by Hubert Sagnières.
400 pp. Paris: Flammarion. ISBN 978-2-08-048791-9
Reviewed by Jonathan Dore
In For Glory, Not Gold, Franco-Canadian executive and global explorer Hubert Sagnières repeats the approach he sums up as “leurs images et leurs mots” that he pioneered in his 2023 book Daring French Explorations 1714–1854: Trailblazing Adventures Around the World: to tell the story of a series of expeditions mostly using the explorers’ own words and illustrated with their own watercolours and sketches, or the more formal engravings and maps they published on their return (many taken from copies in the author’s own extensive library of early editions). Each chapter, generally focusing on one explorer, is prefaced by the author’s summary of the explorer’s life and expeditions, followed by a large general map showing the routes of their major journeys. The extracts that follow from their published journals (and those of other participants) are in each case from one representative expedition, though the visual materials used to illustrate them are drawn more widely and often includes others of their expeditions as well. The book as a physical object – an imposing 33 x 28 cm and 4 cm thick, with heavy hard covers, embossed titling, and satisfyingly thick pages weighing in at over 3 kg overall – at times seems almost to exert its own gravitational field. To add to the sense of an international event, both this and the earlier title were published simultaneously in French and English editions.
The book’s focus is on the British and American expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage (John Ross, Parry, Franklin), then in search of the last Franklin expedition (McClure, Rae, McClintock, and as organizer and inspirer, Jane Franklin), and finally making the first forays towards the North Pole (Kane, Hall and Nares). The inclusion of the much-loved but tragic figure of Joseph-René Bellot among the second group also gives an opportunity for justified pride in a French contribution to the Franklin search. Sagnières’s warmth, enthusiasm, and admiration for the people he writes about is palpable throughout, and as someone who has made some twenty-five Arctic expeditions on skis and sleds he has a far more direct understanding of these explorers’ efforts and experiences than most authors would ever be in a position to bring to the subject. He notes the shortcomings of outlook of some of the expeditions, particularly in relation to diet and travel, but entirely without the sarcasm, censoriousness or lack of generosity that has characterized much writing about these expeditions in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The selection of extracts shows a deep familiarity with the original material – mostly the official accounts published after each expedition’s return. Although presented in chronological order as each expedition progresses, the brief extracts make no attempt to summarize the course or findings of the expedition, but instead have been imaginatively chosen to shine spotlights on a wide range of incidents, subjects and moods – animals and plants, icebergs and ice floes, food and hunger, meteorology and temperature, meetings and farewells with the Inuit and Inughuit, position-finding and direction-finding, instruments and record-keeping, map-reading and map-making, frostbite and scurvy, sleds and boats, hunting and fishing – that together provide a rich overview of the lives and personalities of each expedition.
But in the context of this book the text is really a backdrop to the main event, the illustrations. Most modern editions of expedition texts reproduce illustrations at a small size, or without their original colour, or sometimes omitted entirely. Here we have a chance to see a large selection of some 300 illustrations, most made by the expedition participants themselves at the scene or worked up after their return, and most at a much larger size than one would normally see them (including several double-page spreads), enabling us to appreciate details often overlooked or not visible in most reprints. Even when, despite the large size, I needed a magnifying glass to read the textual notes in the contemporary maps, even the smallest were all clearly legible – a tribute to the expert colour registration of the Italian printers, Musumeci. And in addition to illustrations from printed sources, the author has also sourced much of the artwork from archives – which most people would never have a chance to see otherwise – as well as, in the later chapters, some of the large and magnificent oil paintings by artists such as Frederick Church and William Bradford that did much to define the nineteenth-century public’s concept of the Arctic regions. For its value alone as an anthology and source-book of beautifully reproduced original visual material from and about nineteenth-century Arctic exploration, For Glory, Not Gold is worth its price.
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