Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/newsatendsofeartOOblum THE NEWS AT THE ENDS of THE EARTH NEWS AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH THE PRINT CULTURE of POLAR EXPLORATION HESTER BLUM duke university PRESS Durham & London 1019 ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE PREFACE.I Title page, Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News xvii FIGURE INTRO.I George Murray Levick’s photographic notebook 14 FIGURE INTRO.2 Copy oiNew Georgia Gazette given to Sir John Franklin 16 FIGURE INTRO.3 Aurora Borealis 16 FIGURE INTRO.4 Flight of the Plover , or the North Pole Charivari 1 7 FIGURE INTRO.5 Weekly Guy 18 FIGURE INTRO.6 Polar Almanac 18 FIGURE INTRO.7 Queen s Illuminated Magazine 19 FIGURE INTRO.8 Port Foulke Weekly News 20 FIGURE INTRO.9 Discovery News 21 FIGURE INTRO.10 Arctic Moon 22 FIGURE INTRO. II Midnight Sun 23 FIGURE INTRO.12 Arctic Eagle 23 FIGURE INTRO.13 South Polar Dimes 24 FIGURE INTRO.14 The Blizzard 25 FIGURE INTRO.15 Aurora Australis frontispiece 26 FIGURE INTRO. 16 Antarctic Petrel 26 FIGURE INTRO.17 Adelie Blizzard 27 FIGURE 1.1 Printing the “Arctic Eagle" 4 6 FIGURE 1.2 Page from Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 4 8 FIGURE 1.3 Royal Arctic Theatre playbill, silk 61 FIGURE 1.4 Royal Arctic Theatre playbill, pink paper 62 FIGURE 1.5 Royal Arctic Theatre playbill, blue paper 62 FIGURE 1.6 Royal Arctic Theatre playbill, linen 63 FIGURE 1.7 Playbill, silk 64 FIGURE 1.8 Arctic Printing Office advertisement 67 FIGURE 1.9 Queer Subject theater program tucked into journal 70 FIGURE I.IO Printer Briant’s fingerprint on a cairn message proof 76 FIGURE I. II Advertisement for the Weekly Guy 80 FIGURE 2.1 Flight of the Plover , detail 10 6 FIGURE 1.2 “The Ravings,” Arctic Eagle 114 FIGURE 2.3 “fatal accident,” Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 119 FIGURE 2.4 “Pretty Men” Elisha Kent Kane private letter book 125 FIGURE 2.5 Illustration, Port Foulke Weekly News 134 FIGURE 2.6 Isaac Israel Hayes 135 FIGURE 3.1 “Mr Cherry-Garrard working on the South Polar Times” 143 FIGURE 3.2 “Frank Hurley and Alexander Macklin at home on the Endurance" 143 FIGURE 3.3 Reading newspapers in Antarctica 144 FIGURE 3.4 Ernest Joyce and printing press 145 FIGURE 3.5 Shackleton’s plan of the hut at winter quarters 146 FIGURE 3.6 Inside front cover of “Stewed Kidney” edition of Aurora Australis 147 FIGURE 3.7 Pony snowshoe from Cape Evans, Antarctica 152 viii ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 3.8 “Breaking Camp, Southern Journey,” Shacldeton’s Nimrod expedition 156 FIGURE 3.9 Edmund Wilson illustration, South Polar Times 138 FIGURE 3.IO Contribution box for the South Polar Times 139 FIGURE 3.II Giant mushrooms of Bathybia 170 FIGURE 3.12. Detail from “Illustrated Interviews de Reginald Koettliz” 173 FIGURE 3.13 Detail from “Bioloveria” 174 FIGURE 4.1 Cairn erected by hms Resolute near Point Baker 178 FIGURE 4.2 Franklin expedition note found by Francis Leopold McClintock 180 FIGURE 4.3 Cairn notice 189 FIGURE 4.4 Balloon used by the Franklin search expeditions for distributing messages 196 FIGURE 4.5 Balloon message on green silk, HMS Resolute , Assistance 196 FIGURE 4.6 Balloon message on red silk 197 FIGURE 4.7 Balloon message on pink and green paper 197 FIGURE 4.8 HMS Plover cairn message 198 FIGURE 4.9 Post office barrel, Charles Island (Floreanna), Galapagos 201 FIGURE 5.1 Inuk-drawn map of iced-in ships 210 FIGURE 5.2 Charles Francis Hall with Taqulittuq and Ipiirviq (Tookoolito and Ebierbing) 213 FIGURE 5.3 “Nature on a spree,” Halls diary 220 FIGURE 5.4 Part of Greenland Coast (and Islands), wooden map 228 FIGURE 5.3 Hall’s notebooks 230 ILLUSTRATIONS CHRONOLOGY Major Polar Expeditions by North Americans and Europeans, 1818-1922 Expeditions in shaded rows produced shipboard newspapers. DATE COMMANDER, SHIP EXPEDITION SHIPBOARD NEWSPAPER 1818 John Ross, Isabella British, Northwest Passage 1819-20 182.1—2.3 1824-25 William Edward Parry, Hecla and Griper Heda and Fury Hecla and Fury British, Northwest Passage and Arctic exploration North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle 1819-22 John Franklin British, overland voyage to Coppermine River 1829-33 John Ross, Victory British, Arctic exploration 1825-26 Frederick William Beechey, Blossom British, Alaskan coast OO G\ 1 \1 George Back, Terror British, Arctic exploration 1 OO CT\ OO Charles Wilkes, Vincennes , etc. American, Antarctic and Pacific exploration OO 'O 1 4 - James Clark Ross, Erebus and Terror British, Antarctic exploration 1845 Franklin, Erebus and Terror British, Northwest Passage 1847-54 T. E. L. Moore, Plover British, Franklin search supply ship Flight of the Plover, or the North Pole Charivari DATE COMMANDER. SHIP EXPEDITION SHIPBOARD NEWSPAPER 1850-51 Horatio Austin, Assistance, Resolute, etc. British, Franklin search Illustrated Arctic News-, Aurora Borealis-, The Gleaner, Minavilins 1850-51 Edwin De Haven, Advance American, Franklin search 1850-54 Robert McClure, Investigator British, Franklin search «/“\ 1 O OO Richard Collison, Enterprise British, Franklin search Polar Almanac 1851-54 Edward Belcher, Assistance British, Franklin search Queen's Illuminated Magazine >/"s 1 rl \S> OO Rochfort Maguire, Plover British, Franklin search Weekly Guy 1855-54 John Rae British, overland Franklin search OO vyt 1 V/l V/» Elisha Kent Kane, Advance American, Franklin search Ice-Blink 1857-59 Francis Leopold McClintock, Fox British, Franklin search l860-6l Isaac Israel Hayes, United States American, Franklin search, open polar sea search Port Foulke Weekly News 1860-62 Charles Francis Hall (independent) American, Franklin search 1864-69 (independent) Arctic exploration 1871-73 Polaris North Pole expedition 1869-70 Carl Koldewey, German, North Pole Ostgronlandische Germania and Hansa expedition zeitung (East Greenland Gazette) 1875-76 George Nares, Alert and Discovery British, Arctic exploration Discovery News 1881-84 Adolphus Greely, Proteus American, Arctic exploration Arctic Moon xii CHRONOLOGY 1879-81 George De Long, Jeannette American, Arctic exploration 1893-96 Fridtjof Nansen, Pram Norwegian, Arctic exploration Framsjaa 1897 S. A. Andree, balloon Swedish, North Pole expedition 1897-99 Adrien de Gerlache, Belgica Belgian, Antarctic expedition 1901-2 Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, America American, Arctic exploration Midnight Sun 1901-4 Otro Nordenskjold, Antarctica Swedish, Antarctic exploration 1901-3 Erich von Drygalski, Gauss German, Antarctic exploration Antarktischen lntelligenzblattern (Antarctic Intelligencer) 1901-4 1910-13 Robert Falcon Scott, Discovery Terra Nova British, Antarctic exploration South Polar Times ; The Blizzard Addie Mail and Cape Adare Times; South Polar Times 1903-5 Anthony Fiala , America American, Arctic exploration Arctic Eagle-, Polar Pirate ; Vulture 1903-6 Roald Amundsen, Gjoa Norwegian, Northwest Passage 1907-9 1914-17 192.1—2.1 Ernest Shackleton, Nimrod Endurance Quest British, Antarctic exploration Antarctic Petrel ; Aurora Australis (book) Expedition Topics 1907-9 Frederick Cook, John R. Bradley American, North Pole expedition 1908-9 Robert Peary, Roosevelt American, North Pole expedition xiii CHRONOLOGY DATE COMMANDER, SHIP EXPEDITION SHIPBOARD NEWSPAPER 1908-10 Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Pourquoi-pas ? French, Antarctic exploration I 9 IO-I 2 Amundsen, Fram Norwegian, South Pole expedition I9II-I4 Douglas Mawson, Aurora Australian, Antarctic exploration Adelie Blizzard-, Glacier Tongue 1911 Knud Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen Greenlandic-Danish, Arctic exploration (first of six Thule expeditions) 1913-16 Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Karluk Canadian, Arctic exploration XIV CHRONOLOGY PREFACE BOOKS ON ICE E arly in 2006 I visited the Grolier Club, a cloister for bibliophiles in New York City, in order to see the exhibition Books on Ice: British and American Literature of Polar Exploration. Curated by David H. Stam and Deirdre C. Stam, librarian-scholars and polar book collectors, the show recast Arctic and Antarctic exploration history as book history; on many expeditions, the Stams proposed, “books seem to have been as essential as pemmican, primus stoves, fuel, and furs .” 1 The exhibition featured signifi¬ cant editions of voyage literature from both Arctic and Antarctic ventures over the centuries, as well as a range of other polariana. This miscellany included illustrations of the Arctic regions depicting (and, in at least one case, drawn by) Inuit translators and guides, such as an image by Inuk in¬ terpreter John Sacheuse (or John Sackhouse, Hans Zakaeus) of the “first communication with the natives” held by John Ross’s British Northwest Passage expedition in 1818. Also on hand was a wooden case that had held a portable library, one of many provided by the American Seamens Friend Society to naval and merchant ships. Robert Peary had carried the portable library on his North Pole expedition of 1905-6 and again in 1908-9. Virtu¬ ally all polar ships had libraries, and the Grolier Club exhibition contained the catalogue of the books in the ship’s library on the Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott’s first Antarctic command. A sound recording made by Ernest Shackleton and released by Edison Phonograph Monthly under the title “My South Polar Expedition” was among the more notable ephemera. Perhaps the most pathetic item was the edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memo- riam: Maud, and Other Poems carried to Antarctica by a member of Scott’s final, fatal expedition, one volume of which was found near the frozen bod¬ ies of the polar party . 2 I was riveted. At the time I was completing a book on the literary culture of early American sailors, and I brought to the Grolier Club both my schol¬ arly interest in the historv oi maritime books and an omnidirectional avid¬ ity for narratives of polar exploration. In a display case halfway through the exhibition I saw an unfamiliar artifact that at once unified my interests and seemed to stand as their apotheosis: an 1852 facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News (1850-51), a shipboard newspaper written and published in the North by the men of the hms Resolute. As I would come to learn, the contents of the paper were largely comic and playful, featuring detailed medical reports on the worrisome decline of the sun as winter advanced; a story about an inflatable named Benjamin Balloon getting “high” on “Hydro-Gin”; no¬ tices of a companion newspaper (th t Aurora Borealis) from the expedition’s sister ship; and reviews of shipboard theatricals . 3 The newspaper combined manuscript hand with printed headers and other typography produced, re¬ markably, on one of the first Arctic expeditionary printing presses. Sailors adapted the press to their use in the Far North in multiple ways: a note in the paper, in one example, specifies that “the large type headings as well as the Arms and devices were cut on board by the Seamen .” 4 The Illustrated Arctic News was created during the total darkness of polar winter by ice¬ bound sailors who were searching for the members of a vanished—and per¬ petually searched-for—British Northwest Passage expedition launched by Sir John Franklin in 1845 aboard the ships Erebus and Terror. To this day most of the bodies of the men have never been found, other than a hand¬ ful of remains of individual sailors who died at various points earlier in the expedition. One of Franklin’s missing ships, the Erebus , was finallv located on the Arctic seafloor near King William Island in the summer of 2014, 167 years after the first searches, bv a state-sponsored submersible mission led by Parks Canada. The second ship, Terror , was located in Terror Bay in the fall of 2016 by a private expedition. In the nineteenth centurv, however, only scattered relics of the expedition (and scattered graves) were discov¬ ered, including a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s Vte Vicar of Wakefield found on the ice. In the Grolier Club, the sight of the Illustrated Arctic News activated not only my fervor bur my archival instinct as well, and moved me to proclaim to my companion, “Here is my next book.” When I made this assertion I knew nothing about the Illustrated Arctic News bevond the information contained on the exhibit display tag. From my reading in polar history I was familiar with the decades-long search for the Franklin expedition. As a nineteenth-century Americanist, I could not help but notice references to xv 1 PREFACE DrMmtcii b]) .feprrial TO THE LOKDS CmmimmmH DJ THE MmiSRAJIFT, BY THEIR LORDSHIPS VERY OBEDIENT SERVANTS. LONDON. PUBLISHED BY ACKERMANN & C? 96. STRAND, 15 th MARCH, 1852. ^ y otu r TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN, H.RH. PRINCE ALBERT, H.RH. THE DUCHESS OF KENT X THE ROYAL FAMILY. FIG PREFACE.I — Tide page, Facsimile ofthe Illustrated Arctic News, Published on Board h.m.S. Resolute, Captn Horatio T. Austin, C.B. in Search of the Expedition under Sir John Franklin (London: Ackermann, 185a). courtesy of Dartmouth college library. the hunt for the Erebus and Terror in the media of the period; Frankliniana was its own mania for a time in the Anglo-American midcentury, and its traces are visible in periodical, literary, and other historical accounts. The existence of literary cultural work by sailors was not news to me either, as mariners’ engagement with and production of narrative writing has been the ongoing focus of mv scholarship. What was unfamiliar—and what impressed me as so strikingly, declaratively different about the Illustrated Arctic News at that moment in the Grolier Club—was the revelation of the presence of an actual printing press, a far-from-standard piece of nautical equipment, aboard that icebound Arctic ship. The press was used, surprisingly, in service of media circulation largely within the confines of the expeditions ships themselves. Of all the ways that a polar expedition might find to pass the tedium of a long, dark, im¬ mobilized winter, I wondered, why would crew members feel an imperative not just to write a newspaper but to print it as well? And not to print it upon their return home to London or another metropole but to print it somewhere around latitude 75 0 N, well north of the Arctic Circle in the Canadian archipelago, for an imagined community defined only by (and necessarily limited to) the members of the expedition, the actual commu¬ nity, themselves? I was arrested by their employment of the very form of the newspaper, an uncommon genre in sailor writing. Yet as I would discover, the Illustrated Arctic News represents only one of many coterie newspapers created by polar voyagers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century in what became a standard practice of such ventures, however little known today. Looking at the Illustrated Arctic News for the first time, I was curious to learn if the climatic and geophysical extremity of the polar re¬ gions, as well as their nonhuman scale—which was tracked in the scientific recordkeeping done by polar ventures as a matter of course—would also register within the quotidian pages of an expedition’s gazette. The genesis for this book, in other words, was a question freighted with multiple impli¬ cations, both then and now: What is the news at the ends of the earth? That is how the book began, but books on ice, like ice itself, are not fixed in place. Nor do they maintain a consistent state of matter. When I began researching and writing Use News at the Ends of the Earth, I was also closely reading contemporary news reports emerging from the Arctic and from Antarctica: news of climate change, of resource extraction and its at¬ tendant land and water claims. I followed the twenty-first-century media reports with one eye cast on the nineteenth-century research in which I was engaged. My questions about the news at the ends of the earth took xviii PREFACE on more detail and more urgency: How does polar news circulate? What is its temporality in a region without familiar patterns of diurnal time? What knowledge do the Arctic and Antarctica impart to the human and nonhuman world in Anthropocenic time, in deep or geological time? Do the forms of media chosen by expedition members—newspapers and other ephemera—have something to tell us about what kind of communicative media and narrative structures can help us represent our current age of climate change ? I came to realize that twenty-first-century news of polar resource circu¬ lation and climate observation, facilitated by textual and other media repre¬ sentation, was not just a contemporary analogue of the story I was telling about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: it was the same story. PREFACE XIX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T he idea for this book was first conceived in a club for book lovers, and it is a tremendous pleasure to thank the many libraries and archives that have made its realization possible. I am in debt to the librarians and staff of the following institutions and collections that I was fortunate to be able to visit while researching this project: the Stefansson Collection at Dartmouth College; the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge; the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London; the Library Com¬ pany of Philadelphia; the American Philosophical Society; the American Antiquarian Society, the New-York Historical Society; the John Carter Brown Library; the Huntington Library; the Smithsonian National Mu¬ seum of American History Archives; the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum; the Cincinnati Historical Society and Library; the Free Library of Philadel¬ phia; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the G. W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport; the British Library; the Royal Geographical Society; National Archives of the United Kingdom; the Biblioteque Nationale de France; the Libraries and Archives of Canada/Biblioteque et Archives de Canada; the Polarmuseet in Tromso, Norway; and special collections librar¬ ies at Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Penn State University, Harvard University, University of Toronto, Bowdoin College, New York University, and the University of Michigan. Librarians at a number of repositories I was not able to visit in person have been liberal with their knowledge and their materials, and I thank the New Zealand Ant¬ arctic Heritage Trust, the Alexander Turnbull Library of New Zealand, the South Australian Museum, the Greenland National Museum and Archives, and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Ger¬ many. Institutions work when the people associated with them are thought¬ ful, discerning, helpful, and ethical. Jim Green, Michael Winship, David Stam and Deirdre Stam, Sandra Stelts, and Paul Erickson have guided, advised, and inspired my archival research over many years and have been models of friendship and professional collaboration. The National Endowment for the Humanities has underwritten my work on this project for a number of years, and I gratefully acknowledge the neh Long-Term Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia that inaugurated my research in zoio; the NEH-sponsored 38 th Voyage of the whaleship Charles W. Morgan that gave me more insight into shipboard life and labor; and the year-long NEH Fellowship in 1014-13 that allowed me uninterrupted writing time. My research at the archives and institutions listed above was also supported by research awards and grants from the following: the Bibliographic Societv of America’s McCorison Fel¬ lowship for the History and Bibliography of Printing in Canada and the United States, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Hunting- ton Library, William Reese Company Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. Two Residential Scholar Awards from the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities/Humanities Institute, as well as the support of the Penn State English Department, College of the Liberal Arts, and Cen¬ ter for American Literary Studies, have also been instrumental to mv work, and I thank Mark Morrisson, Susan Welch, Michael Berube, Lauren Koo- istra, Sue Reighard, John Christman, and Robin Schulze. I am grateful to Robert Levine, Dana Nelson, Donald Pease, and Priscilla Wald for their support of my work over the years. For sharing their knowledge and materi¬ als (both institutional and private) I also thank Connie King, F.laine Hoag, Naomi Boneham, Ted Widmer, John Pollack, Douglas Wamslev, Rachael Green, Paul O'Pecko, June Phillips, and Thomas Walker. My scholarship has benefited enormously from conversations with col¬ leagues at a number of colleges and universities at which I Ve had the privilege to present parts of this book in progress. For their kind attention and vital input, I thank audiences at Notre Dame University’s Unauthorized States Symposium; Harvard University; The Futures of American Studies Insti¬ tute at Dartmouth College; UC Santa Barbara Interdisciplinarv Humani¬ ties Center; University of Maryland; University of Kentuckv; New York Metro American Studies Association; Cornell University; Center for Cul¬ tural Analysis at Rutgers University; ucla’s Americanist Research Collo¬ quium; Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Lecture/Seminar Series, University of Rhode Island; Freibert/Wittreich Symposium, University of Louisville; University of South Carolina; McNeil Center Biennial Graduate Student Conference; CSUS and F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series, Uni¬ versity of Toronto Centre for the Book and the Centre for the Study of the United States; Universitv of Delaware; Universitv of Massachusetts-Boston; xxi 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Princeton University; CUNY Graduate Center; Oakland University; UC Ir¬ vine; Pomona College; Rice University; University of Miami; University of Oxford; Early American Literature and Material Texts Workshop, McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Library Company of Philadelphia; University of Nottingham; University of Sussex; Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon; Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3; University of Pennsylva¬ nia; Bowdoin College; Baylor University; Perilous Passages Symposium at Bayreuth University; University of Michigan; Ice 3 Symposium at Columbia University; CUNY Victorian Conference; Llorida International University/ Bayerische Amerika-Akademie; Archipelagoes/Oceans/Americas Sympo¬ sium at Brigham Young University; Movement and Mobility Symposium, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi; Yale University; and Northwestern University. I am very grateful to my hosts, interlocutors, great friends, and longtime mentors at these talks, who include (roughly chronologically) Ivy Wilson, Elisa New, Donald Pease, Eric Lott, Elizabeth Dillon, Emily Zinn, Robert Levine, Jeff Clymer, Sarah Chinn, Shirley Samuels, Brigitte Fielder, Alex Black, Jonathan Senchyne, Meredith McGill, Chris Looby, Martha Elena Rojas, Aaron Jaffe, Tatjana Soldat, Gretchen Woertendyke, Jeannine DeLombard, Martin Bruckner, Ed Larkin, Cathy Matson, Sari Edelstein, Holly Jackson, Rebecca Rosen, Sarah Rivett, Duncan Faherty, Jeff Insko, Rodrigo Lazo, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Judith Roof, Tim Watson, Jason Bell, Lloyd Pratt, Marcy Dinius, Hannah Murray, Graham Thompson, Pam Thurschwell, Francois Specq, Helene Quanquin, Cecile Roudeau, Jazmin Delgado, Evelyn Soto, Don James McLaughlin, Tess Chakkalakal, Susan Kaplan, Dan Walden, Tim Cassedy, Kelly Wisecup, Kelly Bezio, Jason Payton, Melissa Gniadek, Karin Hoepker, Susan Scott Parrish, Fritz Swanson, Mag¬ gie Cao, Rebecca Woods, Talia Shaeffer, Richard Kaye, Tanya Agathocleous, Caroline Reitz, Martha Schoolman, Heike Paul, Brian Russell Roberts, Mary Eyring, Sarah Salter, Dale Pattison, Sarah Weston, Hyoun Yang, Wai Chee Dimock, Corey Byrnes, and Harris Feinsod. For searingly smart readings of draft chapters of this book, I am in debt to Martha Schoolman (with whom an unsurpassed friendship began with a conversation about Captains Littlepage and Shackleton twenty years ago), Stephanie Foote, Scotti Parrish, Sarah Mesle, Sarah Blackwood, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and Dana Luciano. For conversations about the polar regions over many years, I thank P. J. Capelotti, El Glasberg, and Penn State Polar Center colleagues Pernille Sporon Boving, Eric Post, Andrew Carleton, and Russ Graham. For their oceanic poetry, I thank Elizabeth Bradfield and Craig Santos Perez. Kenn Harper offered valuable insight into Inuit ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xxiii culture and the Inuktitut language. For C19 Americanist friendship that lifts me up and teaches me something new every day, I deeply thank every¬ one mentioned above, plus Monique Allewaert, Sari Altschuler, Nancy Bentley, Mary K. Bercaw-Edsvards, Jennifer Brady, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Michelle Burnham, Rachel Buurma, Siobhan Carroll, Lara Cohen, Brian Connolly, Pete Coviello, Pat Crain, Colin Dickey, Betsy Duquette, John Durham Peters, Amv Elias, Elizabeth Freeman, Amy Greenberg, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Naomi Greyser, Melissa Homestead, Carrie Hyde, Leon Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Jamie Jones, Catherine Kelly, Wyn Kelly, Ari Kel- man, Greta LaFleur, Caroline Levander, Gesa Mackenthun, Stacey Margolis, Tim Marr, Barbara McCaskill, Steve Mentz, Michele Navakas, Meredith Neu¬ man, Eden Osucha, Sam Otter, Chris Parsons, John Pat Leary, Carla Pe¬ terson, James Peterson, Chris Phillips, Joe Rezek, Seth Rockman, Jason Rudy, Karen Sanchez-F.ppler, Sarah Scheutze, Kyla Schuller, Dana Seitler, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Caleb Smith, Jacob Smith, Stephanie Sobelle, Gus Stadler, Jordan Stein, Laura Stevens, Claudia Stokes, Ed Sugden, Lisa Swanstrom, Elisa Tamarkin, Steve Thomas, Bob Wallace, Ken Ward, Lenora Warren, Eric Wertheimer, Ed Whitley, Edlie Wong, Nazera Wright, Xine Yao, and the extended community of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. It has been an honor and a joy to work with the wonderful Courtney Berger and Duke University Press on this book. I thank Courtney most warmly for her superlative editorial insights and support, and particularly for helping me think through this book’s engagement with media studies. I also am grateful to Sandra Korn for her close care, Christopher Catanese for expertly shepherding the book through production, Judith Hoover for careful copyediting, and Chris Robinson for his great marketing assistance. Two anonymous readers provided remarkably incisive comments and sug¬ gestions, and I am hugely thankful to them for their intellectual generosity and their contributions to the final product. Portions of this book have been revised from earlier w'ork, and I acknowl¬ edge with gratitude the editors and publishers of these pieces. An earlier ver¬ sion of chapter 5 was published as “Charles Francis Hall’s Arctic Researches,” in The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture , edited by Steven Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (New York: Routledge, 1017), and has been revised and expanded for this book. Several pages of chapter 1 and the conclusion have been rew r orked from “The News at the End of the Earth: Polar Periodicals,” in Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy Wilson (New York: New York University Press, 1014), “Melville in the Arcti c”Leviathan 2.0.1 (1018): xxiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 74-84- and “ Bitter with the Salt of Continents’: Rachel Carson and Oce¬ anic Returns,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 45.1-2 (2017): 287-91. My think¬ ing on ice and Antarctic ponies has developed from short essays I wrote for Avidly and for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I thank the superb edi¬ tors of those pieces, Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle. At Penn State I am thrilled to have such dear friends and colleagues as Janet Lyon, Michael Berube, Jamie Berube, Robert Caserio, Kris Jacob¬ son, Julia Kasdorf, Philip Ruth, Ben Schreier, Sarah Koenig, Susan Squier, Gowan Roper, Anne McCarthy, Courtney Morris, Dan Purdy, Debbie Hawhee, John Marsh, Sean Goudie, Tina Chen, Jessica O’Hara, Cynthia Young, Zachary Morgan, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Ebony Coletu, Scott Smith, Colin Hogan, Erica Stevens, Eric Vallee, Nate Windon, Ting Chang, Mir¬ iam Gonzales, Liana Glew, Eric Norton, Dustin Kennedy, and Tyler Roeger. The academic lady feminism and dear friendship of Janet Lyon, Lisa Sur- willo, Sarah Blackwood, Claire Jarvis, Sarah Mesle, and Kyla Wazana Tomp¬ kins inspire and teach me. Mary McClanahan keeps me sane. For good and especially for bad I thank Lisa Beskin, Katherine Biers, Fiona Brideoake, Pete Coviello, Karo Engstrom, Stephanie Foote, Elizabeth Freeman, Geoff Gil¬ bert, Susan Gregson, Katherine Lieber, Cris Mayo, Britt Metevier, Michael Metevier, Frank Ridgway, Pam Thurschwell, Sarah Leamon Turula, and Joan Stroer White. I am lucky to have friends like Lisi Schoenbach, Ben Lee, Daryl Kovalich, John Mancuso, Amanda Mancino-Williams, Nigel Roth, Emily Zinn, Jim Kearney, Jeremy Braddock, Rayna Kalas, Mary Richardson Graham, Patrick Richardson Graham, Patrick North, Billie Jo North, Don Becker, and Toni Jensen; how I wish we all lived in the same town. Martha Schoolman, Caitlin Wood, Orly Schoolman-Wood, Jamie Tay¬ lor, Andres Villalta, Javi Taylor-Villalta, and Leo Taylor-Villalta have been the core of my people—our “friends who are family”—for twenty years; they buoy me every day. I would match the strength and resilience of my parents, Carl Blum and Maureen Blum, against any polar explorer alive or dead. They always keep moving, no matter the challenge or the conditions, and I hope I can con¬ tinue to keep up. And to my radiant, electrifying, brilliant partner and child, Jonathan Eburne and Adelaide Blum Eburne, who always do a good show and have fun with it, who bring wit, artistry, adventurousness, herceness, justness, curiosity, and topgallant delight to our every moment together: this book, like its author, is dedicated to you. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XXV INTRODUCTION POLAR ECOMEDIA .decrease in the number of blizzards, failure of the Ross Sea to freeze, absence of very low temperatures on the Barrier. .bitterly regretted their failure to keep Meteorological records. records of the British Antarctic expedition were unearthed from the highest shelves of the lumber rooms of the libraries and were perused with avidity... .the great question of the day was, Does climate change ? — GEORGE SIMPSON, “Fragment of a Manuscript Found by the People of Sirius 8 When They Visited the Earth during Their Exploration of the Solar System,” South Polar Times (1911) The ocean has a very poor respect for daily papers. — 'william henry Gilman, Letters Written Home (1858) P olar exploration produces writing. Whether from the Northwest Passage-seeking Arctic voyages of the early nineteenth century or the “heroic age” of Antarctic ventures in the early twentieth, the most consis¬ tent outcomes of historic polar missions were not expeditionary feats but narrative accounts of the vovages. Expeditions were not particularly suc¬ cessful if judged by the standard of whether or not they fulfilled their voy¬ age objectives; nearly all historical British and American polar missions can be said to have failed if our evaluative criteria are whether parties navigated the Northwest Passage, flagged the North or South Poles, or traversed Ant¬ arctica. As a geologist who participated in two Antarctic expeditions (and who contributed articles to both expeditions’ winter quarters publications, Aurora Australis and the Adelie Mail and Cape Adare Times ) characterized it, the four phases of polar exploration history are “(a) The voyage south from civilisation, (b) Winter and summer at winter quarters, (c) Spring and summer sledging, (d) The catastrophic phase. (May or may not occur).” 1 Loss and death thinned many voyages, which were salvaged in the pub¬ lic imagination bv tales of valor or endurance. Expeditionary writing told these stories. In 1880 an American naval officer and North Polar explorer, George De Long, entered in his journal, “I frequentlv think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition.'- Yet continue to write he did. And even after his ship Jeannette was annihilated by the ice and twenty of the thirty-three men aboard had perished—De Long himself among the dead—his journals remained in circulation. What do the narratives of polar exploration tell us ? In large part, stories of extremity. In their meteorological, geographical, and political remove from the usual variances among nation¬ states or global precincts, the polar regions have been figured as impossibly remote. Today rapidly accelerating anthropogenic climate change (the evi¬ dence for which has been particularly stark in the Arctic, and increasingly in Antarctica as well) has rendered the atmospheric state of the planet itself extreme. As a result, human futuritv too is in a state of extremity. Among proliferating challenges, our Anthropocenic moment has produced a crisis in how scholars think and write about humans, the nonhuman world, and the earth itself, in imagining both our present and across time. Of all the responses to extreme environmental conditions that were attempted by polar expedition members of rhe long nineteenth century, perhaps the least known are a body of printed ephemera and other tenu¬ ous informational media created aboard icebound ships in the darkness of high-latitude winters. These ephemeral works include a rich, offbeat collec¬ tion of Arctic and Antarctic ship newspapers, as well as notes in bottles, letters and cairn messages, rescue notices printed on silk and lofted by fire balloon, playbills, songs, menus, and maps constructed of organic materials, all of which polar sailors used to mark time and communicate information. The News at the Ends of the Earth studies transitory printing and textual circulation amid extreme climate processes, in moments when human life itself has seemed ephemeral, whether during a British Northwest Passage expedition in the 1810s, an American search for missing Arctic explorers in the 1850s, a Norwegian sprint to the South Pole in the 1910s, or in the face of the devastating effects of anthropogenic climate change on polar icecaps today. In the polar regions the production of works of textual ephemera is i INTRODUCTION a testimonial to (and fuel for) resilience, perhaps counterintuitively. As a category of transient objects and evidentiary media, ephemera record tem¬ porary moments, instances in time; the material artifacts and texts them¬ selves are neither crafted to last nor presumed to warrant preservation. The etymology of the term for the genre itself bears a special charge when in¬ voked in the polar regions: “ephemera” comes from the Greek £i. F 6 / 1 * l,'2^X-V $Ua/£t /in/" M/ti-A&d o &*-‘£<4 dfacd- oCXZii-f ^ d~ ~ ^H f^A. *ic— 9 le> S. /V" fcag, Af£d. $£.£Zt 4 . 7 X. ^ ; le^-^iT /%ZS~ 'U-^^ a+usuf U^A^d-Ur a^d. ~ j .'V?^w..<*. A—<2.w*_ A£- ^ f C^Ta^ 4 a. ^ ^ ^ r" 7 ^ ;SL Aaa -*•- / ^ "7' u— / ' ■ ■ „ /— v_ 4 a* z *— fa-fa-ntf / a. %^LZ£7ntT^ #- * ^rtr A ^ ^ AA - '- <■—■ AA/ Asr-Zg-b-u^ £f~ ac~ (2.^h u/yi "; , t '*^>7 s~\ v _ ^ 7 «r 4 ^ -i^-< CU*^&L : y^/LeA*-& L ~. tJbrx- Osl-c- Q^r\-r~ «*_ ^ c ' A/^ kf^-^zn 4 ~ -ftcr e*us>-ftr a* /*£—& A.-W ’&*~-ut s A. «^<- - 4-t. 4«_ ^4/~ /A •***- A>~-^ e—^-i .^.cy - fa^/fczr L ■fe=-J+s»~+- oL.oa~~-<^ -77 t^ftr'H ^ 7 A" 4 W’~<~ Pu-^~^d 1 /x, Q'^mdi^-ay faptt 4 . 4 zfcr < 2 — d***-fa- U~*~t- fa**-* a^.d FIG INTRO.2 — (opposite, top) Copy oiNew Georgia Gazette given to Sir John Franklin. Pasted in S?r_/o/)« Franklin, the Discoverer of the North West Passage, Original Letters Written during His Arctic Expeditions, frn/i. © national maritime museum, GREENWICH, LONDON. FIG INTRO.3 — (opposite, bottom) Inaugural issue of Aurora Borealis, shipboard newspaper of hms Assistance. Mss/75/ 061/4. © national maritime museum, GREENWICH, LONDON. FIG INTR0.4 —(above) Flight of the Plover, or the North Pole Charivari 3 (1 May 1848), hms Plover , 1848. John Simpson Papers, 182.5-1875. david m. rubenstein rare book AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY. THE WEEKLY GUY. ao. v.j Friday, D. t. 1S3-2. fOrati« Having marie ilia 'amende honorable’ af the cnu.iiUjsioii of our paper, by apologising for its late appearance last week, we little thought anv farther allusion to the subject would hr at all necessary In fact we consider the boasted ■freedom of the pi. ss'a dead letter, a hoax, if we arc not at ltbeily to come and go as pleases best ourselves and our friends. Kveuto mention it, i' perhaps conferring undue importance to a contemptible joke perpetrated against us on Monday, in the shape of a report industriously emulated to the effect, that our ‘Guy' had come tv an untimely md, having been stolen, or stray¬ ed, or others.■ made away with. Possibly in this ease as in many others, 'the wish was father urthc thought.’ But it. is the very reverse of any feeling of annoyance, that induces us now to al¬ lude to the subject; on the contrary, we heartily thank the perpetrators for the attempt, and would, feel great pleasure in bestowing on them our meed of praise, if we could but discover a single gleam of wit in the joke, either as to. the matter or the manner thereof. We must tliere- f -re content ourse’vvs with the expression of POLAR ALMANAC, for the YEAR OF OUR LORD 1S54, being the seventeenth year of the reign of IIER MAJESTY QUEER VICTORIA. Printed on board of Her Majesty’s Slop Enterprise, in Camden Bay Latitude 70°08'North. Longitude l46°29'West, by Henry Hester Captains Coxswain, Vivat Regina. FIG INTRO.5 — Weekly Guy 5 (3 Dec. 1851). John Simpson Papers, 182.5-1875. david m . RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY. FIG INTRO.6 — Polar Almanac. John Simpson Papers, 182.5—1875. david m. rubenstein RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY. These publications were produced in great part for a reading audience of the mission’s crew members. As Lara Langer Cohen has argued about amateur newspapers in the 1870s and 1880s in the United States, such com¬ munities are “not just an effect of print”; “community is also the cause of print.” ' The logic applies to polar newspapers as well. Concocted origi¬ nally as a stratagem to combat the physically and mentally debilitating trials of a sunless polar winter, the newspapers generated near the poles were gen¬ erally comic or parodic. The Port Foulke Weekly News of Isaac Israel Hayes’s United States expedition, for example, facetiously adhered to periodical expectations. As Hayes described it, “There is a regular corps of editors and reporters, and office for ‘general news,’ and ‘editorial department,’ and a ‘telegraph station,’ where information is supposed to be received from all quarters of the world, and the relations existing between the sun, moon, 18 INTRODUCTION FIG INTR 0.7 — Qiieen’s Illuminated Magazine. Barrow Bequest vol. 6, Add S 35305. © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. and stars are duly reported by ‘reliable correspondents,’ and pictorial repre¬ sentations of extraordinary occurrences are also received from ‘our artist on the spot.”’ (This expedition consisted of only fourteen men; it should go without saying that there was no “telegraph station” at latitude 8i° N in i860.) The PortFoulke Weekly News was not alone in its “farcical” inhabita¬ tion of the expected beats for a newspaper, and Hayes’s description of its contents can stand for a general one: “There is a fair sprinkling of‘enig¬ mas,’ ‘original jokes,’ ‘items of domestic and foreign intelligence,’ ‘personals,’ ‘advertisements,’ See., See., among a larger allowance of more pretentious effusions.” 24 Hayes’s quotation marks designate the different sections of the POLAR ECOMEDIA 19 FIG INTRO.8 — Port Foulke Weekly News. Manuscript newspaper aboard United. States , Isaac Israel Hayes’s Arctic expedition, 1860-61. new-york historical society. THE SATURDAY. NOY. 27 . 1875 . All readers of the “News 1 ’ will learn with astonishment that so largsasoction of its readers ns the whole of the Not-W esterly Community have as yet found no subject upon which to dilate in its pages. Many causes may be assig¬ ned for this state of affairs, but doubtless it would be hard to find the real one, a multiplicity is no doubt at work, and the result is the rather melancholy one that our wit and humour column remains unfilled. Least Baud is however soonest mended, and it may be that the intellectual charms of that district are even now mustering themselves to storm the maiden fortress, we will therefore not give way to green-sickness but smilingly and blushingly await the onset, in full hopes that another week will have brought a conclusion, to the preparatory measure hitherto at work. It is a beautful and instructive thing to observe the artificers at their labours under the masterly direction of our skilful architect. The theatre, at which their time is uow employed, is almost complete, and its appearance already goes far to verify the prediction as to its success uttered in this paper last week. It is considered advisable by a corres¬ pondent that in future no one journey to any distance from the ship greater then a hun¬ dred yards unarmed; noiseB have been heard in the wardroom at night utterly unlike any a dog can make, and yet evidently issuing from a large and powerful animal; a sort of a medium between the sneezings of a drayhorse and the contemptu¬ ous grants of a pig, these must have been vented by a Polar near; those who will persist, after this warning in circumambulating the mile would do well to begin at the other end, and thereby elude the animal’s observation, they would moreover find it a pleasing change in the monotony of that somewhat unromantic trudge. The public will bo glad to learn that Dr. Ninnis has kindly consented to furnish the Dis¬ covery News with a weekly weather notice; this, the only true and authentic account will considerably enhance the value of our paper. We beg hero to state that tho thanks of all on board are due to the unflagging industry and zeal of their printer Benjamin Wyatt; without •, ho unsparing attention to the work which ho ha s f ••incid,. ibwould have been impossible for thi 8 paper to have gained the popularity and sueees % it has met with. Thoughts on the Floe I consider tho aspects of nature here, are more impressive than in many other regions. The snow-clad mountains in their Bhadowy darkuesB at even - tide, the brilhant moon sur¬ rounded by a clear and cloudless sky, and which alike illumes and shadows all, impart 8 to all around an appearance with whioh one finds it difficult to draw a comparison. On this scene one gazeB with awe aud silent admiration, as conscious midst all this Giant Creation, of man’s insignificance. What countless myriads of such as we, have been swept from this earth out of sight, and not a single natural law been disturbed, or a moments cessation been caused in the silent march of creation. Our civilization and familiarity, cer¬ tainly has a tendency to make us pass with little thought or notice the wonderful works of nature on earth and air; but I think it is almost confined to the few who visit these regions, to observe the Majesty of the great Creator as exemplified on the third natural element. As the majority of our ideas of grandeur and importance are formed from eomparisions, so from a falling brook or rivulet we build up our imaginations, until we eventually form an idea even of the gTeat Niagara; familiarity hav¬ ing made ns conversant with the devious and uneven course of our brook or rivulet through all its vicissitudes; and thuB we allow our mind to multiply and create the magnitude and phenomena of bodies of water - and often err but little. Furthermore we ought to bear in mind when viewing this seen©, that the potent force of these immense masses of ice is equal to its grandeur and sublimity; the expansive force of water when freezing being known to rend asunder the stoutest rocks aud strongest vessilR in which it may be $ !i I UfflM •- *•» .A- ••'••■/ • i?■/•!'. _• - HS< fv, i-st.c*. • ■?. ; t ; r.. v r '< , ✓>V*- A-v-' -'H/ «• , • • ' V-'/-' • , >. VvU' 'V-V»5( *.> v» •*-. • . ^Vv,. vw«* ,w •••:; ./ *• . / .. : ... uJ x . ; • -j' T» ' J 1 ■'•■ .'''"' " / „• '. v . . /H«r **' •' »**• ■*■ . *’4 ■■/ --- ’ v •*, V ’ . ~ , . •' • . ' ‘ ’ .. »• s ~ r ? 1 . ■ * - $} . ./. • > • ? - ? ; vVr v ».«v *» 4.^8- VV*J' 1 A., *■, ..... { * J y^vv.? - •/ ’ . >.: '!<** *■• - \ s 1 ., .•• -ySiix- M C-A L* ' - 4 . • » . y J > '.***> JEL 1 - . ■ ‘ • - | • ' ' t‘ • 4 •«' »■ *• j .. . *i... ^'VS>iuy 1 v.i « • ’ ./•. -i-■<.«.<*&■*/* ■■?**•*'* ■ ' J ’ ' ' l*A*. * * .< y U, * • . »•-.'• -v J d ~>.f '' • “• A -d f\ • « F -• ^ • • r * ' • / - / •. t i, v , v.s 4 ., -4. is? _=i //.■*, . ««»- * j ■ 4 . . . ... ■(*■* ; • -. y ‘ t ' . *• * \ . ’ • ' \-\>J*">?%<. * •' ■// • ff., •. . i 4 a * •< •* ' > . .. , • w . • ■» i * ’ i ' . • . / « * .. / . ■ ' : '7: . M'C% ‘rt ' / ’ v... ‘ j.^A* •.»*», ■* * ' / . J • # - c " / *'' , % \j *. a •<(.-*1*' ’• " .'. • '. ■; '•■■, . .1 ;> ■ ./ .. •- • - - • ■ :'. i . - • - V ■j y » ■ * • * ^ .. i ’ ■ : . 7 '• y / -'At. '.: as rr K i'Pk ,T^. FIG INTRO.10 — Arctic Moon. Adolphus Greelv Papers, 1876-1973* courtesy of DARTMOUTH COLLEGE LIBRARY. PIPP" —■ The ite pilot /is* ted to Capt tic*. lUnj-etMi thtj %n.cvx>iug -that he had pW served o{>«» wakr cm a- bead. Inad ?3 Td. A TKAP,f I* ~t>i lyr-* t ».t rr 4®W*U'»e WVult taii.v- a Tt'vcnnt of ,»caUI- .tag rw<«.4. rov'p ?(vt/i flic Cligiuc lortlU vtl-fdiiQ- £ &cti dLCEtdliy s/jMJ.i< cl^j* saf- Tin- air ujrvftvtttly In’cemu iftwi/c r* ‘X- ftd- f rfpc {er nfe-T ob-rextireA llbc A fim*. Ml ? 1 \ < XKv -fjrvintn /|»ent flic *l«txb watcl* -rhctcling o* id.- tin lot'Jt ./uJji hn- 311- cV Im.iw ics\v_. utJ V -veved th&t il*v *rtid«U> xi vise t'f Che- Amcartc^- J l)Ow C*fi Ok r^cKi -nc- ?a: Wilcxek - J.>la«d,xwax cAiise*! I tv the /totvAT> ii &v£ ^Itoa.o^K- ' ***' • v Brwdt'V f - oysxl iVtku v*T to tlic j\rr<;l» iktld - - A CCM<"fAKy *4«UOtV (i^jr'i lx- Beedta* tl«' faro- o'WJ phyjicecvt AX>d -Fetih , -**Zkj tu i>\'5 u«h i- VyCCtJ CCct tUv Tt 5 >CTV- i\I ng af3 , i 'ti <, a hoW in city# of Ktr S[)jof CoTtrmMvdw!/ Ji%Esvi*'fir. FIG INTRO.II —Midnight Sun. Ernest deKoven Leffingwell Papers, 1900-1961. COURTESY OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE LIBRARY. TRe Arctic Eagle. • i. Camp Abrewi, l>.v, jj„ 1903 , N . 3 They may be -The Key of the Silur«lk>«:" w.they may 'not be—but ilir-r » *1 undoubted!)' be a bowling success! I CiLICE ITF.MV Hottsehoulders in (be vicinity of Al>- ruwt Am are requested to be particular¬ ly etitt-ful about locking tlieir. doorurtnd windows before retiring:, as (here have been gov era) cases of mysterious account for the losses otherwise than lhat the culprits are watching to.tafee-id- v antage of !h»t hegleet or torgeiMnes# of tliow concerned, i,i order to gain their points'- Keep a -barp lookout bye them Mr. Pctc-issnw (pifft: a-o^imterof n>:« stare in the alley way the night of Mr, Vedoe's birthday. CHOICE BUILWNC. LOTS FORS^LK. llesirabtu lootix'dn with uurt.-stricted privileges , Swept bv (»> r>ri.un hrevw,- ' Apply to Realty Trustee. CanipAhuwx. HOLIDAY SKlllEi. Make your purchases at Charlies Cache. f’rar.v Josepli LaiwIV, or.lv Oepar-: tment Store Anything«ent a moukey-wrc-nch to a nL twvo tag. ii FIG INTRO .12 —ArcticEagle. Harrie H. Newcomb Papers, 1897-1958, ms 157. GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPT. OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, BOWDOIN COLLEGE LIBRARY. DISCOVERY THE Times . APRIL * 1902 OUTH B)LAP^ FIG INTRO.13 — South Polar Times, courtesy of Dartmouth college library. paper, of course, but they also serve as ironized scare quotes referring to the performance of quotidian habit in the Arctic. In many ways we might see newspapers as the social media of polar ex¬ peditions. Contributions to polar newspapers, for instance, focused on in¬ terpersonal or canine affairs (intrigues among the sled dogs were a popular topic); the scientific and exploratory aims of the missions rarely made the pages of the gazettes. “The place for scientific results is not here,” a note at 14 INTRODUCTION FIG INTRO.14 — The Blizzard, ms 856. scott polar research institute, UNIVERSITY OP CAMBRIDGE. the end of a contribution to Aurora Australis explains, “but rather in the contemplated meteorological, geological, and mineralogical memoirs of this expedition .” 25 The poetry that appears in Arctic and Antarctic print¬ ing is droll and aspires to wit; it includes special-occasion menus in verse (“The Desserts much as usual—you’ll all know the reason/ ’Tis difficult here to get things out of season ”); 26 complaints about polar problems such as condensation (“And in the middle of the night/ In our sleeping bags there’s a riot./ Someone turns and screws about,/ And gets in such a pet,/ Says he cannot sleep anymore,/ ’Cause his sleeping bag is wet ”); 2 and paro¬ dies of well-known literature (“Once more unto the beach, dear friends, once more/ Or live for ever on the legs of crabs ”). 28 And yet this content amplified—even as it was designed to ease—the time and distance between the expeditions’ location and resources and the usual journalistic and liter¬ ary center of the metropole. But if polar newspapers were a form of social media, a collective pro¬ duction of unbounded diffusion while in extremity, then they embody POLAR ECOMEDIA 2-5 <* tv* i S.Y Nimrod. 1907 - \ FIG INTRO.15 — Ernest H. Shackleton, ed., Aurora Australis (Ancarcrica: Printed at the Sign of “The Penguin” by Joyce and Wild, 1908). john carter brown library. FIG INTRO.16 —Antarctic Petrel, no 1. British Antarctic Expedition, 1907-9. MS-02.61. ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND. boundedness at the same time, as their producers were literally confined to ships while wedged in ice. Produced in regions and at times of year hos¬ tile to demarcations of hour, day, and global positioning, Arctic and Antarctic newspapers did not regulate time so much as they marked its dilation. Polar publications model possibilities for oceanic inscription in geophysical spaces resistant to terrestrial commonplaces. Thev also constitute an impor¬ tant resource in themselves: they become an alternative medium by which expedition members worked through questions of time, space, and human duration in climatic extremity. The Arctic and Antarctic regions have long presented imaginative anci strategic impediments to stable possession, given the geophvsical challenges of sustaining human life. But when faced with the natural antagonism of the extremity of polar conditions, nineteenth- century expedition members did not draw blanks; they printed gazettes. The very act of printing texts in the Arctic and Antarctica represents an attempt to make a mark in an icy, oceanic environment hostile to custom¬ ary forms of inscription, whether locational, imperial, or infrastructural. 16 INTRODUCTION — nnriTEHTH — - 1 - ^cfrior/o! ------ -Page / Southern 3>ft c *9 ,n 9 3ong - 2 O Phantasm of the J)noW ----- 3 Jhc Romance of fxp/orai/on f/rjt (foys/ng of (freen/one/ (Hanjen) - & Ode to Jobocco ------ 10 JPunch, the dinner zpi/ogue - - - // Jo the fd/tor ------ >2 J^cottj 'Jfni/sh Cfntarctic (fped/i/or) - 13 Jytat/c^ and CJrti ore ties !4- Y/ire/ejj - the rea/jJation • • - - - !6 Tfirthy, JJcathj and hjarr/ageg - IJ Jhc f/o/ution of Women - • - - /6 (7 (onc/je ttorrat/Vk ■ - 2! The J)ay iight Jpropojdion ~ 23 ffeteoro/ogica/ and /YJagne/ic Wotej - - 24 (a/endar 'lfhyme.< ) - - - ' -25 Ohjderj to (orresponden tj - - - ■ ■ 26 YDLT — f&l AFFUL 1313 FIG INTRO .17 — Adelie Blizzard, south Australian museum, Australian POLAR COLLECTIONS. (Analogously, a robotics project by scientists at the University of South¬ ern California and NASA aimed at installing a large-scale 3D printer on the moon lor building structures shows a similar drive to imagine production inlrastructure in extreme environments; that 3D printer would be the polar press of the future .) 29 And vet the lact that all the printed materials are fugitive pieces demonstrates a recognition oi the fleeting ephemerality of human life in climate extremity. This is the insight that polar ecomedia fur¬ nishes: it is ephemera designed to encode its motion and its ice-carved re¬ treat in its very creation. If in Stephanie LeMenager’s observation, “climate change represents, among other things, an assault on the everyday,” then the iorms ol everyday liie will not only change under climate crisis but will reflect it in their content and creation. In her astute extension ol the impli¬ cations of climate news to the very form ol news itself LeMenager contin¬ ues, “Climate change ‘news’ tails to be ‘news’ insofar as it implies an end to the everyday itself.... Extreme weather, including superstorms and severe drought, and all of these conditions that are taking hold as conditions rather than as events shift the ground ol habit and call attention to the proloundly ecological, interdependent state of humanity .” 30 LeMenager introduces the genre ol the news to conversations about Anthropocene writing by invok¬ ing Henry David Thoreau’s lofty rejection ol periodical inlormation: I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. II we read ol one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot ol grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read oi another. One is enough. II vou are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications ? 31 LeMenager’s gloss on this passage is that Thoreau hated the concept of the news “because it implied that ‘the world’ is a disposable externality, a serial fiction with an iterative and forgettable plot .” 32 Yet to my reading Thoreau (who was well up on the polar expeditions ol his time) is noting the collapse of temporal distinctions, read ecologically, as well as calling lor serial—it asynchronic—forms ol inlormation to emerge from the natural world it¬ self . 33 In other words, he calls lor those in “the world” to be attentive not just to the natural world, but to the natural world-as-media. In the polar regions, the genre of the news and the medium oi the newspaper are sell-conscious registers ol the ephemerality oi liie in climate extremity. Rather than the banal, quotidian repetition that riles Thoreau, the evanescent nature oi 18 INTRODUCTION news is the subject of polar papers. If climate change disrupts the notion of the everyday, then we might see in the extremities of polar climate a disrup¬ tion of diurnal timescales, as well. Ecomedia at the Ends of the Earth By naming icebound newspapers, cairn messages, and other expeditionary ephemera polar ecomedia I do not intend to argue simply that these polar exploratory communication materials are the bits and pieces that consti¬ tute a different class of ecomedia. More broadly, I am interested in how we might understand the ephemera of historical polar expeditionary com¬ munities within ongoing scientific and humanistic conversations about how the environment and forms of communicative media are mutually constituted—and mutually in flux and degeneration. The continuity of these questions across historical time is one of the primary arguments of The News at the Ends of the Earth. The term “ecomedia” denotes, for one, the technological media used to register complex systems of ecological and environmental change. It indicates as well an approach to thinking about the imbrication of media forms (whether art, film, data visualization, etc.) within systems and environments. My use of the term understands these two definitions as fundamentally intertwined within the polar landscape . 34 The coinage “ecomedia” has been used in recent years by some scholars in media studies (in conversation with work in media archaeology, dead media, and ecocriticism) in analyzing forms of nonprint media, such as film and photography, that offer ecocritical perspectives on the relation¬ ship between humans and the natural world . 35 Media archaeology unearths communicative technologies that have been superseded, discarded, or ren¬ dered obsolete, on the logic that narratives of supplanted media can inform our understanding and deployment of communicative media today. They inform both in the sense of providing information and in giving form, revealing the processes by which historical media are constituted and sub¬ sequently dismantled or preserved. In Jussi Parikka’s account, media archae¬ ology understands “media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew, and the new technologies grow obsolete increasingly fast .” 36 The practice of media archaeology seeks to disrupt narratives of smooth technological advancement told by conventional progressive histories. “If history is a term that means both what happened in the past and the varied practices of representing that POLAR ECOMEDIA 2-9 past,” Lisa Gicelman writes of media and history, “then media are historical at several different levels.” Media are artifactually of the past, for one, but they also produce a sense of pastness—and thus a temporal collapse—as “using media also involves implicit encounters with the past that produced the representations in question .” 3 What distinguishes polar expeditionary media from other forms is that their very creation and reproduction occur under conditions of transience and displacement. Not confined to the standard ephemeral genres they inhabit (the newspaper, the blank form), polar ecomedia are produced—and subject to modification and obsoles¬ cence alike—in extremity, ecologically and geophysically. Their inevitable desuetude occurs within an environment in which human life and nonhu¬ man geological and aqueous processes alike are precarious. Yet for all this precarity, polar ecomedia such as periodicals and blank forms presume a futurity, readers and writers to come. Within such extreme environments, polar ecomedia are not just responding to climate conditions but encoding their effects within the very evolution of the media themselves. In Tije News at the Ends of the Earth my extraction of works of polar ecomedia from expeditionary history is in part an attempt to imagine sus¬ tainable communication cultures, ones whose revelatory power emerges in concert with the ecologies in which they are produced. In his work on “eco- sonic media,” Jacob Smith argues for a “green-media archaeology,” in which the exhumation of abandoned technologies likewise functions “as part of a search for more sustainable media cultures of the future." Smith cautions scholars of media archaeology, though, not to relegate the communication devices of the past to some “quirky 7 ” cabinet of curiosity; they persist .- 18 Polar ecomedia are situated in the time of the Anthropocene, and as such are continuous both with an arc of modernity predicated on resource ex¬ traction and global commerce and a futurity that must reckon with their planetary effects. I join media archaeologists in affirming the weird tem¬ poralities of polar communicative texts. Telling stories like these, Parikka writes, requires beginning “in the middle—from the entanglement of past and present, and accepting] the complexity this decision brings with it to any analysis of modern media culture .” 39 If, as Siegfried Zielinski writes, “media worlds are phenomena of the relational,” then the ecomedia pro¬ duced within conditions and locations of climate extremity communicate about climate extremity, both in form and content ."* 0 In his striking work on elemental media environments, John Durham Peters characterizes media as “vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our exis¬ tence.” In arguing that environments can be seen as media (just as media 30 INTRODUCTION are themselves environments), Peters proposes that media “not only send messages about human doings and our relations with our ecological and economic systems; they are also ... constitutive parts of those systems .” 41 It is in this sense that polar ecomedia differentiate themselves from con¬ temporary works of ecomedia, which strive to represent or communicate ecological conditions to its viewers, auditors, or readers. Polar ecomedia surpass representation to exemplify in their very ephemerality the processes of drift, erasure, acceleration, and change endemic to Anthropocene life. Writing about and in the Anthropocene is a “question of mediation ,” or how “media operate conceptually in geological time,” as Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall stipulate, and the work of media archaeology in this sense is, in part, to excavate the layers of accumulation even while recognizing that such conceptual work only contributes to the accretion . 42 Mediation in this case is not arbitration or resolution but rather a condition that forms (or calls into awareness) a connection . 43 The term “polar ecomedia” like¬ wise does not necessarily refer to the mediating element itself but rather to the aggregate product of the intercession between the nonhuman environ¬ ment and the human agents existing within and shaping it. hr this book I am working from and speaking to the fields of the environmental humanities, material textual studies and the history of print, oceanic studies, and the literature and history of polar exploration; my reworking of ecomedia in a polar context reflects this critical genealogy throughout the book . 44 Questions of linguistic or conceptual insufficiency have been occupying environmental humanities scholars and others attentive to climate change in recent years. On the one hand, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued in a foundational essay, the crisis calls for academics to set aside disciplinary distinctions—“to rise above their disciplinary prejudices”—as all human history, from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, is contemporary . 45 On the other hand, as Rob Nixon writes, the Anthropocene presents a broader representational challenge: “how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of [the] delayed effects” of “slowing unfolding environmental catastrophes .” 46 One appeal of Anthropocene-framed thinking to humanities scholars is its necessary disruption of modes of inquiry organized around disciplinary boundaries, as Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor observe. By understanding “the Anthropocene as a narrative,” they propose, we recognize the “inherently fictional and yet epistemologically productive quality of any periodizing marker .” 4 Academic distinctions are not the only categories reshaped by Anthropocenic thinking; the nature of knowledge itself is at issue. “What POLAR ECOMEDIA 31 does ir mean to generate knowledge in the age of climate changer” ask Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelskv, observing that “climate change discourses have reshaped the contemporary architecture of knowledge itself, reconsti¬ tuting intellectual disciplines and artistic practices, redrawing and dissolving boundaries, but also reframing how knowledge is represented and dissemi¬ nated.”^ In her work on climate fiction and the Anthropocene, LeMenager sees in climate change a “struggle for genre,” or “the struggle to find new patterns of expectation and new means of living with an unprecedented set of limiting conditions.” The concept of the “everyday,” in turn, “frays in this unique moment of global ecologv,” an observation that has implications for understanding polar newspapers, as I discuss further below . 49 Scholars working in the environmental humanities have been bringing humanities methodologies and critical thinking to information generated, in part, bv the sciences and other disciplines. One of the benefits of this ap¬ proach, as Nixon says, is that “creative people are using objects to try to re¬ lease stories about the Anthropocene that have the capacity to inform and surprise .”’’ 1 For LeMenager and Stephanie Foote, a key to this “capacity to inform and surprise” is the humanist’s skill with storytelling, a narrative and argumentative strategy that “provides adaptable points of view, ways of see¬ ing the world that can be picked up, pieced apart, borrowed and bricolaged into modes of resistance and response .”^ 1 Genre fiction and other modes of art and expression have been responsive to climate change for several decades, even if Amitav Ghosh questions why “serious fiction has not made climate change a topic worthy of the imagination .’ 2 As Foote suggests, one question might be whether aesthetic production is even the way to approach slow- moving climate change; Timothv Morton proposes that climate change is too enormous a concept or realitv for the human mind to grasp fully.'" \XTiat these various interventions share is an interest in the play of narrative form, a commitment to disciplinarv heterogeneitv, and a conviction of the inad¬ equacy of previous timescales, whether academic or geological. Polar media require different critical modes. Although their production and circulation is exceptionally constrained in practice, the sphere of their influence is oceanic in its implications. In examining ecomedia and other polar circuits of knowledge, I am alert to literarv and textual production and circulation in oceanic terms, on a scale beyond the human and outside of linear time and space. In considering what epistemic forms and practices are sustainable in the Arctic or Antarctica, I explore what forms of oce¬ anic exchange (both imaginative and material) are continuous with polar ecomedia—that is, exchange not defined bv relations between nation- 31 INTRODUCTION states or by linear trajectories. 54 Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, but human visualizations of the globe insistently privilege a terrestrial perspec¬ tive; most students are trained to recognize the shapes of continents, but not the bodies of water that give them form. As the seas are rising as a result of the melting of polar ice caps, the contours of the land that interrupts the aqueous globe are themselves transformed, whether low-lying islands or coastal cities. Oceanic studies is invested in recognizing the artificiality and intellectual limitations of certain kinds of boundaries—national, political, linguistic, physiological, temporal—in studying forms of literary and cul¬ tural influence and circulation. 55 The sea must be “a space of circulation because it is constituted through its very geophysical mobility,” in Philip E. Steinberg’s formulation. 56 A fundamental premise of oceanic studies is that familiar patterns of relationality (capital, national, planar, human) dissolve in the space and time of the sea. If, in other words, many scholars now view history from the bottom up, or nations in terms of their transnational or hemispheric relations, or the colonizer as seen by the colonized—to gesture to just a few reorientations of critical perception in recent decades—then what would happen if such scholars took the oceans’ nonhuman scale and depth as a first critical position and principle ? While transnational forms of exchange (whether cultural, political, or economic) have historically taken place via the medium of the sea, only recently have humanities scholars paid attention to that medium itself: its properties, its conditions, its shaping or eroding forces. The sea is “continually being reconstituted by a variety of elements: the non-human and the human, the biological and the geophysi¬ cal, the historic and the contemporary,” as Steinberg characterizes it, and in turn modes of oceanic thought are themselves predicated on relations whose unfixed, ungraspable contours are ever in multidimensional flux. 57 Still, much as the polar regions are oceanic spaces that frustrate imperial or national ambitions, they are governed by geophysical forces and biological habits different from the fluid, unfrozen nautical world. In this sense, the question governing this book is not just what is the news at the ends of the earth, but when and where is the news at the ends of the earth. Oceanic spaces are not friction-free, as the examples in this book dem¬ onstrate, and nor are the other environmental channels that support communications infrastructure, as recent critics have noted. The need for study of the very materiality of the infrastructure supporting networked communications—a materiality too often de-emphasized or hidden—is perhaps most evident in the rhetorical erasure of the hardware that enables the cloud to exist in wireless communications. Media and communication POLAR ECOMEDIA 33 studies, as Nicole Starosielski writes, have “focused on the content, mes¬ sages, and reception of digital media and paid less attention to the infra¬ structures that support its distribution.” 58 An example of a counterpoint to such neglect is Michael Warners recent work on the power grid (and on what it means to go offgrid). He highlights the pervasive abstraction of the idea of the grid, an abstraction that does not make visible what form of primary energy—oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, or geothermal—fuels the sec¬ ondary electricity in use when flipping a light switch, say. 59 In her work on undersea cables, Starosielski too observes that when “communication infrastructures are represented, they are most often wireless ... directing our attention above rather than below and reinforcing a long-standing imagination of communication that moves us beyond our worldly limita¬ tions.” 6 " In bringing into relief the apparatuses that undergird resource and media networks, both Warner and Starosielski note that these circuits are imagined as frictionless. Or, as John Durham Peters puts it, “Infrastruc¬ turalism shares a classic concern of media theory: the call to make envi¬ ronments visible.” 61 In Starosielski’s formulation, the result is “a cultural imagination of dematerialization: immaterial information flows appear to make the environments they extend through fluid and matter less.” hi argu¬ ing against the notion that a “fluid” environment is smooth or turbulence- free, Starosielski is not using fluidity as a metaphor: she is analyzing the actual oceanic environments through which digital cables pass. But these are not stable or untroubled environments, as she argues in her description of the “turbulent ecologies” of digital media: “Turbulence is a chaotic form of motion that is produced when the speed of a fluid exceeds a threshold relative to the environment it is moving though.. . . Turbulence is rarely a direct and purposeful opposition to flow. Rather, it describes the way that social or natural forces inadvertently create interference in transmission simplv because they occupv the same environment, in the end contributing to the networks precariousness.”''" In conceiving of the undersea world as part of the network of contemporary digital communications itself, Sta¬ rosielski provides a schematic for thinking of Arctic and Antarctic spaces too. The polar regions are both fluid and ice-stalled; while geophvsically re¬ moved from modern trade routes, the Arctic in particular has nevertheless been a speculative global passage for many centuries, a fantasy of planetary access that global warming is increasingly making a reality. The ephemera and other forms of polar ecomedia created by polar expe¬ dition members provide a provocative model for understanding the oceanic contours of literary exchange. What forms and practices of thought are 34 INTRODUCTION sustainable in the Arctic or in other regions beyond the political world, in the actual Ultima Thule? What do these knowledge practices tell us about human acts of inscription in and on a natural world under increasing threat? Polar exchange in the form of newspapers is, on one hand, the most quotidian in the world; the distance between the Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Arctic News is not that great. On the other hand it can be seen as the most eccentric, in the sense that the supposed blankness and barrenness of the polar regions both exceed the kinds of traffic we think of as part of global or intranational exchange and also stand as its limit. Ultima Thule The polar regions are ever in the headlines. Interest in the Arctic and Ant¬ arctica is at a new pitch in our present moment of anthropogenic climate change and resource depletion. The late eighteenth-century advent of industrialization marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, in some ac¬ counts, and the measurements for such study are geometrically proliferating in our present moment. 63 For one, Arctic ice is melting at potentially cata¬ strophic rates as a result of climate change, turning the warm open polar sea of nineteenth-century fancy into an oceanic reality in parts of the Arctic North in recent summers. Circumpolar oil and gas reserves are increasingly targeted for mining in response to human fossil fuel overconsumption. Five nations (Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States) have coastal claims to the North Pole, and thus by extension to any mineral rights in its radius. Russia even planted a titanium version of its national flag on the seafloor at the North Pole to secure its assertion. The Canadian discovery of one of John Franklin’s ships on the seafloor in the summer of 2014 prompted that nation’s prime minister Stephen J. Harper to avow that finding the British ship, lost for 169 years, “strengthened Canadian sover¬ eignty in the North,” which had been one of the Harper administration’s broader aims. 64 (Indeed in 2017 the U.K. Ministry of Defense transferred ownership of the two ships to Canada.) In May, 2015 U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the oil giant Shell to resume drilling in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast, although Shell ultimately pulled out after accruing over $4 billion in exploratory costs. Obama did conclude his presidency with sweeping environmental protection orders for the Arctic and other U.S.-claimed oceanic spaces under the power of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (a law that came into being in the mid-twentieth century POLAR ECOMEDIA 35 to secure U.S. oil and gas drilling rights, ironically); Donald Trump granted new Chukchi Sea well permits to an Italian oil company in July 2017, how¬ ever, and in early 2018 moved to open to drilling all U.S. claims to Outer Continental Shelf lands. Russia and other Northern powers have been re¬ opening circumpolar naval bases and commissioning new icebreakers for their northern fleets. At the same time, in unanticipated news, a substantial portion of the immense West Antarctic ice sheet was determined in 2014 to be on the verge of unstoppable disintegration, which will lead to a pre¬ cipitous rise in global sea levels; in 2017 it was reported that “miles of ice [are] collapsing into the sea.” 6 ^ Satellite footage of the Yamal peninsula in Siberia has shown giant new holes in the earth, and while the initial images looked as if they could have been created by hoaxical hollow earth websites, the craters seem to have been caused by methane gas explosions triggered by the thawing permafrost and rising air temperatures caused by climate change. 66 As the methane holes in Siberia warn us, holes in the earth are not only the cause of climate change (via drilling and other modes of resource extraction) but also the product of it, as methane gas is released from the softening permafrost. Long-dormant diseases are rising from the thawing permafrost as well. However remote and inhospitable Antarctica and the Arctic might remain for the lived experience of most humans, the global significance of the regions registers across space and time—well bevond our present moment, even as the Arctic, in particular, has been in manv ways an Anthropocenic bellwether. Recent literary and theoretical explorations of the environmental hu¬ manities, oceanic studies, deep time, environmental justice, and planetarity all reflect a growing interest in the long-reaching global effects of recent human actions, for human agency in the Anthropocene, as Boes and Mar¬ shall have argued, must be “radicallv open to nonhuman influences.” 6 At the same time Dana Luciano cautions us to be mindful that “the ‘Anthro¬ pocene’ was not brought about by all members of the species it names”; the human toll in the Anthropocene is more commonlv visited upon indig¬ enous people and those in the developing world, populations not always included in notions of a “humanism” figured as universal but shored up by racial and imperial violence. 68 Stacy Alaimo has similarly maintained that “questions of social justice, global capitalist rapacitv, and unequal re¬ lations between the global North and the global South are invaluable for developing models of sustainability that do more than try to maintain the current, brutally unjust status quo. l '‘’ These and other critical interventions recognize the finitude of human technical and mechanical control over and 36 INTRODUCTION around the globe. For historical polar explorers, these mechanical limits existed to be tested. Today the insatiable demands by industrialized and developing nations for fossil fuels have refigured the Arctic and Antarctica again as bountiful—at least for capitalism. The early nineteenth-century mania for Arctic exploration, the early twentieth-century obsession with Antarctic missions, and our present turn to both polar regions in an at¬ tempt to maintain human resource-consuming habits all coalesce around resources, whether natural or intellectual, and include a recognition of their limits. The news reported from the ends of the earth has consequences not just for the North and South Polar regions themselves but for the planet. The polar regions might be said to speak in the sense that their ecologi¬ cal motility discloses information about our planet’s past and threatened future. The Arctic and Antarctica are, in turn, given expression by humans in various forms of writing and other media. These have included voyage accounts and expeditionary diaries, such as Parry’s Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage fi-om the Atlantic to the Pacific (182.1), Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (1856), and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1912.); poetry, fiction, and film on ice as sublimity or terror, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mari¬ ner,” John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and Elizabeth Bradfield’s Ap¬ proaching Ice (2010); Arctic indigenous communications, trade routes, and travel networks, such as the Inuit navigational landmark cairns known as Inuksuit; data and accounts from climatologists, ecologists, glaciolo¬ gists, biologists, and other scientists, such as the information used to track anthropogenic climate change; and visual and plastic artistic creation, such as the paintings of William Bradford and Peder Balke, the films of Guido van der Werve, the photography of An-My Le, the installations of Olafur Eliasson, and the printmaking of Pitseolak Ashoona. In nineteenth-century fiction and poetry, the realms of ice were imagi¬ natively encountered beyond the reach of geophysical or temporal regula¬ tions. Readers could travel to the milky, boiling South Polar seas of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the warm open Arctic sea that was Captain Walton’s objective in Frankenstein ; stand poised on the verge of the hollow earths of “Adam Seaborn’s” Symzonia and James De Mille’s Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder ; or step out of nation-time in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “The Moonstone Mass” and in Captain Littlepage’s Arctic reveries in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. Polar sublimity in works of fancy drew from the published POLAR ECOMEDIA 37 journals and voyage narratives of Arctic and Antarctic explorers in the pe¬ riod. While the extremities of the actual worlds described in expeditionary accounts of the frozen zones may not have reached the fanciful pitch of their fictional interpreters, the voyage narratives, too, brought news of a region outside of easilv classifiable Western notions ol geoplanetarv space or diurnal time. The poets and novelists of the nineteenth centurv turned to the language of the Burkean sublime to frame their imaginary encoun¬ ters with the Arctic, drawing from polar expeditions’ extensive coverage in print. They emphasized the North’s frigid stillness, and in an ideological move analogous to that of earlv Europeans in the Americas, inaccurately described the Arctic as an uninhabited wasteland. Actual expeditionary venturers, on the other hand, met the unutterable or annihilating aspects of polar experience not with the awestruck silence of the sublime but with a density of textual production, in a variety of genres. The Illustrated Arctic News and the nearlv thirtv other shipboard newspa¬ pers and other polar ecomedia that I have researched across dispersed ar¬ chives constitute one form of text through which sojourners to the Arctic and Antarctica mediated their experience. While researchers in media stud¬ ies have been in rich critical conversation with ecocritics, scholars of book history or the history of the material text have had relatively few sustained engagements with the environmental humanities. This book aims to kindle more such dialogue bv attempting to reconcile the structural estrangement of print culture from ecocriticism. In its isolation from industrial centers, Arctic coterie publishing and other forms of ephemeral inscription are po¬ sitioned to provide fresh perspectives on the polar regions and print spheres alike. Arctic and Antarctic printing also gives us new ways to think about literarv publics. If, in Michael Warner’s provision, a public “comes into being onlv in relation to texts and their circulation,” then what kind of public is constituted bv a newspaper created by and for thirtv-odd men on a single frozen-in ship, a thousand miles from the nearest English reader? 0 If for Benedict Anderson a newspaper produces imagined communities, what happens when those communities are not anonvmous or broadlv dispersed but constitute the entire “nation” in a single intimate body? 1 The Arctic and Antarctica have functioned as teloses for conceits of global influence from earlv modern mapmaking to our resource-hungry present. The extent and implications of this reach—from polar vortices to rising seas—is only increasing, and oceanic forms of ecomedia demand that we reconceive of the relationship between message and audience, at a geographical as well as temporal remove. The geophysical distance of the ?8 INTRODUCTION Arctic and Antarctica from standard or expected print and communica¬ tion spheres is one condition of this reorientation. The modes and organs of transmission of texts within polar and oceanic environments are often incommensurate with our usual understanding of print circulation. Polar news emerges from and records other temporalities, whether in the form of lost expeditions, the geologic history discernible in polar ice, or the future global destruction scried in melting ice. In these ways we might think of polar news as always belated, or ever frustrating linearity. Questions of resource identification and management, Arctic and Ant¬ arctic preservation and exploitation, and climatic variation have ever been the lede for stories about the polar regions. How did the first largely white, Western voyagers beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles understand the scale of their own news as it circulated within the geophysical space of the poles ? The Newsfrom the Ends of the Earth takes that question literally, exploring the difference in resources—both material and intellectual— presented by polar spaces. By resources I refer both to the ecological sub¬ stance of the polar regions, in their remove from predictable routes and terms of exchange, and to the imaginative and ecomedia output of polar exploration, which is often ephemeral and itself does not follow recogniz¬ able circuits. The News at the Ends of the Earth is attuned to the tension be¬ tween the oceanic or global ambitions of polar voyages and the remarkably tenuous and circumscribed conditions of their practice. I open this book with three chapters on the newspapers and other printed materials created in the Arctic and Antarctica and discuss how expedition members used the generic form of the periodical to work through ques¬ tions about their time, place, and impermanence in the polar regions. The final two chapters turn to forms of ecomedia such as Arctic dead letters and Inuit knowledge circulation, both of which have broader critical and theoretical implications for the study of the environmental humanities and literary history alike. The chapters do not strictly observe chronological order, for polar history is not a narrative of linear progression, as I have been suggesting. Accounting for polar ecomedia, from the nineteenth-century expeditionary age to the present, demonstrates instead the asynchronous nature of oceanic forms of exchange. Both the evidentiary basis and intel¬ lectual ambitions of this project argue for the revelatory force of ephemera. The first Arctic newspaper, the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle of Parry’s first Arctic expedition (1819-20), was a novelty and POLAR ECOMEDIA 39 provoked some unexpected questions about how expedition members con¬ tributed (or else acted as NCs or noncontributors) to the shipboard com¬ munity. Yet as I discuss in chapter i, “Extreme Printing,” the availability ol printing presses aboard Arctic-voyaging ships beginning in 1848 trans¬ formed the practice of newspaper production among polar sailors. The output from Arctic presses was conditioned by and responding to specific polar environmental conditions, I argue. The genre ol the newspaper—an ephemeral form associated with diurnal time—was put to use by Arctic- and Antarctic-voyaging sailors in their meditations on polar temporality, com¬ munity, and circulation. Once tabletop printing presses found their way aboard ship, expedition members adapted them to their literary and theat¬ rical ends. Chapter 1, “Arctic News,” examines the rich variety of post-1848 Arctic newspapers, including the Weekly Guy, the Discovery News, the Port Foulke Weekly News, the Arctic Eagle, the Illustrated Arctic News, and the Aurora Borealis, newspapers by ships engaged in the search tor Franklin in the early 1850s, as well as other forms of printing related to shipboard the¬ atricals and entertainments. The forms of exchange that took place within the pages of these newspapers in the second halt of the nineteenth century had a more expansive sense of contribution and collective exchange, both within the expeditions themselves and within the polar regions more generally. Expeditions to Antarctica in the early twentieth century—the so-called heroic age of exploration—produced the most lavish of all polar publica¬ tions. Shackleton was central to two of the most elaborate ventures: the South Polar Times, which he edited while an officer on Scott’s British Dis¬ covery expedition of 1901-4, and Aurora Australis, the first book printed in Antarctica, which was published by members of Shackletons own Nimrod expedition of 1907-9. The book, published in about one hundred copies, of which eighty-plus are extant, consists of no pages of mixed-genre mate¬ rial, bound with the materials that were at hand, from orange crates to horse halters to boxes that once contained stewed kidneys. The heightened pro¬ fessionalization of the book arts practiced by Antarctic voyagers is just one distinction between publications of the North and the South: the subject matter of Antarctic periodicals turns more explicitly to climate change and environmental science, and chapter 5, “Antarctic Imprints,” examines the in¬ creased expertise of the onetime amateur polar publishers within the context of an increase in narrative accounting for the planet’s climatic variability. Newspapers were not the only media to circulate among polar expedi¬ tion members, as the second part of Tt)e News from the Ends of the Earth 40 INTRODUCTION details. Chapter 4, “Dead Letter Reckoning,” ranges widely over a form of ecomedia that I call “Arctic dead letters.” These consist of the cairn mes¬ sages, notes in bottles, cached documents, mail, and other periodic circuits of delivery or connection in geophysical spaces that would seem otherwise to frustrate human exchange networks. Polar expeditions were required to leave messages in cairns or other outposts at regular intervals, in multiple copies, often on preprinted forms in six languages. Other official documents were printed aboard ship. Even though thousands of bits of paper were dis¬ tributed throughout the Arctic in the nineteenth century, it was exception¬ ally rare for one of these messages to be found or received; most remained in circulation for an open-ended period of time and may yet emerge today, as ice melts and permafrost thaws. In their risk of annihilating dispersion and their potential for ceaseless drift, Arctic dead letters exemplify the un¬ boundedness of polar ecomedia in its attenuated temporality, randomness, and motility. The career of the unconventional American Charles Francis Hall is a somewhat different example of an exchange of knowledge whose circuits are both routine and extravagant within and without the Arctic regions in the long nineteenth century. The fifth chapter, “Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall,” focuses on Hall’s accounts of the circulation of sub¬ sistence and intellectual knowledge as well as historiography between him¬ self and Inuit residents of the Arctic regions. Hall was unusual among most nineteenth-century Anglo-American explorers in choosing to adapt to in¬ digenous lifeways; his relationship to nautical epistemology as practiced by white sailors was more complicated (and violent). His exceptional path to and within the Arctic, accompanied along the way by the Inuit couple Ipi- irviq and Taqulittuq (or Ebierbing and Tookoolito, as they were known to the American public), helps to delineate how Arctic indigeneity has been figured within oceanic models of intellectual circulation. I close The News at the Ends of the Earth with a brief coda on a thwarted Arctic expedition and on matters of life and death. Subsistence and mutual cooperation have become especially urgent issues in the Anthropocene. But although the temporalities of life and death are usually conceived in human terms, this book joins other humanities work on the Anthropocene in shifting our scales of relation from the human to the nonhuman, from the global to the planetary, and, in my argument in particular, from the ter¬ restrial to the oceanic. The course of my work on this project in some ways mirrors the trajec¬ tory of the British and American explorers I study. Initially I brought to my POLAR ECOMEDIA 41 polar archival findings a scholarly approach practiced in my earlier work in oceanic studies, maritime narratives, and material text studies. The topogra¬ phy of this research, however, has demanded additional methodologies lor my critical navigation, drawn from the environmental humanities, Anthro- pocene studies, and media studies. The archives of ice ring with a special ethical urgency today. I thought mv preoccupation in recent years with the news coming out of the Arctic and Antarctica was a consequence of being an ecologicallv concerned citizen in the Anthropocene, a by-product of my historicist impulses; it turns out, though, that the archive of news from the polar regions in the past several hundred years (and across geological time) was speaking to me as well. It is mv hope in this book to amplify what that deep and motile repository of polar ecomedia can tell us. INTRODUCTION ONE EXTREME PRINTING Captain Parry! Captain Parry! Thy vocation stops not here: Thou must dine with Mr. Murray And a quarto must appear. — SAMUEL TAYLOR Coleridge, “Captain Parry” (182s) ... North Cornwall has not had as yet its Caxton. — advertisement for Queens Illuminated Magazine (1852) P olar newspapers were created and printed in conditions of extremity in multiple senses. The expeditions for which newspapers formed the shipboard social media, for one, were journeying toward latitudinal ex¬ tremes approaching 90° S or N. Polar expeditions had infrequent contact with an Anglophone public after a point, and thus the potential for circu¬ lation of the media they produced was necessarily exceptionally limited. While their isolation was not complete—in the Arctic, Anglo-American explorers had frequent contact with Inuit and other indigenous peoples and routinely employed Inuit guides—Western expedition members, in their cultural chauvinism, imagined themselves at a supreme distance from others. The meteorological conditions and attendant environmental hard¬ ships of life in the polar regions are also notoriously extreme; the mechani¬ cal acts of writing and operating printing equipment become challenging in turn. This chapter describes how sailors came to print at the polar ends of the earth, concentrating on the outfitting, mechanics, and production of presses and printed materials in the polar regions. (The second and third chapters turn to analysis of the literary and informational content of the papers.) The material and intellectual strategies they brought to bear in mediating the particular challenges of creating printed texts in extreme conditions gave shape to the forms of communicative texts I am cAYmgpolar ecomedia. Printing presses were first stocked on Arctic ships in service of the search for Sir John Franklin’s missing Northwest Passage expedition aboard the ships Erebus and Terror , which had left Britain in 1845. The presses were almost immediately requisitioned, however, by crew members for their entertain¬ ment during the sunless months of the polar winters. The materials that polar expedition members printed using the presses may reasonably be seen as the curious or charming incidentals of the leisure hours of a collective formed by circumstance. But polar periodicals tell us more than the news (or a mocking facsimile of the news) from the cramped cabins of icebound crews. The ephemeral form of the newspaper is crucial to this story: news conveys information that interrupts a moment in time, even as newspapers are characterized by their periodicity, their marking of time. In Walter Ben¬ jamin’s formulation in “The Storyteller,” newspapers provide information but not stories; the storyteller, who offers the benefit and the intimacy of experience, recedes in an age of impersonal information distributed via newspapers. Sailors, those notable travelers and yarn spinners, are story¬ tellers in Benjamin’s account—and the conditions for storytelling, stillness and boredom, are certainly in place in the polar regions. Yet the form of the newspaper, considered in Benjaminian terms, does in fact have utility for sailor storytellers. Arctic and Antarctic voyaging sailors turn to the genre of the periodical not to convey news in the form of information—the content of the papers is parodic, light, and farcical—but to structure their medita¬ tions on polar temporality, community, and circulation. Expeditionary newspapers produced in the Arctic and Antarctica are forms of media that are both shaped by and consciously responding to polar environmental conditions. Newspapers are understood to be peri¬ odic, marking daily time. Polar winter, however, is relentlesslv nocturnal, out of time. While polar winter rhythms would be disruptive to any unused to their temporal irregularities, they were especially so to sailors accustomed to watch-oriented discipline, in both senses of “watch.” An Antarctic winter, for example, unsettled Otto G. Nordenskjold’s work with the Swedish Ant¬ arctic Expedition in both its labor and literary dimensions; while in polar darkness, he wrote, “A thing that I missed above all things was regular, or¬ dered work. All the preceding pages must have shown the difficulty there 44 CHAPTER ONE was in arranging such labour, whether indoor work or outdoor .” 1 In crafting gazettes, newspapers, and periodicals, expedition members explicitly mark the weirdness of their time and place. They are simultaneously imposing diurnal order on a region without sun and rather seriously calculating what goes awry when temperate forms of periodical writing are imposed on an intemperate world. This is how quotidian newspapers become polar eco- media: produced by and within the outlandishness of the Arctic and Ant¬ arctic environments, they theorize ephemeral ways of reading and writing in and about the polar regions in their very pages. We see this most clearly in one of the few extant photographs of the actual act of polar printing. 2 The photo, Printing the “Arctic Eagle” was taken during the Fiala-Ziegler Expedition (1903-5), a U.S. attempt to reach the North Pole on the ship America. In the image we see a series of bunks, the crowded sleeping quarters of the seamen; this is not an officer’s private cabin. Three men are abed, wrapped in wool blankets, in positions of re¬ pose and observation. 3 In the foreground are a pair of fur boots. The focus is on the printer, Spencer Stewart, who served as the expedition’s assistant commissary: he is clad in a wool sweater, with a pencil tucked behind his ear. Seated on the edge of the bunk of one of the reclining men, Stewart straddles a hand-operated tabletop press, which appears to be a Boston- produced Golding Official Press. (The name “Golding” is just perceptible on the curved side of the press.) Judging from the machine’s size relative to the printer—and from the size of the press’s production, the newspa¬ per Arctic Eagle —this was probably the Official model no. 6, with a chase size of 8/4 in. X 12V2 in. 4 A thick stack of folded paper, presumably cop¬ ies of the Arctic Eagle, is visible on the left. Just above the printer’s right hand the type case is discernable, and the blurred man in motion working with it would be Seaman Alien Montrose, who, according to Commander Anthony Fiala, “had been a wandering newspaper typo before he took to following the sea.” 5 The photographer must be squeezed within the frame of the door. Since Commander Fiala himself had previously been the art director and photographer for the Arctic paper’s namesake, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, we might guess that he operates the camera here. This remarkable image makes visible the situational intimacy of the me¬ chanics of the production and circulation of shipboard newspapers. Our idiomatic sense of a paper emerging “hot off the press” has a different tactil- ity when the press (its ink, in particular) would have to be thawed for use. The heat and breath of the cluster of bodies in bed around Stewart and Montrose is conjured by this glimpse of printing the Arctic Eagle, the very EXTREME PRINTING 45 F i \ 1 T*>'W 9 ™ 'JR -Jo ; if v\| FIG l.l — Printing the “Arctic Eagle,” Fiala-Ziegler Expedition, private collection. USED WITH PERMISSION. body heat and breath that is likely providing much of the room’s meager warmth. Unlike the abstracted, invisible, imagined communities of Bene¬ dict Anderson’s classic formulation regarding newspapers, polar periodicals are produced quite literally in the laps of their readership. Notions of print circulation and the political and social bodies of the ship’s community take on new meanings in this context. Half of the men within the space framed by the photograph are in bed; does this imply that th c Arctic Eagle is a morning paper? or a very late evening edition? The usual temporalities of newspaper publication, as we will see, do not matter—or thev signify differently—in an environment in which the sun might not rise for as many as 120+ days and in which the crew has no easily observable means of marking time. We cannot tell what time it is in the photograph, nor can polar newspa¬ pers mark diurnal or other serial time in the customary manner of the genre. Nautical time is a factor in this ecology as well; sailors’ schedules are typi- 46 CHAPTER ONE cally divided into four-hour blocks of time known as “watches,” although the standard four-hour watches at sea become attenuated during the relative calm of polar nautical labor. While these are responsive to a twenty-four- hour calendar, a rotating watch system does not establish a natural division between morning and night for nautical laborers. (The American explorer Donald MacMillan was among those who addressed this problem by wear¬ ing a twenty-four-hour watch.) The photo Printing the “Arctic Eagle" cap¬ tures in one frame several of the topics that this chapter on polar printing illuminates: the extremity of the circumstances in which polar periodicals were produced and circulated, and the attendant difficulties this produced; the intimacy and social forms of this particular media; and the collectivity of the papers’ creation. Polar ecologies shaped the media forms with which voyagers marked time and established community, however ephemerally. Neptune’s Newsrooms Printing presses were originally brought to the Arctic to assist in the broad dispersal of messages in the decades-long search for the sizable missing Brit¬ ish Northwest Passage expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin, which launched in 1845 with 129 men on two ships, Erebus and Terror. (I treat this search in greater detail in chapter 4.) Once tabletop printing presses were aboard ship, and after winter storms made fire balloon messaging and the other official uses of the devices impractical, expedition members sought to pass the dark winter hours by adapting the technology to literary and the¬ atrical ends. The presses produced broadsides and playbills for shipboard theatricals, copies of songs and occasional poems composed by mission members, and the community newspapers that I discuss in the next several chapters. Sailors even carved their own large-font type and emblems from the ship’s store of spare lumber stocked for repairs, although wood is at a premium in regions north of the timberline. A number of Arctic expe¬ ditionary newspapers were published in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the following Anglophone papers: the Flight of the Plover, or the North Pole Charivari (1848); the Illustrated Arctic News (1850-51) and the Aurora Borealis (1850-51), companion papers by sister ships engaged in the search for Franklin; the Gleaner and Minavilins (1850-51), under¬ ground papers suppressed by ship commanders; the Weekly Guy (1852-53); the Queens Illuminated Magazine (1852-54); the Polar Almanac (1854); the Ice-Blink (1853-55); ffi e Port Foulke Weekly News (1860-61); the Discovery EXTREME PRINTING 47 t LLU SIR ATEO ARCTIC NEWS 31 ^T/ C 4 rf */*A 0 *r*n/ RM.S. ASSISTANCE. 7 ///?t tirjrs/ ft, /■?/■/■/ /'S!. //^Au /' 7 f (/RAND ATTRACTION for hie new year . 7/rt.i.>//siy Trrttffi’ty /fj/ //,, .Jft-it*>if0* ■ 0r/f to y^ 0/r.f j /%-m^TtTizf fd /£(* /ndy, A, '/* FARCE OF THE TURNED HEAD. ■Tf A f -/-y //is jfltr-T/f/J^rit^f/trAdtrytra/ 7//f/ eyy t s*r,i<7 r*£T 4*1 rr.riy .d/i7y(s " M « /*>/< i/r' COT «£n/00M' y/ V/rt' €/ , ■/>’ tf/rf/f ///S C*/ff re r/ /£*> y'r/ix'ir/s ,. fi/tn-R' ojifrt «/ ( ,/it'ik _ (inu ROYAL INTREPID SALOON ORAM) ATTRACTION!!! / - ',i. f ■■ ■ ././ t/17)y 0 // '* // s /s/y'c >'** f s*tr. * *■ if* // rc~?/T't **f f ** i f *i r // rr/ir/-> /*/fsrrcsy S/fyC#ooy> tft.y/' rr/tytstr/f //lyrryift l/ 1 , 10 /fyr-y? $cc-16 thorn 1 , the i'avo'i < A-'tors of tin* Ship's Companies present will jierf mn the truly lunghabh 4 FARCE OF THE TURNED HE To be followed by the Grand Farcical, Tragical, Molo-dromaUcnl, Serio-Comic PLAY OF iTI If E H nmioso Which will lie produc ed by the Oth ers of the Squadron. The only Lady it- this piece, has heeu engaged lit nil Enormous Sociffice; it being h«r first appearance on any Stage 1 ! The whole u> Conclude with the entirely NEW PANTOMIME OP / IL OR HARUXK tN LIGHT!' Written expressly for the oe?? ?, "« by a talc-tied member of iheexpediiim. In which the celebrated Clowns will niito- dace some of their favorite, atrs. Doors open at 6 o'clock. Com mence atfrUil G ifmit's Island Priidin? Office. W°y 44 AR C,,MtiSSP S ' Ifh TVwti. LAST NIGHT FOR THE SEASON H On Friday the 28 tU February 1651 , lacing the aR.nv. crsary oFC-ommifrsionmg the Expe- dition; will hr performed the GRAND HISTORICAL DRAMA, in Two Acts, of CHARLES THE ELFTH, Charles XII, . J.ieut .Mecham. Adam Brock, Mr.Eds. Map Vlinkero,(as Firmati>,Capt. Ommanney. Gustavos da Mervelt, . > Mr. Markham. Triptelemus Muddlewcrk, . F..T. Kr»hhe'. Gcn't Duekcrt , Until. Cator. Col. Reiehel, Mr May. Officers, Messrs Richards and ShellabCnr. Eudiga, Mr. McDottgall. Cine*, Mr. Pcar>e. ACT 1 . The scenesarelaid in the Id. of Riio-ou Swedish Pomerania. Charles XII m- mj^ito, as an Officer of t>.< Royal household. ACT 11 . Scenes in the Town ofStralsund, duriiig a state of siege- diaries in propria persona. j Entirely new scenery and dresses! After which, grand Phantasmagoria! ! MAGICAL FIGURES! 1 To conclude with THE NE’VF PANTOMIME OF Repeated by Special Desire; and prepared -with tttinsral magtnfteeitce 1 y Doors mie n at 6a'clock. CommenceatGdSP Griffith'sId. PrintingOffice. F I R- & " V FIG 1.4 — Royal Arctic Theatre playbill, printed on pink paper. General Reference Collection C.45.LI1. © the British library board. FIG 1.5 — Roval Arctic Theatre playbill, printed on blue paper, possibly a proof sheet. General Reference Collection c. 45 .i.n. © the British library board. Ii Ld,m- m out i on mh ssasqs ; Jg Oa JVvicy tfe*2Si’; EuBrsMrr )$$!, Wing ^ *rj tfc*wsmef*>.t>- pt &xomwiotdu;{ && Eipe- j W dZtiasi ««f w pwforjrctf 4b? ^ GRaAU MitJTCRlCAf. DitAMA, Xfi k, Two Am*. f f * cinms mz Tnm: , CfeAw X H.> . - Liwt >t«r!i«o. i . Adam Brock, ?*ir.E4e, . Mtj> Yr:::herg,(s4 TLrrmuiyGkpt. Oara»: d* Men 'll* . . JUi-, Mrtr>jt«m. '* ' Trt|*;kffla» MuitUeirerk, . r, X K>*Bfec. Gcs’lBuckwt ^Xioovfesfti- CoL Iteiehtf, MrW,v Ofiww, Mwtre fUobiifds and .'rh«5iab&itf. BcTiga, Mr. MoDcu^a!!. t,Tri«i> Mr. Btarsc. * ACT I. Th* .sftanc* w«Ui.i in Jho Id. of A SwesjAk Ptaatmah. Cbnrio* XI! in, edgaao,«» an OUkaef ofth Rov«l liou*«!tws* in the Tow# ofSosIsiuttf, * during afitsf* ->f Rt;je, f’iiiule« In propria * jwoa*. 6 Esta«jy an sccn»rv and di«s «a} AfbwiWTdvk, jr»ad Pfeaatasmagwml « MUSICAL FIGURES*; To conclude wjffe PANTOMIME OF mm kl<(pee&t£t By Bpecioi Depite; tad piapar- d ' w «ilb aisusaal m*gniCf«c-~el c jY Irkxs en at 6 o'clock. Ctmmn&}a£&36. k I RPrite^jf Office. FJK.i.W.1). *£tr8»iw> tSr&Zxe- FIG 1.6 — Playbill advertising a performance during the Franklin search, 1850-51. It is printed in black on linen with a seam down the left hand side and a line of stitching at the bottom. TXT0089. © national maritime museum, GREENWICH, LONDON. the trouble to set type: in the interim, their ship had been demolished by ice. The prospectus for the Queens Illuminated Magazine was printed, and the newspaper had printed headers, but the paper was generally handwrit¬ ten and hand-illustrated; the same is true for the Illustrated Arctic News, which had elaborate and extensive printed headers and printed theatri¬ cal announcements but was otherwise in manuscript hand. The first fully printed Arctic paper was the Weekly Guy (1851). EXTREME PRINTING 63 MELVILLE ISLAND. Vi„!,-r p«jri*ng,; of ii.Tf. KKU.ETT. C. B, wJ F. t. MtOlISTOCK T!«- &st of tfcs* S.Wi=.'#.ii iS }*W-C i* 2 -«i U. M. S. V. INTREPID. on Tbn/»Uyt, Dw i^KvDt^viiilrvr. li&2. Tin' aum^ranwt-s of the <‘Veojjra, \ri]l'conu^^t^ tylb, a CT<*. by Mc-jTs & Oi-an. n:u3 (ianakfcfc •lis -$r 3 $£*SI »&i .',i iug l«»f flic fii.-t Kit •• 'Vi’.f i tVi-s -country. tvifkll - tv.n l|WrftH5Ttte»'v«v LEGERDEWIA ..,■» . .->C • «>*.<*;) hj iliw fc»Iw*v4 ^ Eg ft* on }.mui«s»* H^wtmns, a aids* . A.' iicK, a k* COMIC SOXU5« Uj. Xassw. Smith, Vi ut. c and 5X« Id & o'clock: to otiinaumc** at CQfrfv. . ■» GOB SAVE THE QCEES! Wt* Mclwlle inland Pre*s. v^M| FIG 1.7 — Playbill produced on board hms Intrepid during the Franklin search led by Sir Edward Belcher. Printed in black and red on cream silk. TXT0090. © NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. In at least one other instance, a proffered press never made it on ship, as Carl Koldewev reports of the German Arctic expedition of 1869-70 aboard the Hansa. “We thought that.. . we ought to follow the example of our predecessors,” Koldewey writes of the origin of the manuscript newspa¬ per Ostgronlandische Zeitung (East Greenland Gazette), which, like a number of other Arctic newspapers, was edited by the ship’s surgeon. “Unfortu¬ nately, a small printing press, given by the printing-house at Bremerhaven, had not followed us on board. In order, therefore, to have two copies, one for the cabin and one for the forecastle, we had to take the trouble to write it.”'- The distinction drawn here between the cabin (occupied by the of¬ ficers) and the forecastle (occupied by the common seamen) was common to general shipboard hierarchies and was certainly a factor in the fractious- 64 CHAPTER ONE ness displayed by and in the manuscript newspaper of Parry’s first expedi¬ tion’s newspaper, the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle. But by this point in this history of nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions most polar newspapers had more explicitly leveled such nautical class structures, at least in their rhetorical insistence on the equal value of the contribu¬ tions (and printing skill) of the “men” or common seamen. Other than possible differences in national naval traditions, the need for two copies of the newspaper aboard Koldewey’s Hansa may reflect instead the prac¬ tical obstacles to general dissemination of the periodical when produced by manuscript hand rather than on a printing press. On Hayes’s United States expedition, which had a manuscript paper, there were only fifteen men, making it among the smallest of polar ventures in the period; the need for multiple copies was likely not as urgent. The Illustrated Arctic News too counted “the men” both among its contributors and its printers; as the pref¬ ace to Arctic Miscellanies (a collection of Aurora Borealis articles) testifies, “Several of the men, too, became adepts in the art of printing, and set up in type, songs and other trifles, chiefly of their own composition.” 53 Albert Hastings Markham’s memoir provides the fullest description of the outfitting and layout of an Arctic printing establishment. He notes that each ship in the expedition “had been provided, before leaving England, with a printing-press, and an officer and seaman [Lieutenant George Giffard and Able Seaman Robert Symons] had been instructed in its use.” The printers issued a prospectus for their printing “firm,” as Markham calls it, which promised that they would “carry on the Noble Art of Printing in a Style & with a Rapidity hitherto quite unattainable. 54 It was difficult for Giffard and Symons to carve out space for their venture on the ship, how¬ ever, as Markham’s memoir testifies: The “cost” and “trouble”... that were expended in obtaining a convenient place in which to carry out the “noble art of printing,” were caused by the fact that our photographers were equally anxious, with our printers, to possess themselves of the small cabin lately occupied by my cousin [Clement Markham], and which is so grandiloquently alluded to as “ex¬ tensive premises.” In fact, for some little time it was a very sore and vexed question between those two celebrated and energetic firms. Trap Lane was so called in consequence of the after-hold being immediately outside the door of the cabin; and it occasionally served as a very disagreeable kind of man-trap when, through inadvertence, the hatch had not been replaced. As this part of the ship was, during the early part of her com- EXTREME PRINTING 65 mission, in total darkness, owing to the pile of stores that were stowed in every available corner, it is no wonder that unsuspecting individuals should occasionally have fallen into the trap! Our printing-press was, it is almost needless to say, of great use to us during the winter; for, although it never printed very much for the public service, it was constantly called into requisition for the purpose of strik¬ ing off programmes for our dramatic and other entertainments; and on such important events as birthdays and Christmas-day we indulged in the extravagance of printed bills of fare. On the whole the printing establish¬ ment on board the “Alert” tended very materiallv to beguile the tedium of our long nights, and must therefore be regarded as a decided success.’ 5 We see here, first of all, the exceptionally constrained physical spaces in which the crew members were operating in general aboard ship, however amusingly conjured in the idea of the icebound ship constituting a “city.” The “extensive premises” of the printing office, according to the prospectus, are located “within half a minute’s walk of the foremost Quarter Deck Lad¬ der, and easily accessible to all parts of the city.” 56 Markham observes that ironic remarks about the grand quarters—and their attendant hazards— disguise some actual tensions among the printers and the photographers: to claim any corner for creative work could be a battle, as the photographers would be engaged in expeditionary work, not art for the sake of art alone. More provocatively, Markham here makes a distinction between the “pub¬ lic service” in support of which the printing press could be put to use, and its counterpart—which would presumably constitute the “private.” The public service would likely be linked to the expeditions mission to attempt the North Pole (Markham is describing George Nares’s 1875-76 large British Arctic Ex¬ pedition), although he notes that the press is not employed to this end. The ex¬ pedition members take it up instead for their private use, which, crucially, does not mean individual use. The private function performed by the press attends to the ships body as a whole in printing “programmes for our dramatic and other entertainments,” Markham writes, as well as “printed bills of fare" for communal holiday meals and birthday celebrations. We might generally as¬ sociate newspapers with a public function, but polar newspapers violate one of the definitions of a public in the sense that all of its members is intimately known to one another.’ It is against this particular concept of publicness that Markham defines the Arctic Press’s function throughout die ship as “private." The language of “privacy” and “private use” to indicate ship-wide com¬ munity recurs in Arctic newspapers. The Port Foulke Weekly News begins 66 CHAPTER ONE 2 ' If | ; The ARCTIC Printing Office Menrs (xfffanl & Symons beg to inform the Public that tliey have obtained - at an imense cost & with infinite trouble - possession of the extensive premises lately occupied by Mr Clements Markham situated in Trap Lane wit Jim lrnlf a minutes walk of the foremost Quarter Deck ladder, and easily accessible to all parts of the City. They have fitted up their new establishment - regarcllex* of expense- with all the late-gt invmtioiU and newest mtt chinenj to enable them to carry on the Noble Art of Printing in a Style & with a Rapidity hitherto quite unattainable. They therefore expect from the Public that support & * assistance which it always gives to the truly rfeserving. Charges moderate. No credit given. All work required to be executed to be paid for in advance. N B. Everything undertaken promptly and correctly executed, ' HALS.Alert. July. 28.th. 1875. FIG 1.8 — The Arctic Printing Office advertisement. May/13/2. © NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. with an invocation of the “private family circle” that comprises the en¬ tirety of the paper s readership and the crew, in a representative example. 38 Within the pages of the newspapers, gazettes, and weeklies, editors and contributors alike demonstrate an awareness of the relative privacy of the circumstances of their periodicals’ distribution, given the absence of a read¬ ing community beyond that of their shipmates. Yet at the same time they recognize that polar newspapers are calling into being an Arctic public de¬ fined not just by proximity or happenstance but by specific ecological con¬ ditions. Within the space of the newspapers we can see expedition mem¬ bers working out ideas of how communities can be both public and private, how transient assemblages can form worlds elsewhere, even in the face of geophysical and ecological extremity. EXTREME PRINTING 67 Amateur Communities Shipboard-printed newspapers increasingly became standard to the lei¬ sure and community-building practices oi Arctic expeditions, and eventu¬ ally Antarctic ones; they remain so to this day. 59 The forms of exchange that take place within their pages reflect a learned, experiential sense of the relationship between the polar environment and what we might call a polar imprint: the mark that expeditions sought to make on what the po¬ etic imagination of the day held to be the Arctics sublime blankness. Polar newspapers also demonstrate an expansive sense of contribution and collec¬ tive exchange, both within the expeditions themselves, and within the polar regions more broadly. Expeditionary interest in the genre of the newspaper is a reflection of the broader cultures of print in the nineteenth century, in both Britain and the United States, in which newspapers played significant roles as organs of nationalism and examples of amateur literary production. At the same time, newspaper production is consistent with polar expedi¬ tionary culture itself, in its imperative to produce volumes of writing as a hedge against polar blankness. As polar gazettes became conventional to expeditionary practice, certain periodical and aesthetic conceits became lit¬ erary conventions among expedition members as they explored the genre of the newspaper as a way to meditate on—and mediate—questions of Artie temporality and isolation. In all cases, Arctic literary imprints, ephemera by the definitions of liter¬ ary genre, have been treated in turn as ephemeral to the histories of polar exploration, which tend to mention Arctic newspapers alongside theat¬ ricals and shipboard libraries in a brief paragraph or two describing win¬ ter pastimes. 60 The exception is the excellent bibliographic work on polar publishing done by Elaine Hoag and by David H. Stam and Deirdre C. Stam, as well as Elizabeth Leane’s analysis of Antarctic newspapers. 61 Arc¬ tic imprints constitute a small and dispersed archive found in the miscel¬ laneous folders, generally, of those expedition members whose papers have been collected in archives, and—among this already small class—within the smaller subset of those who kept samples of polar printing as souve¬ nirs. (Hoag estimates the total number of imprints produced in the Arctic in a five-year stretch at midcentury, the height of the Franklin searches, at around one hundred; she doesn’t work with Antarctic material.) 62 A collec¬ tion of printed theatrical playbills from the Nares British Arctic Expedition (1875-76) held at the Scott Polar Research Institute, for instance, had been preserved bv an able seaman on the mission named William Maskell; his 68 CHAPTER ONE daughter donated them to the archive in 1942. John Simpson, a surgeon on several Arctic expeditions, tucked theatrical programs into his journal of one voyage. In another example, a librarian at the Virginia Historical Soci¬ ety came across what she characterized as a “curious scrap of paper” in the society’s holdings while researching a website feature on a different polar mission. The tattered paper, partly printed and partly inscribed in ink, is an 1850 balloon dispatch from the hms Resolute engaged in a search for Frank¬ lin. In a 2013 blogpost written on the balloon message, the librarian Kath¬ erine Wilkins wonders, “How could a scrap of paper be retrieved from the Arctic circle and placed in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia?” The repository does not know the provenance of the item, she continues, which suggests “that it has been in our collections for a long time. We may never learn how we acquired this unique item.” 63 In my own research for this book, I have traveled to thirty-odd archives in five countries, the majority of which hold only a single periodical or a handful of examples of Arctic or Antarctic imprints. The archival presence of the balance of these imprints, in turn, is not readily apparent from library find¬ ing aids, which have historically privileged the printed voyage accounts and correspondence associated with polar exploration. 64 In my research for this project, I have seen multiple versions of the same couple of playbills printed from this press on different media: paper (of various colors), linen, silk, and chamois (see figures 1.3-1.7). Some of the newspaper and theatrical adver¬ tisements that survive are printed on yellow or blue paper and may be proof sheets, which could explain their presence in the archive as reserve cop¬ ies. 65 In the playbills one can also observe examples of the emblems as well as the hand-cut large-type font made by the sailors in the titles “turned head!” and “magical figures” and “bombastes furioso !!!” 66 This heterogeneity of material reflects, in part, the novelty of the practice of Arctic printing and the attendant desire to preserve souvenirs on fan¬ cier fabric. The National Maritime Museum, for instance, holds several playbills printed on brightly colored silk that had been elaborately framed for display by their mid-nineteenth-century preservationists. The relative volume of such commemorative souvenir production is a primary reason such playbills remain in the “Uncatalogued” or “Miscellaneous” folders of prominent expedition members. The elusiveness of this material reflects, for one, the ephemerality of a moment in time, a season, an expedition carried out in the absence of diur¬ nal measurements of days, abstracted from contact with the state sponsors of most ventures other than via the singular national time kept by sea clocks EXTREME PRINTING 69 I ,?2 'I ks. 1 *« 4 > . \ rt ^ L+ 7^ 4 x -*-' • ' 7 / »■*" T ' * 4 * . jft _ a; . >/: .*/<*. ~. -it * .t*-j>i A. ->': §i ••a :.7 ■THEATRE ROYAL, POINT BARROW. 00 P^iDAY EVENIMC, DECEMBER S4. i«s>. Will be pnfhMMd I lie Uuglabie l'nrce of liv Q! TEE SI III ITT. DHASSAT 5 S PERSON/E, Or. Jiislfi®. C.Wl*s, "ill Af at fork, A' ■ ! Shairli. Tt):u Dnrkiog, •r.iii*, ' Mr. Omisti’l. , Cork. Matthews. (‘»>i*-}»> ¥ lw * ^ “»• to lommowe « seven’ jitwiWif. - A- *£n. /4C~ A~- A -- C.. - -' /vb /f-r^A A*— A Z,^Z£v-r-o & As~/£r ■Z / jaVA lx A*~~ . A.-.. - /A 7X fig i.g — Qiieer Subject theater program tucked into John Simpson’s “Account of Voyages.” Box i. Folder: Account of Voyages, John Simpson Papers, 1825-1875. david m, rubenstein rare book and MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY'. keyed to the Greenwich meridian. Rather than a mechanism tor passing time, newspapers, as Yveli as letters and logbooks, become a measurement and codification of it. In addition, the elusiveness of polar periodicals within archives is consistent with the imperfect preservation histories ot periodi¬ cals more generally, especially for amateur publications or those created by nonelites. 6 These media were never designed to stay, to stick, to make it to the shelf; they were as transitory as the ship or the ice, always on the move. In their newspaper incarnations, polar ecomedia bear affinities in some ways with the amateur periodicals of the latter halt ot the nineteenth century. Both were enabled by the wide availability of desktop printing presses, which gave nonprofessionals access to parlor (or cabin) publica- 70 CHAPTER ONE tion. Small presses were initially manufactured lor use by tradesmen look¬ ing to economize on job printing costs, but as Elizabeth Harris describes, “almost as an afterthought, manufacturers advertised the same apparatus [do-it-yourself printing presses] to children and amateur printers.” Hobby presses were a hit; between i860 and 1880 the “number of press-making companies tripled.” 68 Tabletop presses in the home were used primarily to print calling cards or other social documents, but younger people—mostly white, middle-class boys—used the presses to create their own newspapers. We see an example of this dual function in the Boys and Girls Favorite , an amateur paper out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. One “prize” for a reader who could furnish twenty-five additional subscribers to the paper was a “beautiful printing press for boys and girls, worked by hand, Cards, Hand¬ bills, Circulars, in fact, all kinds of printing can be done with neatness and dispatch. Just the thing all boys and girls want. Given for twenty-five new names.” 69 The process of generating new subscribers to the paper was also a process of generating new outlets for print, both periodical and social. We see some of the differences between amateur periodicals of the tem¬ perate and polar zones on display in the career of Isaac Israel Hayes, who had experience with recreational papers both as an Arctic explorer and as a surgeon in Pennsylvania. He had first traveled to the Far North with his fellow Philadelphian doctor-turned-polar-explorer Elisha Kent Kane on the 1853 Second Grinnell Expedition in search of Franklin’s lost ships, and when Hayes returned from his own command of an 1860-61 Arctic expe¬ dition, he found that the United States was engaged in the Civil War. He became the surgeon in charge of Satterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, the large Union medical center known for treating thousands of casualties from the battle of Gettysburg. There Hayes established a library as well as a hospital newspaper—written and printed by convalescing soldiers—for the sake of their mental health and amusement. According to an article in its first number entitled “Our Printers,” the West Philadelphia Hospi¬ tal Register “is printed and published, within the walls of the Hospital.— The type is set up, and the press-work performed by Soldiers, whose names are given below.—convalescent patients, partially disabled by service in the field.” 0 The West Philadelphia Hospital Register describes a lecture course (a general midcentury amusement also popular aboard polar ventures), and the first topic was a familiar one: “The Surgeon in Charge [Hayes] will in¬ augurate the course by a Lecture on the Arctic Regions.” (Subsequent lec¬ ture topics similarly trended heavily toward Arctic themes.) 1 There was at least one crucial distinction between the West Philadelphia Hospital EXTREME PRINTING 71 Register , however, and the two Arctic newspapers with which Hayes had been associated (the Ice-Blink of Kane’s Second Grinnell Expedition and the Port Foulke Weekly News of Hayes’s own command of the United States). A fundamental aspect of U.S. amateur newspaper publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century was exchange, the process bv which publish¬ ers of small-circulation sheets sent copies of their papers to other amateurs in expectation of returns in kind. This custom was facilitated, in part, by very low postage rates lor newspapers. The second issue of the West Phila¬ delphia Hospital Register reported, “We have the pleasure of welcoming, already, a number of newspaper exchanges, which are placed immediately into the hands of eager readers. We tender to our brethren of the quill (scal¬ pel) our affectionate greetings .” : Other medical institutions had papers as well, as Benjamin Reiss’s work on asvlums in the period reveals; the Opal of the New York State Lunatic Asylum in Utica (which began publication in 1851) exchanged with 330 other periodicals. 1 Exchanges were not practi¬ cable, of course, for Arctic papers, or for shipboard papers more generally. In this way the ship circulates differently than other supposedly heterotopic spaces, such as the prison. 4 In the 1870s and 1880s in the United States the amateur journalism trade was remarkably robust. There are fifty-five thousand amateur newspapers in the American Antiquarian Society’s holdings alone, the great majority pro¬ duced by teenage boys—comprising the first teenage print subculture, Lara Langer Cohen has argued. Cohen’s work with this particular archive has revealed that much of the content of the late nineteenth-century Ameri¬ can amateur newspapers was tedious, repetitive, and largely beside the point. “Instead of creating an outlet for one’s own thoughts,” she writes, “it appears that one started an amateur newspaper to join a community of other amateurs. This communitv is not just an effect of print, as has often been argued of other print cultures. Community is also the cause of print.” Cohen’s latter point equally applies to polar print cultures. The audience for amateur newspapers, she continues, “largelv seems to have consisted of other amateurs.” ’ Amateur papers achieved an audience of their fel¬ lows by participating in cultures of exchange; many hobby papers printed within their own pages the titles of the papers with whom they were in an exchange relationship. 6 An amateur paper published in the port town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, took the obligations of exchange particularly seriously; an editorial statement in the first number of Shells and Seaweed promised, “We will exchange with ALL amateur publications. No sample copv fiends need apply, unless their request be accompanied by a stamp." 71 CHAPTER ONE A concern about the “fiends” who request sample copies without sharing in kind pops up again and again in its pages; what seems monstrous about such fiends is their nonparticipation in a print culture based on reciprocity. Concerns about nonreciprocity were central to the first Arctic news¬ paper, the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle (1819-20). But it preceded Shells and Seaweed (1884)—and indeed the amateur journalism movement—by over a half century. While polar newspapers share many generic and technological affinities with the amateur boys’ newspapers of the late nineteenth century, they were not directly inspired by them, nor by the papers of the English public schools, which also postdate the first Arctic papers. Indeed a great number of naval officers left school early to go to sea. One officer on Parry’s first expedition wrote in a private letter about the ship’s manuscript newspaper, the North Georgia Gazette , and Winter Chronicle, “When it is considered at what an early period the officers of the navy are sent to sea generally at eleven or twelve years of age and that the education which they receive on board can scarcely be supposed to be on the best or most enlarged plan it will we think be admitted that many of the papers in the North Georgia Gazette are far superior to what might reason¬ ably be expected and such as would not discredit the more regular scholar and practised writer.” 8 Newspapers were part of a culture of periodical publication that flourished in Britain and the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. In Adriana Craciun’s account, polar exploration more broadly benefited from an expansion of print in the period. Begin¬ ning in the early nineteenth century, British Arctic expeditions produced published narratives as part of a formalized relationship with the London publisher John Murray; in turn, “the voyage account authored by the ship’s captain [became] increasingly important to the business of exploration.” 79 As the scholars Craciun, Janice Cavell, and Russell Potter have docu¬ mented, Arctic expeditions in the second half of the nineteenth century generated enormous media attention, particularly in response to the search for Franklin’s missing expedition. 8 " Thus while the newspapers printed by polar expedition members aboard ship during sunless, ice-stalled winters were not direct analogues to the broadsheets of the temperate metropoles, they were enabled in some ways by similar impulses. In publishing their news in polar periodicals, as I have been arguing, Arctic explorers were, in part, seeking to re-create the forms of temporal regularity and imagined community that newspapers have historically been understood to serve in the period—only in this instance doing so in ex¬ travagantly outlandish conditions. The process of printing their news and EXTREME PRINTING 73 engaging in the satiric imagination of its broader periodical circulation of¬ fered expedition members a particular manner of inhabiting and reflecting upon the genre of their literary production, one that emphasized their eco¬ logically extreme perspective and acknowledged their ephemerality within that space and time. Polar Imprints Putting thoughts to words and words to print reverberates in other ways, as well. The dedications and apologia in the opening numbers of polar papers make strong claims for what one paper called an “intellectual revolution” among seamen. (They also make claims for the mental health benefits pro¬ vided by the amusements of periodical play, as chapter i discusses in more detail.) According to the Aurora Borealis , “the general public appear to have no conception” of sailors’ nonmanual skills. “The popular opinion seems to be, that the literary attainments of British sailors seldom exceed the ac¬ quisition of some boisterous song, and that only the very erudite amongst them can succeed in scrawling a letter to their friends at home.” To the con¬ trary, the paper of th z Assistance continues: [Here] we find articles written by veteran tars, whose home since boy¬ hood has been upon the sea, that would not disgrace the pages of some of our magazines. These men with frames of iron, with a courage and a stern endurance that nothing can subdue, show themselves possessed of a delicacy of imagination and a power of perception that one has great difficulty in reconciling with the honest roughness of their appearance.... The men from before the mast, who contributed to the “Aurora Borea¬ lis,” are amongst the most exemplary in Her Majesty’s service. 81 The men “before the mast” are the common seamen aboard ship, the nonofficers and the “veteran tars,” whose literacy rates were notably high for a laboring class. 82 To be sure, it is in an expeditions self-interest to pro¬ mote a view of common sailors as powerful in mind as well as body, even in a document for internal circulation. But the evidence bears out the peri¬ odical’s claims. The Nares expedition of 1875-76, for example, consisted of two ships of sixty men each. During the Arctic winter the ships established a school for sailors, which included instruction in navigation and history. “Only two men out of the entire ship’s company were unable to read and write,” recalls Markham, “and these two men were placed in a class with two 74 CHAPTER ONE others, who were unable to read and write English.” (The nonreaders in En¬ glish were from Denmark and Gibraltar.) The literacy class “was presided over by the doctor, who kindly volunteered to devote himself to the in¬ struction of the ‘cripples,’ as they were facetiously called.” 83 Such facetious¬ ness indicates that their illiteracy was relatively unusual. The elite Markham found himself impressed by the knowledge and intellectual curiosity he found among the common seamen with whom he fraternized during his Arctic voyaging. “I was much surprised at the extensive Arctic knowledge which they possessed,” he wrote, “showing that they had read largely on this subject, and were anxious to learn yet more.” 8 " 1 There was also a makeshift academy and a Reading Room on the Assistance during the immobilized inactivity and darkness of polar winter. In addition to working on the paper Aurora Borealis, the men of the “lower deck” (that is, the seamen) orga¬ nized themselves into “schools on the Lancasterian system,” in which the stronger students taught the less able; subjects included navigation, steam, seamanship, arithmetic, and even modern languages and music. 85 Sherard Osborn, who commanded a support tender for the Resolute and Assistance Franklin search ships in 1850-51, merrily recollected the sight of “tough old marines curving ‘pothooks and hangers’ [practicing their letters], as if their very lives depended on their performances, with an occasional burst of petulance, such as, ‘D—the pen, it won’t write! I beg pardon, sir; this ’ere pen will splutter!’ which set the scholars in a roar.” 86 The biological discipline at work here is regulatory but directed more immediately toward personal community than state imperatives. In th e Aurora Borealis “articles were contributed by the commanders, of¬ ficers and men, of the expedition. Some of the papers are from the pen of the venerable Admiral Sir John Ross, and others, and not the least interesting, are from rough and weather-beaten tars before the mast.” 8 George Murray, a quartermaster or petty supply agent, was judged the “best writer” among those contributing to the Aurora Borealis. 88 This nautical class-leveling was common in post-1848 Arctic papers. The prolific printer aboard the Belcher expedition, for example, was a seaman named H. Briant, rated “musician”; he contributed poems to the Queens Illuminated Magazine in addition to his printing work. We see the literal mark of his labor in an inky fingerprint left at the bottom of a proof sheet from one of the expedition’s official dis¬ patches, a blank cairn record, preserved in the British Admiralty Records. 89 One of the great archival pleasures of the text of this project has been just such encounters with the mark of the hand oflabor upon the material of mechanized production, however limited in its industrial scope. Briant’s EXTREME PRINTING 75 C’aini erected Second Cylinder true north from centre— feet. Condition — Remarks — I)iid Assistance. Pioneer, Tender. Jan 1854 Officer in Charge. [li. Hill ANT. PRINTER, H.M.S, ASSISTANCE.] FIG 1.10 — H. Briant, Printer. Documents Relating to Arctic Expeditions, ADM 7/195. NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON. fingertip, a hand-stitched folded hem on a pink silk-printed Arctic song composed on ship, a broken tooth enclosed with a commemorative printed menu: these flaws or remnants constitute less errata or variant than aide- memoire of the exceptional intimacy within which the extremity of these printed texts were produced. As the labor of letterpress printing itself was generally trade work, it is not surprising that seamen would be involved in typesetting and working the shipboard presses. Key within an Arctic con¬ text, though, is how frequently officers and men were working the presses side by side, creating different forms of naval and textual community. Able Seaman Symons of the Alert on the Nares expedition also acted as a printer and contributor, standing shoulder to shoulder with a lieutenant, Giffard. The sister ship of the Alert likewise had a press, and on the Discovery Able Seaman Benjamin Wyatt was the printer. The Scott Polar Research Institute holds a printed “Education Sheet” from the Discovery expedition, presum¬ ably designed to give the printers some practice in setting type. In it we see how the men are using the medium of print to work through the terms of their maritime experience. The sheet runs through the alphabet, assigning a word to each letter according to custom—but several of the nonstandard word choices reveal something about the tastes and backgrounds of the printers: “And.Bee.Cat.Dog.Ear.Fig.Gin.Hop.Inn.Jug.Kit.Loo.Man.Noon .Oil.Pence.Quay.Rot.Sin.Tin.Urn.Vex.Win.Yes.Zinc .” 90 W hile the first five 76 CHAPTER ONE or six words might be examples used by any schoolchild in practicing al¬ phabet words, contributions such as “gin,” “loo,” “quay,” “rot,” and “sin” show a kind oi louche devolution better associated with working seamen. The nautical class known as the “men” printed on many other expeditions as well. Kane’s Ice-Blink (1853-54; Second Grinnell Expedition, a Franklin search) was composed by “authors of every nautical grade: some of the best from the forecastle .” 91 Rochfort Maguire notes in his diary of his time on the Plover, “In the Printing department a man named Daw a Seaman, is making himself very useful [in helping to produce the Weekly Guy]N 2 On the Fiala-Ziegler Expedition of 1903-5, the Arctic Eagle was printed by the “assistant commissary steward, the youngest man in the field department; the compositor [was] Seaman Montrose, who had been a wandering news¬ paper typo before he took to following the sea.” A woodcut formed a spe¬ cial cover for th e Arctic Eagle to commemorate Christmas in 1903; it shows the ice-beset ship in the background and two expedition members raising brimming goblets in the foreground, sled dogs at their feet. The engraving was created with a “chisel and pocketknife by [the ship’s] assistant scientist porter. When Arctic newspapers were not offering testimony in support of the cultural bona fides of their crewmen in earnest, edifying tones, they were doing so in the very spirit of fun and frolic with which the periodicals were launched. The publishing schedule of the Arctic Eagle was “when¬ ever convenient”; the “maiden effort” of the paper was designed as a “flyer; feeler, as it were, to test the market for such a paper among the reading pub¬ lic of Franz Josef hand.” The public for the unpopulated Far Northern Rus¬ sian archipelago was, of course, constituted solely by the crew of the ship, as th t Eagle acknowledges: “We can confidently assert.. . that it is the only paper in six hundred miles .” 94 Such was the case with all Arctic periodicals, even as they might jestingly have an eye on other markets. “We fear not the frowns of the Temperate Zone,” the prefatory matter to the Illustrated Arctic News states, for these Far North newsmen, “being of a peaceable dis¬ position, would deprecate wrath, or jealousy on the part of the Titans of the Southern Press, who may fear our entering the field as competitors in these Regions.” While London printers are certainly “Titans,” especially compared to amateurs on the Resolute, the southerliness of their northern European location is globally relative. The Illustrated Arctic News continues its sport by assuring the printers of the metropole that “unless Old England be overtaken by a night of three months duration, it is not our intention to appear again in the Editorial line .” 95 This self-deprecation makes claims for EXTREME PRINTING 77 the legitimacy of the seamen’s publications in positioning the Illustrated Arctic News as an object for jealousy or competition, however impudently. One basis for this comparison, or this sense of competition with London or other metropolitan papers, may be the fact that shipboard clocks are syn¬ chronized with Greenwich Mean Time for longitudinal location purposes. Moored in Arctic ice for months or years, expeditions were navigationally tethered to the prime meridian, even as their daily lives were synchronized to polar temporalities, displaced by many meridians. The editors of polar newspapers recognize that one expectation of contemporary media, how¬ ever, is to erase such temporal distinctions in the name of broader and swifter communication. As the preface to a collection of articles from the Aurora Borealis explains, “A great paper like the [London] ‘Times’ no lon¬ ger addresses itself to one empire or to a single people. The telegraph and the railroad have destroyed space, and a truth now uttered in London in a few minutes later vibrates through the heart of France, or is heard on the shores of the Adriatic.” 96 Yet even as the Aurora Borealis served as the “pub¬ lic organ of the little world” constituted by “Captain Austin’s squadron in the Arctic Seas,” that little world itself was not networked with U.S. or European spheres of communication; the “truths” published in this Arctic organ resonate only among the members of Austin’s ships. “We fear that the time is far distant, the preface concludes, “before ‘the peoples’ of Eu¬ rope will feel any of the brotherly spirit which animated ‘the Austin Happy Family’” } Dispersed F.uropean “peoples” cannot share the intimacy of the expeditionary “familv” unit, for one. But the sentiment also underscores a different point: as an example of ecomedia, the Aurora Borealis is net¬ worked with the polar region, not with the temperate world. Note, too, that the preface to the Aurora Borealis selections stresses that “the time is far distant” when such networks might be joined: the Arctic is figured as both temporallv and spatially extreme. Yet even in their acknowledgment of the distance of the Arctic papers from the printing centers of the “Temperate Zone,” both in their geo¬ graphic location and in their fabrication, polar periodicals hew to literary formal expectations. In their dedications, preambles, and preludes, for ex¬ ample, Arctic newspapers offer the kind of conventional apologia familiar to readers of first-person narratives, even as they recognize how unusual their periodicals were, relatively speaking. “We follow the custom of our breth¬ ren of the quill,” the preamble to the Arctic Moon (of Adolphus Greely’s American Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881-84) observes, “who gener¬ ally devote a column of their first issue of a newspaper—like the preface to 78 CHAPTER ONE a book—in whys and wherefores, in the way of an apology for introduc¬ ing themselves upon the public.” Published semimonthly (at a waggish list price of 2.5C per issue) from Fort Conger in Grinnell Land (lat 8 i° 44 / , long 64°45 / ), the Arctic Moon invited “articles in poetry or prose, short or long, serious or facetious.” As the musical ability of the expedition members is relatively poor, the author of the preamble admits, “we have more than or¬ dinary justifications in prescribing, th t Arctic Moon twice a month during the days of darkness,” since the expedition’s “predecessors in the realm of the ice king have long ago established the precedent ” of a shipboard news¬ paper. 98 The apologia that prefaced the earlier Illustrated Arctic News (1850), the precedent-setters mentioned in the Arctic Moon , had recognized that paradox in claiming novelty in the production of an all-too-familiar peri¬ odical form. Using the conventions of publishing to argue for its lack of convention, in other words, the Illustrated Arctic News had made this part of the paper’s raison d’etre: “Where merit cannot be pleaded, novelty, as in Bloomerism, may avail.” 99 A periodical in the Arctic was as dislocatingly out of place as Bloomers or pants were on a woman; both became Anglo- American fads in the 1850s nevertheless. The Weekly Guy in 1852. had been billed as a curiosity: “ANOTHER NOVELTY!!!” 101 ' The expedition’s initial novelty had been an Inuit dance, also advertised via printed playbill—— albeit only as a “great novelty!!,” with two exclamation points rather than three. (A journal kept by a crew member observes, “The Notice headed ‘Great Novelty’ was turned out of hand by the Compositors in a very cred¬ itable form, but they regret that they have not four times the number of types.”) 101 It did not take long for exceptional novelties to become expecta¬ tions, commonplaces aboard Arctic ships. But this is a function of nauti¬ cal practice: when a method or technique is effective or an improvement upon former custom, it becomes regularized in common. We have seen al¬ ready how one ship responded to a dearth of fonts—they carved their own. “Whatever is wanting, we must endeavour to supply,” the advertisement for the Qiieeris Illuminated Magazine states. These needs include “A Morning Paper and its Latest intelligence ! .. . Periodicals Papers See, where will they come from if not created by our selves?... The Printing Press has been we fear, but little appreciated, by the sagacious if not intelligent inhabitants of these realms, and North Cornwall, has not had as yet its Caxton.” (William Caxton was the fifteenth-century merchant, writer, and printer who intro¬ duced the first printing press to England in 1476.) 102 The printedness of words had its own ecological value to expedition members, both as a mark of the degree and quality of Arctic light and as EXTREME PRINTING 79 FIFTH OF NOVEMBER. 1852 . A N 0 T H E li N 0 V E L T Y!!! On that day will ha brought out the fn>; Number of ‘Till: WEEKLY GIT" v, it Vi nnmerou;' illustrations'': published ;it the Amateur Priutin^-OlHc* on board lie; Majesty's ShipiMovi r'. WINTER QUARTERS, S^OlPiT BARROW; [where •(■ on try orders’ are puu< timlly attended to] ;•) d to be hr.d of i ll Hooks diets within titty n.Ts of the £f DidfvtfTd -Pi) ! % i3 v. li u eonfichatly E n -d that . : timing Public will nol toil to give due support to a Weakly P.iuxlicd cith.-ulaied to ail. • fund of amu . ■incut lor Iti.-mv hour?. Hu. Proprietors of th • ]hiper » runic uimaidelhd exertions. and spared u«» e\[R*iiso in getting it up., and h ring It embellished with (Ivan Tgs by THE FIRST ARTISTS OF THE DAY. \ l‘>.. No 1 v, i ! contain an account of the ' • ns ’ y Ians, shewing what an aspiring per.-on he was hi hi? early youth, mid what a leguh: < -n ■ * lit bicmnt in his old age Observe ! Owing to a givat pressure of mntir r th. c paee in cur columns is nl- i. adv limited; Contributors are therefore i* qn -ied to put their Articles’ into the Editors Hox before Tuesday, oiherv, i- thr - possibly may rot appear in cm .Journal until the fol¬ lowing week, if then FIG l.ll — Advertisement for the Weekly Guy. Box 4, Miscellaneous Printed Material 1844 N0V.-1875 Jan. zo, undated, John Simpson Papers, 1815-1875- DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY. a gauge of their distance from comparative comfort. It was common on expeditions to judge the degree of winter darkness bv whether or not it was possible to read a copy of a newspaper at noon. During the Second Grinnell Expedition, Kane wrote in his journal on 14 January 1855 that it was “growing lighter,” a relief, as it “has now been fifty-two days since we could read [newspaper] type, even after climbing the dreary hills.” 10. With the disappearance of the sun in 1875 during rhe Nares expedition, the com¬ mander recalled, the “noon twilight was insufficient to enable us to make out the words in a ‘Times’ leading article, when the paper was held up fac¬ ing the south.” Nares then calculated with some grimness, “We have yet 80 CHAPTER ONE eighty-seven days of more intense darkness to pass through.” 104 Late Janu¬ ary “raised the spirits” of those on the expedition, as each day brought “an increased arch of twilight.... At noon of the z8th we were able to read on the floe a few lines from the leading article of the ‘Times.’” 105 Edward Moss’s account of this expedition adds texture to Nares’s account: “The words ‘Epps’s Cocoa,’ in type nearly half-an-inch long, were easily read, but the ‘breakfast’ in small type between them was utterly illegible. It was just possible to spell out ‘Oetzmann’ in clear Roman type five-sixteenths of an inch long; and after much staring at the page, held close before the eyes, we managed to make out ‘great novelty’ in type one-fourth of an inch long.” Moss also gives an example in large font, bold type of what is “legible at MID-DAY.” 106 The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen also used the newspaper- sunlight gauge on his Fram expedition; on 2.7 January his crew could “just see to read Verdens Gang [The Course of the World, a Norwegian newspa¬ per] about midday.” 10 Why did the form of the newspaper serve as the standard for gauging polar solar radiance ? The small type of newsprint may have been variable across the nineteenth century, but it provided a familiar measure across ships and over time; more light is required to read tiny type, naturally. The leading article of the Times of London, used by the Nares expedition in 1876, appeared in what today we would measure as six-point font. News¬ papers were cheap, widely available, disposable, and carried on virtually all ships, making them an accessible basis for comparison. More evocatively, papers are tied directly to the sun’s rise and fall. In temperate latitudes, periodi¬ cals are generally daily, diurnal; whether in morning or evening editions, their temporality is irrevocably linked with the sun’s periodicity. In employing a newsprint light meter for polar practice, expedition members acknowl¬ edge both the expectations of printedness and its daily practices, and their estrangement from it. Printed text, and its scarcity, becomes a marker for the distance between temperate latitudinal regularity and polar latitudinal extremity: If a daily paper has no daily sun by which to be read, are days still a measure of time?—of information? Printedness represents different things at different times in the polar regions, however. George E. Tyson’s diary of his survival of the Polaris ex¬ pedition achingly records the loss of the ship’s store of books after he and eighteen others are separated from the leaking ship: No Bible, no Prayer-book, no magazines or newspapers—not even a Harper’s Weekly —was saved by any one, though there are almost always EXTREME PRINTING more or less ol these to be found in a ship’s company where there are anv reading men. Newspapers I have learned to do without to a great extent, having been at sea so much of my life, where it is impossible to get them; but some sort of reading I always had before. It is now one hundred and seven days since I have seen printed words! What a treat a bundle of old papers would be! All the world over, I suppose some people are wasting and destroying what would make others feel rich indeed . 1 Is Tyson is counting the days since he has seen printed words. What does this longing for print represent when expressed by someone actually adrift in the Arctic, untethered from ship or shelter? His lament is all the more striking in the face of the extremity of his condition: he wrote these words while on a diminishing ice floe upon which the nineteen Polaris survivors— refugees after the murder of their ship’s captain, Charles Francis Hall, and the loss of their ship—traveled eighteen hundred miles over six months before their rescue. They survived on seal that their Inuit companions were able to hunt from the floe, and on the few stores they managed to salvage from the ship. No one, apparently, salvaged the Harper’s Weekly. And yet what Tyson highlights is the very ephemerality of print in temperate lati¬ tudes, which people who do not happen to be on a loose floe in the Arctic are “wasting and destroying." In this instance print is a stabilizing, regula¬ tory entity, its neat ruled lines in fixed contrast to the errancy of the move¬ ment of the Polaris survivors. Print is likewise a “comfort” to Fridtjof Nansen and his crew, and not just when it is visible bv the light of the returning sun. When Nansen and his men leave their ship and are camped in their winter quarters for the dark season, they pine for printed matter: “How we longed for a book!... The little readable matter which was to be found in our navigation-table and almanack I had read so many times already that I knew it almost by heart.... Yet it was always a comfort to see these books; the sight of the printed letters gave one a feeling that there was after all a little bit of the civilized man left .” 1 " 9 There is no human Other invoked in this passage to provide a supposed “savage” counterpart to the “civilized man Nansen imagines; the erosion of civilization in the Arctic is instead conflated with a loss of access to readable print. What is important to note in both Tyson’s and Nansen’s situations is that neither has access to a printing press and thus cannot readilv produce new forms of printed ecomedia. Tyson is in desperate survival mode on an ice floe that is breaking up; Nansen’s physical location is less tenuous, but his expedition does not have a press, although 82 CHAPTER ONE it does produce the manuscript newspaper Framsjaa. Their distress is thus especially keen. For those expeditions that did have access to presses, though, the polar regions still presented many challenges. The following section describes how polar ice, often evoked in imaginative conjurations of polar spaces or Arctic sublimes in this period, was often a deterrent to textual creation in polar spaces themselves. The printed and other textual media that expedi¬ tion members ultimately produce are polar ecomedia in the sense that they account for—reflect or incorporate in some way—the very icy conditions in which they were produced, despite manifest hardships. Ice! Ice!! Ice!!! Is the Handwriting on the Wall Arctic printing had its mechanical privations, some of which might be read¬ ily imagined. Resupplying the press was not an option in the Far North. On the Franklin search ships Assistance and Resolute printing became “so great a passion” that “at length their stock of paper was run out.” 110 The variable range and quality of the materials on which playbills and other ephemera were printed—linen, cloth, silk, oiled paper, chamois—also suggests the limited range of supplies aboard ship, although those substrates were likely also used to create commemorative copies. The extreme cold was an issue as well. Frozen ink had to be melted for each printing session. (An ingenious solution to this problem was invented by the American Charles Francis Hall in maintaining his journals in — 40°; it is described in chapter 5.) A note appended to a theatrical playbill by the printer Briant during Belcher’s expedition alerted the crew to this contingency: “n.b. —The business of the Printing Office is considerably retarded, in consequence of the ink freezing on the rollers.—Printers Devil.” 111 So widely recognized a consequence of Arctic printing was frozen ink and other writing materials that the circum¬ stance could be invoked for comic effect, as it was in one article, “Departure of the Travelling Parties,” a mock diary detailing the brutal conditions expe¬ rienced by sledging teams while establishing forward depots of provisions: “The M.S.S. here ceases in consequence of the Ink having become solid, an evil which might have been remedied, had not the pencils been already used for fuel.” The same article sardonically reports that on 3 October the party “awoke, horribly hot—Ther. -17 0 .” 112 Tire punchline is that —17 0 is far warmer than conditions had been for the men, working usually in tempera¬ tures below — 50°. (Temperatures are given in Fahrenheit unless otherwise EXTREME PRINTING 83 indicated.) Extreme temperatures in Antarctica had an effect on the very color of the ink used to illustrate the caricatures in Tlje Blizzard, the lighter sister publication to the South Polar Times on Scott’s 1901-4 Discovery ex¬ pedition: “The severe weather ... has even affected the ink used in print¬ ing, changing it from blue to green, and from green to purple; so if [carica¬ ture subjects] do not see the delicate contour, the regular features, and the noble expression that their looking glasses would lead them to expect... they must blame the low temperatures which have of late affected the office machinery. 113 Ink was not the onlv artistic pigment in demand; in fashion¬ ing sets for the Arctic theatricals aboard Assistance, for example—a ship on which there was “a scarcity of paint”—the resident artist had to impro¬ vise paint combinations: “He was reduced to mixtures of ‘Day and Mar¬ tin,’ black ink, black-lead, whitening, washing blue, glue, and other unusual ingredients, consisting of chimney-soot and lamp-black, to complete his picture.” 16 * There may not have been a rich palette of paint colors aboard this particular Arctic mission, but the officers at least had shined shoes, as the reference to the shoe polish brand Day & Martin indicates. These were not conditions conducive to writing. “I daily applied myself to mental work,” wrote Adolphus Greely, yet “the ink froze nightly at my head.” 115 A reader of the Weekly Guy (the paper for the Plover, 1851) wrote to the paper’s editor, “I would fain be a contributor to the pages of your periodical,” but the sunless winter of their icebound world was an obstacle to inspiration rather than its source: “The hoar winter here conceals from sight / All pleasing objects which to verse invite.” 116 There was nothing par¬ ticularly inspirational about such extreme conditions for Hayes. “Our read¬ ers no doubt think it very funnv to write an Editorial; thermometer below zero, ink frozen, imagination congealed, memory gone with the summer; thoughts in the sunnv south, and feet wrapped up in furs. But there’s no fun about it,” he complained in the Port Foulke Weekly News. “The editor has a very uneasy chair. His bed is not a bed of roses, but a bed of ice. He eats ice, he drinks ice and he even smells ice.... Ice! Ice!! Ice!!! is the handwriting on the wall:—The ‘MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN’ of the Arctic Edito¬ rial Belshazzar.” 11 There will be no futurity in human underestimation of the dominion of ice, Hayes’s biblical analogy makes clear. Ice was destructive to literarv cultures in more secular ways, too. Ship¬ board condensation was an ongoing problem throughout nineteenth- century polar exploration history. Because the interior of the ship was warmer than the exterior, human breath would freeze and the walls would 84 CHAPTER ONE sweat, forming clouds of icy vapor or thin sheets of ice that had to be chipped away. In a scrapbook photo kept by Anton Vedoe of the Fiala-Ziegler Expe¬ dition, ice crystals appear thickly clustered on the beams above and along¬ side the men; the ice looks like badly fraying contemporary asbestos fibers or fiberglass insulation . 118 “Every week or ten days throughout the winter we had to remove from our cabins the ice caused by the condensation of the moist air where it came in contact with the cool outer walls,” recalls Robert Peary. “Behind every article of furniture near the outer wall the ice would form, and we used to chop it out from under our bunks by the pailful .” 119 Such was the trade-off for having temperatures above freezing in the cabins of the ship; condensation produced the great “annoyance” of “the incessant drip in our cabins and elsewhere on board.” The “disagreeable drip” was destructive to books and paper, naturally, and they had be removed from shelves and any position in which they might come into contact with the ship’s sides or beams. Markham found it “decidedly unpleasant, whilst writ¬ ing, to have a continual stream of water pouring down upon your head and upon your paper.” One of his messmates, however, “had brought an umbrella with him, and this being spread over his chair protected him from the wet, and thus enabled him to read or write in comparative comfort .” 120 A sound plan, indeed, even as one questions why an umbrella would be a necessary item to bring to a High Arctic expedition. When paired with the shoe pol¬ ish, these trappings of gentlemanly custom show one aspect of maladaptation of British expeditionary preparation to local conditions. A more utilitarian nautical supply might have been a locker for the ships library. As David H. Stam has shown, on two of his expeditions Peary brought loan libraries in wooden cases that had been provided by the American Seamen’s Friend Soci¬ ety . 121 But as Peary’s narrative suggests, even lockers did not prevent damage to books caused by condensation: “Books were always placed far forward on the shelves, because if a book were pushed back it would freeze solid to the wall. Then, if a warmer day came, or a fire was built in the cabin, the ice would melt, the water would run down and the leaves of the book would mold .” 122 In such non-climate controlled conditions, other book arts were neces¬ sarily practiced as well. The doctor on Fridtjof Nansen’s expedition sets up a bookbindery, “greatly patronized by the Frams library”; this becomes a necessity both on account of condensation and because “several books that are in constant circulation, such as Gjest Baardsens Liv ogLevnet, etc., etc., are in a very bad state.” (Gjest Baardsen was a notorious early nineteenth- century Norwegian thief and escape artist, and this volume, his autobiog- EXTREME PRINTING 85 raphy, was very popular.) The most extensive trade in the book arts aboard ship, however, is the “manufacture ol diaries,” Nansen writes, of which everv sailor is a producer. 1 - ' In addition to diary writing and the requisite shipboard recordkeeping and journaling, expedition members supplemented their store of theatrical texts by composing their own . 124 A partial list of plays performed in the Arctic follows, organized in rough chronological order and divided into two generic categories. I have culled this list from playbills, polar periodi¬ cals, and voyage narratives; those designated with an asterisk were com¬ posed bv expedition members aboard ship: farce/comedy * The North West Passage: or, the Voyage Finished [He cl a and Griper ) 12 ’ Miss in Her Teens {Hecla and Griper) The Liar {Hecla and Griper) Tlse Citizen {Hecla and Griper ) A Bold Stroke for a Wife {Hecla and Griper) The Mayor of Garratt {Hecla and Griper) Bon Ton-, or, High Life above Stairs {Hecla and Griper) Heir-at-Law {Hecla and Griper) Queer Subject {Plover) Tl)e Original {Plover) * Fun, Foolery, Frolic, and Mirth {Amphitrite) Box and Cox {Amphitrite and London) King Glumpus {Investigator) Raising the Wind {Investigator) Slasher and Crasher {Assistance and London) ' Arctic Pantomime of Zero, or Harlequin Light {Resolute and Assistance ) 126 Who Speaks First: {Resolute) The Scapegrace {Assistance) The Irish Tutor {Assistance) Tlse Silent Woman {Assistance) Turned Head {Assistance) 86 CHAPTER ONE Bombastes Furioso ( Assistance ) Married Life {Assistance) The Lottery Ticket ( Assistance ) Legerdemain ( Intrepid) Taming [of] the Shrew ( Resolute) The Two Bonnycastles {Resolute) * The Countryman {Advance) Vse Blue Devils {Advance) * Little Vulgar Boy, or Weeping Bill {Alert ) 11 * Vs e Arctic Twin {Alert) * The Ice-Bound Regions {Alert ) 128 Vie Chops of the Channel {Alert) Catch a Weasel {Alert) Aladdin, or The Wonderful Scamp {Alert) Vilikins and His Dinah {Alert) Area Belle {Alert) Money Makes the Mare Go (Jeannette) Vse Siamese Twins {Jeannette ) Vse Irish Schoolmaster (Jeannette) history/tragedy/drama Hamlet {Assistance) Charles the Twelfth [A Night with Charles XII. of Sweden, or, A Soldier’s Wife’s Fidelity] {Resolute and Assistance) Nearly all theatrical performances aboard expedition ships were of one- act farces of the nineteenth century. Many were comedies of manners, and their situational humor may have come, in part, from the opportunity they afforded sailors to cross-dress and engage in various acts of class, gender, and ethnic transgression. They were hugely popular with the crew mem¬ bers, despite open-air performance temperatures that could range in the teens . 12 " 1 Arctic plays written in situ were themselves farces, reflecting this distinct generic preference. They includ c Arctic Pantomime of Zero, or Har¬ lequin Light, a farce featuring evil sprites named Frost-Bite, Scorbutus, and EXTREME PRINTING 87 Hunger. “Turning all the dangers and inconveniences to which we are ex¬ posed in these inhospitable climates into evil spirits that are leagued against us,” the farce stages those malign spirits as “continually watching every op¬ portunity to surprise an unfortunate travelling party, till at length their power is destroyed by the appearance of the more puissant good spirits, Sun and Daylight.” 1,0 It proved a hit; the Royal Arctic Theatre performed the Pantomime of Zero on a number of occasions, according to extant play¬ bills. The “original pathetico-comico-burlesque operetta” Little Vulgar Boy , written by Chaplain William Pullen (“poet-laureate” of the Nares ex¬ pedition), was a dramatic adaptation of a poem in Lite Ingolsby Legends , a popular midcentury collection of folk tales and ghost stories. And on Par¬ ry’s first expedition, when the ship’s scanty stock of plays had been run through, Parry wrote a five-act musical entitled The North West Passage: or, the Voyage Finished. Its plot described the expedition’s hoped-for progress through the Bering Straits (which would have meant achieving the North¬ west Passage, which the expedition did not in fact accomplish) and a return home to the Prince of Wales pub to regale their sweethearts with stories of their exertions. The very few dramas or histories performed bv polar voyag¬ ers seem to reflect either those works’ exceptional popularity or familiarity, in the case of Hamlet, or a theme of spousal fidelity that would resonate with men on a long voyage. A talent for dramatic composition and interest in the genre more gener¬ ally is in line with the observations recorded in the “Literature and Art” column of the Port Foulke Weekly News, produced by Hayes’s United States North Pole expedition. On that venture too “there is an evident preference for dramatic entertainments.” Second Mate Henry Dodge, the literature columnist and coeditor of the paper, continues the “Literature and Art report by noting that the general “taste in literary matters is not inclined to the religious or to the fictitious;—A large invoice of both this class of books having been packed away on Friday morning, as unmarketable.” bI Dodge’s own tastes, according to Commander Hayes, esteemed periodicals over re¬ ligious works, fiction, or plays; by earlier November i860 the editor had “al¬ ready consumed several boxes of ‘Littell’s Living Age’ and the “Westminster Review.’” 132 Dodge’s periodic excess registered not just in literature: he was a notorious drunk, according to private diaries kept by several expedition members, even if this behavior is not documented in Hayes’s Open Polar Sea . 133 (This discrepancy between expeditionary accounts demonstrates that official voyage narratives rarely, if ever, give the full story of personnel 88 CHAPTER ONE matters.) His alcohol abuse did not interfere with his work for the expedi¬ tion newspaper, though; Dodge was a frequent and talented contributor. In a provocative and bitingly funny “Literature” column in the Port Foulke Weekly News with which I will close this chapter, Dodge writes, “We are such an enlightened set of mortals that Books are unnecessary either for our amusement, or knowledge.” In fact, Dodge writes blithely, “we know enough.” Demonstrating their collective knowledge, he boasts: We all know who wrote Shakespeare; we all know that John Btmyon wrote Paradise Lost; we all know that Napoleon Bonaparte was the greatest gen¬ eral of his age, until he was defeated by Caesar the Great, who in his turn was defeated by General Walker, who is now the greatest man alive. We all know that in 1942 a man by the name of Columbus discovered the New World, in a small vessel called the “Great Eastern,” and that he opposed the landing of the Pilgrims, in which engagement he was killed.... What, then, is the use of books ? It is a great deal better to employ our time in learning the art of spinning yarns, and in acquiring a knowledge of the valuable sciences of “cribbage,” “faro,” “vingt et un,” “Kimi, &c.” ... Then who cares for books; is it not better to be able to amuse “my mess” with yarns, which are of old standing, may be a hundred years old (in which of course “I” am the principle actor) than to be able to an¬ swer our “learned Astronomer ” why we have so many successive months of darkness and light here? Of course it is! Then overboard with the books! who cares for “general information”? Not I! I would rather read one copy of the “N. Y. Ledger” or “Clipper,” than the whole ships com¬ pany’s collection of books . 134 Within the pages of a ship’s newspaper, Dodge elevates the value of news¬ papers over books. He cites as proof of the exhaustion of books’ value the sufficiency of knowledge gained by the crew of the United States. But their knowledge is, of course, inaccurate, comically so. Instead sailors trust their own yarn spinning, storytelling practices. Dodge is wittily playing with the idea of sailor knowledge—what I have called maritime epistemology or the “sea eye” and what Margaret Cohen has called sailors’ “know how”—as more properly the province of experience and oral history than abstract book knowledge . 135 Yet Dodge’s humor is also at the expense of the kind of information that newspapers provide, and in this sense he anticipates Walter Benjamin’s well-traveled sailor-storyteller, long on experience and ill-served by “general information.” Yet for Dodge (unlike Benjamin), the EXTREME PRINTING 89 impoverished media form providing unwelcome information is books rather than the newspapers that Dodge embraces. Dodge’s “Literature” column stresses the communal vividness of sailor forms of narrative media and the collective experience represented therein. In the case of the Port Foulke Weekly News of Hayes’s United States expe¬ dition, and the papers of polar expeditions more broadly, the challenge of collective experience is building and representing community in geo¬ physical and climatic extremity. The printing press became a tool in facing that challenge. 90 CHAPTER ONE TWO ARCTIC NEWS And indeed, what they wanted to talk about all along, was the Ocean. Some¬ how they could not get to the Topick. Neither Clock really knows what it is,—beyond an undeniably rhythmick Being of some sort,—tho’ they’ve spent most of their lives in Range of it, sometimes no more than a Barrel-Stave and a Hull-Plank away. Its Wave-beats have ever been with them, yet can neither quite say, where upon it they may he. What they feel is an Attraction, more or less resistible, to beat in Synchrony with it, regardless of their Pendulum- lengths, or even the divisions of the Day. The closest they come to talking of it is when the Shelton Clock confides, “I really don’t like Ships much.” — THOMAS p yn chon, Mason and Dixon (1004) I would rather read one copy of the “N.Y. Ledger” or “Clipper,” than the whole ships company’s collection of books. — henry dodge, "Literature,” Port Foulke Weekly News (i860) T homas Pyn chon’s novel Mason and Dixon features two sentient, chatty sea clocks who are curious about the relationship of linear, terrestrial time to the weird temporalities of the sea. Stashed together briefly on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena in the mid-eighteenth century, the clocks discover that the cadence of the sea allows their sensitive pen¬ dulums to speak to one another, as the first epigraph details. The clocks understand that the ocean is “an undeniably rhythmick Being of some sort” and feel an “Attraction” to those rhythms. Yet both the Ellicott Clock and the Shelton Clock (made by eighteenth-century clockmasters so named) find it “more or less resistible, to beat in Synchrony with it, regardless of their Pendulum-lengths, or even the divisions of the Day.” The irregularity of the swells both compels the clocks and repels them; to join in oceanic Synchrony would be a rejection of the imperial time they are designed ro keep. As entities whose function is to ensure that sailors are tied to the metropole (to Greenwich Mean Time) for the sake of navigational ac¬ curacy, the clocks must, to their vague regret, stand in permanent obliquity to the time of the sea. This is why the Shelton and Fdlicott clocks “some¬ how ... could not get to the Topick” of the Ocean, even though it is “what they wanted to talk about all along.” Arctic sailors too are looking for ways to stage conversations about oce¬ anic registers of time. They too find that remaining in touch with Green¬ wich time puts them at odds with the ecological rhythms that structure their polar life. Shipboard newspapers, as this chapter describes, became the mechanism for their conversations about polar temporalities. Arctic news¬ papers began as a novel way for expedition members to amuse and distract themselves during the darkness and relative inactivity of a polar winter, in the same spirit in which crew members mounted theatricals and partici¬ pated in other entertainments such as dancing, magic lantern shows, lec¬ tures, and singing. Dramatic performances and dances might concede some limitations in staging and orchestration aboard an icebound ship thousands of miles from London or Philadelphia, yet the structural expectations for the participants and audience of a play or a waltz do not materially differ in the Arctic. This is not, however, the case tor newspapers. It newspapers are generally defined by their seriality, topicality, accessibility, diversity of coverage, and compass of address, then Arctic newspapers were in violation of these terms nearly across the board, ha a region without diurnal time measurements, papers did not appear regularlv. The majority of ships had no interaction with the rest of the Anglophone world (and thus no pos¬ sibility for broader news reports or circulation) for at least six months of the year. Contributors to Arctic papers signaled their awareness of a lack of material with which to populate the sections of a conventional paper by cre¬ ating parodies of them: mock classified ads or comical real estate sections. Shipboard papers might have been available to the vessel’s crew, but they rarely circulated or were much acknowledged publicly upon an expedition’s return home. The members of the community constituted by polar papers were always within one hundred feet of each other, even though they might be flung far from the reach of other Anglophone readers . 1 A crowded, competitive British journalistic field helped drive interest in Arctic exploration earlv in the nineteenth century, as scholars have detailed; 92 - chapter TWO the various London and other British metropolitan papers sought to scoop not just each others’ gazettes but also the voyage narratives that publishers (particularly John Murray) would publish with the Admiralty’s imprima¬ tur shortly after expeditions returned home . 2 The journalism produced by actual polar expedition members has not been the focus of scholarship to date, and when Arctic newspapers are briefly mentioned they are seen by such critics as amusing provincial analogues to their more established cous¬ ins. Yet Arctic papers are not simply displaced, parodic versions of the fa¬ miliar periodical metropolitan or national titles. As I argue in this chapter, in their creation of Arctic newspapers polar sailors are attempting to work through an appropriate textual response, in both temporal and literary terms, to the nonnormative time and nonnormative forms of community and everyday life in which they find themselves in the ice of polar winter. A theater may operate without formal alteration in the Arctic, in other words, but when mounted in polar spaces a daily or weekly newspaper becomes generically eccentric. In exploring what kind of media is sufficient to polar spaces, British and American expeditions in the North explore their own relationships to the regulatory functions ofliterary genres associated with nationalism, to the space of shipboard community, and to Arctic time. In the loose, comic form of the newspapers produced by expedition members, we see their acknowledgment of the futility—the incongruity—of impress¬ ing serial, diurnal, and national temporal narratives upon Arctic spaces. This chapter focuses on polar newspapers aboard British and Ameri¬ can expeditionary ships in the Far North, with attention to their putative objectives, the literary content and generic range of contributions to the papers, and the climatic and material conditions that structured the contin¬ uation or cessation of the periodicals’ circulation. The responsibilities oflit¬ erary citizenship within such an Arctic periodical community became the preoccupation, in fact, of the first polar paper (the North Georgia Gazette , and Winter Chronicle ), which predated others in the genre by nearly thirty years but did not succeed on the terms established by its expedition lead¬ ers, as the opening section of this chapter describes. After the North Geor¬ gia Gazette, the sphere of circulation of newspapers in the North changes from one restricted to the officers, to a broader practice of marking time that incorporated the entire expeditionary crew. Subsequent Arctic papers likewise demonstrate a reconception of the relationship between expedi¬ tionary crews and polar environmental spaces in both place and time. The newspaper genre of polar ecomedia comes into being as a result of the hab¬ its and practices that are designed to ensure survival and endurance while ARCTIC NEWS 93 overwintering. What Arctic papers achieve, ultimately, is the formulation oi a genericallv sophisticated theory of polar writing. The Winter Chronicle of Their Discontent The first polar newspaper, the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle (1819-2.0), was not printed but rather circulated in manuscript. 3 The Win¬ ter Chronicle , as it was called within its own pages, was written in the Arctic by the officers oi William Edward Parrv’s British Northwest Passage Expe¬ dition, which consisted oi nearlv one hundred men, about twenty of whom were officers. Parrv pioneered the tactic oi deliberatelv spending the winter on the ice; whereas previous Arctic missions had ioundered if unable to return to open water before the cold season set in, Parry prepared for and embraced the prospect of a long, irozen sojourn above the Arctic Circle. Winter recreation included plays and dancing, and “In order still further to promote good-humour among ourselves, as well as to iurnish amusing occupation, during the hours of constant darkness,” Parry wrote, the ship would “set on ioot a weekly newspaper.” He named Captain Edward Sabine (who helmed the expedition’s sister ship) as editor and hoped the gazette would serve the purpose of “diverting the mind from the gloomy prospect which would sometimes obtrude itself on the stoutest heart.” 4 The newspaper’s charge to bring recreation and pleasure to its intimate sphere of circulation, however, found a more electric transference than Parry had anticipated. Over the course of its issues, the newspaper’s sense of fun and play began to curdle over a staged feud between the contributors and the noncontributors, or NCs, to the paper—all of whom were officers. But when the expedition’s success and popularity resulted in republica¬ tion in London of the North Georgia Gazette , and Winter Chronicle, Parry suppressed many of the most barbed articles on the NCs. The wit that had circulated among their coterie was disallowed from circulation in the liter¬ ary sphere outside of the ship’s own economv. The expedition officers’ pre¬ sumptions of private, intimate, collaborative mutuality were compromised in and altered bv publication, in other words, and the effect was to call into question the very premises of joint endeavor and mutuality undergirding the expedition itself. The broader result was that neither Parry nor any other Arctic commanders would attempt another shipboard newspaper for nearly thirty years. While the content of the Winter Chronicle was similar to the contributions that would characterize later nineteenth-century Arctic 94 CHAPTER TWO papers, its mode of community and spatial address differed. For Parry and the other officers who wrote for the paper, the tether of “home” (whether understood as Britain, the Admiralty, or naval hierarchy) was strong. The Winter Chronicle does not evince the epistemological commitment to writ¬ ing from and about polar spaces that later papers would have; the form of the periodical had not yet adapted itself to the ecologically specific condi¬ tions consistent with later polar ecomedia. The example of Parry’s paper is key to understanding the rich body of Arctic newspapers that would ensue later in the century. The initial number of the Winter Chronicle proposed to circulate the paper “amongst the Officers of the Expedition,” who acted as content pro¬ viders; editor Edward Sabine claimed that he was “wholly dependent on the Gentleman of the Expedition” for the success of the paper. 3 The con¬ tributions were delivered anonymously and published pseudonymously.® As in later papers, the tone of the contributions to the Chronicle reflect its recreational aims: articles include reviews of shipboard theatricals in addi¬ tion to the lyrics of expedition-themed songs written and performed at the ship’s winter quarters. Other genres featured in the paper are riddles and enigmas, mock-advertisements and notices, and analyses of the social hab¬ its of the expedition’s dogs. One “Nauticus” tried to submit a mathematical problem, but it was rejected for its simplicity; it failed to “exercise the inge¬ nuity” of the crew (1:15). Even though the paper’s editor, Captain Sabine, later wrote that “at the time [the issues] were composed, not the remotest idea was entertained of their fulfilling any other purpose than that of re¬ lieving the tedium of an Arctic Winter, and perhaps of afterwards afford¬ ing amusement to a few private friends at home,” the Chronicle was in fact printed in London a year after the expedition’s return, in response to “the interest which the Public took in all that had passed during the voyage.” In the prefatory note to the printed edition of the paper, Sabine trusts that the contributors “may be allowed to claim from the general reader the same indulgence, which they would have received, had the perusal of the Chron¬ icle been confined to the partial circle to which they originally intended it should have been limited” (v). 8 The implied reader of the Winter Chronicle remains Arctic-bound, even as Sabine’s language evokes the conventions of first-person narrative writing: an apology for deficiencies of circumstance, which we are told have been uncorrected upon publication. Yet despite Sabine’s promise that “no alteration has been attempted in the respective papers, in preparing them for the press,” the printed edition nev¬ ertheless excised a good number of articles and letters from the manuscript ARCTIC NEWS 95 version. The decision about which pieces to cut seems to have been made by Parry himself. 9 One might expect that the expurgations made for the sake of public circulation of the gazette would be of material that was racy, crude, or nonsensical. This is not, however, the case; Parry’s censorship fo¬ cuses largely on articles that concern a supposed feud among the officers on the question of who is adequately contributing to the expedition’s mission. The majority of the excised pieces consist of an ongoing series of edito¬ rials, letters, and fictional stories proposing outlandishly violent reprisals against the ncs. The NCs are singled out for not contributing specifically to the paper, I will stress; there is no indication that their contributions to the broader polar mission are deficient. This is not to say that concerns about the noncontributors did not make it into the print version; in fact the contents of the late issues in volume zi of the Chronicle were increasingly dominated by articles on the NCs. At their most mild, the articles won¬ der whether the noncontributors lack the wit to contribute; at their most heated, the contributors threaten to multiply behead the “many-headed monster, the Encea Borealis, vulgarly called N.C.,” or to brand their counter¬ parts “with a red-hotte ironne, fashioned after the letters N.C.” The latter, in fact, is drawn from the one piece Parry identified for omission that for an unknown reason made its way into the paper; an example of the genre of fiction in which a narrator finds a superannuated manuscript account, which he in turn presents to the reader. In this short fiction, the found manuscript describes an expedition to the Arctic in which certain mem¬ bers refuse to participate in “merrie-making”; the captain withholds their rations in punishment, for “those which do not benefitte the Communitie, the Communitie is not bounded to benefittee them' (ms Chronicle No. 9 ). These tensions, while real, were largely rhetorical. No sailors were branded or beheaded on the expedition. Parrv’s identification of the pseudonymous contributors shows that the fight was pitched between and among the top- ranking officers writing variously as ncs arid as contributors. But even though the tone of both the printed and the excised articles is satirical, the rhetorical plavfulness of the attacks on the noncontributors cannot disguise a very serious concern: that not all expedition members were fairly sharing in the mission’s labors and in its rewards. The suppressed pieces, in particular, reveal an escalating distress and mock anger over the differences between the contributing and noncontributing members of the expedition. Sabine’s notion of a “partial circle" of readers is key to this ten¬ sion. And as a reflexive gesture to the severely limited circulation of the paper, it is also disingenuous, like all such gestures in genres of coterie writing. 96 CHAPTER TWO The articles in the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle —and in¬ deed those of later polar newspapers as well—are finely tuned to their inti¬ mate sphere of circulation, given all the inside jokes and event- and place- specific references. In the Winter Chronicle this attention is most keenly felt in terms of the paper’s role in fostering and reflecting collaborative labor. The paper’s existence was wholly reliant on full participation in its produc¬ tion, the editorial statements said repeatedly. In just the second issue of the paper, Sabine was sounding the alarm to those who had not yet contrib¬ uted: “I would also remind those who are yet silent, that now is the time when support is most needed; when, if every person will put his shoulder to the wheel in earnest, (and each individual may command his own exer¬ tions,) there can be no doubt that your Paper will go on with spirit” (aus). Sabine’s metaphor of self-directed manual labor aside, this call for writerly work was issued to a coterie within a coterie: the twenty-odd officers shar¬ ing exceptionally tight quarters with nearly eighty “men,” the seamen not holding officer status. We see this worry about the failure of collectivity in a poem directed to the NCs by one of the expedition’s lieutenants, writing as “Timothy Tickle’em.” In the poem—which was one of the ones Parry struck from appearance in print—we learn of the contributors’ plan “to tear their char¬ acters to bits” upon the expedition’s return home: The Churls, I vow, who cannot write Aught to be hang’d, or shot outright, As useless Vermin who destroy The food we should alone enjoy But wherefore spend our words in vain, When all our hints inflict no pain? We’ll roar it out to all the world, When once again our sails are furl’d: Thus, my dear friends, we’ll serve each knave, Who does not chuse to send his stave, And if we can’t excite their shame, At home, at last, we’ll brand their name, (ms Chronicle No. 14) This poem excited “considerable foment” among the NCs, we learn from a suppressed letter to the editor, written by Parry himself. The vow, when back in England to “shame” or “brand” the name of those who did not con¬ tribute, is seen in other contributions, such as the punishment mentioned ARCTIC NEWS 97 above of branding the letters NC on an offender’s cheeks. What is notable is that these threats to expose the noncontributors to the broader social and professional world—however humorously intended in the manuscript or coterie newspaper—are nevertheless censored from the public record of the printed newspaper. They wished to keep the rhetorical exercise of noncontribution within the world of the expedition onlv. Even though threats of beating or hanging noncontributors are not meant to be taken literally, one presumes, a response from a supposed NC- sympathizer (identified as Lieutenant Henry Parkyns Hoppner, a very fre¬ quent contributor to the Chronicle) in the form of a letter to the editor (likewise censored from the print version) seems to take the larger social and professional threat more seriously. The poem by Timothy Tickle’em, the correspondent writes, “seemed to express a degree of malice that I imagined never would have been permitted to creep into [the Chronicle' s] columns, which I always fancied, were originally intended to afford amuse¬ ment to our own little circle'.' The writer’s stress here on the “ little circle" of this coterie newspaper’s audience is significant; the frequency of the attacks on those not writing for the paper means the noncontributors had legiti¬ mate reasons to fear losing face in the social and professional spheres back home. What is more, the NCs’ concerns seem to have been ongoing, as the letter continues: “The spiteful pleasure which your Correspondent antici¬ pates in pointing out the Non-Contributors to those who have no concern in the affair will, I fear, give just grounds for strengthening the apprehen¬ sions that many entertained before, of similar intentions” (ms Chronicle No. 15). The fear on behalf of the NCs of the possibility of a “stain on their characters” seems to hit a nerve; the letter from the defender of the non¬ contributors concludes, “Although the N.c.’s may be wrong, still they do not deserve ... that stain upon their Characters which this, and some other Articles are likelv to impress on the minds of readers who are unacquainted with circumstances” (ms Chronicle No. 15).' This remark, made by a pseud- onvmous contributor, shows a presumption of an audience outside the orbit of their polar sphere. The social tension staged is palpable here, and the paper’s editor, Captain Sabine, appended a judicious note to the letter of protest, which said that Sabine would have questioned the letter-writer had he known who he was. The “lines in question did not strike us as writ¬ ten with any such ill-design,” Sabine explains, but allows that although “we mav... have been mistaken, but we reallv do not perceive what occasion any individual amongst us can have for a ‘malicious feeling’ toward the persons who have not written for the Winter Chronicle (ms Chronicle 98 CHAPTER TWO No. 15). This measured justification stands in contrast to the bombastic af¬ fectation of the newspaper’s previously published threats against the bodies and reputations ol the noncontributors. A follow-up letter from the author of the threatening poem, Timothy Tickle’em (again, one omitted from the London publication of the paper), asks facetiously what the NC fear—that the “Admiralty will seek out the names of those two or three individuals out of 20, who have never written for the Winter Chronicle?” No, the contributor argues; “the N.C.’s must know, that the knowledge even of the existence of a paper among us must necessarily be confined to a very limited circle; & that whatever stigma is brought upon them on this account, is one of their own seeking.” The pre¬ sumption of intimacy, of a private society outside of state relations, is key to this contributor’s position, as he continues: “If the contributions to the Winter Chronicle were to be regulated by law, like the Income-tax, accord¬ ing to each man’s ability to contribute, it is evident how woefully the N.C.’s would be in arrears!” (ms Chronicle No. 16). This letter relocates the social threat of noncontribution to the immediate officer coterie of the expedi¬ tion itself rather than the broader English professional world. It also sug¬ gests what may be lost in translation when polar ecomedia is removed from polar spaces. As it turns out, Parry’s manuscript edition of the Chronicle reveals that the proportion of contributors was far less than that claimed in the letter quoted above (that is, that only “two or three individuals out of 20” were NCs). Parry’s copy identifies virtually all the authors of the pseudonymous contributions, and we find there were a total of ten contributors. Three of the ten, however, contributed just one or two pieces to the paper. The seven frequent contributors were Parry, Captain Sabine, several other lieutenants, and the ship’s clerk and purser. The three who made only a few contributions, however, were all midshipmen, the lowest class of of¬ ficers. And among these midshipmen is one John Bushnan, whom Parry identifies as the author of the letter from “N.C.” —his only contribution to the Chronicle. Midshipmen, who had just begun their professional naval careers, would have the most to fear from threats to their reputa¬ tion. This would be especially true in the case of the Chronicle , in which the spats and disputes are all staged among high-ranking officers writing pseudonymously. But officers, of course, were not the only members of the expedition. None of the “men” aboard ship—the able seamen, boatswain’s and carpen¬ ter’s mates, eighty-odd all told—seems to have contributed to the paper. Nor ARCTIC NEWS 99 is ir clear that they necessarily read it, although the men serving at the officers’ mess would have the occasion to overhear the reading aloud of the Chronicle over a meal and to spread its contents among the common sea¬ men. 10 Perhaps a seaman might have been given one of the manuscript cop¬ ies of the paper, but it would likely have been something acquired under the table. This sense is reinforced by another unprinted letter to the editor. This short note is signed by “Timothy Hint” and expresses pointedlv the stresses of keeping labor expectations in balance. Here is the note, in full: “It is a well-known fact in the Natural History of Bees, that a certain part of the year, the working Bees confederate to turn the Drones out of the Hive; perhaps some one of your Correspondents may know at what part of the year this circumstance usually takes place, and whether it differs in different climates” (ms Chronicle No. 14). Worker bees do virtually all of the labor in the beehive, including catering to the drones, whose only function is to be available to impregnate the queen bee—at which point the drone dies. Also relevant, given the Arctic setting, is the fact that the turning out of the drones from the hive usually happens in early winter, when the Winter Chronicle was launched. The letter, written by second-in-command (and Chronicle editor) Sabine, could indicate a coded fear, however wry, that the workers (that is, the common seamen of the voyage) might feel col¬ lectively mutinous against the drones (the officers). The potential for in¬ surrection would be no laughing matter at sea, of course, where mutinous sailors potentially faced death. Less than two months before the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle shut down production, a letter from a correspondent named “Peter Plainwav”—Parry himself—asserted a re¬ surgence of collective work and goodwill. Notably, this letter appears in the fourteenth volume of the London version, where it was printed in place of the provocative Timothy Tickle’em poem, which had opened that par¬ ticular issue in the manuscript version of the Chronicle. Parry claims that it “is evident, that the number of [the paper’s] Correspondents is weekly increasing.... The N.c.s! —but alas the very name is now almost extinct” (14: 53). “Extinct” in the printed North Georgia Gazette , perhaps, but alive and kicking in the manuscript version, and therefore among the officers during the expedition. Parry had intended for the newspaper to “emplo[y] the mind” and “di¬ vert the leisure hours”; he had anticipated no “unpleasant consequences” of giving his men a literary outlet for their opinions. 11 Yet the expedition’s sur¬ geon, Alexander Fisher, reveals in his own narrative of the voyage that there 100 CHAPTER TWO was, in fact, reason to worry about the consequences of giving the men li¬ cense to free expression. Fisher’s narrative is taken from the journal he kept during the voyage; the following concerns about the Winter Chronicle were presumably recorded before its first numbers appeared: I have no doubt but it will answer its end, that is, of diverting the men; but... I am not quite so certain of its answering its purpose so well, for I have seen one or two instances, and have heard of many more, where newspapers on board of ship, instead of affording general amusement, and promoting friendship and a good understanding amongst officers, tended in a short time to destroy both . .. until at length the paper, in¬ stead of being the source of amusement and instruction, becomes the vehicle of sarcasms and bitter reflections . 12 Fisher was himself a noncontributor. A contemporary review of the Chron¬ icle (one not familiar with the unexpurgated version of the gazette) pointed out that injunctions against wounding the feelings of members of the group serve only to weaken the junto’s literary output; forbidding hurt feelings is “a law as destructive to mirth and quizzery, as that of political libel would be to free opinion. ... It seems absolutely to have assisted the climate to freeze up the spirit of fun altogether .” 12 During Parry’s first expedition, the newspaper did not serve the function of plays on British ships, which were understood to be safe, contained spaces for playacting resentments and disrupting hierarchies. In fact, in one striking example sailors on a prison ship staged a play about the Haitian Revolution . 14 Parry would go on to command two more successful Arctic expeditions, with increasingly elaborate costumes and props for theatricals. Yet he never again permitted a newspaper. Joking about noncontribution by high-ranking officers was all very well when it was an internal matter, a private manuscript newspaper. But as the more incendiary pieces in the Chronicle —all written by major officers— were withheld from the version printed for the public, the actual attri¬ bution of the suppressed articles says a good deal about how Parry’s men imagined the intelligibility of their experience to the broader world, how they imagined their literary collectivity as something apart from their pro¬ fessional collectivity. This bifurcation would not continue, as future Arctic expeditionary papers did not confine their contributor list to the officer corps and ceased to consider the metropoles of the temperate zones as at all part of their orbit of circulation. ARCTIC NEWS IOI Minds at Work British and American polar expeditions launched less frequently in the 1830s; the British Admiralty was conserving its resources, and the United States devoted its oceanic expeditionary energies to the Exploring Expedi¬ tion led by Charles Wilkes (1838-42). When Sir John Franklin’s North¬ west Passage expedition sailed in 1845, k was the first British mission in nearly a decade. (George Back had led the single Royal Navy mission of the 1830s.) Newspapers also returned to the Arctic in the late 1840s, after nearly three decades in which expeditions chose other winter pastimes. Their re- emergence was an effect, in part, of technological innovations in portable tabletop printing presses; the presses were initiallv designated for use in the Arctic to print thousands of rescue ship location notifications to aid in the search for the lost Franklin expedition. The searches that began in 1848 for Franklin and his men inaugurated a new boom in Arctic exploration, which in turn gave rise to the shipboard newspaper production and printing that would become a new convention in polar expeditionary practice. An important factor among the reasons polar papers caught on with expedi¬ tions in the second half of the nineteenth century (and were of less interest in the 1820s and 1830s after Parry’s initial experiment) was the availability of tabletop printing press technologv, as I discussed in chapter 1. The form of the newspaper in turn gave polar venturers an intellectual space in which to experiment with notions of both time in the absence of diurnal regula¬ tion and the “new” in the face of monotony. Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror and their combined crew of 129 men had sailed in 1845, and by 1847 there were concerns in Britain that there had been no word of the expedition in two years. The Plover was one of the first Franklin searches, engaged as of 1848 in that “important mission to relieve our fellow countrvmen in distress.” 15 The Plover was provided with a small press bv the British Admiralty—Elaine Hoag suggests that this press might have been folio-foolscap size—which on the Plovers subsequent voyage of 1832-54 would be employed in printing relief messages designed for dis¬ tribution with the Yupik and Inuit of the western Arctic. 16 The Plovers surgeon, John Simpson, established a newspaper in 1848 entitled Flight of the Plover, or the North Pole Charivari } Its objectives, Simpson wrote in its inaugural number with a medical-professional interest, were “to employ the hours of idleness on our passage in mental exercises, that may, we hope be conducive to the general amusement and hilarity of our small society.” 18 The Flight of the Plover was to be published monthly, the first issue pro- 102 CHAPTER TWO claimed on March i, 1848. The early spring date is notable, as this season of production would not continue to be observed for later Arctic periodicals, which were written during the winter months in which ships were stilled by ice and polar night. 19 Subsequent periodicals began in October or Novem¬ ber and generally lasted (if they carried on that long) until January or Feb¬ ruary, when the returning light and increased work of the spring sledging season turned the crew’s attention to different forms of exercise, mental or otherwise. Simpson stresses the need to cultivate “amusement and hilarity” among the crew in order to maintain morale during a long, uncomfortable, and potentially fruitless cruise. Unlike the earlier North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle , whose circulation was limited to the mission’s of¬ ficers, the Flight of the Plover and all subsequent Arctic papers extended the “amusement” of the paper to the entire crew. The form of hilarity taken by the Flight ofthe Plover, or North Pole Chari¬ vari was not the crudity by which sailors were stereotyped in the nineteenth century (although it should be acknowledged that polar missions staffed a somewhat more elite class of seamen). The newspaper was born of literary jokes and puns, as a poem by Tieutenant William Hulme Hooper insists. As he details in its origin story, an untitled poem that forms part of the first issue’s opening article, Hooper and four shipmates were clustered intimately in his cabin, “at least three in, one half without,” playing the literary dozens: In converse pleasant, yarns now spinning On books or morals sage debating One on our ears had puns a drumming The rest him for them soundly rating “What a rum cove must that queer prophet He of Khorassan veiled, I mean,” Says one: “ofwhom Tom Moore made profit In Lalla Rookh, as if he’d been A most enchanting sort of creature— Fancy his phiz now all who can What’ere you think I’ll bet I’ll beat your Most horrid pictures of this man— He must have been a Knowing Codger To cheat his victims with a veil, What an infernal artful dodger! To make so slight a screen avail.” ARCTIC NEWS 103 “A serpent’s mouth and forked tongue his is T’enchant the maidens while they’re kissing.” At this we laughed & talking went Of other Books to take a [blank] Until one evening well nigh spent “I vote” says one, “we cop x Punch ”'. 20 The idea is greeted rapturously by Hooper’s companions, who fall to nam¬ ing suggestions, after which Hooper determines that “if none else will chaper / I’ll edit, sure, myself the Paper.” The verse displays an awareness of the contemporary literary scene, as well as a capacity for playful critique of various of its elements. The proposal to copy Punch, the widely popu¬ lar British satirical weekly, sets an editorial tone that would be followed in most Arctic newspapers: the contents of the papers were generally comic and farcical. The subtitle of Punch was London Charivari, which is given a nod by the North Pole Charivari subtitle of Flight of the Plover. A charivari is a noisy, discordant, mock serenade or din, often made crudely with pots and pans; thus the papers’ titles and subtitles conjoin lofty ambition with humorous self-deprecation about the instruments employed in the con¬ tributors’ literary soundings. The poem also demonstrates the familiarity of the crew with literary taste and convention: for one, they joke about the seeming superiority of conversations about “books and morals” to the making of bad puns (their frequent practice, in fact); they then engage in speculation about Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), a popular Oriental¬ ist romance featuring a veiled prophet from Khorassan, or Persia. The Plo¬ ver crew members’ interest is in the “phiz,” or face, beneath the veil: What must the prophet have been concealing? Their fascination with the disguised oracular figure might reflect the at¬ traction of anonymity to men confined to a small ship with little privacy; it could at the same time be a nod to the practice of anonymous article submission that was routine with polar periodicals, as well as to many mag¬ azines back in the metropole. The crew members’ discussion invokes Dick¬ ens’s “artful dodger” from Oliver Twist and shows sufficient ease and facility with the contemporary literary scene to mock it. (Other popular novels in circulation on Arctic expeditions included Pickwick Papers, Two on a Tower, The Old Curiosity Shop, Tom Jones, Gulliver’s Travels, Ihe Lady of the Lake, Pride and Prejudice, Typee, and Omoo.) lx An omitted word at one point in the poem—at least, a word omitted in the copy of the Flight of the Plover that Simpson brought home; the original edition may have included 104 CHAPTER TWO it—seems to be a vulgarity that raises the rhetorical stakes of this mockery. Imagining what is beneath the veil of the prophet of Khorassan, Hooper speculates: ‘“A serpent’s mouth and forked tongue his is / T’enchant the maidens while they’re kissing.’ / At this we laughed & talking went / Of other Books to take a [blank].” In order for the final line to scan, and to rhyme, the empty space left in the page should signify a trochee that rhymes with “kissing.” It seems likely that the missing words are “piss on” or “piss in.” 22 One of the functions of polar periodicals is to stand as social media, as in-house scandal sheets; there are inside jokes to which nonexpedition members will not have access. Thus while this may be a metaliterary joke, the men of the Plover may also be lampooning someone in particular. The comfort of the contributors with dispersing irreverence among the crew as a whole marks another difference from the North Georgia Gazette’s more narrow and more anxious mode of address. This inaugural poem fulfills the objective that Simpson claimed for the Flight of the Plover, that “fun and frolic” would mix with “more sober narration” to the “good and laudable” end of fostering community and providing mental exercise. 2 ’ This aim was shared with other Arctic papers. The Illustrated Arctic News of the Resolute (commanded by Horatio Austin during a Franklin search in 1850-51), another Franklin search ex¬ pedition, was likewise founded on “amusement,” designed “to relieve the monotony of sunless days—to show to all, that fun & good fellowship, may exist” in constant night. 24 Provocatively the Illustrated Arctic News differentiates the “strange, & ever changing phenomena of Nature” in the “desolation of Tand & Ice” into which the mission has ventured, from the “the ruins of an old World” which also invite the crew’s contemplation. Within the context of exploratory expeditions more generally, the lan¬ guage of old and new worlds is inescapably imperialist or colonialist, pri¬ marily associated with the Columbian encounter with the Americas. Such suggestions are in part inevitable, given the northern Canadian location of the Northwest Passage ventures and related Franklin searches. Yet Arctic expeditions did not long retain a vision of any practical colonialist future in the Far North, despite the presence of Inuit, Inupiat, Sami, Yupik, and other indigenous communities; attention quickly shifted more fully to the other telos for Arctic exploration: resource extraction and commer¬ cial transportation via the Northwest Passage. (We can see an echo of this interest in global exchange in the Oriental imagery of the Lalla Rookh in¬ vocation in the Flight of the Plover.) The articulations of Old and New World imaginaries within polar periodicals, then, refer less to imperial ARCTIC NEWS 105 7U T J~Z Lt~ > fk .: .. / k |fe ^;q.uU TFCU<.ey i^leTU- A. tfUPL. kzUt- -/ T ^" A+yjdu*., gA+ t /?<:.: ^CJkU Pg'FKBS At HOflC Witt FIG 3.13 — Detail from “Bioloveria,” South Polar Times 1.5 (1901): 18. still and serene, / The Blizzard so boisterous and rorty.” 1 What Antarctic poems recognize, though, is that despite their authors’ distance from “the world,” all planetary life is connected. A poem on “Life in the Antarctic; or, The Protoplasmic Cycle” documents the polar food chain, demonstrat¬ ing that the circularity and codependence of global life functions like “a huge recurring decimal... to which no / End is found.” 1 On Mawson’s 1911-14 expedition, the planetary connection took on a new form: for the first time in Antarctic exploration history, radio contact was established with the outside world via wireless communication. Mawson’s crew used a Telefunken 1.5 kilowatt transmitter employing long wave and Morse code telegraphy and relayed messages to Australia through a station they es¬ tablished on Macquarie Island, a bit of land roughly equidistant between New Zealand and Antarctica. Katabatic winds (which commonlv exceed 150 miles per hour) at Commonwealth Bay, where Mawson established his continental base, made transmission difficult but not impossible; the com¬ mander wrote drily of their attempts to maintain the wireless apparatus in consistently awful weather, “Hurricane conditions were not catered for in 174 CHAPTER THREE the original aerial system.” An article in the first issue of th c Adelie Blizzard, ‘“Wireless’—The Realisation,” celebrates the radio technology’s success in establishing communications by remarking how much “money, time, and life” would have been saved if expeditionary “untoward circumstances” could have been reported to the outside world. Tire technology has transformed the very field itself, Mawson writes: “With the successful application of wireless to the field of operations, Polar Exploration has taken on a new ph ase.” 72 The power to call for help is one of many benefits; another is the expedition’s new ability to receive “exact time, and hence, longitude .. . from civilized lands.” Polar research and travel in Antarctica rely on “exact relative time,” and Mawson celebrates the wireless for placing “the inventive brains of each base at the disposal of all.” 3 Radio technology puts an end to the phase of polar exploration in which expedition members located themselves out of time, in asynchronous step with the outer world. The Mawson expedition’s employment of the tech¬ nology, then, forms the chronological endpoint of this book and signals the end of the heroic age of polar exploration and the beginning of the me¬ chanical age. Polar connection to the outside is not unequivocally a cause for celebration, however, as Mawson’s notebooks reveal. Even as he saluted the wireless in the Adelie Blizzard, he expressed private irritation with “the chatter which goes on in the aether [the wireless] every evening,” which is “deafening.” The Antarctic veteran’s searing lament: “We are not free from ‘the world’ even here.”" 4 Yet Mawson’s newspaper sought to bring the world to Antarctica in a fashion that had not previously been on display in polar papers: th & Adelie Blizzard ran a four-part series of earnest articles on “the commercialization of Antarctica.” These are not the faux real estate ads or futuristic speculative fiction of Antarctic papers more generally, but instead discussion of “aspects of economic and scientific interest” that would “form an invincible retort to those who still say, what’s the practical use of these Antarctic expeditions.” 5 The final installment of the series suggests that the katabatic winds might be harnessed for their energy, but the focus is not all on renewables; the article also suggests that Antarctica’s “geological forma¬ tions are most propitious, and mineral discoveries on a commercial scale are quite likely [to] turn up as further areas of exposed rock are gone over.” 6 The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 dedicated the continent to peace and science, holding at bay the “commercialization” imagined in th z Adelie Blizzard. As the outside world seeped into Antarctic via the Australasian Antarctic Ex¬ pedition’s wireless technology, though, the distinction between inner and outer polar worlds was collapsing. ANTARCTIC IMPRINTS 175 What does it mean to be unfxee from “the world” in Antarctic writ¬ ing? As hollow earth and other speculative polar fictions demonstrate, the fantasy of an internal southern realm is interrupted by the external world every time, whether in a return to consciousness, a return to terrestrial real¬ ity, or the intrusive chatter of the wireless. The relationship between the outer world and the inner world to which it makes itself known is defined, crucially, by climate extremes, from which the inner world of the Pole ul¬ timately offers no refuge. Climate change today compels humans anew to look to Antarctica and the Arctic in crafting our planetary narratives of survival. 176 CHAPTER TH REE FOUR DEAD LETTER RECKONING Seeing a cairn near the water’s edge, I hurried towards it, and quickly demol¬ ished the heap in the expectation of finding some record, but, after an hour’s hard work with pick and shovel, I was horrified to find that it was a grave. — albert HASTINGS markham, The Great Frozen Sea: A Personal Narrative of the Voyage of the Alert” during the Arctic Expedition of 1875-6 (1878) A rguably the most important document to date in the history of Arc¬ tic exploration was found in a cairn at Victory Point on King Wil¬ liam Island (Qikiqtaq) in the northern Canadian archipelago in 1859. The document was a preprinted blank form supplemented with handwritten updates, one of thousands dispersed throughout the circumpolar North by British and American ventures throughout the nineteenth century. Arctic expeditions were expected to leave notice of their whereabouts and opera¬ tions, depositing them under rock caches, in bottles dropped into the sea, in copper or tin cylinders, or at other outposts at regular intervals, ideally in multiple copies. Such multilingual forms (in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and German) left lined blank space at their tops for the handwritten updates; their bottom halves were imprinted with variations on the following: “Whoever finds this paper is requested to forward it to the Secretary of the Admiralty, London, with a note ofthe time and place at which it was found: or, if more convenient, to deliver it for that purpose to the British consul at the nearest Port.” The U.S. Navy employed an analo¬ gous form. This manner of blank form was “usually supplied to discovery ships for the purpose of being enclosed in bottles and thrown overboard FIG 4.1 — Cairn erected by Mate George F. McDougall, hms Resolute , near Point Baker. The cairn was topped by a bamboo pole hoisting a flag made of tin; under the rocks was a tin cylinder containing official documents. Its height was twelve to fourteen feet. ADM 7/190. NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON. at sea, in order to ascertain the set of the currents, blanks being left for the date and position .” 1 The sending and receiving of messages by humans con¬ stitutes a data set of currents and other nonhuman factors. Leaving such rec¬ ords, one officer wrote, “is done every day that the ships are under weigh .” 2 The notice found at Victory Point on King William Island in 1859 was one of the standard multilingual forms. In 1847 h had been written upon briefly and then sealed in a tin cylinder by officers of the large Northwest Passage expedition led by Franklin, which had launched from England in 1845. hi 1848, eleven months after the cylinders first interment, members of the Franklin expedition subsequently returned to the cairn, extracted the notice, and wrote upon it a second time, in script that wended its way around the border of the document, afterward recommitting it to a cairn. There it remained until its discovery twelve years later by the Fox expedi¬ tion, commanded by Francis Leopold M’Clintock (or McClintock), a recovery mission seeking evidence of Franklins missing voyagers. The 1847 script tells us that Franklin remains in command—“ All well ”—two years into the voyage. Here is a transcription of the first note: 28 of May 1847 H.M.S.hips Erebus and Terror Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70 N Long. 98°.23 / w Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechev Island 178 CHAPTER POUR in Lat N Long w After having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat 77° and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition. All well Party consisting of 1 Officers and 6 Men left the ships on Monday 14th May 1847.—Gm. Gore, Lieut., Chas. F. DesVoeux, Mate Just two weeks after this message had been committed to the cairn, how¬ ever, Franklin was dead. We learn this from the second inscription, written eleven months after the original. The emphatic “All well ” of the previous year takes on a special poignancy in light of the trials hinted at in the 1848 addition, which reads in full: 15th April 1848 HMShips Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April 5 leagues NN¥ of this having been beset since 12th Sept 1846. The officers and crews consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier landed here—in Lat. 69°37 , 42 / ' Long. 98°4T This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831—4 miles to the Northward—where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May 1847. Sir James Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper has been transferred to this position which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected—Sir John Franklin died on the nth of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.—James Fitzjames Captain HMS Erebus F. R. M. Crozier Captain & Senior Offr And start on tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River Franklin and his two ships, Erebus and Terror, with their crew of 129 men, had been missing for fourteen years when McClintock’s Fox expedition located the cairn note, stained by rust from the metal container and begin¬ ning to deteriorate. At least forty rescue and recovery missions had sought evidence of their whereabouts and mysterious end within those first fifteen years of searching—and they continued through the location of both ships on the Arctic seafloor, the Erebus in 2014 and the Terror in 2016c 1 Traces had been found in the early years of the search in the form of Inuit testimony (not always fully credited by white, Western audiences) and in assorted Erebus and Terror artifacts in abandoned campsites and among Inuit parties. Notably, one Scottish searcher, John Rae, had purchased a number of Franklin materials from the Inuit in 1834; they told him a large party of “kabloonas” (Qabluunak)—white men, around thirty-five to forty of them—had resorted to cannibalism and starved to death in a previous DEAD LETTER RECKONING 179 FIG 4.2 — Franklin expedi¬ tion note found in a cairn by Francis Leopold McClintock, 1859. From McClintock, The Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, after 281. winter. (I discuss Rae further in chapter 5.) McClintock’s Fox expedition itself located many more relics, including, in one small boat that had been hauled from the ship, twine, bristles, wax ends, sailmakers’ palms, needle and thread cases, TJte Vicar of Wakefield, several bayonet scabbards cut down into knife sheaths, two rolls of sheet-lead, eleven large spoons, eleven forks, and four teaspoons, many of these last bearing Franklin’s crest/* Franklin “relics” had been central to the international interest in the expedition’s fate for years; indeed Adriana Craciun argues that they were the “most eloquent texts” available to the public. 5 Yet none of these fragments of¬ fered an obliging narrative in documentary, written form that explained the outcome of a party the size of the full Franklin expedition. Not until McClintock’s cairn discovery was there confirmation that satisfied Anglo- Americans and Europeans that the beset ships had been abandoned to the ice and that Sir John himself was dead, along with twenty-four other expedition members (by circumstances unknown, although causes likely 180 CHAPTER FOUR include exposure, starvation, and lead poisoning from poorly soldered tins). The Victory Point cairn note is the only written record that has been found to date that provides any information about the fate of the Franklin expedition. McClintock was deeply affected by what he read in the cairn message; he reflected in his narrative, “In the short space of twelve months how mournful had become the history of Franklin’s expedition; how changed from the cheerful ‘All well’ of Graham Gore!” 6 For McClintock, the bu¬ reaucratic status of the note adds to rather than detracts from its elegiac qualities. “A sad tale was never told in fewer words,” he wrote. “There is something deeply touching in their extreme simplicity, and they show in the strongest manner that both the leaders of this retreating party were ac¬ tuated by the loftiest sense of duty.” The duty to which McClintock refers is primarily constituted by the surviving officers’ recognition that the ex¬ pedition was provisioned only through the summer of 1848, and thus they were compelled into the risky act of abandoning the trapped ships. Far less dramatically, but also significantly, the responsibilities of the remaining of¬ ficers included leaving official records. The forms “are perfect models of of¬ ficial brevity. No log-book could be more provokingly laconic,” McClintock observed. “Yet, that any record at all should be deposited after the aban¬ donment of the ships, does not seem to have been intended .. . and our gratitude ought to be all the greater when we remember that the ink had to be thawed, and that writing in a tent during an April day in the Arctic regions is by no means an easy task.” 8 McClintock fulfilled his own duty: even though he took the original Franklin message back to the Admiralty in England, he created a copy to leave in the cairn and added to it records of his own Fox expedition’s maneuvers. We know what message the cairn note conveyed to an Anglo-American public hungry for information in the fall of 1859, almost fifteen years into a series of far-reaching missions of mercy: it provided an elusive cenotaph for the ships and for Franklin himself, even as it left unanswered numer¬ ous questions about the expedition’s broader fate. 9 But what message was the form itself designed to convey, at the original scene of its production and inscriptions? McClintock’s analysis of the cairn record oscillates be¬ tween finding it exceptional (difficult to write, crafted in dire conditions) and mundane (a rote task of “official brevity”). Yet the document found by his party at Victory Point was not an emergency message, specially crafted for potential rescuers or for posterity. Rather it was just another update among hundreds that the expedition would have scattered over three years. DEAD LETTER RECKONING l8l Such updates were often dispersed in multiple copies in order to amplify their chance of detection; indeed not far from the cairn in which this mes¬ sage was discovered, a copy was found, consisting only of the content of the first, 1847 message. Cairn messages, in this sense, bear the charge of the Franklin relics—the cutlery, pins, bits of metal—in their fetishistic prom¬ ise to reveal the secrets of the vanished men. Yet while cairn messages, like the relics, are bits of mundane ephemera from a life in the Arctic, they are distinctive in one fundamental way: their form is both static (in that they are literally forms, to be filled in) and endlessly narratively adaptable (in the information added to them and in their vague and tenuous locatabilitv). They have an intended circuit, which is to track daily movement; they also have a contingent circuit, determined by polar ecological conditions. The Franklin notice becomes a variation of what I call the Arctic dead letter: the blank form, the procedural information sheet, the status report, the routine paperwork that polar expeditions filed dailv in bottles tossed in the sea, in caches built on flinty shores, or in metal casks covered with stones. In the case of the Franklin expedition, a routine notice left in a cairn becomes known as exceptional when it emerges as the only record, partial though it may be, of the fate of 1x9 men. I propose that despite the importance it has assumed in the history of polar exploration, the Franklin message in the cairn was in fact routine. In the popular imagination a “message in a bottle” connotes solitude or aban¬ donment, the voice ol a singularity desperate to connect against long odds. In the case of Arctic recordkeeping, messages in bottles were generated en masse and as a matter of course; scarcity is a function of their reception, not of their generation. The onlv thing unusual about the Victory Point Arctic letter, that is to say, is that it actually was received. The cairn message found readers: first in McClintock, then among the broader Anglo-American nineteenth-century world, in polar historians, in me, in you. I open this chapter bv describing the famous cairn message as if its con¬ tents were exceptional, but as I’ve begun to suggest, the Franklin expedi¬ tion note was just another dispatch among the blanks, forms, notices, and other official documents that circulate in the Arctic region in tenuous and provocative ways, as forms of polar ecomedia that embody oceanic condi¬ tions of drift, contingency, dispersal, and annihilation. Nautical ventures in general (naval, exploratory, or commercial voyages other than polar ex¬ peditions) produced an enormous volume of writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in multiple forms and genres. Recordkeeping, argu- 181 CHAPTER FOUR ably the most common category of sea writing, was as much a mainstay of nautical practice as the exercise of seamanship. In the form of logbooks, weather records, navigational accounts, wind and tide charts, longitude and latitude measurements, course and distance notations, and hydrography, officers and other seamen tracked the progress of their voyages. One as¬ pect of this recordkeeping involved leaving letters, notices, and other forms of mail in whatever circumstances conditions might permit. For standard nautical routes, whether naval or merchant, this meant leaving letters in ports or exchanging them with passing ships. This system was irregular but surprisingly effective. The relative desolation of the polar regions arrested and altered the usual circulation of nautical mail, even as it opened up the possibilities for other forms of oceanic exchange. This chapter studies the unusual and baroque extent of messages sent from Arctic expedition ships, as well as the vagaries and contours of their posting and potential for deliv¬ ery or receipt. What I am calling Arctic dead letters comprise the notifications dis¬ patched from ships into the polar regions, in the generally vain hope of future reception. Like letters in postal mail exchange found to be unde¬ liverable and thus labeled “dead,” Arctic dead letters lie unclaimed. Like figurative dead letters, Arctic dead letters have passed out of use. Like dead media, they are discarded and possibly obsolete forms of communication. Yet unlike dead-end postal mail—which is eventually consigned to the fire—the circuit remains open for Arctic letters; they retain potential en¬ ergy. In literary studies our association with dead letters is usually tied to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853): after Bartleby’s death by starvation in the Tombs, the lawyer-narrator hears a rumor that the scrivener had once worked in the Dead Letter Office. The detail, for many readers, has evoked the alienation of labor under capital¬ ism, especially in light of Bartleby s job, which was to produce duplicates of legal documents (in a manner not unlike the unrelenting duplication of Arctic records at sea). Through abstemiousness, Bartleby prefers to be unproductive: he moves from the Dead Letter Office, to a law office in which he fails to generate document copies, to an actual death that the lawyer-narrator histrionically equates with dead letters. In media studies, Bartleby’s dead letters—his rote, unoriginal, and ultimately unproductive copying—can be seen as a form of dead media, one of the processes of re¬ production by an alienated human that would soon become reproduction by nonhuman machines. DEAD LETTER RECKONING 183 A different logic for production and reproduction of letters obtains in the polar regions: whereas in “Bartleby” dead letters are a terminus, in the Arctic dead letters are inert components in a circuit that could conceivably blink into conductivity. The messages that have not disintegrated of the thousands cast onto ice or into the seas in the nineteenth centurv possibly remain in the Arctic in some form, whether in a state of decomposition or in persistent drift: or awaiting some potential future reader, perhaps made more accessible in the twenty-first century by climate change. Nautical spaces are inherently resistant to inscription and other forms of demarca¬ tion. Recognizing this, polar-voyaging messengers multiply their modes and numbers of address, seeking oceanic registers of circulation both in terms of the wayward proliferation and mass publication scale of their dis¬ patches. Arctic dead letters exemplify the unbounded dimensions of polar ecomedia in their potential for open, ceaseless circulation, and their risk of obliterating dispersal. Other fundamentally oceanic characteristics of Arctic dead letters are their attenuated temporality and their randomness: any given cairn mes¬ sage or note in a bottle, if found at all, might be picked up decades after its inscription—a scrap of newsprint recovered, say, from Beechey Island by a Franklin search party, labeled by the Admiralty as “piece of brown paper found in washhouse,” or an insert from a tin of Superior Chocolate Pow¬ der provided to the expedition by Fortnum, Mason & Co. 10 In visiting the expeditionary headquarters of Adolphus Greely’s Lady Franklin Bay Ex¬ pedition decades later, Donald MacMillan found newspaper clippings of various poems whose pathos would be amplified in the Far North: “The Sweet Bv-and-By,” the refrain of which is “We shall meet on that beauti¬ ful shore”; Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us”; and Longfel¬ low’s “To Stay at Ffome Is Best.” The men returned home, but their scraps of newsprinted poetry remained at latitude 8 i° 4 o' N —at least until 1909, when MacMillan took them up anew.! 1 Neither the interval nor the content of the materials circulating in the oceanic world can be strictly plotted geographically or hydrographically. They can be approximated, though (much like the debris from the 2.011 Japanese tsunami that continues to wash ashore periodically on the Pacific coast of North America). 12 Metaphors of mapping likewise falter in rep¬ resenting oceanic diffusion. Unmoored from territorial and temporal fix¬ ity, Artie dead letters and other forms of polar ecomedia bear the promise of ceaseless potential yet also stand as bits of the detritus that global-scale human resource extraction has unceasingly left in its wake. 184 CHAPTER FOUR Blank Forms on the Map Arctic dead letters are a body of records that were produced under the usual conditions of polar recordkeeping, but their primary mode was distribu¬ tion away from the ship rather than retention aboard it (except in duplicate form—another circuit of Arctic exchange, about which I will say more). Even messages deposited in caches, on more solid surfaces that could be flagged or marked in some way, ran the risk of infrequent encounter. Elisha Kent Kane, for example, the best known of the American Arctic explorers at midcentury, engaged in the standard practices of “build[ing] cairns and leav[ing] notices at every eligible point’’ during his unsuccessful Grinnell expedition in search of Franklin (1853-55). But appropriate materials were not always at hand, and Kane recalls a time when, “as I had neither paper, pencil, nor pennant, I burnt a K. with powder on the rock, and scratching O.K. with a pointed bullet on my cap-lining, hoisted it as the representa¬ tive of a flag.” One such improvised cairn, “rudely marked,” he writes in his narrative, was found by a party sent in aid of Kane’s expedition, but “strange to say, [it] was the only direct memorial of my whereabouts communicated from some hundreds of beacons.” 13 Other depots were disrupted by polar bears or other Arctic megafauna. McClintock repeatedly encountered sup¬ ply caches that had been destroyed; in one instance, a previous expedition had left a “small depot of provisions and three boats” on Cape Hotham across from Beechey Island. “The boats were sound,” McClintock found, “but several of their oars, which had been secured upright, were found broken down by bears—those inquisitive animals having a decided an¬ tipathy to anything stuck up—stuck-up things in general being, in this country, unnatural.” 14 (In blaming this destruction on polar megafauna, McClintock elides the possibility that Westerners on previous search ex¬ peditions had ransacked cairns, including Intuit communication cairns, or Inuksuit, looking for messages or supplies.) Oceanic environments work to erode the outcroppings, the “stuck-up,” whether through atmospheric attrition or more direct intervention from large organisms. Other Arctic environmental conditions conspired to interfere with cairn messaging. A lieutenant on the Nares expedition, Charles Arbuthnot, labored for some time to locate a message buried near a supply depot. “I regret to say,” he reports to his superiors, “that just after I had made one copy of this, and had written a notice of our visit on the back of it, a strong gust of wind took the original record from under a stone where I had placed it, and that although I followed it a long way down the hill, it eventually got amongst the cliffs, DEAD LETTER RECKONING l8$ and I was unable to recover it.” b Arbuthnot then had to install the copy in the cairn after making a second copy of the document to bring aboard ship. At every turn Artie conditions demand a multiplication of messages. The chances that letters in bottles would wash ashore or ride the global oceanic currents to some other reception were vanishingly slim. James Clark Ross (nephew of the Arctic explorer John Ross) worries about this when describing the process of distributing his own versions of the very same standard blank form that was used by the Franklin expedition: In the evening a cask was put overboard in lat. 77 0 S. and long. 187° 24' E., containing a brief account of our proceedings, and with a request that whoever might find it would forward the paper to the Secretary of the Admiralty. It was my practice to throw a bottle over almost every day containing a paper with our latitude and longitude marked on it, for the purpose of gaining information respecting the joint effects of the prevailing winds and currents in these parts; but amongst ice, and in so turbulent an ocean, I fear but few of them will ever be found to subserve the intended purpose . 16 The messages, accounts, notices, bulletins, updates, and discarded papers scattered across the ice and waters of the Arctic (or the Southern Ocean, as in Ross’s case) are the shipboard press output not created from an imagi¬ native impetus, such as the newspapers, broadsides, and songs I discuss in earlier chapters; such creative publications remained on ship and circulated among expedition members. Instead the blank forms and other informa¬ tional documents produced or filled out in the circumpolar North were addressed to a conjectural future audience in the Artie itself. The forms note the location of expeditions, the numbers and health of their party, the contents of the supply caches they leave along their routes, the progress of their sledging ventures, and their planned future trajectories. For example, a form sent from the hms Lady Franklin (a Franklin search vessel) via an Inuk or “Esquimaux” carrier that did ultimately reach the Admiralty had been filled in with the following information (other than the date [May 7, 1850] and the latitude and longitude notation): “Beset off Unknown Island since May 4th. h.m.S. Sophia in company. Crews of both ships well. Ice very light. Great appearance of Water to North. Despatches landed at Lively. William Penny, Commander.' 1 Cast into oceanic spaces (ice, the pack, open water), these dead letters rarely, however, connected with a reader other than through copies retained aboard ship—and therefore are encountered onlv far from the scene of their Arctic emplacement, whether 186 CHAPTER FOUR by Admiralty secretaries at the conclusion of a voyage or in bound histori¬ cal records in archives by researchers. Some ol the materials that were com¬ posed and then deposited within the polar regions, directed to an audience that seldom materialized, remain potentially discoverable—deliverable, in a sense—today, in melting polar regions. 18 In addition to illuminating the little-known role that Arctic dead letters play in the history of polar literature, this chapter recasts a once commonly held view ol the Far North as a “blank.” The concept of polar blankness can be seen in the nineteenth-century Arctic sublime of romantic writers, as well as in the imperialist rhetoric of northern European and American expedi¬ tions, all of which inaccurately—whether deliberately or not—recast the continuously populated Arctic as barren. My aim is not to heap up evidence of the error of this figuration; there have been many correctives to this view. Instead I consider the notion of Arctic blanks in media and material text terms: What is the role of the printer’s blank when employed in polar circu¬ lation? 19 A “blank,” according to the 0 £D, is “a document, ‘paper,’ or ‘form’ with spaces left blank to be filled up at the pleasure of the person to whom it is given (e.g., a blank charter), or as the event may determine; a blank form.” Neither a printed book nor part of manuscript culture, the blank registers in the history of printing as an element of “job printing,” the kind of oc¬ casional work for hire done by printers. Job printing could include hand bills, tickets, letterhead, lottery tickets, currency, coupons, and other docu¬ ments and ephemera. In areas where ready paper was comparatively scarce, job-printed matter could provide manuscript material too, adaptable to the use of the writer. Such was the case for one sailor, who deserted an Arctic whaling ship in i860 and wrote an account of his experience in a bank pass¬ book printed in the maritime town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Jobbing accounted for the majority of most printers’ work in the nineteenth century but has received comparatively little attention in material text studies. As Lisa Gitelman observes, job printing is often neglected in histories of print culture and the book in favor of “accounts of authors, editors, booksellers, publishers, and readers; cohorts notably missing from the world of blanks. Blanks are printed and used,” Gitelman writes pointedly, rather than “au¬ thored or read.” 20 Scholarly interest in the history of books and the study of cultures of print, in other words, has been primarily focused on readers, writ¬ ers, and publishers; blanks, by contrast, seem to exist outside of the agency of an author function or the humanism of a reader response. The wide employment of blanks within polar spaces with relatively diffuse human reading populations—as Inuit, Yupik, Inupiaq, and other circumpolar DEAD LETTER RECKONING 187 indigenous populations were not usually targeted as print publics, with a few exceptions—tmderscores, in some ways, the abstraction of blanks from the intimacy of direct human exchange. If the polar regions themselves were historically figured as blank or barren compared to the verdant temperate zones, then it is possible to think of printed blanks as bearing an analogous relationship to texts with more identifiable authors and readers. And yet, as James Green and Peter Stallvbrass have pointed out, job printing had blank spaces for completion by manuscript hand, as blanks invited direct interaction. Rather than superseding manuscript culture, that is, the various forms of job printing provided an “incitement to writ¬ ing by hand.” Green and Stallvbrass observe, “One may or may not read a blank form; but if the form is to fulfill its function, it must be filled in.”' 1 For Green and Stallvbrass, the function of a form like the Franklin cairn message would be notification—ideally, in these terms, to notify the docu¬ ment’s readers of the expedition’s condition and whereabouts. But the experiential function of forms in the Arctic is not to notify but to leave notes. The designated reader may never appear or mav come one year later, or one hundred. The expectation of notification relies on a relative svn- chronicity between sender and recipient that does not inhere in the fro¬ zen oceanic regions. It is happenstance that when McClintock found the Victory Point cairn message eleven years after its second emplacement, the Franklin expedition remained alive enough in the Anglo-American con¬ sciousness (if not in its own embodied state) for the discovery or “delivery” of the original message to resonate still, despite the temporal lag between the moment of its release and its receipt. Virtually all theoretical readers of Arctic documents such as figure 4.3, however, encounter the blanks not in situ but far from the time and space of their inscription and read them necessarily in the form of copies—duplicates created at the scene of their original completion. The copies exist precisely because Arctic blanks are expected to become dead letters. Oceanic spaces are fundamentally characterized by dispersal, extension, and diffusion. In the frozen oceanic spaces of the Arctic, in which monuments and markers can stand for a time, an excess of writing and recordkeeping functions as a mechanism for multiplying possibilities for connection or inscription upon an ice-, land-, and seascape adversarial to permanent markers. Blanks in the Arctic thus function as a response both to the misconceived “blankness” of the regions themselves and to the standard expectations of claims-making by voyages undertaken under the banners of discovery, science, imperial¬ ism, or colonialism. 22 Unlike fluid oceanic surfaces, however, the icy polar 188 CHAPTER POUR . . • 34 ' C V* ?' "/ " < ‘ r &-*«■■* - ■*>/ A*g / 5 s .<,..#t H-MA -Alkut.- at 3 fc z /exfAtr* oA (Lat ^ Sty', ^oriL. Wg. // W^t.) sS*r* *t / ;/-^ f/t« z 2 r tJ* , <-*■ ?/ x/A****//st. !"«■•*. /*'* «.,**/ 2$*/ /*T*.-e Y /V iA/tt i//ttf yt- ,-r (/tt. & -S-Stty- Csrrt* s/.St f/tc , rc S* t* s r* e*Cr *t tr/r.,. . y < x/r S. /.Yet 2* -.//& At r./ •"^ 'Atl... < 2 , /? S/te tC , C?<<*sr/,*. */,... S. *yi/s,,,S /£*. /**■*.«/ A. 1*, / /'/jl As .S-A's * * Y ...-,/ tYc *. As Jt. sAz*?> X oC t .y/A. Ye &},.*'& »/ &./, /%/£.. /A. ?! O- r. e / [,it. . ..s«r->t/~'^ a Ay't* /Cfs C\Ct/ A. Yc &*% y // a/,,..y~A. sA?./r *■ yy f 7 * t ft s / f' l~ r - rS« J S ' / - r X 'A•s & 1 *f y A Ytr~! < * ?Ae. f y •< * < * « /s.Y -2 Y/ * • •?' /* //*. frs,sy?*~.*.Y, fs*.* 4. / j.Y //t As St,,/y *y ''/t £ytv At . . . . t% /iju searcIi 1 of ; Slr J - . FranklinV Expedition. ' ; ; Bj Balloon 1851. H MS Resolute, ■ ; Assisi once, Steam Temlers Pioneer&lntrepitk: ; ' (wintering at Griffith leafed) m Scarab of .Str.J' an Frdiiklmfij Expedition. y -> n- \ Provisi-in<> und Boat Port Leopolcf.tainall depot a .rtd Boat Cape Spencer, supply Cape Hotkani; y ^ rt ".- r Barries tr, Cep- Walker,Melville Island; : A%IBi>i*t'onC%-ait. ” lte *‘ P,>rt n»|«W..ro«n depot “ .CC Cope nntkat® 1 FIG 4.7 — Balloon message on pink and green paper, 1851. The message was printed with the same set of type as figure 4.5 but on different material: oiled pink paper instead of green silk. The printed text on the note reads as follows: “By Balloon 1851. h m s Resolute, Assistance, Steam Tenders Pioneer & Intrepid, (wintering at Griffith Island) in search of Sir J Franklin’s Expedition. Provisions and Boat Port Leopold, small depot and Boat Cape Spencer, supply Cape Hotham, Spring Parties to Cape Walker, Melville Island, Wellington Strait.” ADM 7/190. NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON. AI!(.’TIC EXPEDITION in search of SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. Her Majesty's Sliip ‘Plover’ will be found wintering (1632 >33) two mii '-i S.E. (true) of Point Barrow, called by the natives Noo-wook. Partu s fulling back iipoi. si-.it point are recommended to travel along ■ : c W chain of sand spits lying off the coast, as the most direct line. 1 he natives on the whole arc not unfriendly, but must be dealt with cautiously to avoid surprise. Commander. Printed on board H. M. 5. Plover, on the 29th. of October- 1852. FIG 4.8 — HMS Plover cairn message, 29 Oct. 1852. Box 4, John Simpson Papers, 1825-1875. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, DUKE UNIVERSITY. ought not to be trusted by strangers, and cannot be relied on for provisions as they frequently suffer from famine themselves .” 38 Maguire takes advantage of the “friendliness” and mobility of Arctic indigenous communities while safeguarding his resources, both materially and politically. The paradoxical accessibility and restrictedness of such circuits is painfully underscored by the Lnuit recognition that British and American cairns were not communicative media within themselves, but caches of food through which to rummage. The Oceanic Postbox I have been describing how messages, notices, and other forms of informa¬ tion circulated in the polar regions in the nineteenth century. These va¬ rieties of Arctic ecomedia are not the only body of oceanic letters: these also comprise the letters whose places of emission and destination were aboard ships, to and from captains, sailors, and long-voyaging passengers. Their circuits of delivery and receipt share with the formal post a process of heterogeneous handling, but one stripped of all regularizing processes, patterns, and forms.'"’ In this section I address rhe intraoccznic (rather than /rawjoceanic) circuits of nautical letter exchange and mail delivery in the 198 CHAPTER FOUR long nineteenth century in order to place into spatial and temporal con¬ text the relative “dead”-ness of Arctic blanks. Ships’ letters were thrown to the commerce of the sea; indifferently handled, passed along, left behind, or intercepted, correspondence nevertheless often reached its address. The provisional postal exchanges that took place at sea, in ports, in cairns, or at watering spots were surprisingly effective ways of delivering mail. Or so it would seem; in their voyage journals and narratives, sailors describe their postal successes but rarely mention the letters that are lost, adrift, dead. After writing a letter—in the age of sail as much as today—an individual encloses it in an envelope, places postage upon it, submits it to the handling of the postal service, and trusts that even though multiply handled on vari¬ ous vehicles of transport, the letter will arrive intact, sealed, and ready for the private reception of its intended audience. This process is exceptionally intimate in its presumption of the one-to-one correspondence and shared tactile experience of its sender and its recipient. At the same time, the post is a broadly public form of exchange, predicated upon the hand-to-hand transmission of the agents of delivery, the national postal systems that under¬ write it, and the economies of the world of letters on the registers of both the local (the stationers and news agents who provide the materials and tools) as well as the global (Syrian gall ink, for example, and gum from the Sudan, to speak of the materials alone). Even electronic mail replicates his¬ torical forms of mail exchange in the digital fragmentation of its modes of transmission, as well as the ambitions it has to privacy despite the me¬ dium’s demonstrably public exchanges. The letter functions as an itinerant signifier, as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have memorably argued; while they may diverge on whether “a letter always reaches its destination” (in Lacan’s reading) or “always not arrive[s] at its destination” (in Derridas response), both see the general economy of epistolary exchange as a sys¬ tem of personal and impersonal object relations . 40 In this sense the Victory Point cairn note left by the doomed Lranklin expedition can serve simul¬ taneously as just another pedestrian expeditionary update and also as the most important document in Arctic exploration history: its ultimate deliv¬ ery into the hands of a reader (McClintock; the Anglo-American public; you and me) is conditioned by Lranklin’s death. Indeed for Derrida in Tloe Post Card, death—which demarcates the space between correspondents— may be the inevitable destiny of letters . 41 failure is the condition of Arctic communication rather than its telos. Various strategies have been used to circulate mail on an oceanic scale. A visitor today to floreana Island (formerly Charles Island) in the Galapagos DEAD LETTER RECKONING 199 archipelago in the Pacific Ocean can stop at the island’s informal post of¬ fice, at which letters and post cards are left—without postage, by design— to be selectively picked up by visitors who promise to hand-deliver them. It has been in existence for hundreds of years, likely since the 1793 visit to the islands by a British Naval officer, James Colnett, who thought that the islands would be a useful refueling and rest station for whaling fleets working the Pacific. Either Colnett or a slightly later visitor erected an empty whale oil barrel to serve as a postbox, and the spot—which became known as Post-Office Bay—became the center of Pacific Ocean epistolary exchange. U.S. Naval captain David Porter, a major figure in the Pacific dur¬ ing the War of 1811, was one of many visitors to take advantage of the local letter box, by then known as “Hathaway’s Post-office.” Vessels stopping by the islands for tortoises, wood, or water would leave letters addressed not to individuals, or even specific ships, but to the Pacific community at large. Porter writes of his first stop on Charles (Floreana) Island in 1813: Understanding that vessels which stopped there for refreshments, such as turtle and land tortoise, and for wood, were in the practice of depositing letters in a box placed for the purpose near the landing-place, (which is a small beach sheltered by rocks, about the middle of the bay,) I dis¬ patched Lieutenant Downes to ascertain if any vessels had been lately there, and to bring off such letters as might be of use to us, if he should find any. He returned in about three hours, with several papers, taken from a box which he found nailed to a post, over which was a black sign, on which was painted Hathaway’s Post-office. There were none of them of a late date, but they were satisfactory. The opportunitv for mail exchange was on a par with resource gathering as an impetus to stop on Charles Island, in Porter s description. The contents of the letters, as described by Porter and other sailors, relate the ships’ move¬ ments, engagements, freight, success, crew health, and future trajectories. Porter quotes from one such letter from a whale ship captain, in part because he is amused by it as a “rare specimen of orthography”: “Ship Sukey John Macey 71/2 Months out 150 Barrels 75 days from Lima No oil Since Leaving that Port.... I leave this port this Day With 250 Turpen 8 Load Wood.” 43 On their first stop on Charles Island, Porter’s men take with them several of the letters they find in the box; on a return trip, Porter writes in A Voyage in the South Seas, thev find that another ship has taken away all of the barrel’s remaining papers. But when Porter needs to communicate directly—and privately—with his lieutenant on another ship, he buries his 200 CHAPTER FOUR FIG 4.9 — hms Lancaster crew members at post office barrel, Charles Island, 28 Nov. 1917. Las Encantadas, Human and Cartographic History of the Galapagos Islands. PRIVATE COLLECTION OF JOHN WO RAM. USED WITH PERMISSION. note in a bottle in the sand, as per prearrangement. Should the lieuten¬ ant not rendezvous with him on the island, Porter commands, he should “search at the foot of the stake to which the letter-box is attached, where I should bury a bottle containing instructions for him.” 44 The presumption is that these postbox letters are public, inasmuch as the small community of whaleships and naval vessels constitutes a public. The Pacific mail-exchange community centered in the Galapagos is a public to a more definitive de¬ gree than the circle of Arctic messengers, for whom the inclusion of strang¬ ers may be a vain hope. 45 Porter’s experience rhymes with that of other mariners. A number of nineteenth-century seamen describe the Galapagos post office in their nar¬ ratives; among them is William Nevens, who in his Forty Years at Sea writes that the post office “consists of a box made water tight, with a close cover, into which every captain that enters the harbor, puts in an open letter telling his ‘where from, where bound, what luck,’ and all about. When we came into the harbor there were many letters in the ‘post office’ and we knew by reading them where all ‘the whalers’ were bound.” 46 Nevens’s ac¬ count is one of many that belie a claim made by the Beagle ’s captain Rob¬ ert Fitzroy, that the small settlement that had emerged on Charles Island DEAD LETTER RECKONING 201 by the 1830s meant that letters intended for homeward-bound whaleships were now left with the residents rather than in the barrel in Post-Office Bay." 1 Reuben Delano’s whaling narrative also affirms the “open” status of this letter point, mentioning the customary epistolary updates: “Bv a let¬ ter which we found in the box, we learned that an English vessel had been there but a few days previous, and had lost two men, one of whom fell dead with a terrapin on his back, from the excessive heat of the sun.”"* 8 The sailors treat the barrel in Post-Office Bay as a convenience and a curiosity, a rare tether in the Pacific to which to affix an epistolary signal. Absent the infra¬ structure of a port community and the environmental starkness of the polar regions, the largely unsettled Galapagos Islands can support an open post for exchange while still remaining proximate to oceanic forms of relation and circulation. While sailors refer to these missives as “letters,” they are, in fact, news, designed to convey information to passing ships. Melville visited the Galapagos during the time he spent as a sailor; he later wrote about the “enchanted” equatorial isles in “The Encantadas,” a se¬ ries of sketches serialized in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1854 (and later included in Tlje Piazza Tales). Although a working seaman for some years, Melville brings a terrestrial skepticism or pessimism to oceanic forms of mail exchange. In his telling, the Galapagos Islands’ post office is catalogued among other signs of “vanishing humanity” detailed in the final sketch of “The Encantadas.” It is a “drearv” spot where letters are staked in bottles and rot in the absence of a recipient. “Curious to say,” Melville writes, that spot which of all others in settled communities is most animated, at the Enchanted Isles presents the most dreary of aspects. And though it may seem very strange to talk of post offices in this barren region, yet post offices are occasionally to be found there. They consist of a stake and a bottle. The letters being not only sealed, but corked. They are gen¬ erally deposited bv captains of Nantucketers for the benefit of passing fishermen, and contain statements as to what luck they had in whaling or tortoise hunting. Frequently, however, long months and months, whole years, glide by and no applicant appears. The stake rots and falls. 4 ’ 1 Melville highlights the sociability that characterizes land-based post offices, which stands in contrast, in his telling, to the lack of animation to be found on the desert islands. Oceanic letters in Melville’s tale are dead, rotting; this is a very different sense of the animation of the spot than can be seen in the writings of his contemporary fellow sailor-authors, for whom the Galapagos mail might not be “of a late date” but is more than “satisfactory." 202 CHAPTER FOUR The oceanic system of mail practiced on the Galapagos serves an ar¬ resting function in the story of the historical hermit Patrick Watkins, alias “Oberlus,” whose tale Melville adapts from naval captain David Porter’s ac¬ count. (This is only one of many elements of Porter’s narrative that Melville borrows in “The Encantadas.”) Watkins was an Irish renegade from an En¬ glish ship, and from his encampment on Charles Island (Melville places him on Hood Island, now Espanola) he sought to kidnap passing sailors and enslave them. Both Porter and Melville describe how crew members of a ship that had been victimized by Watkins had, in Porter’s words, “put a letter in a keg, giving intelligence of the affair, and moored it in the bay” in order to warn other vessels that Watkins was targeting shore parties. 50 In Melville’s slight alteration of the line, “they put a letter in a keg, giving the Pacific Ocean intelligence of the affair, and moored the keg in the bay.” 51 In Actively moving Watkins off Charles Island, and thus away from Post- Office Bay, Melville removes him from the actual sphere of Pacific episto¬ lary exchange (which he casts as stagnant, in any case). Melville’s addition of the whole of the Pacific Ocean to the intended audience for this letter of warning introduces a jape about the open access, as it were, of sea letters, available to those who would put the news to use and share it in turn. For as it happens, Watkins—having deserted his own ship—establishes on the island a Crusoe-esque parody of terrestrial containment, declaring himself sovereign over the island and enslaving men from passing ships, the first of whom is a black sailor. Rather than extending the potential geographi¬ cal and political mobility offered to him by his oceanic location, Watkins doubles back to land-based models of constraint. An incident in Moby-Dick involving oceanic mail exchange likewise underscores Melville’s Derridean emphasis on the morbidity of letters at sea rather than their circulatory potential. In “The Jeroboam’s Story,” the Pequod encounters a plague-beset whaleship whose crew is in thrall to a lu¬ natic sailor who fashions himself a prophet—the archangel Gabriel, in fact. This is the Jeroboams story: Gabriel had commanded his shipmates not to hunt the white whale, but when the chief mate, Macey, risked doing so, Moby Dick swept him from the boat with a flick of its tail, killing him. In the Jeroboams aborted gam with the Pequod , Gabriel warns Ahab, in turn, to beware the white whale. At this moment, incongruously, Ahab recalls that in his letter bag he has some correspondence for an officer of the Jeroboam. “Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans,” Ishmael narrates. DEAD LETTER RECKONING 203 “Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are onlv received after attaining an age of two or three years or more.” The letter that is retrieved from Ahab’s letter bag is “sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin.” Its mossiness is a sign of its relative immobility; Ahab’s letter bag has not been in circulation but has instead accrued the moisture of oce¬ anic spaces without their fluidity of exchange. Even in the open sea this is a dead letter: “Of such a letter,” Melville writes, “Death himself might well have been the post-boy.”' 2 And such is the case, as it happens. The single letter that Afiab holds for th t Jeroboam is addressed to the mate Macey, dead by the flukes of the white whale. When Ahab tries to deliver it to the ship despite its absent recipient, the letter attached to a long pole to escape contagion from plague, the cracked archangel Gabriel shriekingly manages to cast the letter back aboard the Pequod, telling Ahab that he himself is bound where Macey has gone. The letter for Macey lands back with AJiab: a dead letter for a death-marked monomaniac. .Ahab’s attempt to circulate the letter, that is, ends with it returned to hand or, literally, to foot, as it falls at his ivory leg—the limb removed from Ahab’s own body’s circulation. For Melville, letters at sea are always not arriving. Yet this is not the experience of other mariners, who hunger for absent letters but do not foreclose on the eventuality of their delivery. If we con¬ sider Melville’s postal pessimism within the context of the countervailing practices and views offered by other sailors, we arrive at a different oceanic order of correspondence. The long establishment of the Galapagos Islands as a nautical watering spot and meeting place—given their relative fixity within the seascape—made them anomalous as a site for seafaring postal exchange. More common would be for ships to exchange letters with other ships or pick up letters in port, in the hope that a given port would have re¬ ceived letters that presumed that that particular ship would indeed have arrived at that particular port. While this method may have been extraor¬ dinarily conditional and serendipitous, the majority of sailors spend little to no time lamenting letters that might have been lost or cast astray. In¬ stead they focus on the gratification to be had from their delayed and peri¬ patetic arrival. William Whitecar, aboard a whaler, records the pleasures of receiving news both via letters and in the form of periodicals: “By the ship Alexander, I received letters from home; and although nine months old, they were heartily welcome.... Such events are the oases in our desert. Newspapers were also sent to me; and I read them completely through, ad¬ vertisements and all, with a degree of attention I had never before bestowed 204 CHAPTER FOUR on a printed sheet.”’ 3 Walter Colton, aboard a U.S. Navy ship, describes his shipmates’ reaction to an unexpected encounter with a homebound whale ship: “All pens were now put in motion to dispatch letters home. Go where you would, fore or aft, nothing was to be heard but the scratch of these pens.... How they can carry paper in their clothes-bags is more than I can explain.... Each seemed lost in thoughts of the surprise and pleasure which the letters he had thus unexpectedly been able to send back would awaken.”’"* Other sailors dealt more strategically with the attenuation and contingency of nautical mail. The captain of J. Ross Browne’s whale ship, devoted to his wife and children, spent an hour every forenoon reading a package of letters written by his wife to entertain him during his long voyage; and every night he regularly wrote her an account of the proceedings of the day, signed and directed as if for the mail. This arrangement, dictated by affection, brought the devoted couple in mutual communion. While thus sepa¬ rated, the wife had all the letters of the preceding voyage to read, and the husband all those interesting little details of domestic life which had transpired during his previous absence, to make up for the deprivation of being separated from those he loved.” The chronometric slide in the calendar they keep does not sour the cor¬ respondence between the captain and his wife, for whom terrestrial time scales are not relevant. Even in the absence of ship-to-ship encounters at which to exchange letters, sailors keep generating material. Aboard the uss Constitution , the anonymous author of Life in a Man-of-War laments that only twice in twenty-six months had his ship received dispatches; neverthe¬ less, he writes, “month after month, our letter bags for the United States were swelled to an enormous magnitude. ”’ 6 The sailor’s tenuous link to the wider social body he has left behind seems to supersede, temporarily, the promise of oceanic fraternity. On the Nares Arctic expedition, a relative of one of the officers had con¬ trived to create a Christmas card for each sailor on board, which were then held in reserve until the holiday; in order to simulate postal exchange—“to make it appear as if they had been actually delivered through the post”— the benefactor had affixed “a second-hand postage-stamp” to each enve¬ lope, enacting a fantasy that overwrites the dead status of Arctic letters. 5 This fantasy encounters the atemporal status of polar ecomedia too. The nautical posting of letters maintains a pragmatic eventuality in addition to an affective or metaphysical one: because they are not restricted to the DEAD LETTER RECKONING 205 private circuit, the mail’s “openness” is defined both in terms of time and the multiplicity of participants involved in the transmission of letters. A different fantasy of receipt is at play in the account that Robert Peary gives of a postcard to his wife that he inscribes upon reaching the North Pole, or at least the postcard that he supposedly writes at the moment of his now- discredited claim to have reached the Pole. He is very busy at the North Pole, Peary explains: “I found time, however, to write to Mrs. Peary on a United States postal card which I had found on the ship during the winter.” The message: 90 North Latitude, April 7th. My dear Jo, I have won out at last. Have been here a day. I start for home and you in an hour. Love to the “kidsies.” “BERT.’ 58 Josephine “Jo” Peary (a polar explorer and successful author in her own right) received the North Pole postcard in Sydney, at the other end of the world. The fact of its delivery, for insouciant “Bert,” confirms his North Polar claims. Other Arctic voyagers wrote and occasionally received correspondence, although the deposit points tended to be in the small port towns along Baffin Bay, which was trafficked by whalers and traders. The orders to Ed¬ ward Belcher from the British Admiralty stipulated that he was “invariably, should any opportunity offer, to leave letters for us at such places as Cape \X arrender, Ponds Bav, etc., provided no delay be incurred thereby.”' 9 Fran¬ cis Leopold McClintock was so eager to collect any letters waiting for him in Godhavn, Greenland, upon the Fox expedition’s return trip that they rousted the inhabitants from bed at 3:00 a.m., “demanding our letters, but great indeed was our disappointment at finding only a very few letters and two or three papers, and these for the officers only!” 60 Weather and ice con¬ ditions naturally affected mail delivery, and a report from the Nares expedi¬ tion displays some anxiety about how best to weigh the dispersal or storage of letters against the environmental challenges: “As in the present condi¬ tion of the straits and at this early season it was impossible to know what our future proceedings would be, or even if we could again visit the cape, and, moreover, the despatches not being in duplicate, I considered it for the best to land now the only loose letters which seemed to comprise some 206 CHAPTER FOUR for nearly every member of the expedition, and to reserve the sealed bags until the landing party returned with further information.” 61 The tempo¬ rary post drop proved successful, and the Nares expedition was later able to use the spot to collect correspondence that had been delivered by a separate tender, even though a notice from the “Postmaster-General” aboard ship cautioned that there was “some uncertainty whether the letters will reach their destination.” 62 When it was discovered that a search party “had found a mail,” the “feelings of all on board were not to be easily-described.... After the first exclamations of pleasure and surprise not a word was spoken until the mail-bags were sorted and the lucky ones received their budgets of news.” 63 Robert McClure of the Franklin search ship HMS Investigator acknowledges, “Communication by post from this region of the globe is rather unprecedented, but nevertheless I hope [a letter] will arrive at its destination safely.” His letter had help: McClure wrote to his sister from Mercy Bay in the far northwest of the Canadian Arctic archipelago, and his dispatches ultimately arrived at their destination with the aid of a “skin-clad chief of the tribe fishing at the cape.” 64 The tether between home and the Arctic was more often than not imagi¬ natively constructed in text, however. A mock letter home that appeared as the first contribution of the first number of the Illustrated Arctic News finds a crew member writing to his father. He describes with breathless drama the ship’s imaginary escapes from destruction in the icepack, near-catastrophes that have made him a “wiser, & I trust, a better man.” Thus improved, the sailor recalls “the fact that a small Bill, about £36, is still owing to Tooney in Regent Street” for cigars—might his father satisfy the debt ? 65 In this comic fantasy of connection, we see Arctic hazards reconfigured as the impetus for moral and economic equity. The joke works only if we recognize that this sailor is, in reality, beyond all accounting. I close this chapter with a hauntingly evocative dream about Franklin and Arctic communication recorded in the journal of George De Tong, an American naval officer and North Polar explorer. De Tong commanded the USS Jeannette expedition (1879-81), which also ended in tragedy: the ship was crushed by ice, the crew was separated, and twenty of the thirty-three men perished, including De Tong, although his body and his papers were later recovered by the survivors. Nearly forty-five years after the Franklin venture, De Tong’s North Pole expedition had a wider range of technology at hand, and this factors into the dream experienced by a Jeannette member: DEAD LETTER RECKONING ZO7 The doctor relates a curious dream he had last night. He seemed to be ac¬ companying the survivors of Sir John Franklin’s last expedition on their journey to the Great Fish River, when suddenly he changed his base to this ship’s cabin, and began explaining to Sir John Franklin there present some of our articles of outfit, such as Edison’s electric machine, the ane¬ mometer, and the telephone. Franklin, after listening to the explanations and viewing the articles, tersely remarked, “Your electric machine is not worth a damn, and your anemometer is just the same.” The telephone he seemed to consider a good thing . 66 When Franklin and his party were heading to the Great Fish River in the late 1840s, both historically and in the dream, they were in their final grim hours. The dream-Franklin rejects the utility of both the anemometer (a machine for gauging wind speed) and the electric lights that a young Edison had of¬ fered to the expedition. (Before perfecting the incandescent lightbulb, Edi¬ son had toyed with arc lamps; he gave the Jeannette a series of arc lamps and the hand-cranked dvnamo that De Long found “not worth a damn .”) 6 But it is the telephone, a communication device reaching across time and space, that attracts dream-Franklin. 6 - Prophetically experienced and recorded be¬ fore De Long or the ship’s doctor could imagine their own deaths on the ice, the dream sifts through possible technologies of ecomedia for illuminating and communicating in the darkness and isolation of the Arctic winter. The doctor’s dream nevertheless keeps alive the possibility that a circuit of com¬ munication with the dead will yet remain open. 108 CHAPTER FOUR FIVE INUIT KNOWLEDGE AND CHARLES FRANCIS HALL Teik-ko se-ko'i teik-ko se-koi —Do you see ice? do you see ice? — CHARLES FRANCIS HALL, Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux: Being the Narrative of an Expedition in Search of SirJohn Franklin, in the Years i860, 1861, and 1862 (1865) T he search for Sir John Franklin’s missing ships that began in 1848 con¬ cluded in 2014 and 2016, when the Erebus and Terror were located on the Canadian Arctic sea floor off King William Island and in Terror Bay, respectively. Identifying the ships has been presented as a triumph of technology, in part: sonar, robot submersibles, subaqueous cameras, and marine archaeology all contributed to the find. It is more properly, how¬ ever, a confirmation of the accuracy of Inuit reports on the starving, desper¬ ate men that have circulated for over 150 years, as some accounts (but far from all) have acknowledged . 1 First Nations sailors were instrumental to the Terror find; the ships were eventually found just where the Inuit had repeatedly said they were. From the early searches beginning in the 1840s, various Inuit had told Anglo-American expedition members that they had seen or had heard of abandoned ships, large groups of emaciated men, and mutilated corpses. Arctic whaling captain Thomas Ward of the Truelove , conscripted to the search in 1849, turned over to the Admiralty a map FIG 5.1 — Inuk-drawn map of four iced-in ships. A penciled annotation from a British sailor notes the “track from ship to ship.” Commu¬ nication by the Whale Ships, ADM 7/189. NATIONAL ARCHIVES, LONDON. of four iced-in Western ships drawn bv an Inuk man; the map attracted little interest or attention. The Inuk translator Adam Beck’s 1851 second¬ hand account of a ship fire and massacre of white men was given no weight by the Admiralty, one member commenting, “Adam Beck’s Report is not to be trusted.” 2 Scotsman John Rae, most significantly, returned from the North in 1854 with word of Franklin expedition relics in the possession of the Inuit, who had encountered a large party of struggling white men, or “kabloonas" (Qabluunak), who had lost their ship; the Inuit also reported finding bodies a season later. They noted signs of cannibalism among the corpses, Rae wrote in a letter from the Arctic: “From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative, as a means of sustaining life.”' Skeptics of Rae’s conclusions feared that Franklin’s men had been torn apart by bears or massacred by the Inuit; one of the strongest of these voices was that of Charles Dickens, who characterized Inuit evidence in House¬ hold Words as “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people ."' 1 Rae, who learned from indigenous Arctic tactics, presented evidence from Inuit oral history as well as from the remnants of the expedition, but his reports ZIO CHAPTER FIVE were generally greeted with skepticism, if not hostility or hatred. In making judgments derived from indigenous knowledge that Franklin men may have resorted to cannibalism, Rae might have been seen by the British public as speaking as an Lnuit and therefore unreliable as a commentator on British naval practice. Some observers invoked Franklins harrowing first voyage in 1819 as justification for finding it preposterous that his men would resort to human consumption; although the earlier expedition members had been driven to eating lichen and their shoe leather during a terrible overland crossing to the Coppermine River delta, they allegedly never resorted to cannibalism (even as eleven of the twenty men on the venture died). Frank¬ lin became known for this first voyage as “the man who ate his boots.” The English commander’s own avowed principles were not the only reason Rae received pushback on his reports. A pseudonymous group pamphlet ad¬ dressed what the authors called the “Great Arctic Mystery”: It may suit Dr. Rae’s purposes to insist upon the tragical termination of cannibalism to the career of the Franklin party, but we well remem¬ ber the burst of incredulity, mingled with disgust, which was felt by the public when Dr. Rae s unwarranted conclusion from third-hand Esqui¬ maux evidence was published. For it is important to remember that the intelligence reached Dr. Rae in the thrice-diluted form through his In¬ terpreter, who heard it from the Esquimaux, who heard it from other Natives, who said they had been at the spot where the death of forty of the Franklin party is stated to have occurred. These facts show the traditionary nature of the Esquimaux report, and, considered in connec¬ tion with the conduct of the Natives, who are notoriously addicted to falsehood and deception, naturally lead us to receive the story with very great caution.... All the experience of our Arctic Explorers proves that Esquimaux are not to be trusted . 5 The pamphleteers set out several of the terms that structure this chapter on lnuit knowledge and the newsman-turned-explorer Charles Francis Hall. For one, they characterize indigenous oral communication as “tradition¬ ary,” which here has a negative valence that would not hold in Hall’s own use of the term. “Traditionary” knowledge, by virtue of its orality, must necessarily be passed along by many voices or hands. In referring to lnuit oral history as “traditionary” knowledge, it should be noted, Hall and his contemporaries anticipate a term that has been in use in recent decades among sociologists and other practitioners of what has also been called ethnoecology: TEK, or traditional ecological knowledge, part of a broader INUIT KNOWLEDGE II I body of indigenous wisdom known as TK or IK (traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge). In her work on glaciers and indigenous epis¬ temology Julie Cruikshank defines TK as “tacit knowledge embodied in life experiences and reproduced in everyday behaviour and speech .” 6 For an Anglo-American expeditionary culture that fetishized textual records, Inuit modes of communication were suspect. hi what follows I turn to indigenous circuits of knowledge in the Arctic and the embrace—or rejection—of “traditionary” knowledge by Anglo- American polar expedition members. The Arctic dead letters discussed in chapter 4 adapt Western forms of communication as ecomedia in order to enable the transfer of information in the Far North. Inuit modes of TK, as I explore in this chapter, are variously employed, appropriated, or dismissed by white expedition members. Many members of British and American ex¬ peditions were slow or reluctant to adapt to indigenous modes of Arctic survival (such as wearing furs instead of woven cloth). British and Ameri¬ can scientific and discovery-minded ventures to the northern polar regions were consistently undertaken as if learning about the Arctic and learning from the Arctic were incommensurate modes of knowledge. I focus on an exception: the American explorer and autodidact Charles Francis Hall (1821-1871), who is usually classified as a colorful footnote to (or doomed eccentric within) the history of Anglo-American polar voyaging. A one¬ time newspaper editor in Cincinnati with no prior nautical experience, Hall first went to the Arctic as part of a personal quest to find traces of the lost Franklin expedition. Hall became best known to his contempo¬ raries initially, however, for developing a long relationship with an Inuit couple, Ipiirviq (whose name Hall rendered as Fbierbing) and Taqulittuq (or Tookoolito; the couple was known to the whaling crews of Cumberland Sound as “Joe” and “Hannah”). Hall lived with the Inuit for over seven years, in two- and five-year continuous periods—a singular act for a white, West¬ ern explorer in the mid-nineteenth century. A provocative tension obtains between Hall’s proud amateurism—“If he was enthusiastic in the extreme, there was some method in his enthusiasm," one account puts it—and the broad-based Arctic expertise he adopted from and championed in the Inuit. Hall’s own adventures, sketched briefly here, have had their chroniclers^ His first two expeditions in search of Franklin relics were not voyages in the usual Arctic sense, since Hall traveled without his own ship or crew; instead he hitched rides with other vessels (including a whaler out of Con¬ necticut captained by Sidney Buddington or Budington) and prepared for his own residencies among the Inuit. After his initial two years living on 212 CHAPTER FIVE FIG 5.2 — Hall with Taqulit- tuq and Ipiirviq (or as he spelled their names, Tookoo- lito and Ebierbing). From Hall, Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux, frontispiece. Baffin Island in the same igloo as Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq, Hall returned to the United States in 1862. along with the Inuit couple and their children. They had already been exposed ro the English language and to white West¬ erners when a whaling captain took them across the Atlantic for a two- year visit to England beginning in 1853, where they were given an audience with Queen Victoria (whose response was to note in her journal that the Inuit couple were “her subjects, very curious, & quite different to any of the southern or African tribes”). 9 Hall’s treatment of Ipiirviq and Taqulit¬ tuq while in America was attentive to their value to his future plans, as the third-person narrative of his second voyage attests: “Hall seems to have been carefully mindful of their welfare. ‘Everything,’ he wrote to Captain Budington, ‘must be done to protect the health of these people; the assis¬ tance which I hope to receive from them on my sledge trip is too important for us to relax our exertions to have them comfortable.’” 10 Nevertheless in INUIT KNOWLEDGE 2-13 between his first two Arctic sojourns Hall embarked on a lecture tour and contracted Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum as part of his fundraising lor his second trip north. Such actions were common in an age of ethnographic and scientific racism, even il Hall reconsidered placing the couple on display shortly thereafter. He wrote to Buddington’s wife, “[Barnum] cannot have them again. I do think it would ruin their healths to go through another siege as when they were there. Money would not induce me to run another such risk ol their lives.” 11 Hall therefore, ac¬ cording to the second narrative, “followed the advice of friends in refusing his consent for their presence at any other lectures than his own.” 12 His belated scruples against making Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq into spectacles did not extend to Hall’s own public performances of Arctic authenticity, even as he regretted having outsourced the couple for a paying American public. Although Hall was a relatively agreeable member of the Inuit commu¬ nity in his two northern residencies, he had a more fractious time in the United States and among white sailors. During his second expedition he shot and killed a mutinous member of a whaling crew with whom he had con¬ tracted transport. Bv 1870, however, Hall had established enough polar bona fides that the U.S. Navy entrusted him with command of a state-sponsored North Pole mission, the nation’s first. This disastrous final expedition, on the ship Polaris (1871-73), ended early for Hall: during the mission’s first winter on the ice he was poisoned to death by arsenic at the hands of his own men. Most suspicion rests with the ship’s doctor and Hall’s rival in ex¬ peditionary science, F.mil Bessels. 1 ’ The remaining crew of the Polaris ven¬ ture secured an even more sensational place in polar history when nineteen members were separated from the leaking ship and subsequently endured an extraordinary six months on a diminishing ice Hoe that traveled eighteen hundred miles before their rescue. Among the floe-floating survivors were Taqulittuq and Ipiirviq, the latter of whom (along with another Inuk man, Suersaq or Hans Hendrik) kept the party alive by his skill at seal hunting. All survived the fractured Polaris mission except the murdered Hall. My aim in returning to this sensational history, with a specific focus on Hall’s conception and execution of his first voyage, is to consider how knowledge circulated in the oceanic spaces and indigenous knowledge sys¬ tems of the polar regions, whether through autodidactic, empirical, pro¬ fessional, or intercultural channels. In what follows I discuss how Hall, in his relationship with Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq, mediates not only between U.S. and Inuit histories of Artie expertise but between experiential and speculative modes of knowing as well. The Arctic career of Charles Fran- Z14 CHAPTER FIVE cis Hall is an example of exchanges of knowledge whose circuits are both routine and extravagant within the Arctic regions and without in the long nineteenth century- While this knowledge took many forms, my interest is the narrative accounts of the circulation of knowledge and historiography between Inuit residents of the Arctic regions and white Westerners such as Hall. As his history demonstrates, a complicated relationship existed between forms of nautical epistemology and indigenous knowledge in the Anglo-American experience of polar exploration. Hall’s unusual path to and within the Arctic, guided along the way by Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq, provides a way to think about the place of indigenous knowledge within oceanic models of intellectual circulation. By this I mean that the logic of “discovery,” by which travelers import the structures and terms of under¬ standing of their own cultural and political origin to the space of their ex¬ ploration, had consistently less success in the polar regions than in other geographical places of imperial, colonial, or economic interest. Hall sought to take the Arctic on its own terms, which has constituted his eccentricity from the circuits of Anglo-American polar histories. And yet it is the fact that Inuit lifeways are empirically verifiable as ways of knowing and sur¬ viving in the Arctic that underwrites his expeditionary innovations. Hall’s speculation was to accede to this fact as an experimental possibility. North from Cincinnati Hall was a particularly zealous member of an Arctic-avid public in the late 1850s, a decade of special attention to Franklin’s lost ships and to the polar expeditions launched on their behalf. He was born in New Hampshire but spent his adult life in Cincinnati, where he first ran an engraving business and then edited two newspapers between 1858 and i860, the Cincinnati Oc¬ casional and the Daily Press, for which he wrote much of the noncommer¬ cial content. His education did not go beyond the eighth grade, which sets him apart from many of the men associated with the leadership of polar ventures; Hall was an autodidact, however, and an obsessive diarist, making detailed notes of the books he read . 14 By the late 1850s those books were mostly about Arctic exploration, a topic he featured in his newspaper col¬ umns as well as in his private journals . 15 Hall’s fixation on accounts of polar expeditions reveals more than his own motivations, of course; his interest reflects both the place of Arctic ventures in the popular Anglo-American imagination, as well as the forms of expression they generated. INUIT KNOWLEDGE 2.15 The mid- to late 1850s were an active time in polar narrative publica¬ tion, and in Cincinnati Hall consumed the published voyage narratives that emerged from Anglo-American Arctic travels. In that decade two key pieces of information emerged about Franklin, the first news since his ships’ dis¬ appearance. For one, Rae’s expedition produced not just oral histories of Franklin’s distressed men but a large trove of relics from the ships them¬ selves that were purchased from the Inuit. Rae’s account did not solve the broader mystery of what happened to both ships and the majority of the crew members, and his news about possible cannibalism was scandalous, but Hall took note of the fact that Rae had made use of Inuit knowledge and lifeways in his search. The second evidentiary announcement came in 1859, when Francis Leopold McClintock’s Fox expedition found the first written account left by the Franklin expedition: a cached document uncov¬ ered on King William Island, as chapter 4 describes. Hall interpreted these two significant items of news differently than manv of his contemporaries. In his view, Rae’s report produced hope that mem¬ bers of the Franklin expedition had had not just commerce with the indig¬ enous Arctic residents but also friendly relations that might have extended to the point of rescue, relief, or cohabitation. And while the confirmation of Franklin’s own death was affecting, Hall focused not on the confirmed losses but on how many men were still known to have survived three years into the doomed expedition—by his conclusions from these fragmentary records, as many as 105 of the original 129. His journals and diaries include numerous extracts from travel narratives whose authors had endured inhospitable re¬ gions for extended periods of time, whether polar or otherwise, which Hall apparentlv found promising antecedents for Franklin’s men. In his diary in January i860, for example, Hall noted that the American sea captain James Rilev had survived captivity and sustained deprivation in the North African desert, although his notes exaggerate some aspects of the feat; Hall records Riley as having been enslaved for ten years (it was less than two) and writes that while Rilev had “weighed 240 lbs” before his trials, after his redemption he only “weighed 60” (it was 90, still a shocking drop). 16 Hall followed up his notes on Riley and other travelers with the fol¬ lowing draft declaration in his diary in early i860; it shows his enthusiasm and dedication, which is initially limited only by his theoretical death, then reconsidered as a shorter term of three to four years: Proposal —I, Chas. F. Hall, of Cin.C. do firmly believe that some of the 105 Companions of Sir John Franklin surviving on the 26th day of 216 CHAPTER FIVE April 1848) [sic] are yet living do propose to spend my life the next 3 or 4 years of my life in or in the vicinity of King William Island & that I believe my 1st duty to mankind is to attempt to project an expedition. 1 One of his preparations for this “duty” made the local papers: one evening in Cincinnati Hall equipped himself with a candle, books, and a bottle of water and pitched a tent near the city’s observatory in order to “inure him¬ self to f atigue” and accustom himself to winter exposure. “At eleven o’clock his tent was visited by two Irishmen,” the Daily Press reported, “armed with a shot-gun” and demanding drink. “We are pretty sure,” the paper con¬ cluded, that “Mr. Hall considers that he would not have been worse served by the Esquimaux .” 18 The newspaper’s conflation of the ethnic “Irishmen” with the “Esquimaux” as types both disruptive and comic stages Hall’s mis¬ sion as itself a folly, as his naive camping experiment in the relatively mild Cincinnati winter might seem to reveal. Yet Hall’s preparations, however amateurish, were not naive. He filled journals with excerpts from the writings of earlier polar explorers, as well as with inspirational quotations from his reading. (“ The greatest discoveries have been made by l eaving the beaten path &c going into bv -paths .”) 19 In addition to his research and notes on previous expeditions, he consulted with—and received written endorsements from—the most prominent liv¬ ing Arctic veteran, Israel Isaac Hayes, as well as the benefactor of earlier American Franklin search expeditions, Henry Grinnell, who donated sev¬ eral hundred dollars to his future travels. His wife, whom Hall abandoned along with his children, donated $27 to the expedition. The funding Hall sought more broadly was offered only modestly, however, despite the polite interest his plans; still, he scrupulously acknowledged all contributions, in¬ cluding a single pound of tea offered by one Z. B. Coffin of Cincinnati . 20 In his diary in February i860 Hall laid out five possible prospects for his Arctic mission: first, he would attempt to secure funding for an actual vessel, at an estimated cost of $2,000; the next two options were similarly oriented. His fourth, penultimate option (which he describes as a “last resort”) would be to constitute a joint whaling-exploration venture. Finally, Hall writes—of what would become his actual means of heading north—“see on what terms I can go with [whaling] Capt. Buddington up to Cumberland Inlet .” 21 It must be stressed that this was an unusual and possiblv unheard of approach to polar exploration in the nineteenth century: no other individual seems to have had the idea of mounting a solo trip relying only on the kindness of strangers, not a fully provisioned expedition, and lived to tell of it. And INUIT KNOWLEDGE 217 not just lived to tell: found himself by his third voyage in command of an official U.S. Navy North Pole mission. Hall knew his tactics were uncom¬ mon; as he addressed himself in his diarv on 17 July i860, “What do vou now propose to do? This case may be an exception to the rule.” :: He continued to refine his plans throughout the spring and early sum¬ mer of i860. Hall came to embrace his status as an unencumbered sojourner in the North, with neither a ship nor an expeditionary team, long before his actually becoming one was classified as an eccentric act: “My object is to acquire personal knowledge of the language & life of the Esquimaux, with a view thereafter to visit the Lands of King William, Boothia & Victoria—to endeavor by my personal investigation to determine more satisfactorilv the fate of the 105 Companions of Sir John Franklin, now known to have been living on the 25th day of Apr. i8-|.8.” : ' Significantly his employment of the term “Esquimaux,” the common one in use at the time among whites and sub-Arctic dwellers, would not be one that Hall would retain. While other Arctic travelers might note that the indigenous population in the eastern Canadian Arctic call themselves Inuit, thev generally failed to use that term in their writing beyond ethnographic observation. Hall, on the other hand, adopts “their true designation" the word Inuit, he tells us, “signifying in their language, ‘ the people ,’ as distinguishing them from all foreigners.” (The singular of Inuit is Inuk.) As Hall clarified on a lecture tour after his first voyage, “The term Esquimaux is not known among these people, it being the name given to them by foreigners, which name signifying eaters of raw fish or meat. ” 2- " Dispensing with the ethnographic distance main¬ tained by other polar explorers, Hall explained to his lecture audiences that his accounts of the Inuit would be coextensive with his account of himself: “As, during my five years of sojourn among these people, I adapted myself in all respects to their habits, customs and manner of living, it follows that in describing these, I am describing my own life during that period.”-' The ex¬ tent of this immersion and its public reception is suggested in the two titles under which Hall’s first-person narrative of his initial expedition appeared in England and the United States in 1865. The English edition was entitled Life with the Esquimaux-, the American edition that followed shortly there¬ after, however, was called Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux. The American title has the effect of reinstalling the ethnographic distance that Hall’s actual experience came to eliminate, treating his cohabitation with the Inuit as an act of scientific curiosity. The title also seems to separate Hall’s living conditions from his research when, as we will see, they were one and the same. 218 CHAPTER FIVE Life among the Inuit Hall was involved in the publication only of his first narrative, the sole vol¬ ume that is in his own voice; after his violent death aboard the Polaris, the U.S. Navy compiled the accounts of his second and third voyages in the third person from his scores of notebooks. 26 So anxious was Hall to return to the Arctic after his first voyage, he writes in the preface to Arctic Re¬ searches, that “the last page ol the manuscript was written on the morning of my embarkation’’ on the second voyage (iii); it was datelined “on board bark Monticello, bound for the Arctic Regions” (iv). His exuberant writing style in his private journals and in his first-person narrative is very different from that of most polar voyagers, whose approaches tended to be sober and scientific. Indeed the two third-person narratives compiled posthumously by the U.S. Navy are far more restrained in the material they quote from Hall’s notebooks. Published Arctic narratives of the nineteenth century focused not on the personal reactions of expedition members to the re¬ gion’s unfamiliar conditions but on documenting the missions’ scientific, exploratory, or hydrographic aims. Many include extensive appendices (or supplementary volumes) of records of observations on the temperature, the magnetic “dip,” Arctic fauna, and the solar, lunar, and ocular distortions produced by polar latitudes. The inner lives of the expeditions warrant only a handful of pages in typical polar narratives; this is consistent with the broader nineteenth-century genre of the disinterested travelogue by the scientific-minded observer. Hall, by contrast, based his conclusions not on a preponderance of data but on enthusiasm and a kind of scientific relativity. On spotting an iceberg for the first time, he stages the drama of the encounter: “Then it was we met. Iceberg was silent; I too was silent” (36). He conveyed the relative meaning of Arctic cold for various north¬ ern travelers, for example, not by taxonomic charts, but by observations such as the following: “In the Arctic regions one seldom or never hears any remark made with regard to its being cold: this staple topic of con¬ versation is thus entirely lost to the Inuits.” 2 And yet Taqulittuq’s time in the United States and England gave her a relative sense of what cold could mean; at one point during Hall’s second expedition, she “expressed a wish that the lady who told her at the Brooklyn fair in New York that Innuits ought to dress like ladies in the States, could herself take a min¬ ute’s walk only at this time over the hill near by, when she would be very glad to change her fine hat and hoop-skirts for any one of an Innuit’s rough dresses.” 28 INUIT KNOWLEDGE 2I 9 ' WVJ'VWv { yyjL.»J^f\r *VW^ ^ JVtt -vwvvw 7 S^ . yv i* \ n v • % tint tU 7 03 ^ Vyv\J^4 ^ ^ ^ v ‘"I l^T J^^wJCS0Vw> (YyvrVv-V^^ ^3 V\a^ Wfe ^^rV*W<^ oWv^ ib\ Avvit rvw A\^vk ^ 5 k\ w^^^S-C \u>vw>l i^A ^'i\, (?w M » / V ^ teyy ^4 ^l^yirvy^ J ^ ^ fVwW— ^AW'" FIG 5.3 — “Nacure on a spree,” Charles Francis Hall, 013 Journal, Vol. II, July 1860-November i860. Charles Francis Hall Collection, national museum of AMERICAN HISTORY, ARCHIVES CENTER, WASHINGTON, DC. Hall approached the polar regions and standard nautical practices with a version ol the gonzo journalism he had practiced while a newspaper editor in Cincinnati. Upon first observing the maritime visual distortion called “looming, for example, Hall wrote ol it, in a stvle typical ol his narrative: “This relracdon? It was Nature turne d inside out! Nature turned topsv- turvev!! nature on a spree!!! Yes, Nature on a spree!” (87). He recog¬ nized that this style (the typography and emphases of which he retains in the published narrative when quoting Irom his own journals, including the mo¬ ment just quoted) was a departure Irom the generic conventions ol polar expedition accounts, writing in the introduction to his Arctic Researches , “This book is to be a work ol narrative and adventure, and not one ol ar¬ gument and discussion” (xvii). In the absence ol a scientific or navigation team—usually a given on polar expeditions—Hall had to record all his own observations with “a knowledge sell-acquired. He trusts that “readers will be able to see, as thev move onward with me through my narrative, how difficult it was—alone, and with no other pair of hands, no other mind, no other thought, sense, or perception but my own—to record, day by day, the occurrences that came under my eve (xvii). The whaling voyage on which Hall arranged transport was captained by Sidney Buddington, an experienced Arctic whaler who had brought back to his Connecticut home an Inuk man he called Kudlago (possibly Kallaarjuk, 120 CHAPTER FIVE writes Kenn Harper). 29 Unlike rhe representation by white writers of Qala- sirssuaq (who was taken aboard the Franklin search ship Assistance in 1850, as chapter 2 details), in Hall’s account Kudlago was not an awestruck naif or “primitive” when introduced to Western forms of technology or knowl¬ edge. “He looked upon the works of civilization with interest, but never with wonder,” Hall reported. “The first time he saw a locomotive no words escaped his lips, nor did he exhibit any signs but what were consistent with the idea of his having seen the same a thousand times before” (40). When later riding a train, Kudlago observed that the passengers given a broad¬ sheet by an urchin held the circular up to their faces to read it; the Inuk man “held his up before his eyes and appeared to read. Though he could not read a word, yet he looked learned” (40). Hall’s early exposure to an Inuk man who had been able to play the part of moving between cultures with facility helped shape the Cincinnatian’s later engagement with the indigenous populations in the Far North—even though Kudlago himself did not survive the encounter. Hall planned to employ him as his guide and interpreter, but Kudlago died of a respiratory ailment during the voy¬ age from New London to Baffin Island. Even the raw liver and heart of an eider duck, provided to him by concerned whale men, failed to revive him. Hall read “appropriate exhortations from the ‘Masonic Manual’” over his sea burial (41), but did not otherwise mystify the Inuk’s experience, which struck him with force. (In his journal, in large letters filling a third of the page, Hall wrote, “Death has been among us! ‘Cudlango’ is dead!!”) 30 Kud- lago’s haunting final words, according to Hall, were “Teik-ko se-ko? teik-ko se-ko ?—Do you see ice? do you see ice?” (41). Kudlago had hoped to arrive home and be reunited with his family; the absence of ice along the Labra¬ dor coast underscored his distance from his Far Northern home. Hall would come to rely on and learn from other Inuit, several of whom had experience with other U.S. and European expeditions. Here again Hall distinguished himself from most other white explorers, as he looked to forge new social connections rather than recur to a contractual relationship with the handful of experienced go-betweens in Greenland villages. The couple with whom Hall would share much of his Arctic time in intimate quarters, Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq, served him primarily as hunter and translator, respectively. Yet when Hall first meets Taqulittuq, as he records it in his journal, the encounter was shocking not for its ethnographic difference but for its familiarity: November 2, i860. About IX this morning, while intently engaged in my little cabin writing, I heard a soft, sweet voice “Good morning, sir!” The INUIT KNOWLEDGE 221 tone in which it was spoken, musical, lively, & varied, told me instantly that a lad v of refinement was here, greeting me! Was I dreaming? No—I was wide awake—&i writ i ng ! Was I mistaken? ... Who should it be but a Lady Esquimaux?... Whence came this civilization refinement? 31 Taqulittuq’s “refinement” and her fluency in English (thanks to her trip to England and her encounters with the Arctic whaling crews) was shocking to Hall in their first meeting, even though he had already been told of the Inuk woman by Buddington. In his inclusion of this diary entry—slightly and insignificantly revised—in his published voyage narrative, however, Hall does not position the encounter in its linear, temporal place, which, like most travel and exploration writing, is the form Arctic Researches takes. Instead he includes this first meeting as an anecdotal aside much later in the book, hundreds of pages after the reader has already been given extensive evidence of Taqulittuq and her Arctic accomplishments. We see here that Hall is not interested in staging her “civilization” or “refinement" as foremost or sensational in his narrative account. Instead his primary em¬ phasis is on what he learns from her in their conversations and shared acts of polar sustenance during Hall’s cohabitation with her and Ipiirviq. In this and other ways Hall emphasizes the difference in his methods from those of other polar travelers, tactics he developed on his first trip and continued to modify for his second: “I shall not, like previous explor¬ ers, set my foot on shore for a few days or weeks, or, like others, journey among men whose language is to me unintelligible. I shall live for two or three years among the Esquimaux, and gain their confidence; and I have the advantage of understanding the language, and of making all my wishes known to them” (iv). Yet the tone of the published narrative, which makes an argument for how “patiently [he] acquired the language and familiarized [himjself with the habits of the Esquimaux” (iii), has a calmness of reflec¬ tion that his journal entries made on the spot do not evince, hi his initial Arctic residence Hall was early exposed to the raw meat diet of the Inuit, which has vital antiscorbutic qualities but was deemed repulsive by most whites (who, in consequence, suffered greatly from scurvy). Hall wrote in his diary on io November i860: I therefore et abundantly of frozen whale! Let those who will think evil of it—one thing is certain, neith er mv conscien ce or—S tom ach con¬ demned the deed! The fact is, to effect the purpose I have at heart—to carry out such what I have motivation to perform—to visit King Wil¬ liams Land & lands adjacent—to continue Sc complete the History of in CHAPTER FIVE Sir John Franklin & his manned Expedition, I must lear n to live as Es¬ q uimaux do! To carry out this Mission, I shall “eat to live,” discarding al¬ together the common idea—at least for three years—of “living to eat”! 32 The force of revelation was strong with Hall, and he took up Inuit ways with the zeal of the convert. This interest was reciprocated; on Baffin Island, where they had taken up residence, Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq treated Hall as kin, as he describes after witnessing a healing ceremony: “This people, know¬ ing that I did not make fun of them or taunt them for believing as they do, had confidence in me.... It is against their customs to have any but the family present, but hitherto I have always had access to their meetings.” 33 His embrace of indigenous means of survival was what most charac¬ terized him to his contemporaries as eccentric. The editors of his posthu¬ mous second expedition narrative, for example, find it odd that Hall would choose an igloo over a ship for his winter residence: “Strange as it might seem to any one but Hall... he still lived in his snow hut, in daily sight and sound of the [whaling] ships, which were now comfortably housed for the winter.... He would not depart from his rough Arctic diet.” 34 This strangeness (or what we can call Halls polar method) may simply have been ex-centric , emerging from a sphere beyond the social and political centers of Western culture, for Hall’s interest in Inuit culture and practices formed the basis for his significant education about survival in the polar regions, which distinguished him from other, more celebrated but less successful explorers (the Briton Robert Falcon Scott in the South first and foremost). While British and American polar expeditions would hire Inuit hunters or guides, they routinely resisted adaptation to indigenous means for Arc¬ tic survival—slow to learn the use of sled dogs, for example, and relying on the hugely debilitating practice of “man-hauling” sledges. (Other than Hall, exceptions include the Scotsman John Rae, the American Frederick Schwatka, and the Canadian Vilhjamur Stefansson.) The outfitting lists drawn up by white captains detail stores of flannel shirts, knitted frocks, worsted stockings, cloth boots, Welsh wigs (wool caps), and comforters, in one example from Horatio Austin; still, that particular Briton recognized that a “sealskin jumper” would be “much preferable” to a wool jacket, “being longer, less bulky and cumbrous, much lighter and impervious to wind, snow, or wet. I would suggest that dressed sealskin be purchased from the Es¬ quimaux for this purpose, and made up on board.” 3 ' Hall’s peculiarity within the history of Anglo-American polar exploration lay in his embrace of native lifeways. Yet his more significant departure from Western tradition can be INUIT KNOWLEDGE 223 found in his no less strong embrace of Inuit scientific, historical, and hydro- graphic observation. “Traditionary” History Hall privileged Inuit hydrographic knowledge—what we would today call tek, or traditional ecological knowledge—over long-standing Anglo- American charts and beliefs. One ol the first revisions he made to Arctic hydrography on the basis of Inuit experience concerned the question of the form taken by the body of water on Baffin Island known to Westerners as Frobisher Strait, after the explorer who had sailed sixty miles up it in 1576. Nearly three hundred years later, Hall recorded the error of this judgment: ‘“ Frobisher Strait,’ so called, does not exist , according to my firm belief! I have had from intelligent Esquimaux travellers” that it is a bay. 36 Hall included in his published narrative several maps and other forms of Inuit ecomedia, including one of Frobisher Bay “drawn bv Koopernktmg while we were at Cape True, 1861" (583). Experiential observation was the order of Hall’s Arctic residency. “On one occasion, when I was speaking with Tookoolito concerning her people,” Hall recorded, “she said, ‘Innuits all think this earth once covered with water.’ I asked her why she thought so. She answered, ‘Did you never see little stones, like clams and such things as live in the sea, away up on the mountains? ” (572). Inuit experiential knowl¬ edge translates to geological and paleontological interpretive conclusions on an oceanic scale. Recall that Hall had come north seeking information on Franklin and his crew, whom he believed might have survived if they had, themselves, embraced Inuit subsistence practices. In his second expedition Hall did, in fact, uncover more Franklin relics as well as an Inuit narrative of contact with the expedition; when meeting with natives in Pelly Bay, Kok-lee-arng-nun, their head man, showed two spoons which had been give to him by Ag-loo-ka (Crozier), one of them having the initials F.R.M.C. stamped upon it. His wife, Koo-narng, had a silver watch- case. This opened up the way for immediate inquiries. Through Too- Koo-li-too who as usual soon proved a good interpreter, it was learned that these Innuits had been at one time on board of the ships of Too- loo-ark, (the great Esh-e-mut-ta , Sir John Franklin), and had their tupiks 124 CHAPTER FIVE [sealskin summer tents] on the ice alongside of him during the spring and summer. They spoke of one ship not far from Ook-kee-bee-jee-lua (Pelly Bay), and two to the westward of Neit-tee-lik, near Ook-goo-lik. Kok-lee-arng-nun was “a big boy when very many men from the ships hunted took-too [tuktu, or caribou]. They had guns, and knives with long handles, and some of their party hunted the took-too on the ice; killing so many that they made a line across the whole bay of Ook-goo- lik.” The Pelly Bay men described the Esh-e-mut-ta 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 (spec¬ tacles, as Too-koo-li-too interpreted it), was quite lame, and appeared sick when they last saw him. He was very kind to the Innuits;—always wanting them to eat something. 3 The description is a good likeness of the portly, sexagenarian Franklin. Among the native communities on Baffin Island Hall found a compelling story of several survivors within the repository of indigenous historical memory. What he learned from his companions was that “strangers” had come among them, strangers described as white men. Hall distinguishes what he calls the Inuits’ “traditionary” oral history from “written” history and finds that this information, as well as other Inuit memories of “strang¬ ers,” rhymed with written records of expeditions going back hundreds of years. While Hall did not travel far from Frobisher Bay, he did learn some¬ thing crucial about Martin Frobisher’s expedition to Baffin Island in 1576, which the Inuit talked about as if it had just happened. At one point in Arc¬ tic Researches Hall asks a community elderwoman about the reports he is hearing of lost vessels (which he originally thought referred to Franklin). The elder tells him that the community recalled multiple ships: “First two, then two or three, then many—very many vessels.” In his dawning realization that this account does not refer to Franklin’s voyage of two ships but to an earlier and larger expedition, he consults a history of Arc¬ tic discovery he had brought with him: Turning to the account of Frobisher’s voyages, I read what had been given to the world by means of writing and printing, and compared it with what was now communicated to me by means of oral tradition. Written history tells me that Frobisher made three voyages to the arctic regions as follows: 2 - 2-5 INUIT KNOWLEDGE First voyage in 1576, with two vessels. Second voyage in 1577, three vessels. Third voyage in 1578, fifteen vessels. Traditionary history informs me that a great many, many years ago the vessels of white men visited the bay (Frobisher’s) three successive years: First, in two vessels. Second, in three vessels. Third, in many vessels. (179) Hall makes a pointed distinction between the knowledge that circulates in the world by means of “writing and printing” and the knowledge gained by oral or “traditionary” history, or TK. Western explorers too often dismissed oral histories of encounters in the polar regions throughout the nineteenth century, even as they drew from Inuit geographical knowledge. Anglo- Americans also consistently misunderstood and even destroyed the infor¬ mational cairns called Inuksuit that are used by the Inuit and other north¬ ern people to navigate the land- and waterscape (“Inuksuk” [sing.] means “that which acts in the capacity of a human ”). 38 Hall continues his account by recognizing the value of Frobisher’s own embrace of Inuit hospitality and knowledge, which enabled his crew’s sur¬ vival of at least one Arctic winter ashore: But this is not all that traditionary history gave me on that day. Writ¬ ten history states that Frobisher lost five of his men on his first voyage when conveying a native on shore. Oral history told me that five white men were captured by Innuit people at the time of the appearance of the ships a great many years ago; that these men wintered on shore (whether one, two, three, or more winters, could not say); that they lived among the Innuits; that they afterward built an oomien (large boat), and put a mast into her, and had sails; that early in the season, before much water appeared, they endeavored to depart; that, in the effort, some froze their hands; but that finally they succeeded in get¬ ting into open water, and away they went, which was the last seen or heard of them. This boat, as near as I could make out at the time, was built on the island that Frobisher and his company landed upon, viz., Niountelik. (279-80) Upon the conclusion of the woman’s testimony, Hall wondered “if such facts concerning an expedition which had been made nearly three hundred years ago can be preserved by the natives, and evidence of those facts ob- 226 CHAPTER FIVE rained, what may not be gleaned of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition of only sixteen years ago?” (280). Fie feels “great astonishment” at the Inuit “pow¬ ers of memory, and the remarkable way in which this strange people of the icy North, who have no written language, can correctly preserve his¬ tory from one generation to another” (281). Such modes of knowing were outlandish to Hall’s Anglo-American contemporaries; in a testimonial used to publicize his lecture tour in between his first two expeditions, for example, a Yale professor emphasized the difference between written and experiential knowledge: “Mr. Hall possesses much knowledge not found in books—the fruits of his own experience.” 39 In a region that had been seen as outside of history (as indigenous or “primitive” peoples often have been) in the particularity of its inhospitableness to colonial settlement or territorial claims, such knowledge creates a world whose circuits oscillate beyond Western evidentiary understanding, much less time and space. This world is oceanic both materially and conceptually, in the sense that its forms of circulation are independent of (or indifferent to) political or doctrinal boundaries. These collaborations were long-standing. Neither the elder who con¬ veys information about the centuries-earlier Frobisher voyage nor Ipiirviq and Taqulittuq were the first Inuit to assist Western expeditions. William Edward Parry and John Ross had relied on native knowledge during their 1820s British expeditions. And not just the knowledge: in several notable cases Inuit collaborators provided the hydrography and illustrations of their encounters as well. The information they provided, however, was treated mostly as a curiosity by the British Admiralty and Anglo-American geographers and hydrographers. Taqulittuq’s abilities in this regard were compared by the U.S. Navy editors who posthumously compiled the narra¬ tive of Hall’s second voyage to those of the Inuk woman who had assisted Parry decades earlier: “Too-koo-li-too showed an unexpected knowledge of the geography of her country, reminding Arctic students of the native woman Iligliuk, and of her chart drawn for Parry.” 413 But even as Iligliuk and Taqulittuq served as translators both of language and of geography, their native knowledge did not translate outside of the North on its own terms; that is, it registered as a curious aside rather than as constitutive to Arctic life. In a similar vein, the carved, wooden, three-dimensional coastal maps used by Greenlandic Inuit when kayaking were valued for their aesthetics rather than their utility when compared to written charts. INUIT KNOWLEDGE 227 FIG 5.4 — Part of Greenland Coast (and Islands), Kunit fra Umivik (Inuit, Greenland), 1884. Wood. Greenland NATIONAL MUSEUM AND ARCHIVES, NUUK. Polar Orientations The example of Hall brings into relief the terms of the ongoing popular fascination with the Arctic and Antarctica, regions that historically have been considered nonnational spaces but that have nevertheless also been the ongoing object of nationally sponsored scientific and exploratory mis¬ sions. The knowledge produced and circulated by and around such expedi¬ tions, in turn, has found purchase in both national and nonnational units of inquiry. What does the example of the “amateur” Charles Francis Hall tell us about the possibilities and limits of “native” knowledge of the poles compared to knowledge generated by national or professionally scientific Western missions? In the afterlife of Hall’s expeditions his gleanings from “traditionary” history were rejected in favor of a narrative of contact that 218 CHAPTER FIVE for centuries preferred the seeming blankness of the ice to an articulate in- digeneity. It was Hall’s very estrangement from Anglo-American, Western modes of scientific exploration that enabled his inhabitation of TK or TEK and other native forms of epistemology and survival. I have traced the cir¬ cuits of indigenous knowledge retold, rejected, and reimagined in the pe¬ riod after Hall’s Arctic residence as a way to consider the potentialities of the polar ecomedia and TEK for our moment of climate extremity today, in which present-day Inuit experience of climate change is not a quirk or cu¬ riosity for later confirmation by Western science, but the reverse. Hall’s his¬ tory resides not within national traditions of exploration of historiography but within indigenous and oceanic histories of the dispersal and collection of knowledge. A final example of Hall’s divergence from expected modes of polar travel and exploration underscores the value and broader applicability of both his own epistemological practices and polar and oceanic modes of knowledge production. Even within a tradition of voluminous polar expeditionary narrative production, Hall is exceptional. In his years in the Arctic he filled over 250 extant journals (a handful of which are seen in figure 5.5), and we know from the narratives of former shipmates that many more were lost or destroyed (whether by Hall himself or by the officers on the Polaris voyage on which he was murdered). 41 His excess of writing, in all its forms, can be seen as a way to inscribe something upon a landscape that is hostile to permanent records. Shifting ice, extreme weather, and frozen ground make unreliable the forms of inscription customary to voyages of discovery or imperial ventures. On the other hand, the cold and aridity helped preserve bodies and other organic remnants for decades or centuries longer than a temperate climate would—as it preserved Halls own body, intact enough to test for arsenic poisoning a century after he died. Most polar expeditions left written records in cairns, in multiple iterations so as to maximize the possibility of their being found. Since his first two Arctic trips were not tethered to any expeditionary crew or patron, Hall did not himself practice constant cairning but instead made monuments of his own excess of writing. Hall was attentive to the technological production of texts, of informa¬ tion, of the demands of polar ecomedia. In addition to the many scores of notebooks he kept while winterbound, he engaged in other meticulous acts of literary practice, including making typographical corrections to a copy of Nathaniel Bowditch s famous Practical Navigator, which he passed along to the volume’s publisher upon his return to the United States. 42 He worked on solutions to the problem of frozen ink in temperatures that reached 70 INUIT KNOWLEDGE 229 FIG 5.5 — Thirty-eight small notebooks with notes of sledge journey to Ig-loo-lik and back, Feb. to June 1868. Charles Francis Hall Collection, Collection 701, Box 11, Folder IOO. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, ARCHIVES CENTER, WASHINGTON, DC. degrees below zero; the ink was stored in “a deposit of icy ink-blocks outside of the igloo-, slices from these were chipped off, crushed and thawed inside.” He developed an ingenious system of writing upon heated metal plates: I have before me a lamp with two wicks kept constantly burning. The brass sheets are 10 inches each by 5; and while one is heated the other, which has been made hot, is under the leal on which I write, warming it; this, in turn, keeps my fingers warm and the ink from freezing in the pen, and dries the writing. Changing the plates after writing on each half a dozen lines, I am able to make up my journals, the thermometer at my side showing 41 0 below the freezing point. It is a plan of my own. 43 “It is a plan of my own”: such might be the alternative title to the story of Charles Francis Hall. But as I have been arguing, the plans that Hall made and enacted were always emergent from collectivities of knowledge, initially from the published narratives of previous Arctic voyagers and ultimately from shared Inuit knowledge. This latter indigenous knowledge, too, was as much a part of a technological production of experiential know¬ ing as the histories of Anglo-American exploration. Hall’s life with the Esquimaux functioned as a mechanism for generating narratives, however ephemeral, that are parallel to the epistemological tasks of science. Hall’s fractiousness—his survival and then nonsurvival—are ultimately subordi¬ nate to his seeminglv indiscriminate but actually exceptionally discerning ability to collate ecomedia and “traditionary” knowledge from circuits on an oceanic scale. 2.30 CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH Over the eons of time the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents. — rachel Carson, The Sea around Us (1951) I n September 2018 I was scheduled to join an Arctic expedition sailing through the Northwest Passage. The warm open polar sea of nineteenth- century speculation has become a reality: once unattainable, the Passage has been transformed by anthropogenic climate change into ice-free open water in many recent summers. Northwest Passage Project expedition members included STEM students, scientists, and a documentary film crew; I signed on to be the ship’s “Arctic humanities scholar” during the venture’s second leg as we explored the effects of climate change on the Far North and the Northwest Passage with the support of the National Science Foundation and a collection of university and museum partners. In prepa¬ ration for the Arctic expedition, I recorded a webinar on ice in the Western imagination and closely followed the science team’s extensive preliminary work surveying contemporary student and public knowledge on climate change and the Arctic regions. On the morning of the second day of the expedition, the ship—the Finnish-built Akademik Ioffe , an ice-strengthened cruise ship sailing under a Russian flag and crew—ran aground in the Canadian Arctic archipelago. After a tense day, all passengers and staff on the listing, compromised ves¬ sel were safely rescued, cruising cancelled for the season. 1 While the cause of the ship’s accident has not been determined as of this writing, less than io percent of the North American Arctic is sufficiently charted, even after half a millennium of exploratory voyages to the region by Europeans and North Americans. There is more than one way for a ship to run aground; this was to be the Northwest Passage Project’s second attempt at Arctic transit, in fact. The voyage was first scheduled to occur in summer 1017, but two months before it launched the contracted tall ship unexpectedly pulled out of the project, and the expedition was postponed a year. 2 As my disappointment in not heading north in 2017 or 2018 began to ease (I live in hope for 2019!), it struck me that the grounded Arctic expedition was another polar cautionary tale: here we were spending years marshal¬ ling resources, recruiting patrons, and laying the scientific and scholarly groundwork, but were thwarted—like centuries of explorers before us—by the capriciousness of polar conditions. Accounting for the persistent insufficiencies of Western methods has historically been one way to gauge the climatic and geographical extremity of the Arctic. Consider the lament made by an open polar sea exponent and Arctic explorer, George De Long: “I frequently think that instead of recording the idle words that express our progress from day to day I might better keep these pages unwritten, leaving a blank properly to represent the utter blank of this Arctic expedition .” 3 De Long’s U.S. Arctic expedition aboard the Jeannette was cataclysmic; the ship was trapped by ice, adrift for two years before being crushed and sunk. De Long was among the twenty men who died of a crew of thirty-two; his journal was preserved by the survivors. The emblematic “blank of [his] Arctic expedition”—swallowed by ice, ruinous—masks the “unfathomable force” of the terraqueous world that seethes beneath the representational text. Like the whiteness of Ahab’s “pasteboard mask” in Melville’s Moby-Dick or the “shrouded human figure” with skin “of the perfect whiteness of snow” that rises from the warm polar South to engulf the travelers at the end of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , De Long’s blank indicates the inadequacy of standard literary forms of textual media to speak for oceanic and polar extremes . 4 In the twentieth century the logic of exploration has been associated with the rationale given by George Mallory for his attempts to ascend Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.” Mallory never returned from his 1924 venture to the summit; his broken body, complete with snow goggles and camera, was identified on the mountain’s ice face in 1999. It is tempting to 2 . 32 - CONCLUSION see Mallory’s corporeal reemergence after more than seventy-five years as a kind of Himalayan dead letter, giving mountaineers and historians new data for the “there” to which the Englishman was seeking access. (And since bodies on Everest cannot effectively be removed, the mountain has become an above-ground frozen graveyard for the hundreds who have died in sum¬ mit attempts in the past century.) The logic of “Because it’s there” registers differently, if it applies at all, in polar terms, however; the “there” is not fixed. The South Pole flag is restaked every year to account for the ice sheet movement that renders the polar marker’s previous Antarctic location ob¬ solete. The North Pole is not on land and thus cannot be flagged at sea level. On 2 August 2007, however, a Russian submarine reached 14,000 feet below sea level at the North Pole and planted a titanium flag on the Arctic seafloor. The flag remains at an invisible remove from the world, seen only through the undersea video taken by expedition members . 5 None of these points are stable other than by the abstraction of longitude and latitude lines; even the magnetic North and South Poles are located several degrees away from the geophysical poles. The vague, shifting locations underscore the ephemeral nature of the polar “there.” Everest too, the great Chomol¬ ungma, is on the move: plate tectonics ensure that Everest is adding—or subtracting—height by a few millimeters a year, and shifting horizontally. Nineteenth-century polar imaginaries of blank spaces, holes in the terres¬ trial verge, or an open polar sea are a kind of polar magical thinking: they are fantasies of circulation that run into trouble because the points of the axis of the spherical globe are ever in retreat. Throughout Tide News at the Ends of the Earth I have discussed ephem¬ eral modes of polar ecomedia created by Arctic and Antarctic expedition members as they sought to represent, in textual form, the space and time of climate extremity. Yet as I have argued, representation alone is often not what constitutes the data of polar ecomedia. Elements of polar ecomedia are rather the shifts, gaps, interrupted circuits, and representative failures that are themselves recorded (whether gathered or memorialized) as a col¬ lection of data. In a moment when human and nonhuman life feels increas¬ ingly ephemeral within the broader scope of planetary climate crisis—even as human actions have propelled these extreme conditions—polar and oce¬ anic perspectives offer representational keys with which we might begin to find conceptual language instrumentalizable to life (and endurance) in the Anthropocene. One template for Anthropocenic accounts is the work of Rachel Car- son, that exemplary theorist of oceanic spaces. In The Sea around Us MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH 2-33 (19S 1 )> Carson is interested in deep time from the perspective of the sea. In a textual instantiation of geology that anticipates Dana Luciano’s work on rocks as Anthropocenic media, she proposes that “the story of how the young planet Earth acquired an ocean ... is founded on the testimony of the earth’s most ancient rocks .” 6 In a similar vein, the sedimentary layer of the sea floor, which in Carson’s quietly moving image accretes as if the lon¬ gest imaginable snowfall, likewise bears witness, this time in verse: “The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For all is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangement of their successive layers the sediments reflect all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands” (76). Carson reads both the rocks themselves (which present “a sort of epic poem”) and the shifting seas, ice floes, and human and nonhuman matter that surround them. Not a metaphor, “the book of the sediments” (76) provides its own thin leaves to the skilled interpreter, much as ice core samples do for glaciologists and pa- leoclimatologists tracking global warming trends, or atmospheric evidence recorded in the earth’s stratigraphic record does for geologists determining epochs of geological time. Deep time also provides a way for Carson to comment upon con¬ temporary trends in global warming and sea level increases. Consider the cool observational pleasure that she takes in documenting warming tem¬ peratures and rising seas before the mid-twentieth century, when The Sea around Us was published. This tone is characteristic of her luminous yet spare prose; a systems thinker, interested in cycles, Carson notes the func¬ tion of the oceans as a “global thermostat” and finds that “the evidence that the top of the world is growing warmer is to be found on every hand" (i8z). What is more, she writes, “we live in an age of rising seas” (97). This “is an interesting and even an exciting thing because it is rare that, in the short span of human life, we can actually observe and measure the progress of one of the great earth rhythms. What is happening is nothing new” (97). What is arresting about rereading this argument today, when rising seas are pro¬ jected to whelm major world coastal cities within the next hundred years, is in part its seeming prescience. Will soon “the surf... break against the foothills of the Appalachians,” Carson wonders. With a shrug, she says sim¬ ply, “No one can say” (98). What is equally startling to realize about her ris¬ ing seas meditation, however, is that the logic of rhythmic return (“nothing new,” another cycle of planetary time) is also the rejoinder made by climate change deniers (nothing new, natural variability) to the alarms about global 234 CONCLUSION warming raised by the very environmental activists and climate scientists to whose movement, and to whose research, Carson has been foundational. Carson’s cycles recur in the writing of contemporary environmental hu¬ manists. Oceanic forms of thought lend themselves to spiralling notions of time—time understood “not as laminar flow, but as spiral of unforeseen propinquity,” asJeffreyJerome Cohen stipulates. “Water does not periodize like stone or landlocked texts,” Cohen writes. “Its archive eddies, whirls, conveys dangerously, transforms the submerged into the rich and strange.” 8 The Anthropocene demands that we reject linear progression, must look for new models of accounting. In both Carson’s and Cohen’s imagination, inspiration for these new models is found in the medium of water. Water is not an indiscriminately fluid medium, however, as the hydrography of the polar regions underscores. For even in their power, the seas are responsive to the lands that interrupt them. Sea water is salty, for instance, because of terrestrial mineral diffusion and circulation. As Carson explains, “From the moment the rain began to fall, the lands began to be worn away and carried to the sea. It is an endless, inexorable process that has never stopped—the dissolving of the rocks, the leaching out of their contained minerals, the carrying of the rock fragments and dissolved minerals to the ocean.” It is difficult, reading The Sea around Us in the twenty-first century, not to at¬ tach new meaning to Carson’s words: that the leached minerals stand in for oil and gas resource extraction in the Arctic Ocean, or that the frag¬ ments carried to the sea substitute for plastiglomerates or other hybrid bits of organic and inorganic waste, as Stacy Alaimo warns. 9 These very minerals have brought salt to the sea, “and over the eons of time,” Carson writes hauntingly, “the sea has grown ever more bitter with the salt of the continents” (7). The very practices of resource extraction that have helped demarcate the Anthropocene have accelerated the processes by which the salt tang of the seas has become instead something too warm, too polluted, too bitter to contemplate. The seas, human and nonhuman life itself, may be spiraling out of our grasp; do we still we recognize our earth, and the sea around us, as our home? For how much longer will humans exist to call it such? Estranged from the cyclical renewal of an earth that in Carson’s time was in less overtly cataclysmic climate crisis, we now find that we cannot count on an idealized terrestrial home, an engulfing Mother Earth. This does not make our planet an utterly alien one, however; we need to form new relationships to and with it, new forms of stewardship and perspective. I have sought to tell survival stories in TJje News at the Ends of the Earth, even when prospects might seem dim. Historical polar voyagers struggled MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH 2 35 to survive; expedition members battled to subsist, to preserve their records. The polar ecomedia they circulated was largely ephemeral; some examples endure, many do not. The question for humans in the Anthropocene is whether we too can write a survival story while in extremity. Perhaps some of the practices of polar expedition members—their triumphs and mistakes, ves, but also their ecomedia production and reproduction processes—can provide a model and some hope. These are matters of life and death. 2.36 CONCLUSION NOTES Preface 1 Grolier Club, press release, October 2005, author’s collection. 2 Stam and Stam, Books on Ice. I refer to items 2.5, 2.6,10.10, 6.7, 7.7, 6.14. 3 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News. Five numbers were published: 31 Oct., 30 Nov., 31 Dec. 1830, 31 Jan. and 14 Mar. 1831. 4 Illustrated Arctic News 3 (31 Dec. 1830): 31. Introduction Epigraphs: George Simpson, “Fragment of a Manuscript Found by the People of Sirius, when they visited the Earrh during their exploration of the Solar System,” South Polar Times 3.2 (1911): 78; Gilman, Letters Written Home (2 Jan. 1858). 1 R. E. Priestley, “The Psychology of Exploration,” 1, in Priestley Collection, Polar Papers, MS 1097/23. 2 De Long, The Voyage Jeannette, 2:456. 3 See the “private family circle” invoked in the Port Foulke Weekly News of the United States Arctic expedition, or “ our own little circle ” as defined within the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle of William Edward Parry’s first Arctic voyage (empha¬ sis in original). Port Foulke Weekly News 1 (n Nov. i860), 1, New-York Historical Soci¬ ety; New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle , North Georgia Gazette Collection, GB/015/GB, MS 438/12, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. 4 Versions of this question have been raised by a number of scholars. See, for exam¬ ple, Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History”; Larour, “Agency at the Time of the An- thropocene”; Dimock, “ Gilgamesh's Planetary Turn”; LeMenager, “The Humanities after the Anthropocene”; Ghosh, The Great Derangement ; Baucom and Omelsky, “Knowledge in the Age of Climate Change”; Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sustain¬ able That”; and Nixon, Slow Violence and the Enviromnentalism of the Poor. 5 Gitelman, Always Already New, 7. She clarifies that in this sense “structures in¬ clude both technological torms and their associated protocols, and ... commu¬ nication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation.” 6 David H. Stam and Deirdre C. Stam, Grolier Club press release, Oct. 1005, au¬ thor’s collection. 7 “A 5°c Arctic in a i°C World.” 8 Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, “Explorers’ Records Found in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago in i960,” 2.8 Mar. 1961, MG2.4 H47, File 4, Library and Archives Canada/Bibliotheque et Archives Canada. 9 Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, “Explorers Records Found in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago in i960,” appendices A-I, MG24 H47, vol. 1, File 5, Library and Archives Canada/Bibliotheque et Archives Canada. 10 Kane, Arctic Explorations, 1:218. 11 Leane and Miles, “The Poles as Planetary Places,” 271. As New Materialists such as Stacy Alaimo have observed, the environmental is not external to the human. 12 Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, 3, is adapting a trope of embodiment similar to that used by John McPhee. 13 I elaborate on these ideas in my essay “Speaking Substances: Ice.” 14 Estrin, “Photographing Climate Change Refugees.” Indeed, at Ice’, a conference on Arctic art, literature, and science hosted by the Columbia University Society of Fellows, presenters noted with some chagrin that a substantial majority of us included the same now iconic image of a polar bear cub on a dissolving berg men¬ tioned by Estrin. (I was among the guilty.) 15 Bradfield, “Polar Explorer Robert Falcon Scott (1912),” in Approaching Ice, Go. 16 “Police News,” Adelie Mail and Cape Adare Times 1911-12, n.p. [1910-13 Scott] ms 1506, en, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. When Levick and Priestly were not documenting penguin shenanigans, they were writ¬ ing comic poems about the odor of the gas lamp. 17 Russell et al., “Dr. George Murray Levick.’ 18 The photographic negatives were taken by a member of the ill-fated Ross Sea Party, the supply wing of Shackleton’s 1914-17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedi¬ tion; they were located in Scott’s Cape Evans hut in 2013 by members of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. “Ross Sea Party Photos,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, https://wsvw.nzaht.org/pages/ross-sea-party-photos. 19 See “Shackleton’s Whisky,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, https://www.nzaht.org/pages /shackletons-whiskv. I have secured one of the pricey reproductions and have saved it to toast this book’s publication. 20 “Levick’s Notebook,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, https://www.nzaht.org/pages /levicks-notebook. 21 Commenter “Sage-on-the-Hudson,” on Rhodi Lee, “100-Year-Old Notebook Found Encased in Antarctic Ice Is Part of Robert Scott’s Expedition Team," Tech Times, 25 Oct. 2014, http://wsvw.techtimes.c0m/articles/18712/20141025/100 238 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION -year-old-notebook-found-encased-in-antarctic-ice-is-part-of-robert-scotts -expedition-team.htm#disqus_thread. 22. Scott’s hut, Cape Evans, Google Street View, https://www.google.com/streetview /#antarctica/scotts-hut-cape-evans-on-ross-island. Shackleton’s hut on Cape Royds is also available: https://www.google.eom/streetview/#antarctica/shackletons-hut -cape-royds-on-ross-island. 23 Cohen, “The Emancipation of Boyhood.” Emphases in original. 24 Hayes, The Open Polar Sea, 177,178-79. 25 T. W. Edgeworth David, “The Ascent of Mount Erebus,” in Shackleton, Aurora Australis, n.p. 26 “Menu,” British Arctic Expedition 1875-1876, MS 1479, D (Playbills, poems etc., 48 leaves), Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. 27 C. W. Emmerson, “The Arctic Twins,” British Arctic Expedition 1875-1876, ms 1479, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. 28 “King Henry V. (not by Shakespeare),” South Polar Times Contributions (unpub¬ lished), ms 1505/5, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. 29 The project is entitled ISRU [In Situ Resource Utilization] Based Robotic Con¬ struction Technologies for Lunar and Martian Infrastructure. “Nasa Research,” use School of Architecture, https://arch.usc.edu/topics/nasa-research. 30 LeMenager, “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” 221-22. 31 Thoreau, Walden, 397. 32 LeMenager, “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” 221-22. 33 In a long passage in the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau refers to the polar voyages of Martin Frobisher, Charles Wilkes, Sir John Franklin, Elisha Kent Kane, and Henry Grinnell, as well as to the hollow earth theory of John Cleves Symmes. His claim is that “it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone” (577-78). 34 A conversation with Lisa Swanstrom helped me develop these ideas, and I am grateful to her for her insights on ecomedia. 35 An ecomedia studies interest group is a relatively recent addition to the Associa¬ tion for the Study of Literature and Environment, for example, and is engaged in the study of “non-print media as it applies to environmental discourse and action.” asle 2011 Ecomedia Seminar, http://asle-seminar.ecomediastudies.org/Ppage_id =10. For especially strong examples of recent ecomedia studies work see Starosiel- ski, The Undersea Network-, Smith, Eco-Sonic Media-, Peters, The Marvelous Clouds-, see as well the media archaeology work of Parikka ,^4 Geology of Media and What Is Media Archaeology ?-, Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media-, the Dead Media Project of writer Bruce Sterling at http://www.deadmedia.org/. 36 Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 2-3. 37 Gitcimnn, Always Already New, 4-5. 38 Smith, Eco-Sonic Media, 5. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 239 39 Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology?, 5. 40 Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 33. 41 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 1,1. 42 Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 64. 43 In arguing that polar ecomedia might help humans mediate the acceleration and effects of climate change, I have in mind Sean Cubitt’s definition of mediation as “the effervescent commonality of human, technical, and natural processes.” Cu- bitt clarifies, “Mediations are not communications (though all communications are mediated). Mediating does not require messages, nor even senders and receiv¬ ers. ... Mediation names the material processes connecting human and nonhu¬ man events” {Finite Media, 3-4). 44 In specifying that I am speaking/?w« a discipline rather than to a field I am invok¬ ing the call issued by Stephanie Foote and Stephanie LeMenager in their opening manifesto to the journal Resilience (“Editors’ Column,” 2). 45 Chakrabartv, “The Climate ol History,” 215. 46 Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 3, 2. 47 Menelv and Taylor, introduction to Anthropocene Reading, 3,5. 48 Baucom and Omelsky, “Knowledge in the Age of Climate Change,” 2. 49 LeMenager, “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre,” 222, 220. 50 LeMenager, “The Environmental Humanities and Public Writing,” 13. 51 Foote and LeMenager, “Editors’ Column,” 8. 52 His provocative call to arms creates what some reviewers have found to be an un¬ sustainable distinction between what Ghosh in The Great Derangement calls “seri¬ ous fiction” and the manv writers of speculative fiction and other forms of genre writing that have engaged with climate change. Such writing has been called cli-fi, or climate fiction. 53 Foote, “The Stuff of Fiction”; Morton, Hyperobjects. 54 For a trenchant critique of the discourse of sustainability and its appropriation by corporate and neoliberal forces, see in particular Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sus¬ tainable That”: “We may well ask how it is that environmentalism as a social move¬ ment became so smoothly co-opted and institutionalized as sustainability” (359). 35 I have written further about oceanic studies in Blum, “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies” and “Introduction: Oceanic Studies.” See also the Theories and Method¬ ologies cluster on Oceanic Studies in PMLA 125.3 (2010): 657-736. 56 Steinberg, “Of Other Seas,” 165. 57 Steinberg, “Of Other Seas,” 157. 58 Starosielski, The Undersea Network, 6. 59 Warner, “Critique in the Anthropocene.” 60 Starosielski, The Undersea Network, 5. 61 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 38. 62 Starosielski, The Undersea Network, 17. 63 See in particular Paul J. Crutzen’s influential formulation of the term “Anthro¬ pocene” in “Geology of Mankind,” 23, as well as his revised work in, for example, 240 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION Steffen et al., “Anthropocene.” The concept has been especially attractive to hu¬ manists; as Boes and Marshall note in their introduction to a special issue, “Writing the Anthropocene,” in the Minnesota Review, “The ability of the Anthropocene to lodge itself firmly within various cultural forms—from popular media to film, fiction, and television—has far outpaced its scientific accounting” (60). An ear¬ lier date for the onset of the Anthropocene, the year 1610, has been proposed by Simon A. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” which re¬ flects the genocidal impact of European colonization of the Americas. See Dana Luciano’s meditation on this “Orbis hypothesis” in “The Inhuman Anthropocene.” In 2016 the Working Group on the “Anthropocene” of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy proposed to the International Commission on Stratigra¬ phy that the Anthropocene be recognized as a formal geological epoch, succeed¬ ing the Holocene. While the subcommission initially acknowledged that “the beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ is most generally considered to be at c. 1800 CE, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe (Crutzen’s original suggestion); other potential candidates for time boundaries have been suggested, at both earlier dates (within or even before the Holocene) or later (e.g. at the start of the nuclear age),” subsequent deliberation has fixed the “golden spike” of the Anthropocene at 1950, the nuclear age. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Working Group on the Anthropocene.’ ” 64 Harper, “Franklin Discovery Strengthens Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty.” 65 Rignot et al., “Widespread, Rapid Grounding Line Retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler Glaciers.” An article in Nature Geoscience in March 2015 made similar claims for an immense glacier in East Antarctica: Green- baum et al., “Ocean Access to a Cavity beneath Totten Glacier in East Antarctica.” See also Gillis, “Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea.” 66 Moskvitch, “Mysterious Siberian Crater Attributed to Methane.” 67 Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 62. See also the recent work of Latour, particularly “Agency in the Time of the Anthropocene”; Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman-, and Timothy Morton’s recent work, particularly Hyper¬ objects, as well as work by Chakrabarty, Foote, LeMenager, Alaimo, Dimock, and Nixon. 68 Luciano, “The Inhuman Anthropocene.” 69 Alaimo, “Sustainable This, Sustainable That,” 562. 70 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 66. 71 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 1. Extreme Printing Epigraphs: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Captain Parry” (1825), in The Collected Works, 1037; advertisement in Queens Illuminated Magazine, 1852, material printed on hms Assistance, MS 1481/1, 1852-34, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 241 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE i Nordenskjold and Andersson, Antarctica, Z90. z Printing the Arctic Eagle, ” Fiala-Ziegler Expedition, private collection, used with permission. My research has uncovered no other photographs of printing in ac¬ tion, although the illustrations in chapter 3 show the unattended press and type case used to print the book Aurora Australis during Shackleton’s Nimrod expedi¬ tion in Antarctica (1909). The act of printing is not otherwise sketched or illus¬ trated, to the best of my searching. 3 The man on the top bunk is John Vedoe, assistant quartermaster, and the bearded sailor on the lower left bunk is Pierre Le Royer, dog caretaker, according to a note on the back of a copy of the photograph. The reclining man on the right is not identified. Anton M. Vedoe Papers, 1895-1963, MSS 133, Box z, Folder iz, Stefans- son Collection, Dartmouth College. 4 For more information on Golding presses, see “Golding Printing Presses,” Handset Press, accessed 10 July zoi6, http://www.handsetpress.org/golding/. 5 Fiala, “Christmas Near the North Pole,” z$. 6 Of these newspapers, I have located copies of all except the Ice-Blink, Gleaner, Minavalins, and Ostgronlandische Zeitung. There is no trace of the Ice-Blink in any of the many archives that hold material related to Elisha Kent Kane and the Second Grinnell Expedition, and librarians and Kane historians have no knowl¬ edge of its location. The Gleaner and Minavilins were both suppressed before their expeditions returned home, and no copies seem to have survived. The Ostgron- landische Zeitung is mentioned in the journal of Carl Koldewey, a German polar explorer, who indicates that at least two manuscript editions were produced. The newspaper cannot be located today, and according to my correspondence with Reinhard Krause of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, “a lot of papers of the expedition (owned by the geographical society in Bremen) were destroyed in a firestorm during WW z in the office of Herbert Abel at the Uberseemuseum Bremen.” Email correspondence with Reinhard A. Krause, z December, zoio. 7 “A Catalogue of the Library Established on Board H.M.S. Assistance, Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.B., Commanding the Arctic Squadron in Search of Sir John Franklin and His Companions: Printed & Published on Board H.M.S. As¬ sistance, Wellington Channel, Arctic regions, H. Briant, Printer, 1853,” Arctic Pamphlets, 185Z-54, courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). 8 On the publisher John Murray’s role in facilitating these publications in Britain, see Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster, Keighren et al., Travels into Print-, Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative. 9 For more on sailors’ literacy and literary culture, see Blum, Ihe l lew from the Masthead. 10 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News z (30 Nov. 1850): 18. 11 Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, i:i6z. In another example, the school es¬ tablished on the Fox, a Franklin search, was led by the ship's doctor (a common stand-in schoolmaster on polar voyages): according to Commander McClintock, Z4Z NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE the doctor “intends to make [the pupils] acquainted with the trade-winds and atmosphere. This subject affords an opportunity of explaining the uses of our ther¬ mometer, barometer, ozonometer, and electrometer, which they see us take much interest in. It is delightful to find a spirit of inquiry amongst them.” McClintock, The Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, 61. n For more on British naval theatricals, see Isbell, “Illustrated Reviews of Naval The¬ atricals”; Isbell, “P(l)aying Off Old Ironsides and the Old Wagon”; Isbell, “When Ditchers and Jack Tars Collide”; Pearson, ‘“No Joke in Petticoats’”; O’Neill, “The¬ atre in the North”; Davis, “British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant.” 13 North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle , in Parry, Journal of a Voyage. 14 Edward Sabine, “Advertisement” [appendix], North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, iii. 13 Stam and Stam, “Bending Time.” 16 Rudy, “Floating Worlds.” See also Rudy’s book Imagined Homelands, and Blum and Rudy, “First Person Nautical.” 17 “Notice,” R.M.S. City of Paris Gazette, Printed on Board 12 (3 Nov. 1891). 18 “Prospectus,” Austral Chronicle. A Bi-Weekly Journal 1.1 (1886). 19 Cunard Cruise News 1 (26 Aug. 1933): 2. 20 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 602-3. 21 Cooper, Sensus Communis, 1. 22 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33. 23 Anderson , Imagined Communities, 34, 36. 24 Scholars of print culture such as Trish Loughran and Meredith McGill have de¬ scribed how paying closer attention to the operations of transnational and local spheres of circulation dismantles some elements of Anderson’s model and shores up others. Anderson presumes the simultaneity of newspaper reading among far-flung individuals, for example, although Loughran has argued persuasively that in the early United States such presumptions are not historically accurate. Rather than a networked national print culture, Loughran describes localized, fragmented communities of print that are more akin to what we see aboard polar ships. She writes, “If the newspaper denies, in its casual columnar form, the scat¬ teredness of the spaces from which it collects its information, it nevertheless bears... the telltale traces of that scatteredness” {The Republic in Print, n). 23 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 12. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35. 27 Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America. 28 Umbria Express, and Atlantic Times 14 (1 Oct. 1887): 4; E. Alsheimer, “Creeds,” All Aboard: The Journal of R.M.S. “Transylvania” 14.4 (1931): 14. 29 Bound Home or The Gold-Hunters’ Manual (2 Mar. 1852). 30 Quoted in Lewis, Sea Routes to the Gold Fields, 92. 31 See Blum, The View from the Masthead. 32 Elaine Hoag documents several examples of wartime shipboard printing during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in “Caxtons of the North,” 81-82. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 2 43 33 Morillo, “Venesolanos que habeis seguido a Bolivar.” 34 See Berkey, “Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’”; Berkev, “Traces of the Confederacy.” In World War I, the men of the British destroyer hms Blenheim printed a paper called the Tenedos Times while stationed off the Aegean isle by that name; “the pressure of stirring events” cut short its publica¬ tion in 1914. “Preface,” Tenedos Times: A Monthly Journal of the Mediterranean Destroyer Flotilla during the Early Part of the War, [ 5 ]. 35 Warns, Personal Impressions, 13. 36 Accountant General’s Record Book, 1852, 1 . 467, 9 Feb. 1852, adm 47/21, National Archives, London. 37 “Organ and printing press landed at Woolwich from the late Polar expedition to be repaired,” Admiralty correspondence index for 1852, cut 68->a, 25 Feb. [1852], adm 12/558, National Archives, London. 38 Hoag, “Caxtons of the North,” 85-88. 39 Arctic Miscellanies, x iii. 40 Maguire, The Journal oj Rochfort Maguire, 106-7. 41 Rochfort Maguire’s Journal mentions the illustrations in his explanation of the origin of the name of the paper Weekly Guy. “A weekly publication is likely to be undertaken by Doctor Simpson, but as it received its name and an accompanying set of illustrations, from a kind friend to all arctic adventurers at the Admiralty, its time has not yet come” ( Tl)e Journal of Rochfort Maguire, 106-7). Hoag reports that these were Cruikshank images (“Shipboard Printing on the Franklin Search Expeditions,” 28). 42 “The Rise and Progress of Arctic Printing,” in Arctic Miscellanies, 246-47. 43 “The Rise and Progress of Arctic Printing,” in Arctic Miscellanies, 247-48. Clements Markham confirms, “wood blocks were cut of the Royal arms and other adorn¬ ments” by the sailors for the playbills, printed on silk ( Lite Lands of Silence, 255). 44 Queen’s Illuminated Magazine, 24 [40]. 45 “A Catalogue of the Librarv Established on Board h.m.S. Assistance.” I discuss the presence of Melville’s two novels in “Melville in the Arctic,” Leviathan 20.1 (March 2018): 74-84. 46 Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, 1:19. 47 Accountant General’s Record Book, 1852, 1 . 1179, S Apr. 1852, ADM 47/21, Na¬ tional Archives, London. 48 Seitz, Polar Diaries, 1901-5,12 June 1903, MSS 244. 49 “Arctic Eagle Printed in Barren Polar Land,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (10 Sept. 1905): 3. 50 An example of some “Fialisms,” parenthetical comments in the original: (After being told that a large mass of dog feces was in the water bblD—“Let it go! It is too blamed much trouble to have it cleaned!” (After fainting)—“Why, this is strange! Just before coming away, I won over four strong men, one after the other, at fencing.” “And at the banquet the General said that the only main in Troop ’C’ whom he would be afraid to meet in personal combat, was Anthony Fiala.” 244 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE “I will fight any man, upon the return of the Exped., with any weapon, from a saber to a cannon.” “I’ll fight you all! I’ll fight you all!—But not on this Exped.” (Speaking of the “Glory Hole”)—“Oh, my! How comfortable you are here! Why, you’ve the finest quarters in the ship!” (To each individual member of the field party)—“You are the only man who will receive $50 per mo. All the others have signed for $2.5.” “Oh, my! Isn’t the atmospheric scenery glorious!” “I am the only male member of the ‘Ladies Aid Society.’” “Fialisms,” in Shorkley Papers, I-4, Stef MSS 207. For a lively, detailed account of this expedition, see Capelotti’s The Greatest Show in the Arctic ; Capelotti finds Shorkley to be an “uninformed malcontent” (406). 51 PortFoulke Weekly News 1 (11 Nov. i860): 1-2. 52 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition, 377-78. 53 Arctic Miscellanies, xiii-xviii. 54 The following is a transcription of the advertisement: The arctic Printing Office Messrs. Giffard & Symons beg to inform the Public that they have obtained—at an immense cost & with infinite trouble—possession of the extensive premises lately occupied by Mr Clements Markham situated in Trap Lane within half a minutes walk of the foremost Quarter Deck Lad¬ der, and easily accessible to all parts of the City. They have fitted up their new establishment— regardless of expense —with all the latest inventions and newest machinery to enable them to carry on the Noble Art of Printing in a Style & with a Rapidity hitherto quite unattainable. They therefore expect from the Public that support & assistance which it always gives to the truly deserving. Charges moderate. No credit given. All work required to be executed to be paid for in advance. N.B. Everything undertaken promptly and correctly executed. h.m.S. Alert. July. 28. th. 1875. (“The Arctic Printing Office,” May, Sir William Henry, Admiral of the Fleet, 1849-1930, May/13/2, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) 55 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 189-90. 56 “The Arctic Printing Office.” 57 In Warner’s terms, “A public is always in excess of its known social basis. It must be more than a list of one’s friends. It must include strangers” ( Publics and Counter- publics, 74). NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 2-45 >8 Port Foulke Weekly News i (n Nov. i860): 1. 59 Elizabeth Leane gives a great taste of the twentieth-century Antarctic papers in “The Polar Press.” Stephanie Pfirman, an Arctic environmental scientist at Bar¬ nard College and Columbia University, told me, “On our Arctic expeditions today we always have a newsletter, and it’s always kept private. What goes [on] in the Arctic stays in the Arctic.” Conversation with the author, 16 Apr. 1016. 60 Pierre Berton’s Arctic Grail , for example, devotes a half-sentence to Arctic news¬ papers in nearly seven hundred pages of its narrative of Northwest Passage and North Pole quests. Douglas Wamsley’s comprehensively researched biography Polar Hayes mentions the Port Foulke Weekly News in four sentences out of 571 pages, and the paper does not make the volume’s index. Francis Spufford’s well- known I May Be Some Time invokes the South Polar Times of Robert Falcon Scott a handful of times. Fergus Fleming’s popular historv of earlv nineteenth-century British exploration, Barrow’s Boys , devotes a few sentences to Parry’s North Geor¬ gia Gazette (judging it “downright appalling” for the quality of its puns) but does not otherwise mention shipboard printing or periodicals. Adriana Craciun’s book on the relationship between Arctic exploration and British print culture, Writing Arctic Disaster, devotes two paragraphs to printing in the region. The Coldest Cru¬ cible, Michael Robinson’s history of American Arctic exploration, doesn’t refer to expeditionary winter pastimes at all. Benjamin Reiss notes a similar curiosity in the relative disregard of an asylum newspaper, the Opal, in medical commentary by the asylum’s officials ( Theaters of Madness, 34). 61 See in particular Hoag, “Caxtons of the North,” and “Shipboard Printing on the Franklin Search Expeditions”; Stam and Stam, “Bending Time”; Stam, “The Lord’s Librarians”; Leane, The Adelie Blizzard and Antarctica in Fiction. 6z Hoag, “Caxtons of the North,” 82. 63 In a model of digitally mediated scholarly exchange, the Arctic scholars Russell Potter and Elaine Hoag take up a conversation in the comments on Wilkins’s blog post, in which Potcer proposes a possible source for the balloon message; a Virgin¬ ian who served as an officer on an American Franklin search ship in 1850, some of whose family members’ papers appear in the Virginia Historical Society col¬ lections. Katerine Wilkins, “Message from a Balloon: How Did It Come to the vhs ?,” Virginia Historical Society’s Blog, 4 Mar. 2013, https://vahistorical.wordpress .com/2013/03/04/message-from-a-balloon-how-did-it-come-to-the-vhs/. 64 I have also taken advantage of digitized records, when available, as such resources are relatively scarce for this tvpe of material. Most North American and British archives have not digitized their manuscript and ephemeral printed polar hold¬ ings as of this writing, with the exception of Franklin search artifacts, which the UK’s National Maritime Museum has made available in its digital collections. My resources for archival travels have not yet enabled me to travel to Australia or New Zealand, the launching points for many Antarctic missions, both of which have rich Antarctic holdings; antipodean libraries have digitized a number of Antarctic holdings, however. 246 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 6s 66 67 68 69 70 7i 72 - 73 74 75 76 I am grateful to Michael Winship for this suggestion. Hoag, however, notes that the Admiralty provided expeditionary ships with paper in a variety of colors; see her excellent bibliographic account in “Caxtons of the North,” 93-94. I am grateful to Fritz Swanson of the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Press for showing me examples of hand-carved wood type and advising me how to identify print made from such type. For especially sharp discussion on archival incompleteness and its ideological and research implications, see Gardner, Black Print Unbound. The librarians with whom I have worked throughout this project have been unfailingly superb and helpful. When polar materials have been uncatalogued or hard to locate, this has been due to changing research and cataloguing interests over time, library re¬ source scarcity, or my own deficiencies, not those of any archivists or librarians with whom I have consulted. Harris , Personal Impressions, 11. The Boys and Girls Favorite 1 (1874): 2. “Our Printers,” West Philadelphia Hospital Register 1.2 (1863); 7. Each contributor to the paper received five free copies; one copy was allotted to every five patients, and extras cost two cents for soldiers and three cents for nonsoldiers. A year’s sub¬ scription was one dollar, and four hundred copies of each number were printed for Reading Room use. “The Library and Reading Room,” West Philadelphia Hospital Register 1.1 (1863): 2. “The Library and Reading Room,” West Philadelphia Hospital Register 1.1 (1863): 2. The library at the hospital grew rapidly by charitable donation. As this same article documents, its holdings were diverse: “The Library at the present time con¬ sists of about 625 bound volumes, and about 900 Magazines and other unbound literature. We make our appeal to the benevolent public, in every part of the coun¬ try, to send us Books in any language. It should be remembered, that we have Sol¬ diers of different nations in our armies. They too, are found in our Hospital.” By the fifth number of the West Philadelphia Hospital Register there were 1,142 bound volumes and 1,300 unbound claimed for the library. West Philadelphia Hospital Register 1.2 (1863): 6. Reiss, Theaters of Madness, 28. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” Cohen, “The Emancipation of Boyhood.” Emphases in original. Shells and Seaweed had a healthy pool of exchanges established by just its second number, as it documented in an article entitled “The Amateur’s Department”: Twenty-one papers, besides all the city papers, are regularly received. Telephone, Amateur Scientist, Langill’s Leisure, Boys’ Favorite, Amateur Emblem, Premier, American Sphinx, Our Compliments, Lake Breezes, Radiator, NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 247 77 78 79 8o 8i 82 8 ? 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 9i 9 2 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 148 Boys’ Folio, New Century, Times of 84, Boys’ Doings, Northern Breezes, Wise and Otherwise, Progressive Youth, Asteroid, Fact and Fancy, Huffman Amateur, Nugget, all have our thanks. (“Tire Amateur’s Department,” Shells and Seaweed 1 [May 1884]: 1) Shells and Seaweed 1 (Apr. 1884): 3. Letters Written during the Late Toy age of Discovery in the Western Arctic Sea, 59. Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster, 6. See Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative-, Potter, Arctic Spectacles. Arctic Miscellanies, xiii-xviii. On sailor literacy and cultures of reading, see Blum, The View from the Masthead. Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 191. Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 169. Arctic Miscellanies, 2.04-5. Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, 153-54. Arctic Miscellanies, xiii-xviii. Markham, Life of Admiral Sir Leopold McClintock, 113. Documents Relating to Arctic Expeditions, 343, ADM 7/195, National Archives, London. “Education Sheet, [for/from] Giffard and Symons, MS 1815/28, Ephemera Col¬ lection, British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Kane, Arctic Explorations, 1:145. Neither I nor the other polar researchers and ar¬ chivists with whom I have consulted have located a copy of the Ice-Blink. Maguire, The Journal 0/ Rochfort Maguire, 122. Fiala, “Christmas Near the North Pole,” 25. Arctic Eagle 1.1 (1903): 2. Preface to Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News. “Preface,” Arctic Miscellanies, xxiii. “Preface,” Arctic Miscellanies, xxiv. Arctic Moon 1.1 (1881): 1. Preface to Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News. The “Native Dance” was conciliatory; its object was “to restore that amicable feel¬ ing with which [our neighbors of Noo-wook] have until lately regarded us... and, avoiding anv just cause of offence, to inspire them with confidence in our friendly disposition towards them; so that, having no injuries to avenge, they may be induced to treat with kindness any of our countrymen belonging to Sir John Franklin’s party, or to the Ships in search of him, who may fall into their hands in a defenceless state.” Box 4, Miscellaneous Printed Material Nov. 1844-20 Jan. 1875, undated, Simpson Papers. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE ioi Maguire, Use Journal ofRochfort Maguire, 112. ioz Advertisement, Queens Illuminated Magazine, Material printed on hms Assis¬ tance, MS 1481/1, 1852-54, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 103 Kane, Arctic Explorations, 2:14. 104 Nares, Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea, 1:191. 105 Arctic Expedition, iSy^-6, 73. Writing of that same expedition, Albert Markham recalled: The sun ... took its final departure on the nth of October. From this date darkness gradually settled upon us, reaching its greatest intensity on the 21st of December. The type of a leading article in the Times newspaper was taken by us as a test of the darkness. This was last read in the open air at mid-day on the 6th of November, and then only by a few with a great deal of difficulty. Many unsuccessful attempts were made on subsequent days. (The Great Frozen Sea, 203) 106 Moss, Shores of the Polar Sea, 45. 107 Nansen, Farthest North, 1:382. 108 Blake, Arctic Experiences, 257-58. Emphasis in original. 109 Nansen, Farthest North, 2:395. no Arctic Miscellanies, xviii. hi Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, 1:188. Extreme weather could be an issue for passenger liners engaged in shipboard newspapers. The Makura Journal of the Ca¬ nadian Australasian Line, en route to Sydney from Vancouver, offered an apology to readers of its fourth number for the paper’s appearance: “It was with difficulty that it was printed at all, for the equatorial heat made the rollers of the press like jelly.” The Makura Journal was edited and published by two passengers and was offered “free as the air of the Pacific Ocean.” “With Apologies to The Boston Jour¬ nal. En Route Vancouver to Sydney,” 1.4 (1909): 1. 112 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 4. 113 The Blizzard 1 (May 1902): 2. ms 859, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 114 Arctic Miscellanies, 204-5. 115 Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, 1:180. 116 Weekly Guy 7 (17 Dec. 1852): 26-27. 117 “Editorial,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.3 (i860): 1. Hayes invokes the Biblical story from the Book of Daniel, in which mysterious writing appears on the wall of the Babylonian king Belshazzar’s palace. Daniel interprets “mene, mene, tekel up- HARSIn” as a warning that the king’s dynasty will fall. 118 Photographs scrapbook, Anton M. Vedoe Papers, 1895-1963, mss 233, Box 3, Ste- fansson Collection, Dartmouth College. 119 Peary, The North Pole, 180. 120 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 208-9. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 249 in Stam, “The Lord’s Librarians.” m Peary, The North Pole, 179-80. 113 Nans tn. Farthest North, 1:381. 124 For more on Arctic shipboard theatricals, see note 12. 125 The manuscript copy of the North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle (which was entitled New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle before the expedition learned that a northern land had already been named New Georgia), held in the Scott Polar Research Institute, includes the script of The North West Passage or Voyage Finished , which was not included in the version of the North Georgia Gazette that was printed upon the expedition’s return to London in 1821. New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, MS 438/12, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 126 Here is a fuller plot summary of the Pantomime of Zero-. This talented and original piece was composed expressly for this theatre (Royal Arctic); and abounds in wit and humour. Turning all the dangers and inconveniences to which we are exposed in these inhospitable climates into evil spirits that are leagued against us, it supposes them continually watching every opportunity to surprise an unfortunate travelling party, till at length their power is destroyed by the appearance of the more puis¬ sant good spirits, Sun and Daylight. Then the metamorphosis takes place: the good spirits become Harlequin and Columbine, and frosty old Zero, who has all along been the leader of the evil spirits, is changed into First Clown; a bear, which had been for some time prowling about, was then fired at, and tailing to pieces, discovers Pantaloon and Second Clown. Then commences the pantomime of fun and frolic, which was carried on with great spirit by the two Clowns and Pantaloon, while they were at intervals relieved by the graceful and elegant pas de deux of Harlequin and Columbine. Several songs, alluding to the Expedition, its purposes and position were also introduced. [ArcticMiscellanies, 204-5) 127 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 244. 128 British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, MS 1479, Scott Polar Research Institute Ar¬ chives, University of Cambridge. 129 Ship’s surgeon Alexander Fisher notes of a performance of The North West Pas¬ sage: or, the Voyage Finished that the temperature “was as low as 19° during the whole time; but the pleasure they derived from seeing a scene exhibiting their own character in so favourable a point of view, completely overcame any inconvenience they may have suffered from the state of the weather” ( A Journal of a Voyage of Discovery, 165-66). 130 Arctic Miscellanies, 204-5. 131 Port Foulke Weekly News 1.1 (i860): 4-5. 132 Hayes, The Open Polar Sea, 184. 250 NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 133 A descendent of the expedition’s sailing master, Samuel Jarvis McCormick, has generously provided me with transcripts of his ancestor’s diary, An Abstract of a Journal in the Arctic Ocean during the Years of i860 and 61 by F L Harris, U.S. Navy , as well as the diaries of Steward Francis L. Harris and Seaman Harvey Scott Heywood, also of the United States. McCormick’s journal reveals his distrust of Dodge’s competency, and Harris’s journal in particular documents over and over Dodge’s extreme intoxication (and the abuse of alcohol in general aboard ship). Here are some selections from Harris’s diary: “The 2nd mate Dodge had been in the navy as an ordinary seaman and could boast of how many floggings he had for smuggling liquor and getting drunk, which he fully demonstrated by getting beastly drunk every opportunity, even stealling the liquor to carry out his purposes, as he was not possessed with any manly courage”; “Dodge was so badly intoxicated that he did not remember of having his supper”; “Dodge steals liquor and gets beastly intoxicated”; “Dodge feels that he has been neglected and swears revenge because he is not allowed free access to the liquor”; “Dodge gets gloriously drunk”; “All winds up in a drunken froflics. Dodge is number one on that list”; “At 2 am. Mr Dodge yells out at the top of his voice that he can not get rum enough to make him drunk”; “Dodge being to drunk [sic] to sleep attempts to pick a quarrel with some of the men.” I am indebted to Thomas Walker for sharing these journals with me. 134 Port Foulke Weekly News 1.3 (i860): 8-9. 135 See Blum, The View from the Masthead; Cohen, 7 he Novel and the Sea. 2. Arctic News Epigraphs: Pynchon, Mason and Dixon, 123; Henry Dodge, “Literature,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.3 (i860): 9, New-York Historical Society. 1 Anderson, Imagined Co?nmunities, 33. 2 Cavell, Fracing the Connected Narrative ; Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster ; Keighren et al., Travels into Print. See also Potter, Arctic Spectacles. 3 The original manuscript version was entitled New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, after the land that Parry named “New Georgia.” Upon the expedition’s return, however, Parry discovered that there already was a New Georgia, so the name of the land and of the gazette was changed in future iterations to “North Georgia.” Henceforth all references to the paper were to the North Georgia Ga¬ zette, and Winter Chronicle. A note on sources: The North Georgia Gazette was printed as an appendix to Parry’s journal of the voyage. When I quote from the printed version, I refer to the pagination in Parry’s journal as well as the periodical’s number. Elsewhere in this chapter I cite the manuscript version of the New Georgia Gazette, which contains material that is not printed in the North Georgia version in Parry’s journal; when I refer to the manuscript version, I cite the newspaper’s number, as there is no pagination in the manuscript version. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 231 4 Parry, Journal of a Voyagefor the Discovery of a North-West Passage, 99. 5 North Georgia Gazette, vi. 6 A manuscript copy of the New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, MS 438/11, held at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge identi¬ fies the anonymous contributors to the newspaper. 7 These categories were not necessarily trifling. The genre of the riddle, as David Shields has written, presumes an audience “something more than witless”; as such, riddles “could be considered the citizenship exam for membership in the republic of letters” ( Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America, 161). 8 The few reviewers who commented on the North Georgia Gazette accepted this cue, noting that standard critical energies would be inappropriate. One review explained, “Though the volume before us has a claim beyond that ol most, if not of all others, that we have ever perused, to be excepted from the severities, and even the justice of criticism; we may be permitted equally to admire and eulo¬ gize those compositions, which sprang into existence amidst the regions of eternal frost.” The only complaint of most reviewers was the high halt-guinea price for the volume. Review of North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, European Magazine, and London Review 79 (June 1811): 541. 9 A manuscript edition ot the newspaper that Parry later gave to his sister is pre¬ served at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Parry’s copy was written in ink but has been corrected with penciled annotations (including a number of grammatical or minor stylistic emendations), presumably in his hand. The most visible editorial marks indicate the excision of a good number of letters, articles, and other pieces for the newspaper. In some examples individual paragraphs are crossed out; in most, the penciled hand strikes through whole contributions. In several instances the word “omit” has been written at the head of an entrv. In all cases but one the omissions proposed in the manuscript paper were indeed left out of the printed version. New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle, MS 438/11, Scott Polar Re¬ search Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 10 This degree of rank-based exclusivity would be significantly smaller in the polar publications in the decades to come. 11 “A Journal of a Voyage of Discoverv to the Arctic Regions, in his Majesty’s Ship Hecla and Griper, in the years 1819 and 1810,” Gentleman’s Magazine (May 1811): 99. 11 Fisher,^ Journal of a Voyage of Discovery, 152. 13 “Literary Notices,” Examiner 14 (3 June 1821): 348. Cavell and Craciun note that competitive journalistic and publishing pressures affected the reviews of Parry’s narrative and of the Chronicle printing. 14 The play, The Revolutionary Philannthropist [sic], or The Elecatomb of Haiti, was composed aboard the prison ship by a French prisoner of war. Theatre bill for H.M. Prison ship “Crown,” 1807, Newspapers and Plavbills, THP/i, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. 15 Flight of the Plover 1 (1 Mar. 1848): 1. 2-52- NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 16 Hoag, “Caxtons of the North,” 85-87. Hoag notes how scant and lacking in de¬ tail Admiralty records are in identifying precisely what models of presses were sent to the Arctic aboard the various search expeditions; mentions of “a small press” are the most specific the surviving records can be. None of the presses that traveled to the Arctic survives or has been identified to date; they may have been requisitioned for other uses. On the cairn messages left by the Plover, with their occasional address to the Inuit, see chapter 4. 17 The finding aid for the manuscript newspaper in Duke University’s special collec¬ tions describes this manuscript version as “the handwritten proofs of The Flight of the Plover or North Pole Charivari, the newsletter that Simpson printed while aboard the Plover ,” which would make it the first printed Arctic newspaper. I suspect that this finding aid is in error, however, as there are no other printed materials extant from this particular expedition, although much printed matter, including the printed newspaper Weekly Guy , has been collected from the Plovers subsequent voyage in 1852 (which I imagine is the source of the finding aid’s con¬ fusion). Guide to the John Simpson Papers. 18 Flight of the Plover 1 (1 Mar. 1848): 1. 19 Albert Hastings Markham notes that as of the month of June the Nares Expedi¬ tion’s press had been long dismantled for the season: “The return of the sledge travelers was celebrated, on the 29th of June, by the best dinner we could afford to put on the table. As our printing-press had long been dismantled, a written menu was given to myself and Aldrich as the leaders of the two extended sledge parties” {The Great Frozen Sea , 377). 20 Flight of the Plover 1 (1 Mar. 1848): 1-2. 21 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 326; Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, 2:201- 2; “A Catalogue of the Library Established on Board h.m.s. Assistance, Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.B., Commanding the Arctic Squadron in Search of Sir John Franklin and His Companions: Printed & Published on Board h.m.s. Assistance, Wellington Channel, Arctic regions, H. Briant, Printer, 1853,” Arctic Pamphlets, 1852-54, courtesy Royal Geographical Society (with ibg), hand¬ written ships’ newspaper (on blue paper) for hms Assistance, “Aurora Borealis,” Baffin Bay, June 1850, HRR./4/10, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. 22 According to the OED, the British expression “to take the piss,” or to deride, does not come into use until the mid-twentieth century, but “piss on,” or to show scorn, is in use beginning in the seventeenth century. 23 Flight of the Plover 1 (1 Mar. 1848): 1. 24 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 1. 25 Regarding indigenous communication networks, Claudio Aporta, Michael Bravo, and Fraser Taylor have created an extraordinary digital atlas of Inuit Arctic trails: Pan Inuit Trails, http://paninuittrails.org/. 26 Facshnile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 5. 27 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 5. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 2-53 i8 Antic Expedition, 187$-6, 464. 29 Markham, Tlte Great Frozen Sea, 188-89. 30 Nansen, Farthest North, 1:277-80. A manuscript edition of the Framsjaa in the original Norwegian is located in the National Library of Norway. 31 Queens Illuminated Magazine 1.1 (28 Oct. 1852): 2-3. Note: the bound copy in the British Library has inconsistent and often contradictory page numbering; in subsequent citations, I give both numbers where available. 32 Markham, Tlte Great Frozen Sea, 188-89. 33 Craciun devotes attention to the collectivity ot London-published official Arctic voyage accounts in Writing Arctic Disaster, chapter 2. 34 Midnight Sun 1.1 (1901): 2. 35 “Arctic Eagle Printed in Barren Polar Land,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (10 Sept. 1905): 3. 36 Rudy, “Floating Worlds.” See also Rudy’s book Imagined Homelands. 37 “Songs of the North,” Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 3. 38 “The Epilogue, at the Close ot the Season, at the Roval Arctic Theatre,” MS 1482/ 1— 3;D Playbills, 1851 [Printed in HMS Assistance] , Scott Polar Research Insti¬ tute Archives, University of Cambridge. 39 “Prologue, Spoken at the Re-Opening of the Arctic Theatre, on Thursday, 18 th No¬ vember, 1875,” Printed Programmes ot Theatrical Entertainment, Museum Regis¬ ter 995, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 40 British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76. 41 Markham notebook, GB 15 British Arctic Expedition ot 1875-76, MS 396/1; bj, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 42 “Stray Shots,” Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 7. 43 See Rudy, “Floating Worlds” and Imagined Homelands. 44 “The Ravings,” Arctic Eagle 1.3 (1903); 4. 45 Weekly Guy 3 (19 Nov. 1852): 10-12. 46 Hirsch,,T Poet’s Glossary, 514. 47 Kenn Harper, a historian of the Canadian Arctic and of the Inuit, recommends the spelling “Qalasersuaq” in keeping with modern Greenlandic orthography. Email correspondence with Kenn Harper, 10 July 2018. 48 Murray, Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian, 15. 49 “Arctic Highlanders” was the descriptor given to the Inughuit or Greenlandic Inuit by the British Arctic explorer John Ross in 1818. 50 “From Erasmus York, of the Arctic Highlands, to the Editor of the Aurora Borea¬ lis,” Arctic Miscellanies 5 (Dec. 1850): 91-92. 51 Queen’s Illuminated Magazine, MS 2 [28]. 5 2 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News, 8. 53 “To the Editor of the Aurora Borealis,” Arctic Miscellanies 4 (Nov. 1850): 51. 54 “To the Editor of the Aurora Borealis,” Arctic Miscellanies 3 (Oct. 1850): 24. 55 Facsimile oj the Illustrated Arctic News, 10. 56 Midnight Sun 1.1 (1901): 1. 57 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News, 10. M 4 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 58 “The State of the Country,” Port Foulke Weekly News i.i (i860): 3-4. The second mate Dodge writes: Our domestic policy remains undisturbed. The provinces, and cities of our dominions are some of them in a flourishing conditions. Of others we have unhappily less encouraging information. The neighboring colony Etah has become ours by right of conquest, but upon taking possession of the capital, we found, to our mortification, that it was inhabited only by an old woman and boy,—both dead. They were immediately secured.... We are living in harmony with the Bears. We are not disturbed by the Bulls (Wall St or otherwise.) A war has been successfully waged against the Reindeer, but they have beat a retreat, and an armistice alike honorable to both parties, has been declared. The foxes continue to despise our traps, on which account war will be declared. (3-4) 59 Arctic Moon 1.1 (1881): 3-4, Adolphus Greely Papers, 1876-1973, Stefansson Col¬ lection, Dartmouth College. 60 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News, 9. 61 Queens Illuminated Magazine, MS 15. 62 Arctic Eagle 1.3 (1903): 1. 63 Queens Illuminated Magazine, MS 8. 64 Arctic Eagle 1.3 (1903): 5. 65 See chapter 1, note 133 on Dodge’s habitual intoxication. He was a skilled writer for the Port Foulke Weekly News in any event. 66 “Wanted Immediately,” Arctic Miscellanies 5 (Dec. 1850): 129. 67 “Nuts for the Arctic Public,” Arctic Miscellanies 3 (Dec. 1830): 131. 68 “Thursday Pops” (10 Feb. 1876), Printed Programmes of Theatrical Entertain¬ ment, Museum Register 995, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. 69 Markham, Fite Life of Sir Clements R. Markham, 122. 70 Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, 1:187. 71 Our Lost Explorers, 284; Lite Arctic Moon, Adolphus Greely Papers, II-20.1. 72 Royal Terror Theatre, 6 Aug. 1902, “Dishcover Minstrel Troupe” Programme, Ste¬ fansson Collection, Dartmouth College. For more on blackface minstrel perfor¬ mances in the polar regions, see Tomasz Filip Mossakowski, ‘“The Sailors Dearly Love To Make Up’: Cross-Dressing and Blackface during Polar Exploration” (PhD diss., Kings College London, 2015). 73 Arctic Eagle 1.3 (1903): 2. 74 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, 236-37. 73 North Georgia Gazette MS, 438/12. 76 Entry, 11 Sept. 1861, in Heywood, The Arctic Diary. I am indebted to Thomas Walker for sharing these journals with me and for giving me permission to quote from them. 77 Peary had two children by Allakasingwah or Alaqasinnguaq: Samik or Saamik and Kale or Kaale. Matthew Henson’s son Anaukkaq eventually met his relatives NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 2-55 at a reunion of- American and Inuit Hensons in the United States shortly before he died in 1987 at the age of 80. The efforts of Allan Counter, who studied black explorers, helped bring Henson’s achievements into wider attention. Email corre¬ spondence with Kenn Harper, 10 July 1018; see also Counter, North Pole Promise. 78 The primary target of Coleridge’s poem, which was published in News of Liter¬ ature and Fashion in 1825, is the publisher John Murray; a subsequent stanza de¬ scribes bookmaking as the point of polar expeditions: “Captain Parry! Captain Parry! / Thy vocation stops not here: / Thou must dine with Mr. Murray / And a quarto must appear” (“Captain Parry,” in The Collected Works , 1055-38). See also Cavell, “Making Books for Mr Murray,” 61. 79 Arctic Exploration Letterbook, Elisha Kent Kane Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 80 Qiieens Illuminated Magazine, MS 11 [15-16]. 81 Markham, The Arctic Navy List, iv-v. 82 Markham, The Arctic Navy List, 4. 83 Roland Huntford’s description of Markham’s homosexuality has received the an¬ griest response to date, which may be related to his sharp criticism of Markham’s preference for man-hauling over the use of sled dogs, which Huntford judged out¬ dated and disastrous. Huntford, Scott arid Amundsen. Others have resorted to the long-standing historiographical canard of “no evidence”; see, for example, David Crane’s book on Robert Falcon Scott, in which he concedes that Markham was attracted to men but concludes improbably that there is “not a shred of evidence” that he acted on his desires (Scott of the Antarctic, 62). 84 Henry P. Hartt to George Shorkley, 22 Mar. 1905, Box 1, Folder 8, Papers of George Shorkley, Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. P. J. Capelotti documents a chronic anal fissure from which Hartt suffered and suggests that its causes “ranged from the restricted diet, the more or less constant drinking, or from the homosex¬ ual activity Hartt would later hint at in his correspondence” ( The Greatest Show in the Arctic, 422). 85 Quoted in Leane, Antarctica in Fiction, 99. 86 C. W. Emmerson, “The Arctic Twins,” British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, ms • 479 - 87 Bradfield, “Against Solitude,” in Approaching Ice. 88 [Herbert Ponting], “The Sleeping Bag,” South Polar Times 3.1 (1911): 43. 89 Sex between men at sea can be a form of situational homosexuality, or the practice of homosexual acts when there is no opportunity for heterosexual practice, such as is found in the military, in boarding schools, and in prisons. As a naval saying summarizes homosexuality at sea, “It’s only queer when you’re tied to the pier.' 90 Facsimile ofthe Illustrated A retie News, preface. 91 Queen’s Illuminated Magazine, ms n.p. 9 2 Queen s Illuminated Magazine, MS 40. 93 “Nuts for the Arctic Public,” Arctic Miscellanies 5 (Dec. 1850); 131. 94 Weekly Guy 6 (14 Jan. 1852): 42. 256 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 95 This is the full transcription provided by Nansen: Up and down on a night so cold, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Walk harpooner and kennelman bold, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Our kennelman swings, I need hardly tell, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, The long, long lash you know so well, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Our harpooner, he is a man of light, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, A burning lantern he grasps tight, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, They as they walk the time beguile, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, With tales of bears and all their wile, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, “Now suddenly a bear they see, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Before whom all the dogs do flee, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Kennelman, like a deer, runs fast, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, Harpooner slow comes in the last, Kvirre virre vip, bom, bom, and so on. {FarthestNorth, 304-6) 96 Anton M. Vedoe Papers, 1895-1963, MSS 233, Box 2, Folder 11, Stefansson Collec¬ tion, Dartmouth College. The smelly shipmate was Eddie Cofhn; the crew mem¬ ber with a “spongy and thin” pecker was likely the first mate, Edward Haven, who hailed from Lynn, Massachusetts. 97 Markham, V) e Life of Sir Clements R. Markham, 120-21. According to the oed, “manavilins” is nautical slang for odds and ends and usually refers to leftover scraps of food. 98 Hoag, “Caxtons of the North,” mn69. 99 Markham, The Life of Sir Clements R. Markham, 122. 100 Arctic Miscellanies 3 (Oct. 1850): 23. 101 Koldewey, The German Arctic Expedition of1869-70, 391. 102 Facsimile ofthe Illustrated Arctic News, 21. 103 Maguire, The Journal ofRochfort Maguire, 305. 104 Arctic Moon 1.1 (1881): 4. 105 Weekly Guy 6 (17 Dec. 1852): 28. 106 Weekly Guy 10 (7 Jan. 1853): 40. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 2-57 107 Discovery News (27 Nov. 1875): 1. 108 Discovery News (6 Dec. 1875): 1. 109 Henry Dodge, “The Grumbler,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.7 (i860). 110 Dodge, “The Grumbler,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.7 (i860); Dodge, “The Grum¬ bler,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.6 (i860). hi Dodge, “The Grumbler,” Port Foulke Weekly News 1.6 (i860). 112 Port Foulke Weekly News 1.1 (11 Nov. i860). 113 Hayes, Tlte Open Polar Sea, 179-80. 3. Antarctic Imprints Epigraph: [Edward Frederick Bage], “To the Editor,” AdelieBlizzard 1.3 (1913): 90. 1 Murray and Marston, Antarctic Days, 15. 2 A comprehensive bibliography is kept at the website Antarctic Circle, coordinated by Robert B. Stephenson: http://www.antarctic-circle.org/aurora.details.htm. 3 While many scholars today observe a strict distinction between the North and South Polar regions, for important geological, political, and sociological reasons, some of the most prominent Western explorers of the long nineteenth century ventured to both ends of the earth (John Clark Ross, George Nares, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Roald Amundsen, plus Edmund Hillary). 4 [Louis Bernacci], “When One Goes Forth a Voyaging, He Has a Tale to Tell—,” South Polar Dimes 2.6 (1903): 21. “Poodle-faker” is British military slang for a young officer who devotes excessive attention to the social world of young ladies. 5 [Reginald Koettlitz], “Polar Plant Life,” South Polar Times 1.1 (1902): 13-15. 6 ‘Too Year Old Fruitcake Found,” Antarctic Heritage Trust, https://www.nzaht .org/pages/ioo-year-old-fruit-cake-found-in-antarcticas-oldest-building#. 7 Leane and Pharaoh, “Introduction,” Adelie Blizzard, xii. 8 Superb bibliographic information on the book is available here: “ Aurora Austra¬ lis Production Details,” Antarctic Circle, http://www.antarctic-circle.org/aurora .production.htm. 9 Murray and Marston, Antarctic Days, 106. 10 Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic, 131-32. 11 “Details on Copies of the Aurora Australis ,” Antarctic Circle, http://www .antarctic-circle.org/aurora.details.htm. The copies I have examined that contain stencils (not all I have seen do)—the “butter,” “oatmeal,” “pates,” “fruit,” and “stewed kidneys” editions—are held in the following institutions, respectively: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge; Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College; Columbia University; Huntington Library; John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. 12 “To Let,” Adelie Mail and Cape Adare Times (1911-12): n.p. 13 “Mining Properties for Sale,” Adelie Blizzard 1.4 (1913): 168. 14 Title page, Adelie Blizzard 1.1 (1913). 258 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 15 Gillis and Chang, “Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans from Polar Melt.” More recently climate scientists have updated their models to stipulate an even faster melting scenario than originally predicted. A summary of these findings appears in Gillis, “Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly.” 16 Peggy Nelson, “About Me,” https://eshackleton.com/about-me/. 17 Comparing the tactics of Nordic to British expeditions has been a common theme in histories of Antarctic exploration, most notably in the 1912-13 “race to the pole” undertaken by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Briton Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole; Scott and his companions died. Amundsen skied to the South Pole, using sled dogs as both transportation and food; Scott and his team “man-hauled” their sledges, laden with rocks for scientific collection, and froze to death twelve miles from a supply depot. For the most Scott-critical account, see Huntford, The Last Place on Earth. For defenses of Scott’s tactics, see Fiennes, Captain Scott ; Solomon, Lite Coldest March. 18 The quotations in this paragraph are taken from Ernest Shackleton, http://twitter .com/EShackleton, on the following dates: 1 March 2014,11:00 a.m.; 14 May 2014, 1:00 p.m., 2:00 p.m., and 3:00 p.m.; 6 June 2011, 7:17 a.m.; 14 May 2014, 9:30 a.m., 10:00 a.m., and 12:00 p.m. 19 Hamilton, Americas Sketchbook, 27. 20 Aston, Alone in Antarctica, 183-84. 21 Shackleton, South, 211. The Shackleton phantom man is thought to be the source of the following moment in T. S. Eliots “The Waste Land”: Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman But who is that on the other side of you? (68) 22 Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition, 1:136. 23 Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition, 2:408. 24 Jacobson, “Desiring Natures.” 25 They are interested in books of travel, magazines, and nautical writing; other than Marryat and Dickens, he reports, novels are not much in favor. Scott, The Voyage of the “Discovery, ”297. 26 [Apsley Cherry-Garrard], “Editorial,” South Polar Times 3.1 (1911): 1. 27 Prospectus, South Polar Times, MS 366/16/34, er. 28 Prospectus, South Polar Times. 29 Scott, The Voyage of the “Discovery; ”311. 30 Scott, Lite Voyage of the “Discovery, ”362. 31 Armitage, Two Years in the Antarctic, 88. 32 Scott, “Preface,” v-vi. NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 2-59 33 [Ernest Shackleton], “The South Polar Times,” South Polar Times i.i (1901): 1. 34 The large Antarctic volcanoes Erebus and Terror were named after his ships by James Clark Ross in 1841 during his expedition to the southern continent; Ross sailed on the very ships Erebus and Terror that a decade later would be abandoned to the ice by Sir John Franklin’s men in 1847 and recovered on the Arctic seafloor in 2014 and 2.016. 35 [ South Polar Times], Draft Editorial by Ernest Shackleton, 23 April 1902, MS 1537/2/51/17, Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. The strikethroughs are Shackleton’s. 36 [South Polar Times], Draft Editorial by Ernest Shackleton. 37 Scott, “Preface,” South Polar Tones, vi. Emphasis added. 38 Sea Leopard [Arthur Lester Quartley], “South Pole Volunteers, South Polar Times 2.6 (1903): 14. The Arctic commander George Nares, it should be noted, had also missed the “outer world,” the land of “home” and “friends” (Nares, Narrative oja Voyage, 2:175). 39 [Ernest Shackleton], Editorial, South Polar Tones 1.2 (1902): 2. 40 Nordenskjdld and Andersson, Antarctica or Two Years amongst the Ice of the South Pole, 186. 41 “The Evolution of Women,” Adelie Blizzard 1.1 (1913): 20. 42 Lisa Mastro and Jim Mastro, “Life in Antarctica,” Antarctica Online, http://www .antarcticaonline.com/culture/culture.htm. 43 “Editorial: Marooned ' Adelie Blizzard 1.1 (1913): 1. 44 M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) also has affinities with the genre. The notion of a hollow earth is one of the constitutive tenets of Mormonism; Joseph Smith believed that the Lost Israelites were located in a balmv land at the North Pole, be¬ yond the reach of ice. In addition to Smith’s writings, there are nineteenth-century Mormon hollow earth writings by LDS Elders, such as The Inner World (1886) by Frederick Culmer. Some late nineteenth-century explorers claimed the native inhabitants they encountered in northern Canada spoke Hebrew. For lively if un¬ even histories of hollow earth theories and fictions, see Standish, Hollow Earth, and Fitting, Subterranean Worlds. See also my “John Cleves Symmes and the Plan¬ etary Reach of Polar Exploration.” 45 The circular in which Symmes first detailed his ideas appeared in U.S. newspapers in April 1818 and was addressed “to all the world!” Symmes’s language in his first brief manifesto relies more on the rhetoric of personal conviction than that of scientific theory or even scientific speculation. “I declare the earth is hollow,” Symmes writes in the circular. “I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the under¬ taking.” The planned exploration should involve “one hundred brave companions, well equipped, [who will] start from Siberia in the fall season, with Reindeer and slays, on the ice of the frozen sea.... I engage we find warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men.” Svmmes, “Light Gives Light. 46 For a review of theories on this deathbed utterance, see Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. 260 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 47 Vilhjamur Stefansson, “The Hollow Earth,” 17 March 1954, Unpublished Articles by Stefansson, Box 68, Folder 24, Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. 48 [Seaborn], Symzonia, vi. 49 John C. Symmes, Letter to Elisha Kent Kane, 20 Oct. 1857, Elisha Kent Kane Pa¬ pers, Series I, MSS.B.K132, Box 10, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 50 De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder , 9,56. 51 Symmes, “Light Gives Light.” 32 [Frank Wild], “Leaves from an Ancient Papyrus,” South Polar Times 2.7 (1903): 32. 33 See, for example, the case of George Murray Levick’s photographic notebook in the introduction. 34 [Frank Wild], “An Old Document,” South Polar Times 1.4 (1902): 13. 53 [Wild], “Leaves from an Ancient Papyrus,” 32. 56 [Frank Wild], “Hieroglyphic Record,” South Polar Times 2.8 (1903): 28. 57 [Wild], “Hieroglyphic Record,” 30. Wild would also produce “An Ancient Man¬ uscript” in the book Aurora Australis , writing there under the pen name Wand Erer; that contribution was an epic tale of Shackleton’s fundraising for the Nim¬ rod voyage, written in the King James style. 58 [Thomas Griffith Taylor], “A Chapter on Antarctic History,” South Polar Times 3.1 (1911): 8,14-15- 59 [George Clarke Simpson], “Fragments of a Manuscript Found by the People of Sirius 8 When They Visited the Earth during the Exploration of the Solar System,” South Polar Times 3.2 (1911): 75. Here is the full story (ellipses in original): I know not why I write for there will be none to read; but the history of the human race since the dawn of civilisation has been written, and I feel impelled to set down the manner of the end. With this intent.The great intellectual activity which had its dawn in the Victorian age was followed by a reaction resulting in a desire for nothing but luxury and self-indulgence.... .human race had become almost uniform and there were no barbarian tribes to overrun and destroy the effeminate.the pains of motherhood and the responsibilities of parentage.only by the most stringent laws could the birthrate be kept even approximately equal to the deathrate, although the latter, by largely increased medical knowledge, was greatly re¬ duced from what it had been previously. The personal habits. .large towns and solitary country resorts. Only in a few places were the sciences and arts cultivated, and the great libraries containing the results of the fervid striving after knowledge, which had been characteristic of the pre¬ vious ages, were deserted and given over to oblivion and decay. The Science of medicine was the only one which continued to be pursued with vigour, and this was mainly with the object of reducing the deathrate. The love of truth for its own sake had departed. .thousand students. Its large medical laboratory was a scene of the greatest excitement. After years of study and experiment, Professor Archibald B. Clarence discovered the Elixir of Life. He was a proud man NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 261 and the highest honours in the land were showered upon him. liquid was of crystal clearness, but had the faintest fluorescent glow, which gave it exquisite colours when agitated.it was the production of great extremes of temperature.electric furnace.liquid air .the demand was beyond the supply. No sufficiently large source of energy with the requisite fall of temperature could be found. remained the privilege of the few and these the ruling classes. .volcanoes. The energy was sufficient, but the fall of tem¬ perature was just short of that required.bookworm, loved to retire to his study with the geographical books of the twentieth centurv . .“The Voyage of the Discovery”.“The Heart of the Antarctic”.“The Conquest of the South Pole”.Erebus” The ice-bound shores of McMurdo Sound became the centre of the world. From it flowed the life-giving fluid which alone sustained the human race. Death was entirely banished, and the race once more became flourishing. The laws which had maintained the birthrate were no longer of vital importance and were gradually allowed to lapse so that within a few countries the birthrate again equalled the deathrate and both were nil!. .decrease in the number of blizzards, failure of the Ross Sea to freeze, absence of very low temperatures on the Barrier. .bitterly regretted their failure to keep Meteorological records. .records of the British Antarctic expedition were unearthed from the highest shelves of the lumber rooms of the libraries and were perused with avidity.the great question of the day was, Does climate change ? The greatest authority, the Physiographer of the Expedition 1910-11 was quoted. He took for granted that ice age succeeded tropical age, and tropi¬ cal age succeeded ice age.could be no doubt, the temperature was no longer sufficiently low to allow of the production of the Elixir.I, the writer of this record, am the last of the race, and soon I must follow the companions who have lived with me through the many centuries since the Elixir was discovered. My dying thoughts are of the folly which neglected the teachings of the Scientists of the British Antarctic Expedition 1910-12. (75-78) 60 [Simpson], “Fragments of a Manuscript Found by the People of Sirius 8,” 76. 61 [Simpson], “Fragments of a Manuscript Found by the People of Sirius 8,” 76-78. Ellipses in original. 62 Another work of short fiction in the s.P.T. also imagines a southern continent of outsized creatures: “The Last of the Terrorcas” is a fantasy about a dragon-like killer whale fighting an immense flying insect. [Griffith Taylor], “The Last of the Terrorcas,” South Polar Times IV, 1911, MS 505/4, EN, Scott Polar Research Insti¬ tute, University of Cambridge. 63 [Douglas Mawson], “Bathvbia,” Aurora Australis, n.p. 261 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 64 “Illustrated Interviews de Reginald Koettliz,” South Polar Times 2.7 (1903): 46-48. 65 [Michael Barne], “Observations,” South Polar Times 1.1 (1902): 22. 66 “Bioloveria,” South Polar Times 1.3 (1902): 27-28. 67 [Bage], “To the Editor,” 90. 68 “Calendar Rhymes,” AdelieBlizzard 1.3 (1913): 125. 69 [Apsley Cherry-Garrard], “Walt Whitman,” South Polar Times IV, 1912, MS 505/4, en, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. I discuss this poem further in “First Person Nautical,” coauthored with Rudy. 70 “A Lament Adelie Mail and Cape Adare Times 1911-12 MS 1506, EN. 71 “Life in the Antarctic; or, The Protoplasmic Cycle,” South Polar Times 3.1 (1911): 4. 72 [Douglas Mawson], ‘“Wireless’—the Realisation,” Adelie Blizzard 1.1 (1913): 16. 73 [Mawson], “‘Wireless’—the Realisation,” 16. 74 Mawson, Notebook 5,1-6 April 1913 , Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries, 187. 75 “Editorial: The Merry Month of May,” Adelie Blizzard 1.2 (1913): 29. 76 “The Commercial Resources of Antarctica IV: General,” Adelie Blizzard 1.5 (1913): 213. 4. Dead Letter Reckoning Epigraph: Markham, The Great Trozen Sea, 251. 1 McClintock, The Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, 283-84. Emphasis in original. 2 The writer continues: The principal object of this custom is, that, by comparing the times and places of the throwing out and the picking up of the bottles, if found at sea, or immediately after they are driven ashore, a calculation may be made of the direction and the motion of the currents of the water by which the bottles have been conveyed along. A bottle of this kind, I am informed, was found on the north-west coast of Ireland, which had been thrown overboard in the former voyage to Baffin’s Bay. It had been ten months in the sea, and must have been carried by the currents upwards of a thousand miles in that time. The chance of conveying, by the same means, to all concerned, intelligence of the state of a ship, is, of itself, suf¬ ficient to engage those on board to its adoption. ( Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery, Saturday 22d, 6) 3 Parks Canada discovered the Erebus on a Canadian state-sponsored mission; her sister ship Terror was found by a private search team. 4 The full list of items found in the boat follows: Five or six small books were found, all of them scriptural or devotional works, except the ‘Vicar ofWakefield.’ One little book, ‘Christian Melodies,’ bore an inscription upon the titlepage from the donor to G.G. (Graham Gore?) A small Bible contained numerous marginal notes, and whole NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 263 passages underlined. Besides these books, the covers of a New Testament and Prayerbook were found. Amongst an amazing quantity of clothing there were seven or eight pairs of boots ot various kinds—cloth winter boots, sea boots, heaw ankle boots, and strong shoes. I noted that there were silk handkerchiefs—black, white, and figured—towels, soap, sponge, toothbrush, and hair-combs; macintosh gun-cover, marked outside with paint A n, and lined with black cloth. Besides these articles we found twine, nails, saws, files, bristles, wax-ends, sail- makers' palms, powder, bullets, shot, cartridges, wads, leather cartridge-case, knives—clasp and dinner ones—needle and thread cases, slow-match, several bavonet-scabbards cut down into knife-sheaths, two rolls of sheet-lead, and, in short, a quantity of articles of one description and another truly astonish¬ ing in variety, and such as, for the most part, modern sledge-travellers in these regions would consider a mere accumulation of dead weight, but slightly use¬ ful, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews.... In the after-part of the boat we discovered eleven large spoons, eleven forks, and four teaspoons, all of silver; of these twenty-six pieces of plate, eight bore Sir John Franklin’s crest, the remainder had the crests of ini¬ tials of nine different officers, with the exception of a single fork which was not marked; of these nine officers, five belonged to the ‘Erebus,’ Gore, Le Vesconte, Fairholme, Couch, and Goodsir. Three others belonged to the ‘Terror,’—Crozier, (a teaspoon only), Hornbv, and Thomas. I do not know to whom the three articles with an owl engraved on them belonged, nor who was the owner of the unmarked fork, but of the owners of those we can identify, the majority belonged to the ‘Erebus.’ (McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox”in Arctic Seas, 195-97) 5 Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster, 37. 6 McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox"in Arctic Seas, 187. 7 McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox”in Arctic Seas, 188. 8 McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, 303-4. Emphasis in original. 9 The news was heavily covered on both sides of the Atlantic; Harper’s Weekly, for example, published a photoengraving of a facsimile of the cairn message on its cover on 19 October 1859, rather than leading with news of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (Potter, Arctic Spectacles, 153). My focus in this chapter, how¬ ever, is not on the history of the broad search for the Franklin expedition, nor on the industry in theories about its disappearance, both of which have held sustaining interest for over 170 years, with scores of volumes written on their progressions. 10 adm 7/190, National Archives, London. In a recent interview, ship captain Sean Bercaw, who has been launching messages in bottles ever since a childhood spent sailing around the world with his family, emphasized as well the open timeline for such ecomedia: “The cool thing about it, is it’s not simply black and white: succeed or fail. Even if no one finds [the bottle] now, there is always that possibility. 2.64 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR That hope always exists that some one may find it a hundred years later.” Brogan, “Messages in a Bottle Chart a Lifelong Romance with the Sea.” 11 Miscellaneous clippings found at Greely Headquarters, Fort Conger, io June 1909, M118.7: Notes, Clippings, Ephemera, and Realia, 1884-1985, n.d., Box 6, Folder 26, Donald Baxter MacMillan Collection, George J. Mitchell Department of Spe¬ cial Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library. 12 See also Steinberg’s smart reading of the drift of a container of Nike sneakers after it fell from a container ship in The Social Construction of the Ocean, 1-4. 13 Kane, Arctic Explorations, 58. He left his mark throughout the region, in name and, suggestively, in specie: “I built a large cairn here, and placed within it a copper penny, on which was scratched the letter K; but, like many other such deposits, it never met the eyes for which it was intended” (207). On Kane’s Arctic inscrip¬ tions, see Craciun, Writing Arctic Disaster. 14 McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, 176. 15 Arctic Expedition, 1875-6, 476. 16 Ross, Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, 233. 17 adm 7/190, National Archives, London. 18 Antarctica was also the scene of the distribution of documentary forms, to a less extensive degree, but the fact of its continental mass—its more stable land and ice, its nonarchipelagic state—keeps my focus in this chapter on the Arctic messages. Just one example from the South, then: in James Clark Ross’s Antarctic venture in the early 1840s on the Erebus and Terror, the very ships targeted by Franklin searchers, he noted the messages left by previous expeditions: Two painted boards, erected upon poles in a conspicuous spot, attracted our attention, and an officer was immediately sent to examine them. They proved to be records of the visits of the French expedition under D’Urville, and of one of the vessels of the American exploring expedition [com¬ manded by Charles Wilkes]. The first, a white board with black letters, as follows:—“Les corvettes Francoises L’Astrolabe et la Zelee, parties de Ho¬ bart Town le 25 Fevrier, 1840, mouillees ici le 11 Mars, et reparties le 20 du dit pour la New Zeland. Du 19 Janvier au 1 Fevrier, 1840, decouverte de la Terre Adelie et determination du pole magnetique Austral!” The second, a black board with white letters, stated,—“U.S. brig Porpoise, 73 days out from Sydney, New Holland, on her return from an exploring cruize along the antarctic circle, all well; arrived the 7th, and sailed again on the 10th March, for the ZBay of Islands, New Zealand.” A paper was also found inclosed in a bottle, which had been so imper¬ fectly corked that some water had got into and so obliterated some parts of the writing, that we had difficulty in deciphering it. Its purport was, that the Porpoise had touched here for water, and that during their cruize they had coasted along the Icy Barrier, and had touched here for water. (Ross, Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, 133-34) 265 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 19 In this sense I speak to conversations about blanks ongoing by others in mate¬ rial textual studies, most notably Lisa Gitelman and James Green and Peter Stallybrass. 2.0 Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 2$. 11 Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin , 89. 22 On the perceived blankness of Arctic spaces in the British imperial imagination, see in particular Carroll, An Empire oj Air and Water ; Hill, White Horizon. 23 Ross, A Voyage oj Discovery, 236-37. 24 Parry, Journal of a Voyagefor the Discovery of a North-West Passage , xxviii. 25 Nares, Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea, xviii. Here is a further example, from a Franklin search expedition’s orders: “The various logs and private journals, with drawings, plans, etc., are to be sent to this office on the return of the Expedition” (Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, 5). 26 In Craciun’s account. Writing Arctic Disaster, the Admiralty injunction was de¬ signed to ensure that the first narratives of the voyages appearing in print would have the official imprint of the Admiralty. 27 Nares, Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea, xviii. 28 Precisely such a crisis of polar expedition printing within the metropole happened after the return of Parrv’s first expedition, when ship surgeon Alexander Fisher’s journal was published so quickly that the Admiralty investigated to see if he had withheld copies of his private papers. As a review of his journal stated, he was “un¬ justly suspected of having kept a duplicate of his Journal, in order to forestall Capt. Parry’s promised work” {A Journal of a Voyage oj Discovery to the Arctic Regions, 442-43). Within the tradition of British polar missions, it was acceptable for other members of an expedition to publish narratives of their experiences eventually, but such accounts were expected to appear subsequent to the volume or volumes first appearing with the implied or explicit imprimatur of the Admiralty. “The Public are probably aware,” one publisher wrote in a preface to a volume of letters written during an Arctic expedition, “that, agreeably to a regulation of the Admi¬ ralty, all Journals of Voyages of Discovery, kept by Officers or others, are required to be temporarily surrendered for the use of that Board: hence it has happened, that we have been unable until now to submit to our Readers full details” of the most recent voyage ( Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery, iii). See chapter 2 for further discussion of Parry’s oversight of post-voyage publications; Craciun discusses this in “Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein,” par¬ ticularly footnote 62, as well as in Writing Arctic Disaster. 29 Parry, A Journal of a Voyagefor the Discovery ofa North-West Passage, 3. 30 Ross, A Voyage of Discovery, 211. 31 One such message cast in a bottle reads as follows: Thrown overboard from H. M. Ship North Star, lying at single anchor in Erebus and Terror Bay, Beechy Island, on the 25. of September 1852. Wind at the time light from North; a N.E. gale having just subsided. Ship not yet housed in; Ice not have made, although there is much soft sludge in the 266 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR bay, which is driven about constantly by wind and tide. Union Bay closed up with ice. Temperature of the air when this was thrown overboard 15.5. Sea 29. All well. Should any one pick this up; please forward it to the following address.— On H.M. Service. To the Secretary of the Admiralty LONDON Stating, in what Latitude & Longitude it was picked up; with the date, condition of the cask &c; in fact any particulars respecting the document. P.S. Two bottles with a similar notice were thrown overboard at the same time. Printed at Beechy Island. Copy of hms North Star message in a bottle thrown overboard, 15 Sept. 185a, adm 7/195, National Archives, London 32 Arctic Miscellanies, 246. 33 Examples digested from proposals collected by the British Admiralty, adm 7/608, National Archives, London. 34 Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal , 172-73. 35 Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, 173. 3 6 Carter, Searchingfor the Franklin Expedition, 66-67. 37 Maguire, The Journal ofRochfort Maguire, 114. 38 Bequeathed by Colonel John Barrow, F.R.S., formerly Keeper ol the Records of the Admiralty, Vol. IX (III. If. 409): 1. “Captain [Richard] Collinson, C.B., H.M. Discovery Ship ‘Enterprize,’ 1850”; 15 Jan. 1850-5 June, 1875: 58, Add MS 35308, British Library. 39 I am not concerned in this discussion with the nineteenth-century transatlantic mail system by which one could send a letter from the United States to France, say, paying postage in both country of origin and destination as well as a separate “sea postage” to the carrier; these letters both originated from and were addressed to terrestrial recipients and used the ocean only as a medium for transport. 40 Lacan, “Lhe Purloined Letter,” 205; Derrida, Lite Post Card, 444. 41 In Lhe Post Card, Derrida sees no difference between the “Division of Dead let¬ ters” and what he would call the “division of living letters”; all remain in suspen¬ sion (124). 42 Porter, A Voyage in the South Seas, 35 43 Porter, A Voyage in the South Seas, 35-36. 44 Porter, A Voyage in the South Seas, 50. 45 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 74. 46 Nevens, Forty Years at Sea, 225. 47 Fitz-Roy, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages, 490. NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 267 48 Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano, 44-45. 49 Melville, “The Encantadas,” 172. 50 Porter, A Voyage in the South Seas, 39. 51 Melville, “The Encantadas,” 168. 52 Melville, Moby-Dick, 317. 53 Whitecar, Four Years in a Whaleship, 127. 54 Colton, Deck and Port, 69-70. 55 Browne, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, 478. 56 Life in a Man-of-War, 230. 57 Markham, The Great Frozen Sea, 221. 58 Peary, Tl>e North Pole, 300. 59 Belcher, The Last of the Arctic Voyages, 5. 60 McClintock, Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas, 342-43. 61 Arctic Expedition, 1875-6, 471. 62 The order for the dispatch of mail to the Nares expedition was printed as a broadside: POLAR EXPEDITION DESPATCH OF MAILS FOR mails for the Polar Ships “Alert” and “Discovery” will be made up for conveyance from Portsmouth on or about the 25th May by the Steam Yacht “Pandora,” Captain Allen Young having kindlv consented to convey letters for the officers and crews of the Polar Ships, to be deposited at the depots. All letters should be sent through the Post Office prepaid the inland rate of postage, and addressed “Arctic Yacht Pandora, Portsmouth.” It should be understood that these letters will be deposited at the de¬ pots on the chance of Captain Nares being able to communicate with the entrance of Smith’s Sound by means of a small sledge party in the autumn of the present year, and that there is, therefore, some uncertainty whether the letters will reach their destination. It is requested that the friends of the officers and men of the Polar Expe¬ dition will make their letters as few and light as possible. No letters containing articles of value should be sent. No newspapers should be sent, as the Admiralty will send a sufficient supply. Bv Command of the Postmaster-General 15th May 1876: Message with information about the dispatch of mails for the Polar Ships “Alert” and “Discovery,” 1 leaf, printed. Ephemera Collection, British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76, MS 1815/30, Scott Polar Research Institute, Univer¬ sity of Cambridge. 63 Nares, Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea, 175. 268 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 64 Robert McClure to his sister, 10 Apr. 1853, The Arctic Dispatches, Arctic Pam¬ phlets 2 1852-53, Royal Geographical Society. 65 Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News 1 (31 Oct. 1850): 1. 66 De Long, The Voyage of the Jeannette, 162-63. 67 On Edison’s contributions to the Jeannette expedition, see Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice. 68 The telephone dream resonates with a late twentieth-century moment of environ¬ mental extremity and death: the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Mount Ever¬ est, in which a blizzard took eight lives in one day. Rob Hall, an experienced New Zealand mountaineer and guide, was trapped and died on the mountain; while he was unable to be reached for rescue, he did have the technology to communicate with Base Camp, which was able to patch his radio via satellite phone through to his wife in New Zealand in order to say a farewell (Krakauer, Into Thin Air). 5. Inuit Knowledge and Charles Francis Hall Epigraph: Hall, Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux, 41. 1 Excellent exceptions include Woodman, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery. Eber, Encounters on the Passage ; Potter, Finding Franklin-, and the work of Louie Ka- mookak, an Inuit historian who lived in Gjoa Haven. 2 Deposition of Adam Beck, 3 Mar. 1852, 202, ADM7/192, National Archives, London. 3 John Rae to Archibald Barclay, 1 Sept. 1854, in Ra t,John Rae’s Arctic Correspon¬ dence, 342. 4 Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” 392. 5 OlAoi EupPouAeuopevoi [Friendly Consultants], The Great Arctic Mystery, 9. 6 Cruikshank cautions scholars, however, not to view tk as “static, timeless, and hermetically sealed” {Do Glaciers Listen?, 9-10). 7 Hall, Narrative ofthe Second Arctic Expedition, 33. 8 The foremost historian of Hall’s adventures is Chauncey Loomis, whose biogra¬ phy Weird and Tragic Shores offers a richly detailed account of his life and of his death. Bruce Henderson’s account of the Polaris expedition, Fatal North, also cov¬ ers Hall extensively. 9 Journal of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, 3 Feb. 1854, Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. Perhaps a sense of similar receptions by white people over the course of his life is behind a plea with which Ipiirviq closes a letter written much later: “Pleas call haff wite man no Esquimaux Joe.” Cited in Russell Potter, “A Letter from Ebierbing,” Visions of the North, blog, https://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/2017 /12/a-letter-from-ebierbing.html. 10 Hall, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 23-24. n Quoted in Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores, 153. 12 Hall, Narrative ofthe Second Arctic Expedition, 23-24. NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 269 13 Loomis’s exhumation of Hall’s body in 1968 confirmed his death by arsenic poisoning. 14 The Smithsonian’s Charles Francis Hall Collection covers only the years 1860-71, and yet consists of over 2.50 notebooks, in addition to hundreds of other letters, notes, scientific observations, and memoranda. 13 His biographer Loomis speculates that the death in 1857 of the best-known American Arctic explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, catalyzed his interest. Kane’s body traveled on an extensive funeral train throughout the country (second only to Abraham Lincoln’s), arriving in Hall’s Cincinnati in March 1857. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores, 39-41. 16 Collection 701, Box 1, Folder 1, Diary, with Notes opening 1 Jan. i860, Hall Collection. 17 Box 1, Folder 1, Diary, with Notes opening 1 Jan. i860, Hall Collection. 18 Box 11, Folder 109, Newspaper clipping, n.d., Hall Collection. 19 Box 1, Folder 2, Journal, with preparations for the first expedition, Hall Collection. 20 Hall, Arctic Researches, 587. Ml future references to this edition will be cited parenthetically. 21 Box 1, Folder 1, Diary, 21 Feb. i860, Hall Collection. 22 Box 1, Folder 1, Diary, 17 July i860, Hall Collection. 23 Box 1, Folder 4, Journal for months preceding the first expedition. Hall Collection. 24 Box 4, Folder 46, Notes for lectures on the 1st expedition, 1863-64, Hall Collec¬ tion. The etymological definition for “Eskimo” used by Hall w-as in long-standing use through the late twentieth century but has been challenged by Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian, w-ho finds the term instead coming from an Algonkian lan¬ guage, Montagnais, and meaning “she who nets snow-shoes.” Goddard, Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 5, 6. 25 Box 4, Folder 46, Notes for lectures on the 1st expedition, 1863-64, Hall Collection. 26 The preface to the second narrative explains that the U.S. Navy had intended initially to produce a narrative only of the third, dramatic Polaris expedition but found they had a volume of material on the second voyage at hand: “Under the act of Congress approved June 23,1874, the Navy Department purchased from his family, for the sum of 815,000, the manuscripts of his several explorations, some of which were made use of bv the late Admiral Davis in preparing for the Department the widely-appreciated ‘Narrative of the North Polar Expedition [in the Polaris] .’ The larger number of the manuscripts, however, have been found to belong to the Second Expedition, and form the basis of the Narrative now- prepared by the orders of the Department.” Hall, Narrative ofthe Second Arctic Expedition, xi-xii. 27 Box 4, Folder 46, Notes for lectures on the 1st expedition, 1863-64, Hall Collection. 28 Hall, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 207. 29 Harper, “Burial at Sea.” 30 Charles Francis Hall, 012 Journal, Vol. I, January 1860-July i860, Hall Collection. 31 Box 1, Folder 14, Journal, Vol. Ill, August 1860-November i860, Hall Collection. 32 Box 1, Folder 14, Journal, Vol. Ill, August 1860-November i860, Hall Collection. 270 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 33 Hall, Life with the Esquimaux, 57. 34 Hall, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 289-90. 35 Horatio Austin, “Scheme of equipment for 2nd Arctic Expedition drawn up [?] 1850 to_drawn up for the Arctic on the return of the Expedition in 1851,” mcl 35 Printed Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. 36 Box 1, Folder 14, Journal, Volume III, August 1860-November i860,13 Sept, i860, Hall Collection. 37 Hall, Narrative ofthe Second Arctic Expedition, 255-56. 38 Hallendy, Tukiliit, 60. 39 Quoted in Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores, 155. 40 Hall, Narrative ofthe Second Arctic Expedition, 25. 41 In one example of destroyed journals, the narrative of a survivor of the Polaris trials reveals that an “expressive article was found” at a campsite of some of the separated crew, “namely, a log-book, out of which was torn all reference to the death of Captain Hall” (Blake, Arctic Experiences, 354). 42 “On his return he had presented to Mr. J. Ingersoll Bowditch the corrections of a number of typographical and other errors in ‘The Navigator,’ which were adopted in the subsequent editions, in regard to which corrections he had replied to an inquiry from Mr. G. W. Blunt by saying that ‘he had made them while working through Bowditch during a winter in the igloos’” (Hall, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 32). 43 Hall, Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 148. Conclusion Epigraph: Carson, The Sea around Us, 7. 1 The grounding happened at the beginning of the expedition’s first leg; I was sched¬ uled to join its second leg. Ed Struzik, a Canadian writer aboard the Akademik Ioffe for the project’s first leg, wrote a deeply sobering account of the ordeal and its implications; see Struzkik, “In the Melting Arctic, a Harrowing Account from a Stranded Ship.” 2 In sharing the story of the 2017 postponement with a friend who is a scholar- sailor I learned that she and other experienced mariners had been concerned about the design and safety of the ship on which we had originally been set to sail. “You dodged a bullet,” she said, and assured me that the other vessel options for the postponed expedition were sound. The twice-delayed expedition is as of this writing scheduling a fall 2019 journey. Northwest Passage Project, https;// northwestpassageproject.org/. 3 De Long, The Voyage of the Jeannette, 2:456. 4 Melville, Moby-Dick, 164; Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1179. The “shrou[dj” seen on the huge figure at the end of Pym in its “whiteness” also evokes the only burial garment or covering the sailor can expect: the sewed-up shroud of his white canvas hammock. 271 NOTES TO CONCLUSION 5 In the footage the claw of a robotic arm embeds the Bag in the seabed. The video still that illustrated manv media reports of the claim-staking shows a rounded camera lens, bounded bv black, that composes the scene to afford a view of the North Pole as if a sphere seen from space. “It’s like putting a flag on the moon,” a Russian official proclaimed. The comparison is pointed: the submersible that planted the flag was named Mir i, just as Russias now-decommissioned space sta¬ tion was named Mir, after the Russian word meaning peace or world (Parfitt, “Russia Plants Flag on North Pole Seabed ’). I discuss the Russian flag planting at greater length in Blum, John Gleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration.” Elizabeth DeLoughrev has found the polar and oceanic regions to be figuratively consistent with extraterrestrial spaces ( Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth,” 160). 6 Carson, The Sea around Us, 3. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 7 In a similar vein, Stacy Alaimo writes, The synchronic depth and breadth of the oceans present a kind of incomprehensible immensity that parallels the diachronic scale of anthropogenic effects.... To begin to glimpse the seas, one must descend, not transcend, be immersed in highly mediated environments that suggest the en¬ tanglements of knowledge, science, economics, and power {Exposed, 161). 8 JeffreyJerome Cohen, “Anarky, in Menely and Taylor ,AnthropoceneReading, 17, 34 - 9 “A more potent marine transcorporeality would submerge the human within global networks of consumption, waste, and pollution, capturing the strange agencies of the ordinary stuff of our lives (Alaimo, Exposed, 113). 2.72 NOTES TO CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Accountant General’s Record Book. 1852. National Archives, London. Adelie Mail and Cape Adare Times. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, Univer¬ sity of Cambridge. Admiralty Correspondence Index for 1852. National Archives, London. Admiralty Records. National Archives, London. Albanov, Valernian. In the Land of White Death. New York: Modern Libraries, 2000. All Aboard: The Journal of r.m.s. “Transylvania!’ Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collec¬ tion. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Amundsen, Roald. The North West Passage. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. Amundsen, Roald. The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910-1912. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. The Antarctic Book, Winter Quarters, 1907-1909. London: William Heinemann, 1909. The Antarctic Petrel. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. The Arctic Eagle. Harrie H. Newcomb Papers. George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library. Arctic Expedition, 1875-6: Journals and Proceedings of the Arctic Expedition, 1875-6, under the Command of Sir George S. Nares. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Harrison and Sons, 1875-77. Arctic Exploration Letterbook (Private). Volume 10. Elisha Kent Kane Papers. Ameri¬ can Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Arctic Miscellanies: A Souvenir of the Late Polar Search by the Officers and Seamen of the Expedition. London: Colburn, 1852. The Arctic Moon. Adolphus Greely Papers, 1876-1973. Stefansson Collection, Dart¬ mouth College. Arctic Pamphlets, 1852-54. Royal Geographical Society, London. Armitage, Albert. Two Years in the Antarctic: Being a Narrative of the British National Antarctic Expedition. London: Edward Arnold, 1905. Aston, Felicity. Alone in Antarctica: The First Woman to Ski Solo across the Southern Ice. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1014. Aston, Felicity. Call of the White: Taking the World to the South Pole. Chichester, UK: Summersdale Press, 2011. Aurora Borealis. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Austin, Horatio. Collection. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Austral Chronicle. A Bi-Weekly Journal. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Hun¬ tington Library, San Marino, California. Back, George. Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings oj George Back, Midshipman with Franklin, 1819-1822. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Barrow, John. Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions,from the Years 1818 to the Present Time. London: John Murray, 1846. Beechey, Frederick William. Narrative of a l oyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait. London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831. Beechey, Frederick William. A Voyage oj Discovery towards the North Pole, Performed in His Majesty’s Ships Dorothea and Trent, under the Command of Captain David Buchan, R.N.; 1818; to which is added, a summary oj all the early attempts to reach the Pacific by way of the Pole. London: Richard Bentley, 1844 Belcher, Edward. The Last of the Arctic Voyages: Being a Narrative oj the Expedition in h.m.S. Assistance, Under the command of Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.B., in search oj Sir John Franklin, during the years 1852-53-54. London: L. Reeve, 1855. Blake, E. Vale, ed. Arctic Experiences: Containing Capt. George E. Tyson’s Wonderful Drift on the Ice-Floe, a History of the Polaris Expedition, the Cruise oj the Tigress, and Rescue of the Polaris Survivors. To Which Is Added a General Arctic Chronol¬ ogy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874. The Blizzard. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Bound Home or The Gold-Hunters’ Manual: A Newspaper Published on Board the Pacific Mail S.S. Co.’s Steamship “Northerner,” Capt. Henry Randall, on Her Trip from San Francisco to Panama. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Hun¬ tington Library, San Marino, California. The Boys and Girls Favorite. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76 Collection. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Browne, J. Ross. Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes of a Sojourn on the Island of Zanzibar, to Which Is Appended a Brief History of the Whale Fishery, Its Past and Present Condition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1846. Bull-Dog Gazette. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Byrd, Richard E. Alone. New York: Ace Books, 1938. Carter, Robert Randolph. Searching for the Franklin Expedition: The Arctic Journals of Robert Randolph Carter. Edited by Harold B. Gill Jr. and Joanne Young. An¬ napolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. *74 BIBLIOGRAPHY Catapult ofthe u.S.S. Maryland. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The WorstJourney in the World. 1922.. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989. Colton, Walter. Deck and Port; or, Incidents of a Cruise in the United States Frigate Congress to California. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1850. Cook, Frederick A . My Attainment of the Pole. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Cunard Cruise News. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Davis, J. E. [John Edward \. A Letterfro?n the Antarctic. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1901. de Bray, Emile Frederic. A Frenchman in Search of Franklin: De Bray’s Arctic Journal, 1892-1894. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. De Long, George W. The Voyage ofthe Jeannette; Fite Ship and Ice Journals of George W De Long, Lieutenant-Commander u.S.N. and Commander of the Polar Expedition of1879-1881. Edited by Emma De Long. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. De Mille, James. Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888. Dickens, Charles. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers.” Household Words 246 (9 Dec. 1854): 392 - Discovery News. Nares Expedition. Private collection. Used with permission. Documents Relating to Arctic Expeditions. National Archives, London. Ephemera Collection. British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News, Published on Board h.m.S. Resolute, Captn Horatio T. Austin, C.B. in Search of the Expedition under SirJohn Franklin. London: Ackermann, 1852. Fiala, Anthony. “Christmas Near the North Pole.” New York Times, 23 Dec. 1906, 25. Fiala, Anthony. Fighting the Polar Ice. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1907. Fisher, Alexander. A Journal of a Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions: In His Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper, in the Years 1819 and 1820. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821. Fitz-Roy, Robert. Narrative ofthe Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, between the Years 1826and 1846. London: Henry Colburn, 1839. Flight of the plover. John Simpson Papers. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. Franklin, John. Narrative of a Journey to the Shores ofthe Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22. London: John Murray, 1824. Gilder, William H. Schwatka’s Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881. Gilman, William Henry. Letters Written Home. Exeter, NH, 1911. BIBLIOGRAPHY 2-75 Greely, Adolphus W. A Handbook of Polar Discoveries. Boston: Little and Brown, 1907. Greely, Adolphus W. Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of1881-84 a »d the Attainment of the Farthest North. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886. Guide to the John Simpson Papers , 1825-75. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. Hall, Charles Francis. Arctic Researches and Lije among the Esquimaux: Being the Nar¬ rative of an Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, in the Years i860,1861, and 1862. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865. Hall, Charles Francis. Collection. National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Washington, DC. Hall, Charles Francis. Life with the Esquimaux: Lite Nairative oj Captain Charles Francis Hall of the Whaling Barque “George Henry”from the 29th May, i860, to the 13 th September, 1862; with the Results of a Long Intercourse with the Innuits and Full Description of Their Mode of Life, the Discovery of Actual Relics ofthe Expedition oj Martin Frobisher of Three Centuries Ago, and Deductions in Favor of Yet Discovering Some oj the Survivors of Sir John Franklin s Expedition. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864. Hall, Charles Francis. Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition Made by Charles F. Hall: His voyage to Repulse Bay, Sledge Journeys to the Straits of Fury and Hecla and to King William’s Land and Residence among the Eskimos during the Years 1864-69. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879. Harris, Francis L. An Abstract of a Journal in the Arctic Ocean during the Years of i860 and 61 by FL Harris, U.S. Navy. Private collection. Used with permission. Hayes, Isaac Israel. An Arctic Boat Journey in the Autumn of1834. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Hayes, Isaac Israel. The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner “United States." New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867. Henson, Matthew. A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. Hevwood, Harvey Scott. The Arctic Diary ofHarvey Scott Hey wood, Volunteer Sea¬ man on the Hayes expedition to the Arctic, 1860-61. Private collection. Used with permission. Kane, Elisha Kent. Arctic Explorations-. The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search oj Sir John Franklin, i8s3, ’S4> SS- Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1856. Koldewey, Carl. The German Arctic Expedition of1869-70, and Narrative oj the Wreck of the “Hansa” in the Ice. Translated by L. Mercier and edited by H. W. Bates. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874. Leane, Elizabeth, ed. TheAdelie Blizzard: Mawsons Forgotten Newspaper. Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2010. Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery in the Western Arctic Sea, by an Of¬ ficer of the Expedition. London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips, 1821. 276 BIBLIOGRAPHY Life in a Man-of-War, or Scenes in “Old Ironsides" during Her Cruise in the Pacific. Philadelphia: Lydia R. Bailey, 1841. Lyon, G. F. The Private Journal of Captain G. F. Lyon, oJh.m.S. Hecla, during the recent voyage of discovery under Captain Parry. London: John Murray, 1814. MacMillan, Donald Baxter. Collection. George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library. Maguire, Rochfort. The Journal of Rochfort Maguire 1852-1854: Two Years at Point Barrow, Alaska, aboard H.M.S. Plover in the Search for Sir John Franklin. Edited by John Bockstoce. London: Hakluyt Society, 1988. Makura Journal, With Apologies to The Boston Journal. En Route Vancouver to Sydney. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Markham, Albert Hastings. The Great Frozen Sea: A Personal Narrative of the Voyage of the “Alert” during the Arctic Expedition of 187s- 6 . London: Daldy, Isbister, 1878. Markham, Albert Hastings. A Polar Reconnaissance: Being the Voyage of the “Isbjdm” to Novaya Zemlya in 1879. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881. Markham, Albert Hastings. A Whaling Cruise to Baffin's Bay and the Gulf ojBoothia. And an Account of the Rescue of the Crew of the “Polaris.” London: Samson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1874. Markham, Clements R. The Arctic Navy List, or a century of Arctic and Antarctic officers, together with a list of officers of the 187s expedition, and their services, 1773-1873. London: Griffin, 1875. Markham, Clements R. The Lands of Silence: A History of Arctic and Antarctic Explo¬ ration. 1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Markham, Clements R. Life ofAdmiral Sir Leopold McClintock. 1909. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Markham, Clements R. The Life of Sir Clements R. Markham. London: John Murray, 1917 - Material printed on hms Assistance, 1852-54. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Mawson, Douglas. Mawsons Antarctic Diaries. Edited by Fred Jacka and Eleanor Jacka. Crows News, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1988. May, William Henry. Collection. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. McClintock [M’Clintock], Francis Leopold. Lite Voyage of the “Fox” in Arctic Seas: A Narrative ofthe Discovery ofthe Fate ofSir John Franklin and his Companions. London: John Murray, 1859. McClure, Robert. The Arctic Dispatches: Containing an Account oj the Discovery of the North-West Passage. London: J. D. Potter, 1853. Melville, George W. In the Lena Delta: A Narrative ofthe Search for Lieut. - Commander De Long and his Companions Followed by an Account of the Greely Relief Expedition and A Proposed Method oj Reaching the North Pole. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885. BIBLIOGRAPHY 2-77 Midnight Sun. Ernest deKoven Leffingwell Papers, 1900-1961. Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. Morillo, Pablo. “Venesolanos que habeis seguido a Bolivar” Frigata Diana Imprenta del Exercito expedicionario: 1 Jan. 1815:1. John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. Moss, Edward L. Shores ofthe Polar Sea: A Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of1873-6. London: M. Ward, 1878. Murdoch, W. G. Burn. From Edinburgh to the Antarctic: An Artist’s Notes and Sketches during the Dundee Antarctic Expedition of 1892-93. London: Longmans, Green, 1894. Murray, James, and George Marston. Antarctic Days: Sketches of the Homely Side of Polar Life by Two of Shackleton’s Men. London: Andrew Melrose, 1913. Murray, Thomas Boyles. Kalli, the Esquimaux Christian: A Memoir. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1856. Nansen, Fridtjof. Farthest North. Westminster, UK: Archibald Constable, 1897. Nares, George S. Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea during 1873-6 in H.M. Ships “Alert”and “Discovery.” London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, 1878. Nevens, W illiam. Forty Years at Sea: Or a Narrative ofthe Adventures of William Nevens. Portland, ME: Thurston, Fenley, 1846. New Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle. North Georgia Gazette Collection. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Nordenskjold, N. Otto G., and Johan Gunnar Andersson. Antarctica or Two Years amongst the Ice of the South Pole. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905. North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle. In William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyagefor the Discovery of a North-West Passagefrom the Atlantic to the Pacific: Performed in the Years, 1819-20, in His Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper under the Orders of William Edward Parry. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 182.1. Northern Regions; or, Uncle Richard’s relation of Captain Parry’s voyages for the dis¬ covery of a north-west passage, and Franklin’s and Cochrane’s overlandjourneys to other parts of the world. New York: O. A. Roorbach, 1827. Observer of the U.S. Aircraft Carrier Lexington. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collec¬ tion. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Ommanney, Erasmus. Collection. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Osborn, Sherard. Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal, or, Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions: In Search of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, in the Years 1830-31. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852. Our Lost Explorers: the Narrative ofthe Jeannette Arctic Expedition as Related by the Survivors, and in the Records and LastJournals of Lieutenant De Long, edited by Raymond Lee Newcomb. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1883. Parry, Edward. Memoirs of Rear-Admiral Sir W. Edward Parry, Kt, F.R.S. New York: Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge, 1857. 178 BIBLIOGRAPHY Parry, William Edward./o«r»tf/ of a Second Voyagefor the Discovery of a North-West Passagefrom the Atlantic to the Pacific; Performed in the Years, 1821-22-23, in His Majesty’s Ships Fury and Hecla under the Orders of William Edward Parry. London: John Murray, 1824. Parry, William Edward. Journal of a Voyagefor the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Performed in the Years, 1819-20, in His Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper under the Orders of William Edward Parry. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1821. Parry, William Edward. Narrative of an Attempt to Reach the North Pole, in Boats Fittedfor the Purpose and Attached to His Majesty’s Ship Hecla. London: John Murray, 1828. Peary, Robert. The North Pole: Its Discovery in 19 09 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1910. Playbills, 1851 [printed in hms Assistance]. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Ponting, Herbert G. The Great White South. London: Duckworth, 1930. Port Foulke Weekly News. New-York Historical Society. Porter, David. A Voyage in the South Seas, in the Years 1812,1813, and 1814 with Particu¬ lar details of the Gallipagos and Washington Islands. London: Phillips, 1823. Priestley, Raymond. Collection, Polar Papers. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Printed Programmes of Theatrical Entertainment. British Arctic Expedition of 1:875—76. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason and Dixon. New York: Picador, 2004. Queen’s Illuminated Magazine and North Cornwall Gazette. Published in Winter quar¬ ters, Arctic Regions. British Library, London. Rae, ]o\\n. John Rae’s Arctic Correspondence 1844-1833. Victoria, Canada: TouchWood Editions, 2014. Richardson, John. Arctic Searching Expedition: A Journal of a Boat-Voyage through Rupert’s Land and the Arctic Sea, in search of the discovery ships under command of Sir John Franklin. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851. R.M.S. City oj Paris Gazette, Printed on Board. Inman and International Steamship Company. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Ross, James Clark. Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, during the Years 1839-43. London: John Murray, 1847. Ross, John. A Voyage of Discovery, Made under the Orders of the Admiralty, in His Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander, for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin’s Bay, and Inquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage. London: J. Murray, 1819. Ross, John. Narrative of a second voyage in search of a North-west passage, and of a resi¬ dence in the Arctic regions, during the years 1829,1830,1831,1832,1833 by Sir John Ross. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835. BIBLIOGRAPHY 279 Sabine, Edward. Remarks on the account of the late voyage of discovery to Baffin’s Bay published by Captain J. Ross, r.n. London: Printed by R. and A. Taylor for John Booth, 1819. Schwatka, Frederick. The Children of the Cold. New York: Cassell, 1895. Scott, Robert Falcon. “Preface." In South Polar Times I: April to August 1902, v-viii. London: Smith, Elder, 1907 Scott, Robert Falcon. Scott's Last Expedition. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1915. Scott, Robert Falcon. Tragedy and Triumph: The Journals of Captain R. F. Scott’s Last Polar Expedition. London: Prospero Press, 2000. Scott, Robert Falcon. The Voyage of the "Discovery.” London: Smith, Elder, 1905. [Seaborn, Adam]. Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery. New York: J. Seymour, 1820. Seitz, Charles L. Polar Diaries. Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. Shackleton, Ernest, e d. Aurora Australis. Antarctica: Printed at the Sign of “The Pen¬ guin” by Joyce and Wild, 1908. Shackleton, Ernest. The Heart ofthe Antarctic: Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1914. Shackleton, Ernest. South. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Shells and Seaweed. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Shorklev, George. Papers. Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. Simpson, John. Papers. David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. South Polar Times. Scott Polar Research Institute Archives, University of Cambridge. South Polar Times Contributions (unpublished). Scott Polar Research Institute Ar¬ chives, University of Cambridge. Stefansson, Vilhjamur. Papers. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. Svmmes, John Cleves. “Light Gives Light, to Light Discover—Ad Infinitum. St. Louis, MO: April 10,1818. Tenedos Times: A Monthly Journal of the Mediterranean Destroyer Flotilla during the Early Part of the War. Originallv Printed on Board H.M.S. “Blenheim." London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. New York: Library of America, 1985. Umbria Express, and Atlantic Times. Kemble Maritime Ephemera Collection. Hun¬ tington Library, San Marino, California. Vedoe, Anton M. Papers. Stefansson Collection, Dartmouth College. Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano, Being a Narrative of Twelve Years Life in a Whale Ship! Worcester, MA: Thomas Drew Jr., 1846. Weekly Guy. John Simpson Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. West Philadelphia Hospital Register. Library Company of Philadelphia. 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY Whitecar, William B. Jr. Four Years in a Whaleship: Embracing Cruises in the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Antarctic Oceans, in the years iSss> ’6, 7, ’8, ’^.Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, i860. Worsley, F. A. Endurance. New York: Norton, 2000. OlAoi lupffouAeuopevoi [Friendly Consultants], Fite Great Arctic Mystery. London: Chapman and Hall, 1856. Secondary Sources “A 5°C Arctic in a 2°c World: Challenges and Recommendations for Immediate Action.” Briefing Paper for Arctic Science Ministerial, 28 Sept. 2016. Columbia Climate Center, Columbia University. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Blooming¬ ton: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Alaimo, Stacy. "Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures.” pmla 127.3 (2-012): 358-64. Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackletons Legendary Antarctic Expedition. New York: Knopf, 1998. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Anthony, Jason C. Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. Antarctic Circle. Edited by Robert B. Stephenson, http://www.antarctic-circle.org/. Aporta, Claudio, Michael Bravo, and Fraser Taylor. Pan Inuit Trails. Accessed 1 Dec. 2016. http://paninuittrails.org/. Baucom, Ian, and Matthew Omelsky. “Knowledge in the Age of Climate Change.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116.1 (2017): 1—18. Beattie, Owen, and John Geiger. Frozen in Thne: Unlocking the Secrets of the Doomed 184s Arctic Expedition. New York: Plume, 1990. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. 1968. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano- vich, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology ofTlnngs. Durham: Duke Univer¬ sity Press, 2010. Berkey, James. “Splendid Little Papers from the ‘Splendid Little War’: Mapping Em¬ pire in the Soldier Newspapers of the Spanish-American War.” Journal of Modem Periodical Studies 3.2 (2012): 158-74. BIBLIOGRAPHY 281 Berkey, James. “Traces of che Confederacy: Soldier Newspapers and Wartime Printing in the Occupied South.” In Literary Cultures of the Civil War , edited by Timothy Sweet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Berton, Pierre. Arctic Grail: Ihe Questfor the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909. 1988. New York: Lyons Press, 2000. Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Blum, Hester. “Introduction: Oceanic Studies!' Atlantic Studies 10.2 (2013): 131-53. Blum, Hester. “John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration.” American Literature 84.2 (2012): 243-71. Blum, Hester. “Melville in the Arctic.” Leviathan 20.1 (2018): 74-84. Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” pmla 125.3 (2010): 770-79. Blum, Hester. “Speaking Substances.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2016. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speaking-substances-ice/. Blum, Hester. The Viewfrom the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Blum, Hester, and Jason R. Rudy. “First Person Nautical: Poetry and Play at Sea.” Jig: Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1.1 (2013): 189-94. Boes, Tobias, and Kate Marshall. “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction.” Min¬ nesota Review 83, new series (2014): 60-72. Bradfield, Elizabeth. Approaching Ice: Poems. New York: Persea Books, 2010. Brogan, Jan. “Messages in a Bottle Chart a Lifelong Romance with the Sea.” Boston Globe , 12 Feb. 2013. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Capelotti, P. J. The Greatest Show in the Arctic: The American Exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1898-190$. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Carroll, Siobhan. An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 17S0-1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Carson, Rachel. The Sea around Us. 1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Carter, Robert Randolph. Searching for the Franklin Expedition: The Arctic Journal of Robert Randolph Carter. Edited by Harold B. Gill Jr. and Joanne Young. An¬ napolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. Cavell, Janice. “Making Books for Mr Murray: The Case of Edward Parry’s Third Arctic Narrative.” The Library 14.1 (2013): 45-69. Cavell, Janice. Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Cohen, Lara Langer. “Tire Emancipation of Boyhood: Postbellum Teenage Sub¬ culture and the Amateur Press.” Common-Place 14.1 (2013). Accessed 10 282 BIBLIOGRAPHY Feb. 2014. http://www.common-place-archives.0rg/vol-14/no-01/cohen/# .Wi9 P othKjMI. Cohen, Margaret. Lire Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Cohoon, Lorinda B. Serialized Citizenships: Periodicals, Books, and American Boys, 1840-1911. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction. Ann Arbor: Univer¬ sity of Michigan Library, Open Humanities Press, 2014. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Tire Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 16: Poetical Works. Edited by J. C. C. Mays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Cooper, Anthony Ashely. Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. London, 1709. Counter, S. Allen. North Pole Promise: Black, White, and Inuit Friends. Peterbor¬ ough, NH: Bauhan, 2017. Craciun, Adriana. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Craciun, Adriana. “Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein.” Nineteenth- Century Literature 65.4 (2011): 433-80. Crane, David. Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy. New York: Knopf, 2006. Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003. Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (3 Jan. 2002): 23. Cubitt, Sean. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Dur¬ ham: Duke University Press, 2017. David, Robert G. Tire Arctic in the British bnagination, 1818-1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Davis, Jim. “British Bravery, or Tars Triumphant: Images of the British Navy in Nauti¬ cal Melodrama.” New Theatre Quarterly 4.14 (1988): 122-43. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. DeLoughery, Elizabeth M. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth.” Public Culture 26.2 (2014): 257-80. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dimock, Wai Chee. “ Gilgamesh' s Planetary Turn.” In The Planetary Turn: Art, Dia¬ logue, and Geoaesthetics in the 21st-Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Dimock, Wai Chee. Lhrough Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Dimock, Wai Chee, and Lawrence Buell, eds. Shades of the Planet: American Litera¬ ture as World Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Eber, Dorothy Harley. Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers. Toronto: University ot Toronto Press, 2008. 283 BIBLIOGRAPHY Eber, Dorothy. When the Whalers Were Up North: Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” In The Annotated Waste Land with Contemporary Prose. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Estrin, James. “Photographing Climate Change Refugees, by Drone and on Foot.” New York Times, 28 Dec. 2016. http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/28 /photographing-climate-change-refugees-drone-foot-josh-haner/. Fiennes, Ranulph. Captain Scott. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004. Fitting, Peter. Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Fleming, Fergus. Barrow’s Boys. London: Granta Books, 1998. Foote, Stephanie. “The Stuff of Fiction: The Rise of the Environmental Novel.” Pre¬ sentation at Penn State University, 5 Dec. 2016. Foote, Stephanie, and Stephanie LeMenager. “Editors’ Column.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1.1 (2014): 1-9. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics (Spring 1986): 22-27. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Techoculture. Cam¬ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Liter¬ ature, and Periodical Culture. New York: Oxford, 2015. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chi¬ cago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Giddings, J. Louis . Ancient Men of the Arctic. New York: Knopf, 1967. Gillis, Justin. “Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly.” New York Times, 30 Mar. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/science /global-warming-antarctica-ice-sheet-sea-level-rise.html. Gillis, Justin. “Miles of Ice Collapsing into the Sea: Antarctic Dispatches.” New York Times, 18 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate /antarctica-ice-melt-climate-change.html. Gillis, Justin, and Kenneth Chang. “Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans from Polar Melt.” New York Times, 12 May 2014. http://wwsv.nytimes.com/2014/05 / 13/science/earth/collapse-of-parts-of-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-has-begun -scientists-say.html. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cam¬ bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Glasberg, Elena. Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012. Goddard, Ives. Handbook of North American Indians: Arctic. Volume 5. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1984. Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discoveiy of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY Green, James, and Peter Stallybrass. Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, Library Company of Philadelphia, British Library, 1006. Greenbaum, J. S., D. D. Blankenship, D. A. Young, T. G. Richter, J. L. Roberts, A. R. A. Aitken, B. Legresy, D. M. Schroeder, R. C. Warner, T. D. van Ommen, and M. J. Siegert. “Ocean Access to a Cavity beneath Totten Glacier in East Antarctica.” Nature Geoscience 8(16 Mar. 2015): 294-98. Hallendy, Norman. Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2001. Hallendy, Norman. Tukiliit: An Introduction to Inuksuit and Other Stone Figures of the North. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre and University of Alaska Press, 2009. Hamilton, Alice Jane. Findingjolm Rae. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2017. Hamilton, Kristie. America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989. Harper, Kenn. “Burial at Sea: The Death of Kudlago.” Nunatsiaq News (-OO.'V'^T A<^c~ 112,142, 244n50. See also Fiala-Ziegler Expedition Fiala-Ziegler Expedition, 45-46, 56, 59, 77, 85,112-13,126,130. See also Fiala, Anthony fiction: about polar regions, 37-38,140, 163-165, 26on44; written by expedition members, 166-71, 96,176, i6zn6z. See also novels Fisher, Alexander, 100-01, 25oni29, z66nzS Fitzroy, Robert, 201 Fleming, Fergus, 246n6o Flight of the Plover, or the North Pole Charivari, 15, 47,102-5,113, 253ni7 Foote, Stephanie, 32, 24on44 forms: blank, 30, 41,165,177-79,181-94, 238n5, 265ms fossil fuels. See resource extraction Fox (ship), 178-81, 206, 216, 242ml. See also McClintock, Francis Leopold Fram (ship), 15, 49, 81, 83, 85,107-8,129. See also Nansen, Fridtjof Framsjaa, 15, 49, 83,107,129 Frankenstein (Shelley), 9, 37 Franklin, John, xvi, 4, 47, 49,102,148, 164,191, 207-8; searches for, 6, 8,35, 40, 44,56-57, 68-69, 71. 73 . 75 . 77 . 83, 102,108, iio-ii, 115,117-18,130,132, 178-85,194-99, 209-212, 215-18, 221, 223, 224-25, 263n4, 264n9 Franz Josef Land, 77 Frobisher Bay, 224-27 Frobisher, Martin, 3, 225-27 Frost Fairs, Thames, 55,59 Galapagos Islands, 199-204 genre: of polar writing, xviii, 3, 5-6, 28,30, 32, 44, 52, 68, 74, 93,115,137,153,165, 194, 24on52 INDEX 2-93 geological time. See deep time Ghosh, Amitav, 31,140051 Giffard, George, 65, 76,145054 Gitelmao, Lisa, 6,30,187,13805 Glacier Tongue , 141 glaciers, 9, n, 154,111 Gleaner , 15, 47,130-31 global warmiog. See climate chaoge Gore, Graham, 179,181 Gould, Stephen Jay, 10 Greely, Adolphus, 4, 15, 49-50, 78, 84, 113 Greeo, James, 188 Greeolaod, 3, 8, 9,116,114,135,111, 117 Greeowich Meao Time, 70, 78, 91 Griper (ship), 15,50, 86. See also Parry, William Edward Grolier Club, xv-xvii gryphons, 133-35 Hall, Charles Fraocis, 4, 6, 41, 81, 83, hi—31,171041 Hamilton, Kristie, 153 Hamlet , 87, 88,113 Hannah. See Taqulittuq Hansa (ship), 15, 64, 65. See also Koldewey, Carl Harper, Kenn, 111,155077 Harper’s Weekly, 81-81,165,16409 Harris, Elizabeth, 55, 71 Harris, Francis L„ 1510133 Hartt, Henry P„ 116,156084 Hayes, Isaac Israel, 4,15,18-19, 63-64, 65, 71-71, 84, 88,133-36,117 Hecla (ship), 15, 50, 86. See also Parry, William Edward Hendrik, Hans (Suersaq), 114 Henson, Matthew, 4, 113,114,155077 Heywood, Harvey Scott, 114,134 hierarchies: nautical, 64-65, 99-101 Hirsch, Edward, 116 Hoag, Elaine, 56, 57, 68,101,131,153016 hollow earth: theories of, 6, 36,37,163-67, 176,160044 homoeroticism: among expedition members, 113-30,171-73,156083-84, 156089 Hooper, William Hulme, 103-5 Hoppner, Henry Parkvns, 98 Hudson, Henry, 3 Huntford, Roland, 156083,159017 Hurley, Frank, 141-41,147-48 Ice-Blink, 47, 71, 77,14106 Iligliuk, 114,117 Illustrated Arctic News, xvi-xvii, 15, 35, 38, 40, 47, 49, 54, 64, 65, 77 - 78 , 79 .105, 107,110,11,110,119,130,131,107 imperialism. See colonialism indigenous knowledge (ik), 5, 41,106,117, 111-130 infrastructure, 18,33-34 ink, 45, 83-84,141,141,144,181,119-30 Inuit, 4, 5, 6, 9, 37,39, 41, 43, 79, 81, 85,105, 106,109, hi, 115—17,114,117,135,151,179, 186,187,195,198,109-30; as guides and translators, xv, 116,117,110,111,117 Inuksuit, 6,37,185,116 Inuktitut, 113,116 , 117 Inupiat, 5,105,109,116,187,195 Investigator (ship), 86,107. See also Mc¬ Clure, Robert Ipiirviq, 41,111-115,111-13,2.2.7.2.6909 Jacobson, Kristin, 155 Jeannette (ship), 1, 87,113,107-8,131. See also De Long, George Jewett, Sarah Orne, 37 job printing, 71,187-89 Joe. See Ipiirviq journalism: amateur, 18, 70-73,141, 147076 Joyce, Ernest, 141 kabloonas (Qabluunak), 179,110 Kalli or Kallihirua. See Qalasirssuaq Kalli, the Christian Esquimaux, 116-17 Kane, Elisha Kent, 4, 9,37, 71, 71, 77, 80, 114, 164,185,165013,170015 2-94 INDEX King William Island (Qikiqtaq), xvi, 177-78,2.09, 2,17, 218, 222 Knorr, George, 136-37 knowledge, traditionary. See traditional ecological knowledge (tek); indigenous knowledge (ik) Koettlitz, Reginald, 171 Koldewey, Carl, 4,15, 64, 63,131, 242n6 Kudlago, 220-21 Lacan, Jacques, 199 Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 49, 78,123, 132,184. See also Greely, Adolphus Lalla Rookh (Moore), 103-4, io 5 Leane, Elizabeth, 9, 68 LeMenager, Stephanie, 28,32 Levick, George Murray, 12-14 libraries: shipboard, xv, 49, 39, 68, 83 linen: as printing medium, 69, 83 literacy: sailor, 49,51, 74-75,157 lithography, 57,139,142,145 Little Vulgar Boy, 87, 88 Lockwood, James Booth, 132 Loughran, Trish, 243^4 Luciano, Dana, 36, 234 Macklin, Alexander, 142 MacMillan, Donald, 4, 8, 47,184 magic lantern shows, 4, 92 Maguire, Rochfort, 15,57, 77,132,195,198, 244041 Mallory, George, 232-33 mapmaking: Inuit, 124, 210-11, 224, 227 Markham, Albert Hastings, 65-66, 74-75, 85,107,109, 130-32, 2490105, 253019 Markham, Clement, 125-26,130-32,158, 245054, 256083 Marshall, Kate, 31,36, 240063 Marston, George, 139,142,144-45, H9 Maskell, William, 68 Mason and Dixon (Pynchon), 91-92 Mawson, Douglas, 15,127,141,147,162, 169-71, 174-75 McClintock (M’Clintock), Francis Leop¬ old, 4,178-82,185,188, 206, 216 McClure, Robert, 207 McCormick, Samuel Jarvis, 2510133 McGill, Meredith, 243024 McMurdo Station, 162 media archaeology, 29-31 media studies, 6-7, 29,38, 42,183 mediation, 14,31, 38, 240043 megafauna: polar, 139-40,151,170,185 Melville, Herman, 49,59,183, 202-4, 2.31, 27104 Menely, Tobais, 31 menus: commemorative, 2, 25, 51, 76, 253019 mental health: of polar expedition mem¬ bers, 71, 74,107-9 messages in bottles, 2, 5, 41,165,177,182, 184,186,193-94, 201, 202, 26302, 264010, 265018, 266031 Midnight Sun, 15, 49,109, no, 120 Miles, Graeme, 9 Minavilins, 14, 47,130-31 mining. See resource extraction minstrelsy: blackface, 122-23 Moby-Dick (Melville), 203-4, 232 Montrose, Allen, 45-46, 77 Morton, Timothy, 32 Moss, Edward, 81 motorcars: in Antarctica, 141,151,167 Murray, George, 75 Murray, James, 139,142,149 Murray, John, 73, 93,192, 265078 Nansen, Fridtjof, 4,15, 81, 82-83, 85-86, 107,127,129-30 Nares, George, 4, 8,15, 66, 68, 74, 76, 80-81, 88,107, in, 122,127,132,185, 192-93, 205, 206-7, 268n62 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 37,140,163, 232, 27104 nationalism: and newspapers, 52, 68, 93, 136-37, 243024; and polar voyages, 4, 33,35, 51,136-37,140,157, 228-29 Nelson, Peggy, 150 Nevens, William, 201 New George Gazette. See North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle INDEX 2-95 newspapers, polar: as community¬ building, xviii, 5,18, 38-39, 40, 46-47, 50, 52.-53, 55, 66-68, 72, 73 - 90, 92-93. 96,105,107,109,161, 243024; Lon¬ don, 35, 77, 78, 93,104, no, 158,171; manuscript, 15,50,53, 54,57, 64-65, 73, 83, 94,129,131,133, 242n6. See also individual newspaper titles Nimrod (ship), 13,15, 40,138,141,142, 145,150,151-52,157,167,169. See also Shackleton, Ernest Nixon, Rob, 31,32 Nordenskjold, Otto G., 44,162 Northern Sea Route, 9 North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle , 15,39, 50, 65, 73, 93-101,103, 105,109,125, 2500125, 25in3, 25208-9 North Pole, 35,133-36,140,165, 206, 233, 27205 Northwest Passage, 9, 44, 88,105, hi, 140, 190, 231-32 North West Passage: or, the Voyage Finished , 86, 88, 2500129 Norway: polar exploration by, 4,12,15, 35, 49, 81, 85,127-28,147,151, 259017 novels: polar-themed, 36,165,169; read by expedition members, 49, 59,104. See also fiction Nuts for the Arctic Public, 122,129 Oates, Lawrence “Titus,” 155 oceanic studies, 31, 32-36, 38-39, 41-42, 92,182-86,188-90,194, 202, 214-15, 227,229, 233-35 Omelsky, Matthew, 32 Ommanney, Erasmus, 8,15,105,116 Omoo (Melville), 59,104 open polar sea, 6, 9, 35,136,163,169, 231, 2-33 Osborn, Sherard, 75,129,194-95 Ostgron/andische Zeitung (East Greenland Gazette), 15, 49, 64,131, 242n6 Parikka, Jussi, 29,30 Parks Canada, xvi, 26303 Parr\ T , William Edward, 4, 9,15, 37,39, 50, 64, 73, 88, 94-102,109,124,191,192, 193, 227, 25103, 25209, 2560^8, 266028 patronage, expeditionary, 138,139,149, 153. 2-32- Peary, Josephine, 206 Pearv, Robert, 4,15, 85,123,124, 206, 2551177 penguins: sexual practices of, 12 Peters, John Durham, 6, 30-31,34 planetarity, 5, 9,10, 30, 36, 41,152,174, 234 playbills, 2, 47, 55, 57-58, 68, 69, 79, 83, 86, 88, in, 122,133 Plover (ship), 15, 47, 57, 77, 84, 86,102-5, 113,115,116,132,195, 253017. See also Maguire, Rochfort Poe, Edgar Allan, 37,112,113,133,140,164, 167,172,169, 232, 27104 poetry: about expeditions, n, 37, 38,124, 127-28; read by expedition members, xv, 112—13,133,184; written by expedi¬ tion members, 25, 47, 75, 88, 97-100, 103-5,107-8, no, in-14,115-17, 127-28,129,148,161,171-174 Point Barrow, 57,116,195 Polar Almanac, 15, 47 polar bears, 10, n, 64,118-19,129-30,139, 140,170,185, 238014 Polar Pirate, 15, 49 Polaris (ship), 81-82, 214, 219, 229, 271041. See also Hall, Charles Francis ponies, 150-56 Ponting, Herbert, 128 Port Foulke Weekly News, 15,18-19, 40, 47, 64, 66-67, 71. 84, 88, 89-90,120,133, 136-37,255058 Porter, David, 200-01, 203 postal mail: at sea, 183,198-207, 267059, 268n62 Potter, Russell, 73, 246063 Priestly. Raymond E„ 12 printing presses: amateur, 51, 55, 70--1; in polar regions, xvi, xvii, 14-15, 40-41, 44-47. 55 . 56-66, 79 . 82,102, 131-33. 142-45,159-60,194, 253m6, 253ni9 296 INDEX privacy: and polar writing, 5, 52-53, 66-67, 94-95, 99,101,120,123-23,128, 191-93, 246n59, 266n28 Proteus (ship), 15. See also Greely, Adolphus public sphere: of polar writing, 38, 50, 52, 53, 66-67,77-79, 95, 98,101 Pullen, William, 88 Punch , 104,112 Qalasirssuaq, 116-18, 221 Qiieens Illuminated Magazine, 15, 47,59, 64, 75, 79,108,117,121-22,124,129, 148, 245n57 raciness, 122,129. See also censorship racism, 10, 53,117,123,167-68, 214 Rae,John, 4,179, 210-n, 216, 223 reading: by expedition members, 18, 49-50, 80-82; 89-90, 95-96,100,108, 117,160,187-90, 217, 221. See also fic¬ tion; literacy; novels; poetry Reiss, Benjamin, 72, 246n6o relics: of Franklin expedition, xvi, 180,182, 210, 212, 216, 224 Resolute (ship), xvi, 15, 69, 77, 83, 86, 87,105, 107, hi, 118,120,122,130,131,194,195. See also Austin, Horatio; Belcher, Edward resource extraction, xviii, 7-8,14,30, 35-39,105,135,149,163,165,184, 235 Reynolds, Jeremiah N„ 163-64 Riley, James, 216 Rilliet, Charles, 126 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge), 37 Robinson, Michael, 246n6o Ross, James Clark, 4,179,186,190,191, 26on34, 265ni8 Ross, John, xv, 4, 75,190,191, 227 Royal Arctic Theatre, 58, 88,122,126, 25oni26 Rudy, Jason R„ 51,112 Russia, 35, 36, 77,195, 233, 272n5 Sabine, Edward, 94-100,191 Sacheuse, John, xv Sami, 5,105,109,151,152 Satterlee Hospital, 71 schools: shipboard, 49-50, 73-75,157, 242ml Schwatka, Frederick, 223 Scott, Robert Falcon, xv, 4, 6,11,12,13,15, 40, 84,123,138,141,147.151.155.157-59. 161, 167, 259ni7 Scott, Walter, 49 sea clocks, 69, 78, 91-92 seals, 82, hi, 120,127,152, 214 Second Grinnell Expedition, 37, 71, 72, 77, 80,185. See also Kane, Elisha Kent Seitz, Charles, 59 sexual relations. See homoeroticism Shackleton, Ernest, xv, 4, 6,12-13, *5. 40, 138,139,141,142,147-48,150-62,167, 169, 259n2i, 26in57 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 52 Shields, David, 53, 252n7 Shorkley, George, 63,126, 244^0 Siberia, 36,163 silk: as printing medium, 57-58, 69, 76, 83, 151,194-95 Simpson, George Clarke, 167-69 Simpson, John, 69,102-3,105, 253ni7, 26in59 sledging, 2, 4,11, 83,102, in, 115,131,147, 150,166,169, 213, 223, 253ni9, 259ni7 sleeping bags, 25,127-28 Smith, Jacob, 30 social media: polar newspapers as, 24-25, 43,105,120,149. See also Twitter songs: sung by expedition members, 47, 65, 74, 76, 95, no, hi, 115-16,123 South Polar Times , 6,15, 40, 84,128,138, 140,141-42,149,156-62,166,167,172, 26in59, 262n62 South Pole, 1, 2,11,12,139-40,147,152, 162,163-67,171, 233, 259ni7 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 37 Spufford, Francis, 246n6o Stallybrass, Peter, 188, 266ni9 Stam, David H., xv, 7, 50, 68, 85 INDEX 497 Scam, Deirdre C., xv, 7, 50, 68 Scarosielski, Nicole, 34 Stefansson, Vilhjamur, 164,123 Steinberg, Philip E., 33, 265012 Stephenson, Robert B„ 146 Stewart, Spencer, 45-46 Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (De Mille), 37,140,163,165 sublime: polar, 37-38, 68, 83,187 Suersaq (Hans Hendrik), 214 Sverdrup, Otto, 4 Swedish Antarctic Expedition, 44,168. See also Nordenskjold, Otto Symmes, John Cleves, 163-65, 260044-45 Symons, Robert, 65, 76, 245054 Symzonia ([Seaborn]), 37,164-65 Taqulittuq, 41, 212-15, 219, 221-23, zl 7 tardigrades, 170 Taylor, Jesse Oak, 31 Taylor, Thomas Griffith, 166-67, 262062 temporality: of polar regions, xix, 3, 7,10, 13, 28, 30, 38-39. 4i. 44. 46, 51. 55. 68, 73, 78, 81, 91-93, no, 131,154,160-61, 184,190 Terra Nova (ship), 12,13,15,141,157,166, 167. See also Scott, Robert Falcon Tenor (ship), xvi, xviii, 47, 49,102, 178-79,194, 209, 260034, 26304, 265018. See also Franklin, John; Ross, John Clark theater: on polar ships, xvi, 47, 49, 50, 58, 66, 68-69, 84, 86-88, 92, 95,101, hi, 122,126,127,132,140, 2500126 “The Encantadas” (Melville), 202-3 “The Raven” (Poe), 112,133,172 Thoreau, Henry David, 28-29, 138033 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 52-53 Tookoolito. See Taqulittuq traditional ecological knowledge (tek), 5, 41,106,117, 211-230 Trudens, John, 126 Twitter, 150-54 Typee (Melville), 59,104 typewriters: in polar regions, 142,156 Tyson, George E„ 81-82 United States (ship), 15,18, 63, 65, 72, 88, 89, 90,122,124,133-36, 2510133. See also Hayes, Isaac Israel United States Exploring Expedition, 164 Universal Yankee Nation, 136-37 Vedoe, Anton, 85,130, 257096 Venesta, 144-46 verge: polar, 148,163-69 Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), xvi, 148,180, 26304 Victoria, Queen, 213 Vulture, 130 Wamsley, Douglas, 246060 Ward, Thomas, 209 Warner, Michael, 34,38, 53, 245057 Watkins, Patrick (Oberlus), 203 Watt, Isaac, 171-72 Weekly Guy, 15, 40, 47, 64, 77, 79, 84, 115-16,129,132, 244041, 253017 West Philadelphia Hospital Register, 71-72, 247070-71 whaling: Arctic, 8,116,140, 209, 212-13, 214, 217, 220, 222, 234; Pacific, 200-06 whisky: Shackleton’s, 12-13 Whitecar, William, 204 Whitman, Walt, 172-73 Wild, Frank, 142,166 Wilkes, Charles, 4,102,163, 265018 Wilson, Edward, 156 wireless technology, 33,55,174-76 Worsley, Frank, 154 Wyatt, Benjamin, 76,132 York, Erasmus. See Qalasirssuaq Yupik, 5,102,105,109,115-16,151,187, 195 Zakaeus, Hans. See Sacheuse Zielinski, Siegfried, 30 298 INDEX LITERARY STUDIES / MEDIA STUDIES / ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES F rom Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an ex¬ travagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition mem¬ bers with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present. “What Hester Blum describes here is the production of print culture for the sake of not going crazy, for the sake of remaining, in some recognizable and accountable sense, human. This is media production under extreme duress, which makes for a fascinating story and theoretical provocation. Founded on a thought-provoking and unique archive and busting with insight, The News at the Ends of the Earth is a terrific book.”— STEPHANIE LeMENAGER, author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the Amer¬ ican Century “Using archives from Europe, Australia, and New Zealand as well as from North America, this pioneering work tells an unforgettable story about ship newspapers and other improvised media produced by sailors on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Informed by indigenous knowledge and bearing witness to the extreme conditions of the polar regions, this invaluable material sheds light on the extreme weather of the Anthropocene as much as on the print culture of the nineteenth century. Labor- intensive, detail-rich, and eye-opening.”— WAI CHEE DIMOCK, Yale University Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives, and editor of Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Stud¬ ies in Motion and Horrors of Slavery: Or, The American Tars in Tripoli. DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS www DUKEUPRESS.EDU COVER ART: The meteorologist, C. T. Madigan. Photograph by Frank I htrlcy. State Library ol New South Wales: ■ Home and Away 16750].