Abstract
Any researcher or scholar of maritime history, the histories of travel, exploration, or nineteenth-century visual culture, will be able to conjure in their mind’s eye Edwin Landseer’s iconic painting, ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1864). This striking visual commentary, with nature’s seemingly unconquerable forces (embodied by two ferocious polar bears) literally shredding the Union Jack, shocked contemporary audiences and is an oft-cited example of later nineteenth-century disillusionment with apparently futile Arctic expeditions. In Imagining the Arctic, Huw Lewis-Jones takes as his starting-point the legend of the boy Nelson shooting a polar bear and identifies ‘bear encounters’ as an important motif in the construction of the heroic figure of the polar explorer. While the authenticity of Robert Southey’s iconography of Nelson was later questioned, it retained popular appeal and kept the legend of Nelson’s encounter with the bear at centre stage. This was reinforced in the mid-nineteenth century with the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, and bear encounters became important focal points in polar narratives. The shift in the image of the Arctic as a pristine virgin land- and sea-scape awaiting subjugation by British heroes, to the Arctic as a merciless arena of sacrifice, provides the chronological backdrop to this study of the national importance of the image of the Arctic hero. Despite the enduring symbolic power of Landseer’s pessimistic vision, throughout the nineteenth century more self-assured and confident portrayals predominated, that ‘provided the Navy with rallying potential and remembering his exploits helped to defray anxiety about the escalating costs of maintaining the ascendancy of the fleet’ (p. 105).
Part of the recent upswing in scholarly and popular interest in Arctic exploration history, this study is bookended by two key moments: the 1818 launch of the British Arctic expeditions and the Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891. The book attempts to examine the place of the ‘heroic explorer’ within the British maritime tradition, the role of this figure in British mythmaking or ‘national fantasy’ (p. 15), and how definitions and representations of the heroic figure evolved and changed in the period. It is, however, the construction of the hero-explorer that emerges as the book’s key concern – how explorers became ‘celebrities’ and national heroes. In Chapter 3, Lewis-Jones asks why, given the failures that dogged John Ross’s Victory expedition in 1829–33 (not a naval, but a privately funded expedition), the expedition still attracted public celebration – and he argues that this was down to the figure of Ross. This chapter is interesting for the way in which it rises above the common focus on Ross’s failures, to instead examine how he became ‘the first Arctic “celebrity”ʼ (p. 135) – a role that Ross himself had no small part in creating. He directly oversaw the production of a Boothia panorama for display in the Leicester Square panorama, and he sat for no fewer than twelve portraits, of which souvenir prints were made for general sale.
However, Lewis-Jones’s focus on the figure of the hero-explorer would perhaps be more compelling if accompanied by some more in-depth analysis of constructions of masculinity as they related to the Royal Navy and polar exploration. Lewis-Jones has obviously researched a great deal of Victorian juvenile literature influenced by polar expeditions, but the tantalising connections between these publications and the role of polar exploration in constructions of boyhood are left unexamined. Furthermore, without sustained critical evaluation of the continued perpetuation of an ideal of exploration as a male endeavour, there is a danger of further embedding the tendency to celebrate a small number of well-known figures. That said, Lewis-Jones does include a chapter on the less well-known naval officer and itinerant lecturer John Powles Cheyne, who in 1877 published a vision – never to be realised – for aeronautical Arctic exploration after taking charge of balloon apparatuses for conveying messages during a search for the missing Franklin expedition. Lewis-Jones sees such schemes as ‘a perfect fit for the self-confident optimism’ (p. 232) of Edwardian juvenile fiction, despite international ridicule of Cheyne’s plans.
Indeed, Chapters 4 and 5, on John Powles Cheyne and the Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891 respectively, are the most interesting and original in the book. The 1890s saw the revival of interest in the state of the Royal Navy; the foundation of the Naval Records Society (1893) and the Navy League (1894); the 50th anniversary of the departure of Franklin’s last expedition (1895); and, simultaneously, changing international political circumstances threatened the security of Britain and of the empire. Within this context, ‘the British Empire and the Royal Navy became twin symbols in the popular mind’ (p. 247). The Royal Naval Exhibition was propaganda intended to project an optimistic image and justifications for the increasing expense of maintaining the Navy. Lewis-Jones isolates the exhibition’s Franklin Gallery as ‘promise, history, myth and human potential combined’ (p. 260), harnessing the power of bear stories to simultaneously assert the Royal Navy’s reputation and reignite public interest in polar exploration. Indeed, maritime historians will find food for thought throughout the book, particularly in its initial positioning of the Arctic as ‘a new theatre of war in which the Navy could refashion a role for itself’ (p. 9), and its allusions to the role of Arctic expeditions in training naval men and in ‘offering rousing images of the nation’s Navy and comforting proof of the vitality of the “national spirit”’ (p. 101).
The book is attractively presented, with an astonishing 99 reproductions of contemporary illustrations (albeit in black-and-white). The illustrations reflect the breadth of source-material consulted by the author, including explorers’ first-hand accounts, visual sources, biographies, playbills, public monuments, contemporary fiction and poetry. Overall, the book forms a useful synthesis, but with the exception of Chapters 4 and 5, it does not shed much new light on the well-trodden paths of nineteenth century polar exploration. The copious notes alone indicate the breadth of material published on the topic in recent decades. The themes of polar aesthetics, Arctic visual culture, media reporting and Arctic heroes have been well treated in a stream of scholarship in the past two decades, including Beau Riffenburgh’s The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (1993), Francis Spufford’s I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996), Robert G. David’s The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (2000), Russell Potter’s Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (2007), and Janice Cavell’s Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (2008) to name just a few. This attractive volume will make a good synthesis for those seeking a solid introduction to the topic, and those readers will find the extensive footnotes and visual materials very useful.