Shipwreck at Cape Flora

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s forgotten Arctic Explorer

by P.J. Capelotti

Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013.

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


Peter Capelotti, anthropologist at Penn State University, archaeologist of human space travel, sometime poet, and writer on many lesser-travelled byways in the exploration and exploitation of the seas, has now written the first biography of Benjamin Leigh Smith (1828–1913), who appears as a shadowy presence in the annals of late-19th-century Arctic exploration—mentioned in passing in the narratives of more famous names—but who is now given centre stage in an account that focuses on his three yachting expeditions to Svalbard and two to Franz Josef Land in the 1870s and 80s.

It doesn’t take long to understand the reason for Leigh Smith’s ghostly absence from the feast of Arctic exploration history, and consequently the challenge that Capelotti set himself. The explorer was such a shunner of public attention—friendly as well as hostile, in print as well as in person—that even medals awarded to him ended up being sent in the post rather than collected. He never wrote (let alone published) accounts of any of his expeditions beyond the bare bones of a ship’s log, and never presented a paper at a meeting or wrote one up for a journal. Even the private correspondence that survives rarely concerns itself with anything beyond the practical arrangements for his voyages, and there is no body of letters from him to other explorers or theorists of the day that might place him as part of the conversation of the time. Most of his letters are to family members and rarely stray beyond the domestic.

The great majority of what we know of him has therefore come from the writings of others. Some of his expeditions resulted in the publication of popular accounts by other participants—of varying quality—and colleagues were also responsible for writing up or analysing the scientific results of his voyages. Most of the rest comes from the dedication of an indefatigable family archivist, Charlotte Moore, without whose work in preserving the documents of her ancestor’s life Capelotti’s task, already difficult, would have been almost impossible.

Benjamin Leigh Smith was the eldest son in a wealthy but socially eccentric family of dissenters that, in the way of such families, produced some groundbreaking and impressive lives; Florence Nightingale was a cousin of the explorer, and the early feminist Barbara Bodichon was a sister. His parents were never married, and only in midlife did he and his siblings discover that their father had sired another family with another unmarried partner who was a few rungs down the social ladder—with the result that, in the stratified society of the time, the two families would never meet and could be kept in ignorance of each other. Capelotti identifies Leigh Smith’s sense of vulnerability to the social stigma of his illegitimacy as one of the drivers behind his reluctance to establish a public profile; his outsider status as a non-Anglican—not unusual among Victorian industrialists but surely rare among Home Counties landed gentry—was no doubt another.

After education at Cambridge and training in law, he coasted without much direction until the death of his father gave him the income to indulge a passion for sailing to the Arctic—something that, like much else in his life, seems to come out of the blue, an almost arbitrary whim for someone with no background in sailing or geographical research beyond an amateur's dabbling. Capelotti gives some possible antecedants for his dream in the voyages of other wealthy yachtsmen to the Arctic, including Lord Dufferin and James Lamont, for both of whom the primary interest had been hunting. This too became the rationale for Leigh Smith’s first expedition, in 1871 in the yacht Sampson, which he had purchased from another landowning huntsman, John Palliser (leader of the British North American Exploring Expedition of 1857–60, though the author notes the name without seeming aware of the identity). If there is more than a touch of self-indulgent vanity in a rich man going hunting in exotically remote locations, Leigh Smith at least avoided hubris: he knew his limitations. All of his voyages were skippered by professional captains and crewed by workaday fishermen and whalers, British or Norwegian, who knew their way around the ropes, and Leigh Smith never seems to have insisted on a dangerous course to prove either his authority or his manliness. Indeed, he made a virtue of his ships’ relative powerlessness against the forces of nature, developing an exploration philosophy that emphasized going with the flow, allowing wind, current, and ice conditions to dictate where the exploring would be done. It’s notable that hard-bitten skippers like the whaler David Gray wrote about him not as a dilettante they tolerated, but as a colleague they genuinely respected.

At a time when no government-sponsored expeditions had been sent to the Arctic from Britain in more than a decade, Leigh Smith’s first voyage showed what patience and modest expectations could accomplish in a much smaller craft than the adapted bomb vessels sent out by the Royal Navy. His target was Svalbard, and in searching to the east of it for Gillies Land (one of many landmasses in Arctic exploration history that turn out to have been mirages) the Sampson became the first ship to reach the easternmost tip of Nordaustlandet—and thus of the Svalbard archipelago as a whole—which was later fittingly named Cape Leigh Smith. Cruising back along the northern coast of the island a lucky run of very late-season fine weather in September allowed them to sail to the northernmost end of the archipelago as well, adding new coastlines and place names to the map. A second expedition to the same area the following year was less lucky with the weather and added only one further name to the map, while a third in 1873 became famous primarily as a humanitarian venture, when Leigh Smith arrived in time to give desperately needed help and supplies to the Swedish North Pole expedition, whose support ships had been frozen in the previous autumn, leaving its leader Nordenskiold with double the expected number of mouths to feed through the winter.

After three expeditions in as many years, it seems that Leigh Smith had got it out of his system, but after the disappointing results of Nares’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76 (Capelotti is somewhat unfair in branding this a complete failure, with its significant science programme and its new furthest norths for both men and ships), the triumph of Nordenskiold’s first sailing of the North-East Passage in the Vega in 1879, and the loss of the Jeannette north of the Lena, Leigh Smith seems to have reconsidered his retirement to the sidelines, and he returned to the fray on a grander scale than ever, this time having his own yacht purpose-built for Arctic work with an icebreaking bow and a supplementary steam engine. In 1880 in this vessel, the Eira, he made his most successful expedition and one of the most geographically productive single-season voyages in the history of Arctic exploration. Following up on the discovery of Franz Josef Land by Weyprecht and Payer in the year of his last expedition, 1873, he managed to sail more than a hundred miles further west along the archipelago’s southern coast than its discoverers had done, charting coastlines, identifying and naming individual islands and their prominent features, and showing it to be a significant landmass rivalling Svalbard in overall dimensions.

This voyage sealed his acclaim among the geographers of Europe and America, but when he tried to follow it up the next year Leigh Smith had only a couple of weeks of further discoveries in the same area before a misjudgement of ice conditions by the Eira’s skipper led to the book’s eponymous shipwreck at Cape Flora, when the vessel was pinned between fast and moving ice and soon crushed, though before she sank there was time to remove almost all of her supplies and equipment. Like Nordenskiold’s crews, they now faced an unexpected overwintering, but unlike the Swedes they were relatively few in number and very well supplied with food, though they had to improvise a hut from local stone plus canvas and wood from the ship. If one guiltily acknowledges a sense of bathos in reading of the almost complete lack of drama during the winter of 1881–82, it is a tribute to Leigh Smith’s leadership and sense of responsibility for his men that ensured everyone had enough to eat. Again, modest expectations came into play: with no superiors to impress, promotion to gain, or desire for fame, Leigh Smith made no ambitious plans for overland expeditions in the spring that would add to their stock of geographical discoveries before attempting their escape southwards. He was content for everyone to stay as warm, dry, and well-fed as himself. And when the ice broke up in 1882 they made a well-ordered voyage towards Novaya Zemlya in the boats, meeting relief just where they expected to from one of a small flotilla of craft sent out that year from Europe to find them.

Two seasons of significant geographical discovery, and involvement in two overwinterings—once as the reliever, once as the relieved—gave Leigh Smith an almost complete set of classic Arctic exploratory experiences, and even if age and the financial burden of the lost ship had not been factors, perhaps he sensed that his career as an explorer was now complete, for he never went north again. Instead, after the inevitable blaze of publicity had been, as usual, diverted onto the heads of colleagues and companions, he retreated to the domestic concerns of his family and the management of his estate.

Peter Capelotti has done a remarkable job in pulling together the rather slender sources for Leigh Smith’s life and voyages into a coherent narrative that benefits from its author’s deep familiarity with the wider background of exploration, geographical theory, and social history of his subject’s time (I spotted only one minor error, a repeated reference to the Royal Geographic, rather than Geographical, Society). The one serious drawback is not in the writing but in the lack of good maps. Apart from reproductions of 19th-century maps, which really provide only historical interest, there are a small number of modern maps in inconsistent formats, and none of sufficient scale to follow the track in detail or note all of the place names bestowed—and none at all of Franz Josef Land, where the greatest number of these names are found . Instead, we have only Payer’s and Markham’s contemporary maps, which are almost impossible to relate to each other, let alone to the reality on a modern map.

But there is a more central lack than maps, and one that no author could supply if it were not available in the sources: a sense of a subject’s real personality. The few genuinely self-revelatory writings we have by Leigh Smith (in his letters) reveal a character solipsistic and startlingly vindictive in personal relationships. But for a man of his drive and achievements, liked and admired by colleagues, there must have been more, and the lack of writings that would have given a sense of his wider view of the world, and of his activities in it, are a keenly felt absence that no maps could make up for. The contradictory outlines refuse to resolve into a coherent whole, so while the ghostly figure at the feast has been adumbrated, he can probably never be made solid.

In Those Days

In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History
Book 1: Inuit Lives

by Kenn Harper

Iqaluit: Inhabit Media. $19.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter




"In those days" is the English equaivalent of Taissumani, the name of Kenn Harper's long-running history column in the Nunatsiaq News; this volume collects from among them those dealing with significant Inuit figures. Many of them will be well-known to anyone with an interest in Arctic histories: "Joe" Ebierbing and "Hannah" Tookoolito, guides and translators for Charles Francis Hall; John Sakeouse, an interpreter and artist who accompanied John Ross on his 1818 voyage to northwest Greenland; and Hans Hendrik, who worked with Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Israel Hayes, and was part of the party who survived on an ice-floe for six months after being separated from Hall's Polaris. But these are only three of the twenty-eight  life-stories in these remarkable, turnable pages. Harper, who has lived and worked in the Arctic for half a century, tells them with clarity and grace, drawing not only from his life experiences and personal contacts but from extensive historical research. I think it's fair to say that there's no living writer with more breadth and depth of knowledge of life in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland -- and by 'life' I mean the lives lived out on the land by people for whom explorers were merely occasional visitors and (often rather demanding) guests.

The tales encompass both the tragic and the comic. We learn of Tatamigana and Alikomiak, the only Inuit ever executed by hanging in Canada; of "Prince" Pomiuk, an Inuit boy who was part of a group displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition, but who suffered physical and emotional abuse during his time among the white people, returning home only to be rejected by his own; of Nancy Columbia, whom Harper aptly dubs the 'most famous Inuk in the world,' whose career stretched from that same Columbian Exposition which gave her her name to her roles in early Hollywood films alongside Tom Mix. Many of the figures here are known due to their connections with early missionaries, especially the Moravians who established the first missions in Labrador, and from whose settlements many Inuit departed to be shown to the public for education and (more often) profit. We learn, too, of those Inuit women who experienced intimate relations with male explorers; with the apparent exception of Hall, every last one of them seems to have had one or more Inuit mistresses. Particularly affecting is the account of Aleqasina, who became Peary's mistress at the age of fifteen, who at one point had to be nursed back to health by Peary's wife Josephine. And yet, of all these tales, perhaps the most touching is that of Ruth Makpii Ipalook, who as a child survived the ill-fated Karluk expedition. That's her on the cover -- and within the book, there's a photo taken of her in 2001, eighty-eight years later -- instantly recognizeable, as her smile was still exactly the same. Throughout the terrible trials of the Karluk survivors, who had to endure the loss of their ship followed by a long trek to land with inadequate supplies, Makpii kept up her spirits and those of others. Asked by her father, "Makpii, are we going to live out the year?" she replied cheerfully "We're living now, and we're going to keep on living!"

And that's what comes across most clearly in this collection -- the extraordinary spirit of the Inuit, who survived and thrived in a region where, despite their seemingly-superior knowledge and technology, white people kept getting lost, starving, and dying. It's the same spirit evident in Minik Wallace, the subject of Mr. Harper's previous book, Give Me My Father's Body -- and, as with that volume, it's the author's frankness, compassion, and intimate knowledge of Inuit life that makes every single one of these stories resonate.

NB: The book is amply illustrated with original pictorial materials, most of them from Mr. Harper's own notable collection. Inhabit Media, the book's publisher, is located in Iqaluit, Nunavut; the book is available now in Canada, and will be published in late March in the US.

In the Shadow of the Pole

In the Shadow of the Pole: An Early History of Arctic Expeditions, 1871-1912

By S.L. Osborne

Toronto: Dundurn, CDN$26.99

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


The history and status of Canada's sovereignty over its Northern possessions has been the subject of many recent studies, most of them focussing on the current geopolitical anxieties over transport  (the Northwest Passages) and potential oil and mineral claims by other circumpolar nations. There have been some excellent overviews of the issues at stake (including Shelagh D. Grant's's Polar Imperative, previously reviewed in these pages). And yet, oddly, there has been very little detailed attention paid to the history, much of it in the time of the Dominion, of the initial efforts by Canada to evaluate, establish, and reinforce its sovereignty. S.L. Osborne's book, despite its curious title (one is not quite sure what the word "Early" is meant to signify), does a fine job of recounting these little-known expeditions, painting in the process quite a vivid picture of the modest but persistent efforts of a young nation in making sense of its vast and frozen Northern zone in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The first of these expeditions were made in a curious attempt to ascertain the length of the navigable travel season in Hudson Bay. As any experienced Arctic pilot would know -- then and now -- there's no season, even the midsummer months, in which easy navigation in those frigid waters can be completely assured, and the government quest to establish one would seem foolish in the extreme. And yet, as Osborne shows, the real driver of these voyages was -- literally -- the price of wheat, or at least of shipping the same; in times when rail costs were high, the idea of a northern line to Hudson Bay had many influential backers. These backers, who as the question lingered sought every conceivable means to influence public opinion, even commissioning veteran explorer Albert Hastings Markham to accompany one voyage to add his celebrity endorsement as to the practicability of the route, were well-moneyed and well-connected. The report of the commander, Lieutenant Andrew Robertson Gordon, which quite accurately indicated the hazards and shortness of the season, was not to the liking of these men,  and they argued for further such expeditions until they heard what they wanted. Unfortunately for them, the later reports essentially did little more than confirm Gordon's assessment.

Gordon's expeditions -- which had also been given the scientific mission of establishing observation stations for the International Polar Year -- were remarkable in their overall success, rarely losing a man even when, as sometimes still happened, some member of the observation team stopped taking his dose of lime juice and nearly succumbed to scurvy. The expeditions that followed in his wake were again doubly tasked -- first with establishing sovereignty in the form of custom-houses and duty collection, and later with erecting and manning RCMP posts -- and again, they did their job in a business-like manner. Indeed, while the men most often celebrated from this era had only one task -- to explore -- these seemingly more modest ventures in fact often accomplished a great deal more.

In-between these narratives, Osborne weaves the story of Joseph-Elzéar Bernier, Canada's one great hope as a polar explorer. Fueled by having heard of Nansen's use of the Fram to follow polar drift, Bernier initially proposed a similar expedition, in which a ship would be deliberately icebound and drift its way to the pole. His proposal earned the support of many scientific and geographical organizations, as well as a number of members of Parliament. Bernier's plan, alas, was far too expensive for the Dominion government to countenance, and when, some time later, Bernier was at last given a ship, he was also given a supernumerary and sailing orders that restricted his activities to establishing and servicing trading posts and police stations. Looking at Bernier's original proposals, it's hard to imagine that he would have fared any better than, say, the Jeanette -- and yet at the same time, it's hard not to admire his spirit.

Osborne's book gives a serviceable, and at times quite engaging account of Bernier's career and those of the others who commanded government-funded expeditions in this period. The tone of the book is a bit odd at times -- Nansen is first described as a "six-foot blond," and Albert Peter Low as "a geologist with iron-man abilities" -- but overall, it's very capably written, and ably fills a significant gap in modern scholarship of Arctic expeditions. It also makes clear the connection that commerce has had, almost from the beginning, with the ostensibly purer motives of science and sovereignty.

My only complaint about the book is not to its author, but to whoever decided to put the endnotes online instead of in the book where they belong. Surely, the savings in omitting a mere eleven leaves of paper from the book are negligible, while the inconvenience of being unable to refer to a note without a computer or tablet is considerable. I sincerely hope that this will be corrected, and will not prove to be a trend.

Lost Beneath the Ice: The Story of HMS Investigator

Lost Beneath the Ice: The Story of HMS Investigator

Text by Andrew Cohen, with images from Parks Canada

Toronto: Dundurn CDN$29.99

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



The story of the rediscovery of the wreck of HMS Investigator by Parks Canada in the frozen waters of Mercy Bay in July of 2010 captured the imagination of the world, and evoked the 'heroic age' of Arctic exploration in a way no other recent event has managed. In part, this is due to the way in which a ship, even in its watery grave, evokes the endeavor of exploration with far more gravity and magnificence than any recent discoveries on land have done (last summer's toothbrush, found at Erebus Bay, comes to mind). But it's also due to the fact that the Parks Canada team was uniquely positioned to undertake a thorough on-site survey of the wreck, and to transmit the news and images of their discovery via the Internet and the news media almost as they were happening. And, it should be mentioned, the chief reason that the archaeologists on the site had the kind of support and media access that they did was largely due to the predilection of the then and present Government of Canada for the symbolic significance of the Franklin expedition and those who searched for it, particularly in relation to the issue of Arctic sovereignty. This is not the place to debate the wisdom of that policy -- historians and the public must be grateful for the commitment of any kind of support to archaeological research of this kind -- but still, there is a certain irony surrounding the fact that, outside of Ryan Harris's team who features in this book, Parks Canada's archaeological staff has suffered from significant losses in funding and personnel.

That said, this is a glorious book, primarily for its beautifully-printed illustrative materials, which include many of the paintings of Lieutenant Gurney Cresswell, which until now were not readily available together, nor reproduced at such a generous scale. The original Admiralty schematics for HMS Investigator herself are also reproduced as double-page illustrations, along with images of some of the letters sent conveying the news of McClure's eventual rescue, and other materials of the day. The modern photographs, although they don't reveal new findings, are reproduced with excellent resolution, and possess a drama in the hand that's missing when the same images are viewed upon a screen. The overall quality of production is very high, and there's no other book of its kind that so dramatically evokes the hazards of Arctic navigation in the nineteenth century. I certainly can't imagine a more welcome holiday gift for any exploration buffs on one's list.

The text, alas, is somewhat less enlightening; while Andrew Cohen has exercised considerable skill in briefly recounting the voyage, the ship's imprisonment in the ice, and eventual abandonment, his lurid patches of language sometimes undercut the story's own intrinsic drama. He's more journalist than historian, which is fine insofar as the book quickly acquaints the reader, in broad strokes, with the history of Arctic exploration in Britain, the reasons the Franklin expedition was dispatched, and McClure's own role in the search for its missing ships. Those deep in the throes of what I like to call 'Franklinomania' will find nothing new, but then, the text isn't really meant for them. They will, however, find the illustrations and photographs as -- or perhaps even more -- valuable than the proverbial thousand words.

Illusions in Motion

Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles

By Erkki Huhtamo.

Boston, MIT Press, $45.00

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


The paramount mass-media attraction of its era, the 'moving panorama' has, until now, received only piecemeal treatment; cast in the shadow of its larger brother, the fixed, 360-dgree panorama, it has generally been regarded as an historical side-note. There have been studies of moving panoramas of certain subjects -- such as my own Arctic Spectacles -- and some of particular regions, such as Mimi Colligan's Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainment in 19th-Century Autralia and New Zealand, but no comprehensive, international consideration of the role of moving panoramas in the history of visual culture. That is, until now: Erkki Huhtamo's Illusions in Motion not only takes up the larger histories of this medium, but documents them with an enormous number of hitherto-unseen primary-source materials. For a medium of which so few actual examples survive -- Professor Huhtamo's annotated list at the end of the book catalogs the two dozen or so known -- they left behind a vast array of supportive and descriptive materials, ranging from handbills and programmes to newspaper adverts, engravings, and sketches. Their great heyday happily coincided with that of print, and so perhaps this is to be expected -- but the problem has been that so many of these materials are classed as ephemera and poorly or incompletely collected or catalogued, that it required almost a superhuman effort to assemble them.

In many ways, this has been a collective undertaking, continued for many years by scholars such as Ralph Hyde, Scott Wilcox, and Kevin Avery, along with dedicated independent researchers, curators, and artists, such as Suzanne Wray, Peter Morelli, and Sara Velas. And yet, when all these and others gathered at one of the annual meetings of the International Panorama Council, it was always Professor Huhtamo's presentations to which we all looked forward the most keenly, knowing that they would not only contain thoughtful historical analysis, but all manner of illustrative materials most of us had never seen before.

Huhtamo has gathered a great many of these same materials for this authoritative volume, which includes more than 120 black-and-white illustrations, many of items in his own collections. He has personally examined all of the surviving panoramas, participating in the discovery and restoration of several, including the remarkable Morieux panorama from the Paris Exposition of 1900, and the Grand Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress, which was recently displayed in full in Saco Maine, accompanied by a full-size copy on cloth which was performed with the original narration before rapt audiences. Having been to one of these performances myself, I can report that, when the lights were dimmed, and the narrator and accompanist wove their overlapping spells, the magic worked as well in 2013 as it had in 1851.

As a subject for a book, though, the moving panorama has two daunting aspects: the vast number of them that once were shown, and the great variety of additional techniques and apparati associated with them, many of which are very imperfectly documented, and indifferently named. From the handbills, it's often difficult to tell exactly what, for instance, a "Grand Illustrated Diorama" consisted of -- was it a panorama, a lantern-show, or some combination of the two? Some panoramas touted their use of "mechanical and chemical apparati" without specifying what they were, or used adjectives such as "Dioramic" with no clear indication of what that meant.

Huhtamo begins with one of the great enigmas of this kind: the Marshalls, a family of Scots panoramists who displayed their work in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, and Dublin, routinely attached the word "peristrephic" -- Greek for "turning around" -- to their shows. This seems to have meant something rather different from any other such productions; at least in the purpose-built structures in Glasgow and Edinburgh, their panoramas were shown on a concave surface, with a subtle, naturalistic motion. The chief of the painted figures were nearly life-size, and there were effects such as ships coming into port or smoke emerging from painted cannons, which must have required technicians behind the scenes. Huhtamo adroitly uses the few bits of eyewitness description, along with surviving illustrations and material evidence, to solve -- as best as it ever can be solved -- this persistent mystery.

In succeeding chapters, he provides comprehensive accounts of the major manifestations of the form: the theatrical panorama, the mid-century panorama craze, the interaction and ambiguity between lantern shows and panoramas, and the final efflorescence of the medium in the late 19th and early 20th century, which saw the Poole brothers taking their "Myriorama" shows to small provincial towns in England in vans with gasoline engines. Along the way, every imaginable subject of panoramas is considered, from depictions of river and ocean travel, vertical mountain ascents, religious didacticism and Biblical subjects, to battles and fortifications. One sees here, for the first time, the deep embeddedness of the moving panorama in the culture of nineteenth-century Europe and America; its procession of sequntial imagery was linked to the deepest narrative (and ideological) sense of 'progress,' both individual and national. And, while historians of the fixed great-circle panorama have always cautioned us that they ought not to be seen merely as the progenitor of the cinema, no such caution is made, or needed here. For the translation of the collective desire for narrative into a time-based sequence of images that the moving panorama provided proved to be the essential step from illustrated but static texts into the narratives of cinema, and  later of course television.

I can think of no other single volume which both documents -- with care and precision -- and explains, with such clarity and lively engagement -- this central aspect of the visual culture of the nineteenth century.

Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition

Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition

By Heather Davis-Fisch

NY: Palgrave Macmillan, $85

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


Books on various aspects of the Franklin expedition have been a staple here at the Arctic Book Review since our very first issue nearly fourteen years ago; we've reviewed biographies of Franklin, volumes of Inuit testimony, the lives of Franklin officers, those who searched for him, and of Lady Franklin, along with novels and poems inspired by these events. There's a great body of conventional historical and biographical material on the subject, enough to fill a lifetime's study -- but what has been wanting has been a book which fully examines the cultural impact and lasting significance of the narratives that have clustered around this history, its mythologies (in the full Barthean sense). Aside from Margaret Atwood's (still brilliant) lecture "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew" (published in Strange Things), and a few scattered essays, such as those collected in John Moss's Echoing Silence, there have been very few such studies; even in my own book, Arctic Spectacles, the Franklin saga is just one part of a larger cultural history.

Which is why Heather Davis-Fisch's book is so very welcome; here, from the perspective of performance history and theory, is the first fully-realized cultural analysis of the reception and significance of the Franklin disaster, both on the public 'stages' of its time, and ours. In so doing, she considers not only theatrical instances -- whether shipboard or, as with The Frozen Deep, on a London stage -- but theatricality in the broader sense, as when Lady Jane Franklin put aside her mourning dress for bright colors in protest of the Admiralty's striking her husband's name from the active list.

For, in the nineteenth century, the dawn of a mass reading public, the illustrated press, photography and  telegraphic dispatches meant indeed that all the world was a stage, visible to nearly anyone, and the Arctic drama was for a time its principal attraction. And within this larger stage there were many smaller ones, whether it be the Arctic shipboard theatricals that Davis-Fisch sees as invoking and enacting a sense of almost familial camaraderie, the figurations of Inuit such as Qalasirssuaq (who was depicted being transformed into a fox in a northern pantomime), or the mix of drum-dance and blackface minstrelsy witnessed by Charles Francis Hall aboard the whaler "George Henry."

Davis-Fisch analyzes these episodes acutely, and follows the thread of performance throughout these very different cultural enactments. Indeed, between Inuit and Euro-Americans, contact itself was almost inevitably a performance; whether in the exaggerated hand-shaking and calls of "Teyma" or "Mannik Toomee" that accompanied first meetings, or the "miming" of Aglooka of his ships having been crushed in the ice, theatre comes in where language cannot find out a way. Her analysis of these contact dramas then segues neatly into an astute analysis of the staging of The Frozen Deep, in which she shows how Dickens's peculiar non-theatricality, received as a kind of translucent naturalism, played a central role in the enormous public catharsis the play provided to its original audiences. It's also, by the by, a very good explanation of why the play, in its original form at least, never had that power again, although modified versions of it have managed to re-infuse the drama with a fresh sense of pathos.

Davis-Fisch's book is, for all these reasons, the most original and engaging work on the cultural impact of the mid-century Franklin fascination yet to appear -- and, it's to be hoped, a harbinger of further such studies of the larger dramas of exploration as such, in all the regions of the world that the "West" thought of as distant. We have plenty of books on hand which re-tell the main story, shed some light on one or another figure, or propose one or another solution, but there are very few books like the present volume.

For, as has been apparent for some time now, the Franklin mystery is never really going to be "solved," not in the usual sense of that word, at any rate. As Davis-Fisch aptly notes, "attempts to reconstruct what happened to the Franklin expedition break down because the material remains of the expedition produce, rather than alleviate, ambiguity." And, for those who appreciate it, this ambiguity, in fact, lies at the heart of the enduring fascination with the Franklin saga; without it, the amateur historian, like the amateur actor, would find no place upon which to stage his or her response.

NB -- The book is solidly and handsomely produced with eight halftone illustrations; it is to be hoped, however, that Palgrave Macmillan will at some point make it available at a more democratic price, whether as a paperback or an e-book (the Kindle edition, at $68, is still far too expensive).

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin, Victorian Lady Adventurer

By Alison Alexander

Allen & Unwin. 294pp.  AU $35

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


For all her enormous stature -- her inspiring of three dozen search expeditions for her missing husband, her persuasive powers over Presidents and Prime Ministers, and her eponymous ballad, Lady Jane Franklin has remained a difficult subject for biographers and historians. It's not that she left no documentation -- between her own letters and journals (extensive, though her handwriting is infamously close and difficult to read) and those of her niece Sophy Cracroft, there's ample material -- it's just that, between the private woman who emerges in these manuscripts, and the public figure so dominant that her apartments opposite the Admirality's headquarters were dubbed "The Battery," there seems at times a strange gap. Not only that, but even with all the material available, there a second, perhaps unbridgeable gap between what Jane confided to her own writings, and what she actually, deeply, thought and felt. She was no confessional writer, not especially forthcoming about her own motives, and what few traces of controversy or impropriety there may have been, she and her correspondents took care to discreetly excise or destroy. Few recent books have really managed to bridge either of these gaps; while Penny Russell painted a delightfully wry and engaging portrait of one of Jane's undertakings in This Errant Lady, and Ken McGoogan fired a broadside of his own with Lady Franklin's Revenge, it's hard to reconcile these two accounts, and the sole volume of her letters recently published, that edited by Erika Elce, includes only her published, public missives.

Happily, in Alison Alexander, Jane Franklin has found a biographer as adroit and willing to explore obscure nooks and crannies as herself. Alexander, a widely-recognized historian whose works encompass both Australian and specifically Tasmanian history, is perhaps best known for her historical accounts of women, particularly her 1987 volume Governors' Ladies: the Wives and Mistresses of Van Diemen's Land's Governors. She is the first biographer to bring the kind of broad familiarity with primary historical sources in Australia needed to set Jane's time in Van Diemen's Land in context, as well as to make full use of the extensive papers held at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. And, despite the vast amount of material involved, Alexander has written an eminently readable, engaging, and lively portrait, one which for the first time gives the reader of today a full sense of Lady Franklin's curious admixture of perspicacity, persistence, and whimsy, and the way she used all three of these qualities to advance her husband's career and her own status, all the while clinging to a curiously conservative set of (often unarticulated) values.

For Jane Franklin, as she emerges here, is a bundle of contradictions. She was a social butterfly who passed up many an eligible bachelor, settling on a famous but famously milquetoast man; an outward embracer of penal reform who privately favored a harshly moralistic philosophy of prison management; an inveterate hostess of balls and social gatherings who at often preferred to absent herself from "civilized" company; a tireless traveller capable of considerable exertion but who often chose to be carried along in a chair; and a remarkable embodiment of a woman with an active intellectual and social life who nevertheless disdained other women who wore their intellect, or their politics, on their sleeves.

Jane was active -- restlessly so -- but not what one could call an an activist. The portrait that emerges here in Alexander's capable hands is of a woman who delighted in the private machinations made possible for her as the wife of a famous explorer and colonial governor, but preferred to demur, crediting her husband and always invoking his name rather than her own. As a Governor's wife, she established schools, founded learned societies (though declining to be a formal "member" of them), and conducted ambitious tours of Tasmania, Australia, and New Zealand in which she sought to learn all she could about the people and places she encountered. And, when her husband became famously lost, she mobilized searches for him, public and private, on two continents. Her letter to President Zachary Taylor led to the First Grinnell Expedition; her pressure on the Admiralty helped launch several government-funded searches, and when official interest declined, a series of private ones. The most famous of these was that of Francis Leopold M'Clintock, which in 1859 finally succeeded where others had failed in finding a final record of Franklin and his men -- but fifteen years later Jane was still supporting searches for her husband's men and the 'papers' she was sure they'd cached somewhere; the last of these -- Sir Allen Young's -- did not return until after her death.

She was skilled at using the power of the pen, and although she fulfilled a youthful promise not to 'write any books,' her writings could fill many of them. Alison Alexander has read them all, and judiciously draws from them to illustrate the texture of Jane Franklin's daily life, opinions, and passions. And though it is true, as Alexander notes, that it's very hard to see into Franklin's inner character, The Ambitions of Jane Franklin comes as close any any book has (or likely will) to discovering the essence of this remarkable woman.

NB: The book is handsomely designed, and includes numerous plates, both color and black-and-white. Notable among them is a photograph, taken in Yosemite in 1861, which is the only known one of Lady Franklin.

Nanook and Palo

Nanook of the North and The Wedding of Palo, and other Films of Arctic Life

Flicker Alley, $44.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


Some years ago, I was at a conference on Arctic films at Nipissing University when I heard an intriguing paper by the Greeenlandic scholar Erik Gant. His talk took aim at the curious bifurcation in filmed portrayals of Eskimo peoples, using Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North and Friedrich Dalsheim's 1934 The Wedding of Palo as its bookends.  The title of his talk was "Good and Bad Eskimos" -- and as I listened I realized I'd only seen half, or rather less than half of the important films depicting Inuit life, since I'd never seen, or even heard of Palo.

My ignorance was remedied, in part at least, later in the conference, when we watched almost all of a 16mm print of Palo that Dr. Gant had brought with him from Denmark (the conference organizers, unforgivably, shut down the film over time concerns before it had concluded). In the years since, I've often shared this film with my students in my Northern Exposures course on Inuit/European contact narratives, but the best I could show them was a badly-transferred VHS version with fuzzy subtitles that could hardly be read. Now, thanks to the marvellous -- and meticulous -- work of the folks at Flicker Alley, I can now show both films side-by-side in dazzling Blu-Ray transfers, and that's not all. This current set includes several other previously hard-to-see -- and, in some cases, impossible-to-see films of this era, revealing for the first time that Nanook, despite its considerable merits, never stood alone; in fact it was preceded and followed by many other films that sought to place before viewers what Nanook's promoters called "the Actual Arctic." Indeed, this release is the most wide-ranging, historically significant, and beautifully presented set of Arctic films ever made available for home viewing.

Some context is needed, however, to set these films in their historical place.  To that end, there is Lawrence Millman's essay on The Wedding of Palo, which is, as his writings always are, deftly written, salted with humor, and impeccably researched. Indeed, Millman's references to Nanook are more informative than Flaherty's own piece on how he made the film (also included), which is riddled with painful condescension (he refers to his cast as "my Eskimos") and half-truths. Palo shines forth above all the other films in this set, despite its filmmaker's somewhat romanticizing tendencies -- it is simply magnificent. Its amateur actors, all East Greenlandic Inuit, do a remarkable job with the story, considering that this means of telling a tale was entirely new to them. The scene of the piseq (drum-dance battle) between Samo and Palo is one of the great moments in the history of cinema; the reaction of the sea of faces, from children to the aged, to each development in the duel is a symphony of laughter, ridicule, and (eventually) shock. The story may be a loose fabrication, but it's one the actors intuitively grasped, and brilliantly portray. Indeed, as Millman notes, it may aptly be said that Nanook is a fiction film disguised as a documentary, while Palo is a documentary disguised as a fiction film.

Of Nanook, I don't think too much more needs to be added here -- the Blu-Ray transfer in this set is from the same source as the old Criterion DVD, only sharper, and with a more luminous luster, as seen in these screen captures. Included on its disc is the television documentary Nanook Revisited (Saumialuk) by Claude Massot, an interesting but incomplete glimpse into some of the communities where Flaherty sojourned. Some (now well-known) truths about the film are revealed -- Nanook's real name was Allakariallak, and "his" wives were actually Flaherty's mistresses; the film crew finds and interviews the widow of one of Flaherty's sons, but gets very little out of her; one senses a sort of disconnect between the film crew and the Inuit.  Another bonus feature of interest is the short 1928 educational film "Houses of the Arctic," which re-frames the "igloo building" sequence from Nanook with wordy title-cards devised by Harvard professors seeking to make a lasting impression on young minds.

But to my mind, the most absolutely fascinating material in this set consists of the two non-restored sections of two Arctic films made by Frank E. Kleinschmidt, here seen for the first time in 86 years. Kleinschmidt, who also did some safari and war films, is little known today but in his heyday he was a very visible and successful impresario of Arctic films, with which he often appeared in person as narrator. And nowhere can the influence of Nanook's success be more clearly read than in the contrast between the footage Kleinschmidt shot as part of his Carnegie Arctic Expedition feature in 1914 and his later Northern feature, the abysmally-titled Primitive Love. The Carnegie footage is an agglomeration of pure old-fashioned "actuality" footage, most of it shot with a fixed camera; there is little movement and less drama, and the only connecting is mere sequence; like a story told by a five-year-old, whose only segue is "and then," the early footage, despite its historical significance, manages to be deadly dull. Returning in 1927 in the company of the photogenic Mrs. Kleinschmidt (she has a cameo in almost all of the stills associated with Primitive Love), the poor filmmaker labors to build a lush and compelling story, using elaborately illustrated title cards, but fails miserably.  A scene in which an Inuit woman seeks, we are told, to warm her "igloo" by lighting her qullik looks as though it were filmed in the lobby of a small hotel! Still, this exceedingly rare nitrate footage, preserved in the vaults of the UCLA film archive, illuminates, precisely through its failures, what made Nanook such a success.

The set also includes two other films, Eskimo Hunters of Northwest Alaska (1949) and Face of the High Arctic (1959) -- both are reasonably competent productions, although they also serve, perhaps unintentionally, to illustrate how the documentary, a revolutionary genre when Flaherty pioneered it, gradually receded and became, for a long time, a byword for the boringly educational.

But that's a minor matter -- this set, taken as a whole, does an extraordinary job of setting Nanook in historical context, and bringing the nearly unavailable Palo to North American viewers. The supplements give fascinating hints as to our changing conception of the "actual" Arctic, and to the role of these films in shaping our understanding -- rightly and sometimes wrongly -- of the land and peoples of the Far North.

Isuma

Isuma: The Art and Imagination of Ruben Komangapik 

Igloolik: Inhabit Media, $29.95


Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


William Butler Yeats once said of the Greek sculptor Callimachus that he "handled marble as though it were bronze." The Inuit sculptor Ruben Komangapik handles no marble, but in his hands, wood, bone, and narhwal horns grow as smooth and fluid as polished metal, or even glass; it is almost as if some spirit hidden within the materials has animated them and brought them to vivid, viscid life. His sculptures play with surfaces, using and altering their texture to create singular effects. Eyes of polished stone gaze out from spongy bone in Taqanaqruluk;  walrus heads with polished tusks peep out of a bony snowbank in Hard Times; an osseous Sedna with an onyx face offers a qulliq with a row of tiny stone flames in Sedna, the Oil Giver; a hooded hunter is poised on a shelf of horn as an unsuspecting seal swims up toward its aglu from below in The Seal Hunter.  There is movement here, in these and many others of Komangapik's figures, movement that animates and belies the more static poses of the more 'traditional' sculpture of the Inuit co-ops; indeed one could say that they dance circles about them. If the stiffness of some of this art was made stiffer by the demands and expectations of southerly art dealers, collectors, and museums, Komangapik pokes subtle fun at their frozen tastes, alluding to them by breaking every one of their rules.

Some of the most striking figures are his Tupilait, the shamanistic spirit-forms whose fearsome shapes and dangerous capabilities underlay so much of the more innocuous figural Inuit art that came later. Some appear playful at first, an Arctic riff on the GEICO Gekko -- but what sharp teeth you have, grandmother! The better to eat you with, one can hear the figure answer. And there are complete stories here too, illustrated by sculptures in sequence, such as "The Legend of the Blind Boy and how the Narwhal came to be."

The striking photographs of these pieces by Estelle Marcoux Komangapik, the artist's wife, are almost as powerful as the works themselves; strikingly lit and set before dark backgrounds, their sharp dimensionality makes them almost seem to leap from every page. The book includes Dorothee Komangapik's commentary on the works and on Inuit culture generally, as well as a biography of the artist, in which we learn that he is a descendant of Quumangaapik, one of the Inuit who followed the shaman Qillaq on his epic journey from Pond Inlet across the frozen seas to northwest Greenland. Qillaq managed this astonishing feat by traveling, in his shamanistic form, over the ice in his dreams to discover the way forward.  Now, a descendant of the families he led guides those who see his work in a similar manner; Komangapik's scupltures stand at the edge of that same territory of dreams, where the path of the spirit is found within the twisted tracks of organic matter made fluid by the sheer force of one man's imagination.

Lost!

Lost! The Franklin Expedition and the Fate of the Crews of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror

By Richard Galaburri

NY: Black Raven

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



Into the icy mists surrounding the final fate of Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition there comes a new figure: Richard Galaburri. An Arctic book dealer, collector, and traveller, his short essays on various aspects of northern history have appeared the The Musk-Ox, Arctic, and other specialist journals, but those seeking a copy of Lost! at their local library or bookstore may be forgiven if they begin to wonder whether the book and its author are themselves phantasms of the frozen zone; even the vast WorldCat archives contain no record of the volume.  Happily, I can report that both the book and Mr. Galaburri do in fact exist; both may be found on eBay, where he's been quietly selling this modest volume for the past year, and I hope that this review will bring them to the attention of a wider audience.

And it will be attention well-deserved, as this slender but meticulous volume is in fact the best available introduction to the essential issues that make the Franklin mystery an 'unsolved' one. Written in a lucid and accessible style, it lays out the basic facts of the case with admirable clarity, and then traces the evidence uncovered by Charles Francis Hall, the Inuit testimony with which any meaningful account of Franklin's fate must grapple. One may disagree with some of the details Galaburri's proposed solution, as I do, and nevertheless find it stimulating and provocative; the author has done his research carefully, and his evidence is sound (and amply footnoted). It is the rare book that will appeal both to newcomers to the story, and those who have grappled with it for decades.

What follows is chiefly for the latter, and I'll apologize in advance for the density of detail; for those not already steeped in these questions, I can simply recommend Mr. Galaburi's book, followed by Woodman's two volumes; those who have read any or all of these will be familiar with the issues I raise.

*     *     *     *     *

The summary of the Franklin evidence offered in the first few sections of the present book is admirable; up to the point of the 1848 abandonment, there is fairly broad consensus as to the disposition of the ships and their crews. Two elements of Inuit testimony, however, offer conflicting alternatives as to teh destiny of the last groups of survivors, and it is these that Galaburri wisely focusses upon. The first is the testimony of one Kok-lee-arng-nun, and old man who gave Hall two spoons with the Crozier crest and told a remarkable tale of visits to the commanders of two ships, who seemed to be Franklin and Crozier, under the names 'Too-loo-ah' and 'A-gloo-ka.' He described 'Too-loo-ah' as "an old man with broad shoulders, thick and heavier set than Hall, with gray hair, full face, and bald head. He was always wearing something over his eyes (spectacles, as Too-koo-li-too interpreted it), was quite lame, and appeared sick when they last saw him. He was very kind to Innuits -- always wanting them to eat something. With this man was his second officer, 'Aglooka' ... after the first summer and first winter, they saw no more of Too-loo-ark, and then A-gloo-ka was the Eshemutta (captain)."

This story, as Galaburri observes, cannot be explained away (as Hall himself and others have tried) as a reminiscence of Sir John and James Ross; the elder Ross had a luxutriant head of hair until the day he died, which was a quarter-century after his expedition, not during it. I believe there's really no other way to explain this testimony other than to posit that some Inuit bands did indeed visit the ships prior to the abandonment, prior indeed to Franklin's death. The dating is even accurate: after the first summer (that of 1846) and winter (1846-47) was precisely when he died.  Still, this evidence has been handled gingerly by some experts, most notably David Woodman, who points out that there is no other evidence that Inuit knew about or visited the ships in the pack ice off King William Island, and that this story must therefore refer to a later event when the ships were further south; in his version Too-loo-ark is Crozier, and thus it is Crozier who dies and is replaced by a subordinate. Galaburri takes the Kok-lee-ang-nun story at face value, and vividly recounts it, along with Hall's (eventually skeptical) response.

But this for Galaburri is just the turning point for his second hypothesis, which is that the "Aglooka" described here and in other Inuit testimony is indeed Crozier.  His argument is based on Crozier's character and Arctic experience, and is of course an appealing one; I myself always find that when I imagine the elusive Aglooka I tend to picture Crozier.  There is no concrete evidence, however, and given that the name was also applied to Ross and Rae and other strangers, the identification of Crozier here must fairly be called conjectural. Given that, however, the rest of his theory is reasonable and well-argued; he believes that Crozier and his men headed east rather than west, apparently making for Igloolik.  He thus credits (as does Woodman in one of his theses in Strangers Among Us) the sighting of strange white men on the Melville Peninsula to this group. There is a conflict here, though, since in the tales of Tooshooarthariu and others, Aglooka told them he was going to "Iwillik" (Repulse Bay) and not to Igloolik.  Clearly, these must be different groups, unless Aglooka changed his mind at some point, and/or there may have been two Aglookas.  Nevertheless, it's a strong argument that one of them was Crozier, since many of the Inuit told Hall that a man who had been with Parry at Igloolik in 1822 was among this group of last survivors -- and that could only be Crozier.

It still seems a bit of a stretch to imagine that a Crozier-led group would march all the way to Igloolik rather than to nearer resources, such as the supplies remaining at Fury Beach, or Repulse Bay, where contact via whalers was possible. Still, since he had been there before, the familiarity of the place and the possibility of finding some familiar Inuit faces must have been strong attractions. Some of the "strangers" were indeed seen by Inuit in the area of Igloolik, but mistaking them for "Etkerlin" (sub-Arctic Indians), they avoided them. It would be ironic indeed if Crozier guided his men this far, but was unable to communicate with any Inuit. If this was his route, he and his companions must have perished just short of their goal; nevertheless their struggle, as Galaburri recounts it, is one that elicits considerable admiration.

There are a few minor shortcomings to the volume: Galaburri did not consult the original Hall papers, relying only on those Nourse transcribed, and he did not make use of Woodman's Strangers Among Us, wanting to avoid any undue influence on his own theories. Nevertheless, his book offers a brisk and lucid possible solution, one which judiciously notes where and how it departs from others; by choosing a single strand of possibility, Galaburri is able to make his account a far more readily readable one. I'd recommend it to anyone commencing their own Franklin search, and hope that it will be more widely available in the near future.