the North, but the interior life of its people.

It’s important to be clear what the book is not: it isn’t a travel book in the sense of recording a journey: its many separate journeys have no connection, forming a pointillistic series of disconnected placements at different times. The logistics of organizing travel to the Arctic are notoriously hair-raising, so the possibility of fashioning a single continuous journey must always have been remote, even if it could be sustained physically and mentally. Nevertheless, the lack of a single trajectory, and the tendency (in most chapters) to encamp at a destination rather than move around, gives the narrative a certain stasis, and the choice of locations a seeming randomness, that prevents the book having the sense of unity and purpose that travel writing based on a journey can give. The disjointed approach also reveals lacunae in the author’s experiences: Wheeler states confidently that Alaska’s Dalton Highway is “the only land route to the Arctic Ocean”, which must be news to travellers on the Dempster Highway and its northern extension to Tuktoyaktuk, which is after all just next door in the Yukon Territory. If her exposure to the Canadian Arctic hadn’t been limited to a couple of pinpricks (Iqaluit and a geological camp on Southampton Island) that’s the sort of mistake that might have been avoided.

What Magnetic North has instead is a meditative, and often melancholy, quality that tells us a lot about what it’s like to simply be in the Arctic, rather than travel through it: the sights and sounds, the ever-present insect annoyance, the subordination of all human activity to the exigencies of weather and geography, the contrasting emphases of isolation and communal solidarity, and, yes, the sense of stasis, embraced for the Zen enjoyment of it when you have no choice but to wait for others to take you from place to place.

More overt themes recur as central strands linking the chapters: the mutually uncomprehending encounters between indigenous hunter-gatherers and nation states, playing out with dispiriting similarity from one country to the next; the Arctic as a mineral bonanza whose value those nation states have rarely failed to appreciate to the last rouble, krone, or cent; the underlying spectre of climate change that greeted Wheeler at every place she stopped, and the related phenomena of bioaccumulation and polar amplification, which concentrate both industrial toxins and the effects of increasing temperature in the Arctic. Having set out as a climate-change agnostic, Wheeler admits to being convinced, at the end, of its stone-cold-sobering reality.

Alongside these themes the author deftly weaves in some nicely crafted vignettes that illuminate various aspects of the Arctic experience as reflected in the history, politics, or exploration of each of the countries she visits. Some of her most successful digressions include those on the Alaska pipeline (the defining presence in the background of all discussions of that state), on the air-route pioneer Gino Watkins, on the anarchic characters of the Klondike Gold Rush, on the skiing prowess of the Sámi and, at either end of the unfathomable Russian north, the sickening horror of the gulags. A few are less successful, such as the breakneck summary of 19th-century Arctic exploration, which deserves the same seriousness with which other subjects are treated rather than the throwaway flippancy displayed here. But the Arctic has so much longer and more varied a human history than the Antarctic that perhaps Wheeler’s southern experience simply misled her into underestimating the amount of material to be digested before writing a book that really partakes of that richness. Anyone wanting an expertly informed—and elegantly written—account of the Arctic’s human history might want to seek out Robert McGhee’s The Last Imaginary Place (2006), but for those wanting a sympathetic, engaged, and multivarious survey of the state of the Arctic today, Magnetic North is a valuable and enjoyable read.

Editor's note: This review appears courtesy of the Times Literary Supplement, in which a shorter version appeared on 12 February 2010

Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments

2010-01-01T07:36:00.001-08:00

Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments.

Eric Ames

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

When the name of Carl Hagenbeck comes up these days, it's most often in reference to his innovations in the design of zoos -- and justly so, as he was certainly the first to place animals in realistic-seeming environments. His other accomplishments, however, were far more varied -- and in certain aspects troubling -- than that. He was an early, and persistent exhibitor of humans from exotic lands; his built environments were modelled not on the actual places the animals lived, but on massive panoramas and cycloramas in which a daub of paint was as good as an iceberg; he was a pioneering maker of wildlife films, but the animals in them were most often shot and killed on camera; and perhaps most significantly, he is the only one of many such exhibitors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose establishment -- the Hamburg Tierpark -- still stands.

Eric Ames' remarkable new study is the first full-length account of Hagenbeck's career in English. It's also the first study in any language to consider his life's work in the context of our modern understandings of zoology, anthropology, and visual culture. It's lucidly written, in a manner that will delight both the specialist and the casual reader, and it's amply illustrated and beautifully designed. It also reveals some very troubling chapters in the history of zoos and exhibitions, including unexpected connections -- between zoos, panoramas, and early film -- and uncomfortable juxtapositions, such as Hagenbeck's placing human and animal exhibits side-by-side, or his "safari" films. And yet we must not be too quick to condemn such entertainments, for as Ames makes increasingly clear as the book progresses, this is also our history -- the history of our curiosity, our demand to see the wonders of the natural world, and of our own long-held yet half-articulated assumptions about the function of cultural spectatorship.

Ames begins by laying out the territory, carefully articulating the history of 'themed spaces,' and of their rise in the age of industrial expansion and world population growth. His account is clear and fluid, drawing effectively on Foucault and Baudrillard without ever, even for a moment, descending into theoretical gobbledegook. He makes fascinating connections and contrasts between the cultural "museum" -- at which, by its very nature, the actual living subjects of its displays are absent -- and the ethnographical show, in which the presence of those very subjects -- however we may regard the ethics of such displays today -- guaranteed their authenticity. Hagenbeck's genius, as Ames describes it, was in realizing that the authenticity of his themed spaces depended on the seamless linkage between the scenic evocation of place and the presence of its animal and human "inhabitants."

The centerpiece of this progression lies in the history of Hagenbeck's "Eismeer" or 'Sea of Ice' panorama. Originally, much like the managers of other travelling menageries, Hagenbeck made do with simple flat painted backdrops to add whatever scenic elements might emphasize an animal's exotic origins. These were as generic as in any circus or carnival, and as a result added little to the perception of authenticity. Hagenbeck made his first innovation by employing moving panoramas, which added a narrative element missing in such flat panels, and grouping animals together by their region of origin. But with the enormous living panorama he designed for his Tierpark, he outdid himself and by old craft created new art -- new enough that, like Robert Barker's original panorama design in 1796, Hagenbeck had it patented.

The patent diagram is reproduced in Ames's book, and a colored detail serves as its frontispiece. Here we see the spectator -- a man with a bowler hat and a cane -- actually thrust in among the environment upon which he gazes. Just beyond him, past a low barrier of ice and stone, seals frolic in an artificial lagoon. Nearby, a flock of penguins wanders about, and an "Eskimo" stands beside his wooden hut. On the next tier, behind a trench hidden from view, polar bears stroll about a second lagoon, while at the highest point, mountains of ice and snow loom over the entire scene. Combining stage ideas such as false perspective with the blending of painted and built environments common in cycloramas of the era, Hagenbeck's exhibition used animals, humans, and a built environment to amplify each others' authenticity. Of course, we all know that there are no Eskimos in Antarctica, nor any penguins in the Arctic -- but nevertheless the presence of one increases the felt authenticity of the other.

There were, of course, trade-offs in Hagenbeck's system. The deep trenches and barriers needed to separate the seals from their natural predators had themselves to be obscured, so that their artifice would not undercut the scene. The "Eskimos" in this arrangement were actually the animals' trainers and keepers in northern costume (their seal-skin coats had to be replaced with cloth replicas after it became clear that the polar bears regarded anything in a seal's skin as a sort of seal). Actual Eskimos were also a part of Hagenbeck's exhibitions, but he could not risk putting them in the midst of his specially-built enclosure. Instead, along with various groups of African tribespeople, they were placed on opposite sides of a nearby lagoon, where the notion of the 'meeting of extremes' was the dominant trope, and geographical difference rather than similarity drove the spectacle.

The arrangements necessary to secure both animals and humans for display are also detailed by Ames, and here the story is a far grimmer one. Like many other zoo and circus managers, Hagenbeck relied upon a number of agents and intermediaries to secure living creatures for his exhibits, keeping his own hands clean, metaphorically speaking. And yet of course it was the knowledge that Hagenbeck would pay handsomely that created this secondary market. In Labrador, there was a roaring trade in Inuit, with several different entities competing for this human market. The pressure on the indigenous population was so great that, early in 1911, the legislature of Newfoundland and Labrador explicitly banned the taking of Inuit for human exhibition. The ban did not, however, much deter Hagenbeck, who found other means to secure "Eskimo" performers. In November of 1911, he hired the troupe led by John C. Smith and Esther Enutseak for his "Nordland" exhibition, happily taking on a group with nearly twenty years experience on the "show" circuit, many of whose younger members had been born on the road and had been no closer to the North Pole than London.

Ames does a capable and thorough job of documenting Hagenbeck's activities both in acquiring new 'specimens' and designing new exhibits, no mean feat considering the variety of his shows and the length of his career. Remarkably, his business emerges as one of the key links between older pre-cinema technologies such as the panorama, and the emerging world of film. Hagenbeck realized early on that his menagerie could serve more than one purpose; like his contemporary, American zoo and studio owner William Selig, he knew that film audiences would pay good money to see authentically-staged dramas featuring "wild" animals alongside humans. And yet, unlike most of Selig's animal films, Hagenbeck's great theme was not simply a journey through the perils of the jungle but the "hunt" -- and a hunt to the death was the biggest draw of all. To this end, he chose animals from his park that were old, or infirm, and thus could be considered expendable. The directors then staged elaborate scenes, whether in the Arctic or the "African" jungle, in which, just as in his park, some natural barrier -- a river, say -- would keep his human actors safe until the final, decisive moment. And then, while the cameras rolled, the great animals would be shot and killed, demonstrating once more the dominance of Man over Animal.

Hagenbeck's films -- among which was one"Eisbärjagd," which featured the death of a polar bear, along with sea lions, seals, and walruses, have mostly, unfortunately, been lost; only one, Løvejagten -- a Danish film made with two lions purchased from Hagenbeck -- survives, but it is difficult to see. Nevertheless, the connection between the kind of authenticity conveyed by a zoo with a "natural" setting and that conferred by a film, is clear enough. Hagenbeck's business, in this sense, forms a vital evolutionary link between both the old panoramas and menageries,through early zoos, to modern entertainments such as the iMAX film, The Serengheti.

Remarkably, Hagenbeck's zoo is currently undertaking a revival and reconceptualization of its original "Eismeer" panorama, dubbed the neue Eismeer, which is presently under construction. Once again combining old and new technologies, it will, when complete, be the first new outdoor display of its kind in more than a century.

Ames's book recounts all these histories with verve and detail, and his text is richly annotated with images, and supported with copious notes. Few of these images have been reproduced outside of Germany, and many have only recently been discovered. Ames has worked closely with the current archivist of the Hamburg Tierpark, and his research in other world archives brings unparalleled depth to a history which was, in the past, very poorly documented and ill-understood. Ames's book casts a rich and provocative light into this previously unrecounted history, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the human fascination with the exotic, the history of zoos, the history of film, or of cultural spectacles of all kinds.

The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the Northwest Passage

2009-10-08T08:29:00.001-07:00

The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the Northwest Passage

by Andrew Lambert

New Haven: Yale University Press, $32.50

I've already reviewed the UK edition of Professor Lambert's book brought out by Faber & Faber earlier this year, but thought the US edition deserves at least a brief notice on its own. The book's appearance is strikingly different; in place of a bald and puffy Sir John Franklin we have Richard Brydges Beechey's luminous "HMS Erebus passing through the Chain of Bergs" from 1842. Quibblers will note that, although these were indeed Franklin's (later) vessels, the setting is the Antarctic rather than the Arctic, and some may find their greenish darkness, framed by deep olive, a bit much -- but I think it's a very handsome design, and beautifully printed. A more significant difference lies in the subtitle, and here there is an odd dissonance; given that one of Lambert's main arguments is that the Franklin expedition was not principally dispatched to search for the Passage, it may give some readers the wrong first impression. Of course, I disagree with this claim, and so the title works for me! And, although the main title makes one think at first of Rodin's great sculpture, it's dramatic and certainly will pique readers' curiosity.

The other differences in the book are physical rather than textual. The binding case is tighter and more sturdy, and the quality of the paper is far better than Faber's fibrous leaves; were I purchasing for a library, I would certainly prefer this edition. Alas, the plates are only reproduced in black and white, unlike the lovely color of the UK edition, which suggests a sort of trade-off in production values. All in all, US readers who have managed to wait will be richly rewarded by this edition, which certainly deserves a spot on the shelf of anyone with an interest in Franklin and the history of Arctic exploration.

Polar Hayes

2009-07-26T08:14:00.001-07:00

Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D.

Douglas W. Wamsley

Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-87169-262-7

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

Douglas Wamsley has filled a glaring gap in the historiography of 19th-century polar exploration by producing the first biography of Isaac Hayes, leader of perhaps the most overlooked US Arctic expedition before the age of Cook and Peary. But Hayes’s activities extended well beyond the Arctic, and in thoroughly charting them Wamsley has given us a picture not only of Arctic exploration but of many disparate aspects of 19th-century American life. The publishers are also to be commended for producing a pleasingly solid and attractively presented volume, illustrated with photographs, engravings, well-drawn maps, and a colour plate.

Isaac Hayes was born into a Quaker community in rural Pennsylvania in 1832, and the author has taken great trouble to evoke the details of what that Quaker upbringing would have meant. To those accustomed to the modern Quaker image as a peace-loving but, in theological terms, virtually doctrine-free sect, it is a bracing shock to realize that in the 1820s American Quakers were stern disciplinarians who experienced a doctrinal and praxis-based schism that bitterly split the community. As a result, their physical assets were divided according to which group could muster the greatest support in each locality. In Chester county, the more orthodox group to which Hayes’s family belonged retained control of the most precious local asset, a residential school, and here the young Isaac had a formal and very serious education that encompassed natural science, mathematics, rhetoric and public speaking alongside religious studies and some carefully controlled exposure to literature. The detail with which Wamsley has researched and recreated the life of this school and the world-view of the community it served marks an impressive contribution to the social history of the Quakers.

Grasping with both hands the opportunity of his few years at the school, young Isaac flourished in the school’s debating and literary societies, and went on to become a junior instructor himself when he graduated. But his ambition clearly drew him to wider horizons from a young age, and he quickly decided that a medical career was his best chance for advancement on the social and economic ladder he desperately wanted to climb. Looking even further afield, he pushed himself unrelentingly to complete a three-year medical course in two years so that he would be qualified in time to sign up with the Second Grinnell Expedition to the Arctic, led by Elisha Kent Kane. A generalized ambition, and specifically a desire to escape from the respectable poverty in which he had been raised, seems to have led Hayes both to medicine and to the Arctic, rather than any specific interest in either field. But while his fascination with the Arctic grew along with his exposure to it, on the evidence of this biography his commitment to medicine as a vocation—rather than as a door-opener—seems always to have been somewhat half-hearted. At no point did he settle down to regular medical practice, even as he complained of a lack of income, and in the one period in his life continuously devoted to a medical institution, when he ran Philadelphia’s Satterlee Hospital during the Civil War, his work was overwhelmingly administrative in nature.

Wamsley’s attention to detail is always impressive, but this sometimes leads him astray in misjudgements of emphasis. This is particularly noticeable during his overly thorough description of Kane’s expedition, which takes up fully a hundred pages of rather close-set text. The detail is unnecessary both because this expedition is so well covered elsewhere and because the pages devoted to it are not used to give any more emphasis to the role of Hayes than that of anyone else. Wamsley’s impeccably impartial view avoids any special pleading for Hayes’s actions in the often acrimonious series of events, as the crew split into camps before uneasily reintegrating. But nor does he provide any particular focus on Hayes’s role in the expedition—which a biography surely ought to—and we get no sense of seeing events from Hayes’s viewpoint. Indeed, for chapters at a time one simply forgets that this is a biography of Hayes, rather than simply an account of the expedition.

As soon as he returned from the Kane expedition, it seems, Hayes decided that he would support himself by public lecturing, drawing on his school-time experience as a public speaker and debater. And within a short time he had conceived the idea of leading his own Arctic expedition to put right the errors of decision and execution he perceived Kane as having made. But throughout his life Hayes’s timing, and much else, was dogged by bad luck, and without the prestigious social and political connections that had smoothed the fundraising process for Kane, or the charismatic force of personality that would later propel Charles Hall to leadership of the government-funded Polaris expedition, Hayes had to cajole, exhort, scrimp, save, beguile, and seduce his would-be funders—and all during an economic downturn. Unsurprisingly it took him five years to raise the funds for even a modest, single-ship expedition.

Crucially, this was a sailing ship rather than a steamer, and the restrictions this placed on navigating in the ice-choked waters of Smith Sound had profound implications for what the expedition could accomplish. Their wintering place was further south than Kane’s (without steam power they could not risk getting stuck further north) and wind and ice had forced them onto the Greenland shore of Smith Sound, while Hayes had explicitly wanted to aim for the Ellesmere side. As a consequence, the main exploratory sledge journey of the expedition in the spring of 1861 had to use virtually all its strength and resources just crossing the frozen strait to the west before the participants could even begin heading north, with the result that Hayes’s furthest advance did not even reach as high a latitude as Morton achieved on Kane’s expedition in 1854. Although some coastline had been mapped for the first time, and Hayes tried to claim a greater distance than, in all probability, he actually achieved, it became apparent when the expedition’s results were eventually published (in 1865) how little new ground had been covered. This, along with the explorers’ return to find themselves in the midst of a civil war, ensured that any momentum that might have been generated for further exploration was lost, and that Hayes’s expedition, with no distinct achievement to call its own, soon faded in the public mind.

The Civil War provided Hayes with another opportunity to show his flair for leadership, as President Lincoln himself recommended him to run the Union’s major military hospital—in fact during its brief three-year existence Satterlee became the largest hospital in the world, and its well-ordered functioning and reputation for high standards of care owed much to Hayes’s zeal and discipline. But from the war’s end onwards the sense of drift in Hayes’s career is palpable. Lecturing and occasional writing continued to be his bread and butter, and his two remaining Arctic journeys (a summer cruise to Greenland with the painter William Bradford in 1869 and an expedition to Iceland during its millennial celebrations in 1874) are perhaps most accurately thought of as extensions of the same type of activity—creating diversions for the edification of the wealthy—rather than as genuinely exploratory ventures. Instead, the major effort of the remainder of what would prove to be a truncated life was in politics. From 1875 until the spring of 1881 Hayes served as an assemblyman representing a New York City district in the state assembly in Albany. He championed many progressive and far-sighted causes, including underground railways, subacqueous tunnels, and the abolition of canal freight charges, and was a consistent opponent of the Tammany Hall corruption that was only then beginning to be seriously challenged.

As with his treatment of Hayes’s Quaker background, Wamsley’s coverage of Hayes’s political career is admirably researched and comprehensive, providing a well-drawn picture of both corrupt and reformist state and city politics in the gilded age. Even this career had completed its brief cycle of rise and fall before Hayes’s death, however: reaching a zenith of popular regard and power in his third year as assemblyman, when he chaired important committees, his behaviour was increasingly erratic in his fourth and fifth years, and he became a marked man whom the New York Times, once supportive, singled out for relentless criticism until Republican Party bosses persuaded him not to run for re-election in November 1881. His decline, marked by intemperate outbursts and rambling orations, was perhaps linked to heart disease, his probable cause of death in December 1881.

Although he was just 49, having finished with careers as explorer, administrator, and politician, and with nothing to show financially for a life of toil, it is hard to know what Hayes would have done next if he hadn’t died; he seems to have consumed and exhausted every opportunity open to him. Yet for all the abundant detail of Wamsley’s work there seems to remain something blankly unknowable about Hayes, a lack of a strongly characterized personality that is puzzling. Perhaps the absence of a life partner (Hayes never married) and the emotional mirror such a person would have provided to his thoughts and actions, is one cause. But the author’s one serious omission in an otherwise all-inclusive book is an extensive consideration of Hayes’s published writing, from which there are surprisingly few quotations, and it is sobering on reaching the bibliography to see how extensive the list of publications is, ranging from exploration narratives, journalism and political advocacy to children’s stories. Perhaps a greater emphasis on evaluation of these writings, rather than simple reporting of their contents, would have gone some way to providing those missing insights into Hayes’s personality.

As a documentary record of the explorer’s life and the background that shaped him, Polar Hayes is surely the definitive work. But the elusive personality of the man still perhaps remains to be grasped.

Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation

2009-06-06T16:47:00.001-07:00

Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation

by Andrew Lambert

London: Faber & Faber, 2009

£20

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Andrew Lambert's Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation is the first new scholarly biography of Sir John Franklin in many years. How many? Well, it depends on how you count. Deadly Winter, Martyn Beardsley's 2002 biography, was more of a general-interest work, while John Wilson's lively 2001 volume, John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas, was geared to younger readers. Before that, if one wanted a detailed biography by a naval historian one would have to reach back almost to Richard J. Cyriax's Sir John Franklin's Last Expedition in 1939. So there can be no doubt that the appearance of Lambert's study is an occasion for celebration among all with an interest in the strange fate of this unhappy navigator.

And yet, as Franklin has come to mean so many things for so many people, it might be wise to say at the outset what this book is not. It is not a psychological study; those looking for insights into Franklin's character would be far better served by Beardsley's book. It is not, in fact, a summa of Franklin's entire career; for that, one would have to reach back to G.F. Lamb's Franklin - Happy Voyager from 1956. Like Cyriax, Lambert's real subject is Franklin's last expedition, and his great aim is to set that event in the richest possible naval and historical context. As such, Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation is a resounding success, easily the most comprehensive and authoritative account we have of the reasons why this man did, and died.

(For those who may resent my pun on Tennyson, who was Sir John's cousin, I would only add that it was -- of all people -- Lady Jane Franklin who caused 10,000 copies of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" to be distributed to soldiers in the Crimea).

Lambert's labor is to give his readers the fullest possible account of the motivations of those who sent Franklin and his men to what turned out to be their demise. In order to do this, he seems to feel, he must take away the popular notion that the Franklin Expedition sailed in order to complete the "Arctic Grail" of the Northwest Passage, and give us instead an account of Franklin as scientist-in-chief of a great voyage of magnetic and geographical observation. The correction, like that for the declination of the compass, is a vital one, and yet in his effort to re-orient our gaze Lambert, in my view, risks distorting the reader's perspective in the opposite direction.

In his strongest declaration, on page 167, he goes so far as to say that "the Victorians were not so foolhardy as to risk two ships and 129 men in pursuit of a geographical curiosity of no practical utility. Instead, [Franklin's] expedition was designed to address a high-profile scientific agenda, and the decision to send him was driven by the political power of organised science." There's certainly no doubt that a scientific imperative, driven (as Lambert vividly recounts) by the Humboldtian quest for the mapping of terrestrial magnetism, was a key factor in getting the necessary government support. But to say that the Victorians were uninterested in geographical accomplishments "of no practical utility" is to distort the political and public sense, driven home over the years by men such as Sir John Barrow, that it was precisely the useless things that mattered. After all, had not Sir John Ross, testifying before a Parliamentary committee in 1834, declared that the Northwest Passage, even if obtained, would be "absolutely useless"? And had not Barrow, in his last and most emphatic defense of the quest for the Passage, rejected the utilitarian view, declaring that "it must be a very narrow spirit and view of the subject which can raise the cry of "Cui bono?" and counsel us to relinquish the honor and peril of such enterprises?"

The divergence between the reasons necessary to justify an undertaking on purely scientific grounds, and those vital to capturing the public imagination, is a persistent one. In response to those who questioned why the United States needed to despatch a man to the surface of Earth's Moon before the Soviets could do so, many an otherwise calm and rational man fell back upon disquisitions about Tang, "space food sticks," and improvements to onboard telemetry. Truth be told, while all of these things had some significant practical value, if their practical value alone had been the only argument, the mission to the Moon would never have been undertaken. Just so, while from a scientific view the "Passage" as such was a nil value, whereas magnetic data obtained near the Pole was worth its weight in scientific gold, such marvelous observations would not have been possible without the public's passion for a national achievement, even and especially one of so little immediate use that only the greatest nations dared undertake it.

So let us simply say that, while that the urge to obtain newly accurate magnetic observations near the North Magnetic Pole was indeed a vital impetus for Franklin's mission, that mission would have never have received Government backing had it not "piggybacked" upon the public's passion for the elusive laurels of the Passage. We need not lessen one achievement by disparaging the allotment of the other. Indeed, Roald Amundsen, who eventually achieved this long-sought goal, was only able to justify his undertaking by making similar protestations that magnetic observations were his chief object. Let us look kindly upon such claims, accepting the boon to science while permitting some degree of adulation for the accomplishment of a useless, yet widely lauded goal.

But back to Lambert's study. He skims over Franklin's earlier expeditions, allotting only a few pages apiece to his voyage under Buchan to Spitsbergen, and his first and second land expeditions. Franklin's time in Tasmania receives more substantial coverage, and rightly so, as it was there, on the colonial frontier, that Franklin was able to take up the mantle of the prime intellectual magnate. Through his, and through Jane's, public foundations, journals, and societies, they laid the foundation of an enlightened country far before -- as it turned out -- the country was ready for them. Nevertheless, it was a grand period, and never more so than when Sir James Clark Ross and Francis Crozier sojourned in Hobart Town. Lambert passes quickly over the dress balls with their famous mirrors, and gives us in their place a contrasting portrait of a Franklin, more Benjamin than John in his inclinations, supporting and encouraging vital magnetic and geological observations.

The buildup to the great undertaking is aptly handled by Lambert, who gives a vivid account of the machinations by which Franklin won the command, as the great gears and cogs of science rotated their contributions into place. As he notes pointedly, on 12 July 1845, as the last parcels of mail headed south, the inner thoughts of Franklin, along with all of his men, passed forever out of direct knowledge, and all the rest is speculation. And yet, in its place, the drama of the search for Franklin soon engaged more men, more resources, and more ships than anything conceived of in Franklin's original orders. Lambert proves a capable chronicler of the Franklin search, and while he does not add a great deal of new insight to our understanding of it, he keeps the drama vividly alive, and sprinkles the salt of lesser-known facts which keep the matter savory.

When it comes, though, to the "last resource" and other events which depend on a complex, ambiguous, and permanently incomplete assortment of Inuit testimony, archaeological finds, and grand conjectures, Lambert remains -- resolutely though frustratingly -- aloof. I'm relieved that, unlike Beardsley, he accepts it as established that cannibalism occurred among some groups of survivors; the preponderance of the forensic and historical evidence leaves no room for comfort here. Nevertheless, he follows Beardsley in setting aside any detailed analysis of this same evidence, leaving his readers with a similar sense that, if they wish to know more, they will have to turn to Woodman, Loomis, Eber, and others. While I respect Lambert's sense of integrity in drawing his limits, I still regret that his study declines to offer what I'm sure would have been his sensible overview of what, by patient inquiry, has at least so far been learned.

The remainder of Lambert's study is largely memorial, in the sense that it traces the evolution of Franklin's reputation in the world he had long since left. His section "Brazen lies" offers an observant and detailed account of Lady Franklin's attempts to secure her husband's posthumous reputation. And yes (how) does that brass lie? The line from Richardson is one of contention: "they forged the last link with their lives." And yet the Inuit testimony of their encounter with Franklin's men at Washington Bay, on whose southern edge Simpson's cairn had been erected -- testimony which Lambert elsewhere accepts -- corroborates this very line. It is strange indeed that Lambert, and -- more notably in the press -- Inuit politician Tagak Curley -- have taken to calling this line a lie. It seems as though Lambert wants it both ways; he desires to free Franklin of falsely-flaunted explorer's laurels while re-crowning him with Science -- and yet at the same time loudly proclaims that the statue on Waterloo Place has feet of clay.

Yet the end, I must say, I remain an admirer of this well-written, challenging, and thoughtful book. It is not precisely a biography, and it has less of social and literary context than I should have liked -- but it is an ardent, energetic volume which does much to correct and balance the historical record. It rewards its readers with a new sense of the substance of the man and his mission, and while it only pauses to observe a few of the many cultural monuments he left in his wake, it restores to us a man who, whatever fancies have kept him in the public's mind since, had an eminently practical and valuable career in the eyes of his Victorian compeers.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Check out our interview with Andrew Lambert.

Coming Soon: New Arctic Books

2009-06-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

Our site may have been quiet for a few weeks, but the silence you hear is actually the sound of our reviewers carefully paging through some of the year's most exciting new titles of Arctic interest. With our new format, these will be published as soon as they're complete, so you won't have to wait for a full "issue" to accumulate before you can sample our latest offerings.

Russell Potter is currently reading Andrew Lambert's new biography of Sir John Franklin from Faber & Faber, the first new scholarly biography in many years. Lambert, a professor of naval history at King's College, London, was featured in John Murray's documentary, Finding Franklin. Meanwhile, Kari Herbert, fresh from work on her forthcoming book The Heart of the Hero - The Women Behind Polar Explorers, will be reviewing Erika Elce's new collection of the letters of Lady Jane Franklin, As affecting the fate of my absent husband. Jonathan Dore will offer his assessment of Polar Hayes, Douglas Wamsley's long-awaited account of Isaac Israel Hayes, whose remarkable career stretched from the Second Grinnell Expedition in 1853 through William Bradford's voyage aboard the Panther in 1869. Last but far from least, our Nunavut correspondent Kenn Harper will bring his knowledge of Arctic shows and exhibitions to bear on Eric Ames's Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments, the first book-length study in English of the German zoo magnate whose polar panoramas were stocked with live bears and seals.

2009 promises to be a banner year for Polar books; in addition to the above titles, there are several noteworthy efforts coming later this year. John Bockstoce's comprehensive new study, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade, is due out this fall from Yale University Press. Glyn Williams, whose Voyages of Delusion was well received here a few years past, has a enticing new offering with Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage, due out in October. Lastly, we're looking foward keenly to Beau Riffenburgh's latest effort, Polar Exploration, a richly illustrated account of the era of Shackleton, Mawson, Scott, and Amundsen.

Wanting: A Novel

2009-04-28T06:10:00.001-07:00

Wanting, by Richard Flanagan

NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, $24

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Wanting is the latest, but surely not the last, in the tradition of fiction inspired by some aspect of the career of Sir John Franklin. And yet, even in this crowded field, it stands out as one of only two or three that draw fully and richly from the indigenous cultures among which Franklin sojourned, and it is the only one to take on his and Lady Jane's relationship with the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania. At the same time, by alternating this narrative with a fictionalized account of Charles Dickens's personal crises in the later 1850's -- a period which would see both the death of his youngest daughter and his separation from his wife -- he complicates the colonial landscape with a cobblestone corollary. The most unexpected figure in all of this is a tragic heroine of almost Dickensian proportions, the native Tasmanian girl Mathinna, adopted by the Franklins during their time at Government House in Hobart Town, then abandoned when they returned to England in 1843.

Mathinna's story has been told before -- most powerfully in a radio play by Carmen Bird, In Her Father's House, which was broadcast on ABC Australia in 2003. Yet here, interwoven into Flanagan's dense, Tolstoyesque garden of forking narratives, it seems somehow even darker and more desperate. Mathinna was part of that remnant of Tasmania's original people who had been rounded up and isolated on Flinders Island (named after Franklin's uncle) under a policy conceived of as protection but in practice both a cultural and literal act of genocide. The program was administered by George Augustus Robinson, the chief "Protector of Aborigines," a man who never appreciated the irony of his title. Early on, Flanagan gives us a vivid portrait of the workings of his mind, and we see the method in the madness he directed. To him, Lady Jane's desire to adopt Mathinna is a conundrum; he recognizes a certain imperious selfishness to which, given the Franklin's position, he has little choice but to accede. Jane comes across as a bossy, breezy, and thoughtless woman, and her husband -- when he comes across at all -- is reduced to little but a wheezing, overweight sack of compliance. Rarely in the tradition of Franklin fiction has the "great man" appeared so reduced; when, as he always does, he dies in this narrative, one can scarcely even muster a feeling of pity.

At the same time, we are introduced to the world of Dickens, and here again Flanagan has clearly done his historical homework. We see him both as the toast of polite society and the restless recluse, wandering the streets of London by night; we meet two men -- John Forster and Wilkie Collins -- whose rivalry for his intimacy triangulates this period of his life. Dickens, of course, was quite carried away by the public feeling over the disappearance of Franklin, offering his services to Lady Jane to dispel Dr. John Rae's reports of cannibalism in 1854, as well as producing, with Collins, the 1857 play The Frozen Deep, which was in many ways a public elegy for Franklin's men. And it was during the Manchester performances of the play at which he met Ellen Ternan, a young actress who quite won his heart, and with whom he spent the rest of his life in a possibly Platonic relationship (they burned all their letters, so the world may never know).

The parallels between the world of Dickens and that of Mathinna seem at times a bit strained; the "experiment" of "civilizing" an Aboriginal girl, and her later abandonment, seems quite distant from Dickens's emotional travails in the midst of a bustling London literary scene. And yet time, being made of moments, works some wonders here; Flanagan frames the epiphanies of his characters as vividly and multifariously as the famous seven hundred looking glasses with which the "Erebus" and "Terror" were festooned for a fancy dress ball while calling on Hobart Town in the midst of James Clark Ross's circumnavigation of Antarctica. That these same ships, only a few years later, would be witness to Franklin's own death and nearly twenty of his men, is a fact not lost on Flanagan, who finds light in darkness and darkness in light. He makes the ball into a costume party, giving Mathinna a wallaby mask and Sir John -- who escorts her on board -- that of a black swan, which enables richly memorable lines: "'Our princess of the wilds,' sighed a wolf."

Mathinna herself comes through vividly, and with the kind of uncondescending empathy that's rare in fictional depictions of tragic native figures. Flanagan has caught something of the weave and the weft of her world, of the impossibility of the promise leant to her by Lady Franklin's stiff affection, the gazes of the white fellas, and the famous red dress given by her Ladyship, preserved in the oil portrait she commissioned. The details of Mathinna's known life form a kind of armature for the fabric of Flanagan's imaginings, but he leaves some parts of his own cloth unwoven and gauzy, as he should.

It would be unfair to the reader to trace the ultimate denouement of these darkly twinned, deeply tangled tales -- suffice it to say that Flanagan manages to make a sort of resolution out of the lack of resolution offered by history. In a Beckettian phrase, Garney Walch, the old oxcart driver who had first driven Mathinna into Hobart Town muses on the meaning of it all:

"How it goes,' he murmured," and keeps on going."

And so it goes.

Encounters on the Passage

2009-04-09T05:25:00.001-07:00

Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers

Dorothy Harley Eber
University of Toronto Press, 2008
ISBN (cloth): 978-0-8020-9275-5

Reviewed by David C. Woodman

I have always envied Dorothy Harley Eber. Two decades ago my soon-to-be editor kindly invited me to lunch to discuss my unpublished manuscript. A charming lady named Dorothy who had a similar interest in Inuit oral history accompanied her. At that time Dorothy, unknown to me, was already famous for her groundbreaking Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life. That book was an illustrated oral biography of the Inuit artist Pitseolak Ashoona created from recorded interviews Dorothy had undertaken in 1970. She had recently completed another biography based on interviews with Peter Pitseolak eventually published as the excellent People from Our Side.

Whereas I mined dusty and obscure sources for Inuit testimony collected during the nineteenth century, Dorothy actually met with living Inuit and over the years had patiently developed a trust and rapport that allowed her to record and preserve a fast-fading culture. We shared a belief in the value of the Inuit oral tradition, both in itself and as a cross-cultural window into historical events. Dorothy had notably pursued this second avenue with her When the Whalers Were Up North: Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic (1989), her first foray into contact between the Inuit and Europeans.

We had a delightful lunch, and I remember asking Dorothy whether there were any modern memories of the Franklin disaster (my own area of interest) among her informants. In this book, finally, and much to my delight, Dorothy has answered that question.

Gleaned from interviews conducted between 1994 and 2008, Encounters on the Passage relates modern Inuit remembrances, passed down through generations, of encounters with European explorers. Eber’s aim in doing so is simple and practical – to preserve the Inuit oral tradition. Yet this book is not simply a repository of endangered stories. Throughout Eber takes pains to place the Inuit traditions in historical context and to compare them with written accounts preserved by the explorers themselves. In doing so she concludes that the traditions offer “correlations and contrasts, and, always, new perspectives.”

Eber is fully forthright about the difficulties involved in the use of Inuit oral history. Tommy Anguttitauruq tells her, “every time the stories are told, maybe they'r [sic] a little bit different; there's a little bit added and maybe some things left out” and she notes that the stories “are sometimes blended or “collapsed” … [t]hese stories are now getting through to the next generation only in a fragmented state.” Even so, as the narrative makes clear, these relics of old traditions often complement the preserved stories of the great-great-grandparents of Eber’s informants. Whether these correlations are confirmation or repetition is more difficult to determine.

The stories themselves preserve Inuit traditions ranging in date from the expeditions of Martin Frobisher (1575-78), to the successful accomplishment of the Northwest Passage by Amundsen in 1903. As the theme of the work is to show the reliability of transmitted oral tradition it is not perhaps surprising to see that there is nothing particularly new in most of the stories, which are often rather pale reiterations of traditions originally relayed, mainly in the nineteenth century, to Rae, McClintock, Hall and Schwatka.

The best test for the accuracy and resiliency of Inuit testimony comes from extended interactions during Sir William Edward Parry's 1821-23 sojourn at Igloolik, and Sir John Ross’ voyage to Lord Mayor Bay between 1830-34. These well-documented expeditions allow Eber to usefully compare modern remembrances with the journals of the explorers themselves. Eber relays various versions of the most colourful intercultural incidents of these interactions. Given prominence of place is the punishment meted out by Parry to a local shaman for stealing a shovel and the shaman’s supernatural revenge. The stories of Ross’ visit include the initial discovery of his ship in the ice and subsequent deliberations among the Inuit, and various tales of the repeated visits of the Inuit to his vessel.

Here the interest lies not so much in the content of the modern recollections, but in noting how these have been filtered and modified by the passage of over a century and a half. Some of the modern Inuit stories also contribute to exploration history by dealing with matters unknown to the explorers themselves, such as the final resting place of Ross’ abandoned Victory, or the use made by the Inuit of his “treasure trove” of abandoned equipment.

The modern stories are best at relaying charming cross-cultural vignettes of a hunter so afraid of a strange ship that he ran so fast that his caribou coat trailed behind him in the wind, of a girl using tobacco blocks as toys, or of children throwing flour into the air as "smoke" having no idea of its food value.

These opening chapters lead to the core of the book, the stories relating to the Third Franklin expedition (1845-?). Comprising almost half of the book, the next three chapters deal with this doomed expedition and the Inuit remembrances of it. The chapters revolve around three of the pivotal questions of the disaster - the burial of a “shaman” or officer, encounters of Franklin’s doomed men on the march, and the location of the wreck(s) of the expedition vessels.

Here Eber runs into the difficulty that, even according to her modern informants, “nobody saw the ship - what happened to it; or how they died … Little stories, here and there. We don't know much at all.”

The remembrances concerning the burial of an officer again follow closely on other recorded testimony, particularly that known as the “Bayne story” which Eber surprisingly buries in a long endnote. Presumably dealing with the burial of a senior officer (usually assumed to be Franklin himself) and, more significantly, with the nearby burial or deposition of written records, the modern physical description of the site “a sandy hill” matches that of Bayne, although the exact location remains frustratingly vague.

The stories of encounters with Franklin survivors on the march are given in three versions, all located in different but uncertain areas. Two of these deal with Franklin crewmen wandering into a camp, one told from the perspective of the women, and one from that of the hunters who returned to find that strangers had come to visit. Even the Inuit are unsure whether these traditions “might be the same story ... but passed on through a different family in a different manner.” These stories do not have much in common with the testimony preserved by Hall, Schwatka and Rasmussen about an encounter between hunters and struggling men in Washington Bay, but there are enough common elements (being offered a small piece of seal, the abandonment of the Europeans after one night etc.) to make one wonder whether these are indeed new stories.

Eber herself considers the stories of the “ship at Imnguyaaluk” and the “fireplace trail” to be the most significant of her collection remarking that they “add a new chapter to the Franklin tragedy.”

The first deals with the discovery by Inuit of a ship to the east of the Royal Geographical Society Islands, and of a presumed Franklin campsite ashore. Although the story adds detail, this again is not entirely new information as Amundsen was told of a ship having been seen here (Eber notes this herself, but not until 10 pages later). The traditions that tell of visits to this ship and interactions with its crew are also in accordance with older stories about pre-abandonment encounters between the Franklin expedition and Inuit and, from the location, tend to validate the hypothesis that at least one ship (only one is mentioned) was remanned after the initial 1848 abandonment.

The “fireplace trail” stories also tend to reinforce this idea as they deal with a sequence of encampments found around the western and northern coasts of the Adelaide Peninsula. These seem to mark a party retreating from the ship spoken of as having been abandoned near O’Reilly Island. The first find was at “Aveomavik” a small island off Grant Point, where Michael Angottitauruq found a non-Inuit campsite and bones of three individuals in 1984. The discovery of campsites and human remains on a small islet nearby in 1997, 2002, and 2004 lends support to this story. Other locations on the “trail” recollect finds from the nineteenth century at Thunder Cove and northwest of Starvation Cove.

Eber then diverts to a long consideration of the possibility that one of Franklin’s ships traversed Simpson and/or Rae Strait to come to rest near Chantrey Inlet or Matty Island. The first idea is based entirely on late testimony from the Anderson expedition that is well known if not widely supported. The idea of a Matty Island wreck is also previously attested, mainly by testimony relayed to Maj. Burwash in 1929. This told of a strange but orderly cache of crates found inland on an islet near a sunken wreck. Eber’s informants add to our knowledge of this strange cache with an eyewitness account of it. They found “burlap and cotton bags filled with flour and sugar and perhaps something like porridge – oatmeal. These were all buried in a mound covered with part of a cotton sail buried under sand and rocks … and when they uncovered this cache they found cans, sacks of sugar, oatmeal.”

This detailed description further calls into doubt the opinion of most commentators (uncritically accepted by Eber) that this deposit was formed from cases of dog food thrown overboard by Amundsen while the Gjoa was enmeshed in the Matty Island shoals. Both the Burwash account of carefully stacked cases inshore, and this new story of a carefully buried cache, imply stores left deliberately and point to the Franklin expedition. This does not necessarily support the idea of a wrecked vessel nearby, which has been repeatedly searched for in vain, for a cache here could have been established to support survey or possible retreat parties.

The book ends with chapters of Inuit stories about the Collinson expedition sent in search of Franklin and of remembrances of Amundsen’s Northwest Passage triumph. Again these stories are interesting windows into the Inuit perception of the visits of these strangers but offer little new information of significance to historians. The publisher’s claim that “new information opens another chapter in our understanding” of the events of these expeditions, especially the Franklin disaster, is perhaps overstated. A close reading shows that there is actually very little new information presented, and that where there is it tends to, at best, confirm earlier evidence.

Overall, the book is a very worthy contribution to the store of preserved Inuit oral traditions. It serves as a useful reference and introduction to the stories relating to explorers that are otherwise scattered throughout the literature on British Arctic exploration, and sets them in a clear context. Those who are already familiar with the traditions will enjoy tracing the genealogies of the modern remembrances; others will be interested in the effect of time on changing the original versions.

To her credit Eber only rarely gets caught up in the intricacies of historical speculation and primarily stays with her strength – the reporting and preservation of the stories themselves. This is a task she was seemingly born to do, and once again we are indebted for her painstaking labours.

Face to Face: Polar Portraits

2009-04-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

Face to Face: Polar Portraits
Huw Lewis-Jones
with Foreword by Ranulph Fiennes and Afterword by Hugh Brody
Cambridge: Scott Polar Research Institute in association with PolarWorld, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-901021-083-3/07-6

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

Face to Face is a travelling exhibition—and now a beautifully produced book—that emerged from “Freeze Frame”, the Scott Polar Research Institute’s project to digitize some 20,000 photographs from its archives. The project’s curator, Huw Lewis-Jones, seems to have been particularly struck by the range of portraiture in the collections, and decided to create an exhibition in which 50 portraits from the archives would be supplemented by another 50 by the photographer Martin Hartley (some previously taken, some newly commissioned), a hugely experienced veteran of 17 polar expeditions. Each of the 100 featured portraits is presented on a full page or double page spread with a caption to the side (usually a generous couple of paragraphs) about the sitter. Preceding these are an essay by Lewis-Jones on early photography and its first applications in the polar regions (“Photography Then”), and succeeding it is a conversation between Lewis-Jones and Hartley on the differing challenges presented by polar conditions to the art today (“Photography Now”). And bookending the whole lot are a foreword by the explorer Ranulph Fiennes and an afterword by the anthropologist Hugh Brody. As a further bonus, all the text features are themselves very generously illustrated.

Herbert Ponting’s haunting cover portrait of the piercing eyes and sun-blackened face of Cecil Meares—expert dog driver on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition—underlines what will surely be the expectation of many that these will mainly be portraits of explorers. Many indeed are, but an important point the selection underlines is that the poles, or at least the Arctic, are a region where people live as well as explore and do science, a point made with gentle grace by Hugh Brody in his afterword, the most beautiful prose in the book. From the portrait of an unnamed Inuit boy in Godhavn in 1869 to another in Resolute Bay in 2008, Inuit sitters are a continuous presence (though it’s a pity there aren’t any images of indigenous people from Arctic Eurasia alongside them). But the “portrait” part of the title is equally important as the “polar” part: these are all individual portraits, a single sitter’s body, and often just the face, dominating the frame. And all are posed, not merely cropped from a general action or group shot. Having said that, there is much variety in the settings in which they are found. Modern photography, with its much shorter exposure times, allows images to be captured quickly out on the ice with the wind howling and the icicles forming on beard or eyebrow, though this can lead counterproductively to images that feature polar clothing more than the people wearing it (can a picture in which literally no part of the face is visible, such as those of Stephen Jones, David de Rothschild, and Ian Wesley, be meaningfully described as a portrait?).

By contrast, many people famous for doing uncomfortable things in uncomfortable places are discovered relaxing in their sitting room or library, emphasizing that it’s the individuals and their achievements, not the setting, that defines their inclusion. And for the best-known subjects, for whom a choice of images was presumably available, the selection is often pleasingly unexpected: Scott and Wilson not in harness, but in three-piece suits; Shackleton munching a sandwich; Vivian Fuchs with a towel on the way to a bath. Fame itself, however, is not a criterion for inclusion, and almost any connection with the poles confers eligibility if it results in a good portrait. Lewis-Jones and Hartley regret some of the names they haven’t been able to include, and interested readers will no doubt be able to think of more—Otto Sverdrup, Adolf Nordenskiöld, John Rae, Elisha Kane, Isaac Hayes, and Frederick Jackson are a few of the obvious ones that popped into my exploration-biased head—but perhaps a simple absence of images in the SPRI collection is to blame. It’s important to remember that this isn’t an encyclopedia with claims of, or responsibility to strive for, comprehensiveness or consistency. Even so, the many omissions make some of the inclusions less comprehensible: for instance the polar connections of Keith Dedman, a naval helicopter pilot who once airlifted passengers from an icebound ship, and Cha-Joon Koo, a Korean insurance executive sent to Antarctica to “check on” Park Young Seok (who perhaps should have been included instead), seem tangential to say the least. And Hartley’s fondness for a pretty pair of eyes has led to the inclusion of two portraits—the Spanish girlfriend of an adventurer about to set off from Siberia, and a Turkish-Bulgarian popcorn seller in London who happens to be wearing a fur-hooded parka—that frankly have no place in the selection no matter who else is in or out.

Lewis-Jones’s extended opening essay artfully summarizes the first few decades of technical development in photography before segueing neatly into the portraits taken by Richard Beard (the first British practitioner of Daguerre’s process) of Franklin’s officers in 1845, from which he proceeds to summarize the role of photography in Arctic exploration during the 19th and early 20th centuries—as documentary tool, as raw material for painters, as artistic statement in its own right, and finally as motion pictures. There is much of value here for readers interested in any aspect of the first century of photography’s history, including philosophical and aesthetic questions as well as its technical developments and social effects.

But the real interest for this reviewer was in “Photography Now”, in which Lewis-Jones and Hartley discuss not only the equipment needs and techniques of a present-day polar photographer but also range widely over the psychology of portrait-making, the role of paid expedition photographer in balancing his own professional judgement with his client’s wishes, and whether anyone travelling somewhere on the earth’s surface in the age of Google Earth and satellite phones can any longer be described as an explorer. Humans more or less ran out of virgin territory to explore sometime in the 20th century (at least without going underwater or into space—the first twice as large an area as the earth’s land surface, the second somewhat larger still!), and we are accustomed to the idea that the challenges available now are essentially secondary: doing something using a new technique, or in a new combination, or faster, or in more difficult conditions. But Lewis-Jones wonders whether even that ethic of self-challenge is enough any longer, or whether “to be imagined as valuable they [also] need to be relevant”. Just as few non-athletes would contemplate running a marathon without doing it for a “good cause”, most polar travelling expeditions, both solo and team, now also try to bring some climatic, zoological, or social problem to wider attention—and climate most of all, since the poles are the places in which global warming will have, and is already having, the most dramatic effects. Scientists have the best case of any outsiders for being at the poles; they are “adding to the existing body of knowledge”. But they fly into known locations and then generally stay put, so their work no longer involves exploration in a geographical sense. So this well thought-out, nicely balanced, and carefully crafted book not only casts a retrospective view on polar history, but captures it at a moment when our understanding of and engagement with it is in transition, as those trying to keep alive a tradition of heroic confrontation with the elements sit sometimes happily, sometimes uneasily beside those who anxiously monitor its environmental condition, and those whose lives and culture are inextricably bound up with the fate of the icy realms.

Welcome to the new Arctic Book Review site

2009-03-04T07:34:00.001-08:00

As of April 2009, this site will be the new home of The Arctic Book Review, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The old site will remain as an archive, but all new reviews will be posted here, "hot off the press," as soon as they're ready. The additional features of the blog, such as posting comments, will only enhance the ABR's overall project, which is to place knowledgeable, thoughtful, well-written reviews of books on all manner of polar subjects before its readers. So watch this space -- we'll be here soon! -- Russell Potter, founding editor