Arctic Labyrinth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 to another Lamb[ert] -- Geoffrey -- and his Franklin, Happy Voyager, published in 1956. 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; 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.

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 sweep 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

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

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 Franklins' 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.