LOST SHIPS: PERFORMANCE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE

FRANKLIN EXPEDITION

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

Of

The University of Guelph

By

HEATHER DAVIS-FISCH

In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy July, 2009

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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT

LOST SHIPS: PERFORMANCE AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE

FRANKLIN EXPEDITION

Heather Davis-Fisch Advisor: University of Guelph, 2009 Professor A. Filewod

This thesis is an investigation of performances that emerged in response to the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, which went missing in the Canadian in 1845. 1 am concerned with two questions arising from the relationship between performance, loss, and remains: How do performances emerge as the remains of what has been loss? How can past performances be known through their remains when critical aspects of performance are lost as time passes? Franklin's 1845 expedition is unique in the annals of polar history because it ended in almost total disappearance: no journals or ship's logs from the expedition were ever retrieved, and the lone legible paper that was found provides little indication of what disaster befell the expedition. Most histories of the Franklin expedition use material and narrative fragments in order to reconstruct what happened to the men; however, reconstructions often fail to address the experiences of the men who abandoned the ships or the way that those left behind at home understood the expedition's absence. This project examines how those impacted by the expedition's disappearance expressed their experiences of loss through performance. By considering four sites of performance, one can trace how performance first facilitated the search for the missing men and then allowed the loss of the expedition to be melancholically engaged with and mourned. Performance initially held open the hope that the search could succeed, first in the shipboard pantomime, Zero, or Harlequin Light, which imaginatively transformed the Arctic into a familiar domestic space and then in the work of American explorer who "acted " in order to demonstrate that survivors might still live. The second pair of examples consider how performances responded to the impossibility of knowing what actually happened to the expedition, first by examining how the experiences of the expedition's final survivors were preserved in the gestural performances of Inuit who came into contact with them, then by considering how the melodrama The Frozen Deep overwrote the incomprehensible disappearance of the expedition by producing a coherent narrative, allowing the British public to mourn the loss of Franklin and his men. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is my pleasure to thank a number of people who have shaped this dissertation and my work as a scholar. First, I would like to thank my advisor Alan Filewod for his challenging questions about spectatorship, performance, and theatre history, for his rigorous mentorship, and for his enthusiasm for this project over the last four years. My advisory committee members, Danny O'Quinn, Michelle Elleray, and Ute Lischke, have provided thoughtful criticism of this project, shaping my research and writing practices, and have shared each of their areas of expertise, enriching this dissertation immeasurably.

Susan Nance, Smaro Kamboureli, and Paul Mulholland provided insightful feedback on this project during its early stages and encouraged me to think more deeply about my research methodology and theoretical approaches to this material. I would like to thank Stephen Johnson, Ann Wilson, and Mark Fortier for their careful readings of the final draft of this project, for their engaging and thought-provoking questions about the implications of this work, and for their suggestions for further ways to develop this project. My fellow graduate students at Guelph have been invaluable resources and caring friends. My parents, Keitha and Michael Davis, my brother Ian, Kim, Gary, and Andrew Fisch, and Tamara Hatton have encouraged me throughout the last four years and have provided support for this project in too many ways to list. Finally, I would like to thank

Scott Davis-Fisch for his unconditional love and support and for reminding me everyday that there is a world outside of books.

? TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations iii

Introduction: What Happened to the Franklin Expedition? 1 What Happened to Franklin's Men? 8 History and Loss 25 Performance Remains 36

1 . Harlequin in the Arctic 45 Austin's Happy Family: Transforming Discipline 51 Domesticating the Arctic 59 Harlequin Heads North 69 Imagining Inuit 83 2. Eating and Fucking: Charles Francis Hall Imagines "Going Native" 104 "Acting Inuit" 112 "Becoming Savage" 130 Mimesis and Franklin 166

3. All the Dead Voices 174 The Crack in the Ice 178 Cracking the Ice 1 95 Survival 202

4. The Designated Mourner 205 The Contents of the Kettles 209 Melodramatic Certainty 227 Mourning an Effigy 246 Imperial Spectatorship 260 The Frozen Deep in 1 866 270

Conclusion: Franklin Remains 277

Works Cited 280

11 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Scene from the Pantomime of 'Zero'" 76 Source: Illustrated Arctic News, pp. 55 Library and Archives Canada

"Kallihirua" 84 Source: KaIH: The Esquimaux Christian, A Memoir, pp. 2 Library and Archives Canada "A scene from 'Frozen Deep'" 235 Source: The Illustrated London News, 17 January 1857, pp. 51 Reproduced with permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library

in Introduction: What Happened to the Franklin Expedition? What wouldpapers mean to them? Cryptic marks, latitudes, signatures, journals, diaries ofdespair, official reports Nobody needs to read, l 've seen the realjournals You left us -you Franklin, you Crozier. l 've seen the skulls ofyour men in the snow, their sterile bones Arranged around cairns like compasses, Marking out all the latitudes and longitudes Ofmen.

~ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Terror and Erebus 132

On 12 January 1854, the Admiralty informed Lady Jane Franklin that it would remove her husband from its books on 31 March of the same year. This administrative decision effectively declared Sir and the 128 men under his command dead. Lady Franklin protested the decision by trading the mourning clothes she had worn for years to signify his disappearance for garish pink and green dresses that suggested her denial of his death. In 1845, Franklin's expedition had disappeared into the central Arctic while attempting to chart the . After dozens of search expeditions failed to find evidence of what happened, most people in England assumed that after close to a decade in the Arctic, Franklin and his men were dead. Jane Franklin, however, wanted proof of her husband's fate. Her protest, intended to spur further search attempts, was understood as a "complex piece of social semaphore" which indicated that "though she had mourned his absence readily, she declined to mourn his death until evidence of it was forthcoming" (Spufford 1 19).

1 By putting on a colourful dress, Lady Franklin made her missing husband appear: she conjured up a ghost. Unknown to Jane, John Franklin had died in 1847. Her performance contradicted this unknowable fact by producing a fictional reality in which he was still alive. A widow of her social standing and with her sense of matrimonial duty would never have flaunted convention by refusing to appropriately mourn her husband.

Wearing pink and green dresses, therefore, visually signified that she was not a widow and that her husband was still alive. Her body, clothed in dresses appropriate to a married woman rather than a widowed one, called another body - her husband's living one - into presence. The uncanniness of the performance - its eerie ability to temporarily evoke a living Franklin - generated passionate responses. Lady Franklin's stepdaughter, Eleanor Gell, was so shocked that she wrote to an aunt that she trembled for her stepmother's mind, adding that her stepmother was "fast losing public sympathy by her strange conduct" (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 331).

The performance raises important questions about the relationship between material remains and affective memory, demonstrating that Jane Franklin's relationship with her missing husband was marked by her melancholic attachment to him. Frances Woodward published the story of the dresses in her biography of Lady Franklin and Woodward seems to have drawn the story from Eleanor Geli' s letter. It has been repeated in virtually every account of Jane Franklin's role in the search.1 The story's durability is surprising when one notes that it is not, apparently, corroborated by other primary sources and that no recent scholarly works cite any alternate account of Lady Franklin's performance. A number of questions remain unanswered in the story: it is unclear when

1 See Pierre Berton, Prisoners ofthe North pp. 153, and Arctic Grail pp. 264; Ken McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's Revenge pp. 33 1 ; Francis Spufford, / May Be Some Time pp. 1 19-20; Jen Hill, White Horizon pp. 18. 2 or where Jane Franklin wore these pink and green dresses; whether she wore first a pink, then a green dress, or one dress which was both pink and green; or who she wore these dresses for. These questions seem trivial, but they underline how aspects of the performance have disappeared over time. And while the material details of the performance are irretrievable, the performance is still engaging: it still has tremendous affective power. The tension between the performance itself and the way the performance has been remembered suggests that complex relationships between affective and factual knowledge, between embodied and archival memory, and between what has been lost and what remains are at work in this story of a performance. David Eng and David Kazanjian suggest "We might say that as soon as the question 'What is lost?' is posed, it invariably slips into the question 'What remains?' That is, loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is only known by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read, and sustained" (2). Jane Franklin's performance evokes the relationship between loss and remains in two critical ways: first, the performance evoked a relationship between her lost husband and herself as survivor by providing a way for his absence to be visually represented; second, the performance's affective impact lingers in the imaginations of those who hear the story, even while - and perhaps precisely because - the archival details of the performance have

been lost. This project is broadly concerned with two questions arising from the relationship between performance, loss, and remains: How do performances emerge as the remains of what has been lost? How can past performances be known through their remains when critical aspects of performance are lost as time passes? I will examine these questions in relation to a series of performances that emerged from the disappearance and loss of the Franklin expedition. Those affected by its disappearance - Franklin's men 3 themselves, participants in search expeditions, Inuit who encountered the missing men, Jane Franklin, interested members of the British public - expressed their particular experiences of loss through performance. In the 1850s and 1860s, performance allowed those impacted by the disappearance of the expedition to address what they had lost. Today, performance remains as a way that one can return to the loss of the expedition and reconsider what was lost when it disappeared. Franklin's 1845 expedition is unique in the annals of history because it ended in almost total disappearance. Other expeditions resulted in high numbers of casualties, in the loss of ships, or in breakdowns of naval discipline, but what happened to these expeditions always became known. For example, Franklin became famous as "the man who ate his boots" after the first expedition he commanded, from 1819-22, was crippled by mass starvation and resulted in the deaths of eleven of his twenty men. As men began to succumb to hunger and hypothermia, the group separated, with surgeon John Richardson taking responsibility for a small group including midshipman Robert Hood, seaman John Hepburn, and the Iroquois guide Michel Teroahauté. Teroahauté's behaviour grew increasingly bizarre and the other men became suspicious when he brought them "wolf meat" to eat, suspecting that it was actually human flesh. After Hood died of a gunshot wound, Teroahauté was accused of his murder and was later shot by Richardson. Hood was the only British member of the expedition to die: other than Teroahauté, one Inuk2 and nine died.3 What differentiates Franklin's first expedition from his final one is not the extent of its failure but the degree to which what happened during his first expedition is known. Although Franklin only

2 Inuk is the singular form of Inuit. 3 See "Dr. Richardson's Narrative" in Sir John Franklin, Journey to the Shores ofthe Polar Sea, vol. iv, pp. 97-122. 4 survived by consuming boot leather and lichens, he and eight of his men returned to

England; Franklin's account of his travels, a "Gothic tale of adventure, starvation, cannibalism, and murder in a harsh and brooding land," cemented his fame as an Arctic explorer (Berton, Grail 74).4 In contrast, no journals or ship's logs from the final Franklin expedition were ever retrieved, and the lone legible paper that was found provides little indication of what disaster befell the expedition.

The Franklin expedition has been remembered and immortalized, according to

Sarah Moss, precisely because what happened to it remains unknown. Moss, in her comparative study of the literature of polar exploration, argues that the story of the

Franklin expedition is marked by a "search for narrative" and that "it is this persistent absence that gives his story its immediacy. For all the academic research and popular speculation poured into the expedition's dissolution and disappearance, no conclusive story has emerged... The narrative remains fragmented where Scott's is excessively polished" (139).5 The impossibility of generating a narrative is, according to Moss, "the key to Franklin's apotheosis" (139). Although Moss situates the lasting fascination with the expedition as fundamentally a narrative problem, the impossibility of generating a coherent narrative arises out of a persistent archival absence. Little is known, with any certainty, about what happened to Franklin's final expedition. A written record, recovered from a cairn on King William Island, relates that Franklin's ships became trapped in ice off that island in 1846, that Franklin died in 1847, and that the ships were abandoned in

1848. Artifacts and corpses found by British and American search parties and by Inuit

4 See also Rudy Wiebe, Playing Dead, pp. 9-45. 5 Moss is referring to and his final expedition to the . Scott and the four men who made the final push for the pole with him died as they returned to their supply depot. His journal and other papers were found, along with his body, months later in the tent. 5 suggest that the crew and officers travelled south, then east, perhaps to hunt, perhaps to reach a Hudson's Bay Company outpost. Inuit preserved stories of an encounter with survivors and of discovering a macabre campsite littered with evidence of cannibalism; however, Inuit were not, until recently, taken seriously as witnesses to what happened and their accounts were often dismissed unless they corroborated what material remains already indicated.6 Inuit oral history makes valuable contributions to the story of what happened, but because Inuit had limited contact with Franklin survivors during the retreat and may not have had any contact with the expedition before the ships were abandoned, many critical questions remain unanswered even after considering Inuit oral histories of

contact.7

6 Inuit accounts were often dismissed because they did not provide the details - precise dates, British names, unambiguous locations - that historians writing about the expedition so ardently desired. Inuit oral traditions have been reconsidered in recent works by David Woodman (Unravelling the Franklin Mystery (1991) and Strangers Among Us (1995)) and Dorothy Eber (Encounters on the Passage (2008)). Woodman examines Inuit accounts of contact with European explorers (primarily as recorded by Charles Francis Hall), using them to query standard reconstructions of what happened. Eber presents Inuit oral histories of encounter gathered from interviews she conducted between 1994 and 2008. 7 Inuit oral history is still in the early stages of being taken seriously as historical evidence. Renée Fossett's 2001 book In Order to Live Untroubled: Inuit ofthe Central Arctic, 1550 to 1940 attempts to bring "together evidence from the spoken and written observations of eyewitnesses and participants, from the mute traces of material culture, and from some of the many voices of Inuit intellectual culture" (xix). Fossett acknowledges that the most "fruitful area" for new work in Arctic history: [W] ill be the Inuit language itself and the oral memory embedded in it. The evidence for Inuit history, to date, is overwhelmingly etic, that is, witnessed, recorded, and interpreted by Others. Except for a very few snippets of oral history written down by outsiders, Inuit, as individuals and as communities, have had almost no opportunity to participate in the writing and interpretation of their history. However, a large body of central Inuit oral traditions and histories, gathered by the major ethnographic expeditions between 1883 and 1924, does exist. Most of it, so far, is not translated, edited, or analyzed. Opening up this neglected source of evidence for the Inuit past will allow at least some of the many voices of Inuit intellectual culture to be heard for the first time, (xix) While Fossett focuses on Inuit history as recorded in primary sources, other historians are focusing on Inuit oral history as elders remember it today. For example the writing of Uqalurait: An Oral History ofNunavut (2004) was guided by a steering committee of Inuit from across Nunavut who created "a vision of history consistent with their beliefs and understanding of their own culture" (xxvi-xxvii). The project concentrates on Inuit life before extensive contact with 6 Most histories of what happened to the Franklin expedition use material and narrative fragments in order to reconstruct what happened to the men; however, reconstructive accounts always reach a point at which they must either leap from interpreting evidence into speculation or admit the impossibility of their task.8 While it is possible to hypothesize about why the ships were abandoned, what killed the men, or what paths the men took, one ultimately cannot conclusively account for everything that might have happened. Furthermore, reconstructions of what happened, often because of their reliance on material evidence, fail to address the experiences of the men who abandoned the ships, the unspeakable horrors they must have witnessed, the way those left behind at home felt the expedition's absence, or the process of coming to recognize

that the expedition had been lost. The desire to reconstruct the past that marks most accounts of what happened to Franklin's expedition contrasts with Walter Benjamin's concept of historical materialism and with "ethnographic history," which Greg Dening describes as the attempt to "present the past as it was actually experienced" (Bligh 5). In order to understand how the loss of the expedition was actually experienced, one must turn away from attempting to reconstruct events and instead focus on addressing how loss was represented. Theories of

Europeans and is made up, in large part, of quotations from elders collected between the 1920s and the present. The book does not provide a chronology of events but "Instead it adheres to the Inuit view of life, not as a linear progression but as a cycle" (xxvii). Dorothy Eber's 1989 book When The Whalers Were Up North records Inuit remembrances of the contact period and provides a counter-narrative to accounts written by Europeans and Americans concerning contact with Inuit. 8 Another stream of scholarly work related to the loss of the Franklin expedition reflects on the question of why the expedition failed, often focusing on the cultural arrogance that distinguished nineteenth-century polar exploration. This view arises in 's Unsolved Mysteries ofthe Arctic, in which he comments "One of the most baffling problems of Canadian exploration is how Sir John Franklin and his party of more than a hundred contrived to die to the last man, apparently from hunger and malnutrition, in a district where several hundred Eskimos had been living for generations" (44). For a recent assessment of these interpretations, see Richard C. Davis "Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Cultural Arrogance and the Final Franklin Expedition." 7 melancholia and trauma demonstrate that loss can be addressed without being reconstructed: one does not need to know precisely what happened in the past in order to address how the past was experienced. But while melancholia and trauma provide access to how past events were experienced, by bringing the incomprehensible events of the past close to consciousness, they do not transform these events into coherent or linear narratives. In the case of the Franklin expedition, the remains of the past surface in and as performance. Performance emerges as a way that the experiential remains of the past - the remains of what was lost - enter representation and become known.

What Happened to Franklin's Men? Despite my contention that attempts to reconstruct what happened to the Franklin expedition consistently break down, failing to account both for the details of what happened and for how what happened was experienced, it is essential to sketch what is known and what has been reasonably speculated about what happened, both to contextualize the performances I will be addressing and to situate the points where this project's examples intersect with reconstructions of what happened. The third Arctic expedition under Sir John Franklin's command left England on 19 May 1845 in an attempt to finally complete the elusive Northwest Passage. At fifty- nine years of age, Franklin was old for and, although he had commanded two Arctic expeditions in his career, he had not been north in almost twenty years.9 Franklin was at best the Admiralty's second choice, after , to

9 Franklin's first voyage to the Arctic was as commander of the brig Trent, which was part of Captain 's 1818 attempt to sail over the . His second expedition, the first under his command, was his disastrous 1819-22 Coppermine expedition. His third expedition, undertaken from 1825-27, was relatively successful and resulted in the mapping of sections of the 8 lead the expedition, but his wife's behind-the-scene machinations and his own good reputation, combined with Ross's refusal to return to the Arctic, led to his appointment.10

The expedition's two ships, HMS Erebus, under the direct command of and on which Franklin sailed, and HMS Terror, under the command of , were supplied for three years, although hopes were high that the expedition would emerge from the in 1846. After the Erebus and the Terror left England, they stopped briefly in the Orkney Islands and then in the Whalefish Islands (on the west coast of ), where five men were discharged and sent home." Once the ships left

Greenland, they met the British whalers Prince of Wales and Enterprise in Melville Bay, in northern Baffin Bay, on 26 July 1845. Franklin and a few other officers dined aboard the Enterprise before the whalers lost sight of them on 28 July (Cooke and Holland 174;

Woodman, Unravelling 1). The whalers were the last Europeans to see Franklin and his men alive.

The first three of the expedition's 129 deaths occurred while the expedition wintered on Beechey Island in 1845-46. The graves of petty officer John Torrington, marine William Braine, and seaman John Hartneil were discovered in August 1850.12 The unusual inscriptions on two of the headstones have led some historians to suspect that the

Mackenzie River and Beaufort Sea coastlines. 10 For details of Lady Franklin's involvement in her husband's appointment, see Ken McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's Revenge pp. 268-72. 1 1 Letters and personal papers from the officers and men of the expedition were sent to England, along with the five discharged men. These letters and papers related the events of the first two months at sea. 12 Four expeditions congregated off the coast of Beechey Island in August 1850 and searched the campsite there. The ten ships that comprised the four expeditions were HMS Resolute, HMS Assistance, HMS Intrepid, HMS Pioneer (British naval expedition commanded by Horatio Austin), HMS Lady Franklin, HMS Sophia (British government expedition commanded by William Penny), Advance, Rescue (American Grinnell Expedition commanded by E.J. DeHaven), Felix and Mary (private expedition financed by the Hudson's Bay Company and public subscriptions, commanded by John Ross). 9 deaths may have been suspicious: Hartnell's headstone inscription read '"Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways' Haggai, i.7"; Braine's read '"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve' Joshua, xxiv.15" (Beattie 93). No evidence has surfaced to prove or disprove this supposition. In 1984 and 1986, forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie led a crew that exhumed the three bodies and, after performing autopsies, x-rays, and lab tests on tissues, determined that all three men were likely weakened by exposure to high levels of lead (likely from poorly soldered food tins), suffered from tuberculosis, and ultimately died of pneumonia (124; 161). Beattie admits that while it was clear that "lead played an important role in the declining health of the entire crews... there is no single reason why the expedition failed; it was a deadly combination of factors" (161). The bodies were almost perfectly preserved by the permafrost, providing a wealth of forensic evidence, yet they provoked more questions than they answered. Beattie acknowledges that "the best that can be done today is to isolate the reasonable possibilities and fit them into the broad circumstances that are identified from scattered remains found at archaeological sites" (161). The bodies at Beechey Island leave one wondering why these three men were so dramatically affected by lead exposure so early in the expedition, why Braine and Hartnell's headstones bore such dark epitaphs, how other members of the expedition reacted to these early deaths, and what impact lead poisoning had on the expedition in the months that followed.13

Franklin apparently left no indication as to where he was heading when he left

Beechey Island in 1846: while it is possible that he left a record that was never

13 Severe lead poisoning causes "a number of physical and neurological problems that can occur separately or in any combination depending on the individual and the amount absorbed. Anorexia, weakness and fatigue, irritability, stupor, paranoia, abdominal pain, and anaemia are just a few of the possible effects" (Beattie 84). 10 discovered, it is more likely that there never was one, as the Beechey Island site appeared undisturbed when it was searched in 1850. While it is impossible to conclusively determine why Franklin neglected to leave a message when it was standard naval practice to do so, there are two likely reasons. First, the officers might have been in a rush to leave Beechey Island once the ice broke up: this hypothesis is supported by the personal items and gear which the 1850 search parties found strewn about the campsite, suggesting a hasty departure. Second, Franklin might have felt a message was unnecessary, since he planned to follow the Admiralty's orders for where to go after leaving Beechey Island:

Franklin might have assumed that any ship dispatched by the Admiralty to follow his ships would have known where he was planning to go. The lone surviving message left by the expedition sketches out where the Erebus and Terror went next. In May 1847, a surveying party led by Lieutenant deposited at least two identical forms, sealed in tin canisters, at Victory Point and Gore

Point on King William Island. Almost a year later, the Victory Point message was retrieved and Commander Fitzjames added a second message to the earlier one, writing around the margins of the page. The first account read: 28 of May 1847 H.M.S.hips Erebus [sic] and Terror Wintered in the Ice in Lat. 70.50N Long. 98°.23'W Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in Lat 74°.43'28"N. Long 91°39'15"W.14 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 2 Officers and 6 Men

left the ships on Monday 24th May 1 847. (National Maritime Museum, Arctic

14 The ships wintered at Beechey Island during the winter of 1845-6, not 1 846-7; Fitzjames made the same mistake on both forms.

11 Collection, doc.2/121, qtd. Woodman, Strangers 4) The record indicates that the ships sailed through in 1845, then travelled north up Wellington Channel, returned south along the west side of Cornwallis Island, then headed east to winter on Beechey Island (Cooke and Holland 174). After the ships left Beechey Island, they made their way to the northwest side of King William Island where, the 1848 addendum relates, they were beset by ice in September 1846. There is some debate about what route the ships took to reach King William Island, but the most widely accepted view is that the ships entered Peel Sound, passed through Franklin Strait, became trapped by impenetrable ice to the north of King William Island, and then drifted south while trapped in the ice (Cooke and Holland 174). While the ships were beset, at least one surveying party - the party that left the 1847 message - was sent to explore the area. In 1859, Lieutenant Hobson discovered the remains of a tent site at the north end of the island, near Cape Felix, suggesting that a group of men had lived away from the ships at some point, possibly during the 1847 summer. The comment "All well" has been subject to much scrutiny because the 1848 addendum indicates that Franklin died shortly after the first record was deposited: it raises the question of whether Fitzjames was aware of Franklin's declining health when he wrote the 1847 message or whether Franklin died suddenly. The comment likely "referred to the general state of the expedition rather than the health or otherwise of any individual" (Woodman, Unravelling 94). The 1847 message, on its own, tells an unremarkable story: the ships were beset in the ice, which was hardly a rare occurrence, and the men were keeping themselves busy investigating the region in which they found themselves. The addendum to the Victory Point record, written in April 1 848, suggests that things had gone horribly wrong on the Terror and Erebus; however, this message, like the 12 first, provides very little detail: 25th April 1848 HM Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Sept. 1846. The Officers & Crews consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier landed here - in Lat. 69°37'42" Long.98°41 ' This paper was found by Lt. Irving

under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1 83 1 - (4 miles to the Northward) - where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in June 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 erected15 - Sir John Franklin died on the 1 1th June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers & 15 men. (National Maritime Museum, Arctic Collection, doc. 2/121, qtd. in Woodman, Strangers 5) Captain Crozier added the postscript: "and start tomorrow, 26th for Backs Fish River" (Woodman, Strangers 5).'6 By April 1848, the ships had been away for just under the three years for which they were provisioned: even on reduced rations, the men would have suffered from a severe food shortage if they stayed with their ships for a fourth winter. It is likely, as Beattie's findings suggest, that much of the canned food carried by the two ships was of dubious quality - meat and vegetables inadequately cooked to kill bacteria and packaged in tins that were not soldered correctly - spoilage would have diminished the ships' stores much more quickly than anticipated.17 After three winters in the ice, most men on the ships would have been suffering from scurvy and other vitamin

15 John Ross' pillar was not found; however, the men left the message in a new cairn at the coordinates of the place where Ross' pillar was supposed to be. 16 Back's Fish River is also called Great Fish River, Back River and Back's River. explored it in 1834. Today the river is called Back River. 1 7 See Scott Cookman, Ice Blink. 13 deficiencies because of the lack of fresh meat and the deterioration of the ships' stores of lemon juice over time. Nine officers and fifteen men had died before the ships were abandoned: this was already a very high fatality rate. The loss of nine officers, including the beloved Franklin, would have devastated morale. Although the second message allows one to hypothesize about what conditions might have been like during the final year on the ships and to speculate about why the men abandoned their ships, it communicates almost nothing specific about events between May 1847 and April 1848. The gap between the 1 847 and 1 848 messages is replicated in reconstructions of what happened. Historians concur that scurvy probably caused most of the deaths and that the spread of the disease likely convinced Crozier to abandon the ships to hunt for fresh food. Although most historians are content to hypothesize about what happened insofar as it led to the abandonment, they shy away from imagining the experience of men on the ships and how this contributed to the retreat, perhaps because to make this interpretive move would mean committing the unthinkable historiographical error of abandoning archival evidence for speculation, perhaps because imagining what happened to the men before abandoning the ships would mean imagining an unthinkably horrible experience. For example, Paul Fenimore Cooper provides one of the most descriptive accounts ofthat winter, yet elides the experience of the men on the ships: "The third winter proved horrible even beyond their forebodings. Scurvy attacked the party... Time and cold had robbed the lemon juice of its effectiveness. There was only one thing to do: get the men as quickly as possible to where fresh meat could be secured" (121). Cooper sidesteps questions of what it was like to have scurvy, to watch messmates dying, to slowly realize how dire one's plight was and instead focuses on the spread of scurvy as the catalyst for

14 Crozier's decision.18 Pierre Berton's account of the fate of the expedition goes further in its silence, jumping from the last sighting of the expedition in 1 845 to the beginning of the search in 1848, effectively erasing the years in the ice entirely: "John Franklin was last seen by a whaling ship on June 25, 1845, his two vessels tethered to an iceberg. Neither he nor any of his 128 officers and crew were ever seen again by white men. No one knows how he died or what it was that killed him. His body was never found. Men and ships combed the Arctic for twelve years before the fate of his expedition was finally unravelled" {Grail 150-51). In Berton's account it is as though the years trapped in the ice never happened because there is no record of what happened during those years.19 Other recent histories of the expedition, by Beattie and Woodman for instance, have been concerned with reexamining specific sets of remains: since nothing material remains from that year on the ships and since no one witnessed what happened that year, they too pass over the events that happened between May 1847 and April 1848.

The question of what happened during the final winter on the ships cannot be answered through reconstruction and it is significant that a fictional account of the final winter does more to capture the horror of what might have happened than can be gathered from the lone document that speaks of it. Mordecai Richler imagines the final year on the

18 Other accounts of the expedition's disappearance are equally silent about the experience of the final year on the ships, concentrating on explicating the rationale behind the decision to abandon the ships and speculating about how Franklin died and where he was buried. G. F. Lamb, for example, asks key questions about the effect of Franklin's death on the expedition and about the high death toll; although he suggests that Franklin's death might have been divisive, he ultimately returns to a discussion of the abandonment itself without speculating about the experience on the ships (273-77). Noel Wright, in Questfor Franklin, discusses possible overland expeditions in summer 1847 and Franklin's death, then suggests that misadventures during the summer expeditions could have led to the high death toll in 1847-48 (133-42; 152-58). 19 Berton is an interesting figure among Arctic historians: the scope of research and popularity of his works, particularly The Arctic Grail, give his work an authority almost unheard of among "popular" historical works and have resulted in his work overshadowing many scholarly works as "the" narrative of what happened during the for the Northwest Passage. 15 ships in his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here and describes the ways that the men physically and psychologically deteriorated before abandoning ship: The men, their teeth swimming in their bloodied mouths, were put on even shorter rations. . . And then the Erebus became the place of darkness between Earth and Hades. Men tore at each other's faces over a chunk of tainted meat and performed acts abhorrent to them for the sake of a ration of tea or tobacco. Officers wept as they wrote letters of farewell. The captain of the forecastle sat at the organ for hours, playing hymns, praying for deliverance from the sunless frozen sea. A demented, feverish Philip Norton, wearing a wig, his cheeks rouged, his lips painted, paraded below decks in a ball gown, attended by admirers, pausing to pinch Izzy Garber's cheeks or caress Ephraim' s buttocks, speculating aloud on which one would taste most tender in the pot. . .20 Hallucinating crew members, fearful of being butchered, were never without a weapon to hand. Those who had spit out their teeth long ago and were now too weakened to move, ridden with skin

ulcers, coughing phlegm and blood, slid in pools of diarrhoea in their hammocks. Those who were still mobile but with gums already livid, their mouths tasting of death, split into rival gangs, each suspecting the other of nourishing themselves on hidden caches of food. On the prowl, armed, they organized flash searches. Officers were openly jeered. (434)

We have no idea whether Richler's account reflects what actually happened on the ships.21 Yet the passage is both captivating and horrifying in its detailed imagining of

20 Both Philip Norton and Izzy Garber are fictitious names. 21 Dan Simmons proposes an alternate account of the final year on the ships in his novel Terror. Although Simmons imagines that discipline was maintained longer than Richler does, he suggests that following Franklin's 1847 death, members of the expedition, both crew and warrant officers, 16 what the men might have experienced during the final year on the ships. Richler fills through fiction a gap that archival reconstruction cannot: in attempting to speak for the ship's survivors, the passage performs precisely the same work that I will suggest performances do, in allowing access to moments outside of archival memory. The 1 848 addendum to the message breaks the silence concerning what happened during the winter of 1847-48; however, it also marks the moment from which any account of what happened becomes speculative. I will briefly outline what likely happened and will then, in more detail, describe how these likelihoods became known. The ships were abandoned in April 1848. The retreating men, weakened by scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies, travelled across the ice from their ships to King William Island. They left a large cache of supplies on the coast of the island, possibly because they worried that one of the ships would sink and they did not want to lose the supplies if that happened (Lamb 276), possibly because it became clear that the men were too weak to carry everything they were trying to take with them (Cooper 125).22 Lieutenant Irving retrieved the record and, after Fitzjames and Crozier added their messages, the record was redeposited.

Crozier was planning to lead the men south toward Back River, perhaps because it was a rich hunting ground that could have provided the fresh meat his men needed to regain their health (Cooper 121; Woodman, Unravelling 107), perhaps because he hoped to lead

engaged in sodomy (224-27), that Crozier became an alcoholic (341), and that Crozier was several times faced with rumors of potential mutiny. Simmons' imagination of what happened becomes less credible than Richler's when he proposes that a sinister and enormous polar bear- like creature preyed on the ships and killed most of the men, including Franklin, who died before the ships were abandoned. 22 One of the ships was likely badly damaged by ice. This may have happened before the abandonment of the ships in April 1848. The story of a damaged ship emerges from Inuit testimony concerning a meeting with retreating sailors. See Eber, Encounters pp. 93. 17 the men to the Hudson's Bay Company outpost at .23 At some point, the group separated into at least two parties, and some of the men attempted to return to the ships.24 Inuit met a group of thirty or forty men near Washington Bay and the leader of this group - called Aglooka by Inuit - performed a "pantomime" of a ship being crushed by ice, mentioned Iwilik (Repulse Bay) but did not indicate whether he was trying to go there or whether he was coming from there, and asked Inuit for food. Inuit gave the men some seal meat and the two groups separated shortly after.25 After meeting these men, Inuit found a campsite where they discovered evidence of cannibalism. There were approximately thirty bodies and graves at this campsite. This campsite was likely near

23 This is less probable: Crozier likely realized his men were too weak to travel that great of a distance. 24 Some of the men likely made it to the ship or ships (Woodman, Unravelling 117). It is unclear how many men returned to the ships or how long they stayed. Noel Wright speculates that the men who remanned the ship spent a few months there and then headed north to Fury Beach, hoping to find a cache of provisions left behind by Parry's 1824 expedition and to rendezvous with whalers (242-45). Woodman hypothesizes that a group remanned the ship for the winter of 1848-49 and that Inuit visited the ship in 1849 (Unravelling 7). Dorothy Eber mentions Inuit stories about finding a ship and taking goods off it, while the white people on the ship stood by and watched (Encounters 90): while it is not certain that this was one of Franklin's ships, the story may corroborate speculations that one of the ships was reboarded by weakened men. Inuit also tell stories about finding a ship on which they found a "dead man, whose body was very large and heavy, his teeth very long"; this ship was plundered repeatedly but then sunk (Eber, Encounters 93). The dead man may have been a human or may have been the figurehead from one of the ships. The uncertainty as to whether Inuit stories were about finding a corpse or a figurehead demonstrates the problems plaguing oral histories of Inuit contact with explorers: it seems obvious that Inuit would have recognized the difference between a wooden figure head and a human, so it seems likely that the confusion stems from a problem translating Inuktitut into English or from the ways that stories travelled between different groups of Inuit and European search parties. 25 As chapter three will discuss, Inuit accounts of this meeting differ regarding how long the two groups spent together. It may have been a single day and night or it may have been a few days. There is also considerable debate as to when this encounter occurred: it could have happened in 1848, 1849, or 1850. Woodman speculates that in 1849 or 1850 one of the ships was badly damaged and a group of men set out for help: this group, led by Aglooka, was the group that met Inuit at Washington Bay. He suggests that it was after this group departed that cannibalism broke out among some of those left behind. Finally, he imagines that the one intact ship was eventually freed from the ice and the final survivors sailed it to Ootgoolik where it was again beset and sank (Unravelling 246-47). Inuit oral history supports the idea that one ship broke free from the ice and sank near Ootgoolik (or Oot-loo-lik); Dorothy Eber explores these stories in detail in Encounters pp. 92-107. 18 Terror Bay, which is closer to Victory Point than Washington Bay, suggesting that the group that Inuit met at Washington Bay left this group of men behind. Inuit collected a number of items from this site, some of which they traded with other Inuit, some of which ultimately ended up being sold to Dr. , a Hudson's Bay Company factor. The men who met Inuit at Washington Bay likely headed along the south shore of King William Island and some of them crossed Simpson Strait to the Adelaide Peninsula. Final survivors likely travelled as far south as Montreal Island, at the mouth of Back River. These "facts" of what happened emerged between 1854 and 1869 as relics and corpses were discovered and Inuit were interviewed. In April 1854, Dr. John Rae met an Inuk man named Innookpoozheejook who wore a gold cap band.26 When Rae questioned the man about the item, he told Rae that it came from the place where the dead white men were: "a large party of 'Kabloonans' . . . had died of starvation, a long distance to the west of where we then were, and beyond a large River; - He stated that, he did not know the exact place; that he had never been there; and that he could not accompany us so far" (Arctic Correspondence 274). Rae, believing he was far away from where Franklin's ships disappeared, bought the cap band but did not investigate further. When he returned to Repulse Bay a month later, Inuit were waiting for him with more relics. They told him stories that had been circulating between groups of Inuit for a few years, which he

26 I attempt to use Inuktitut spelling of Inuit proper names when possible; however, Inuktitut, the general term for the multiple dialects spoken by Inuit peoples, was primarily an oral language until later in the nineteenth century. Names of Inuit involved in the search for the Franklin expedition are often only preserved in anglicized form in primary sources - when there is no recent re-spelling of the name, I have used the spelling included in primary sources: for instance, Innookpoozheejook is an obvious anglicization; there is no Inuktitut equivalent for the sound "jook" so the pronunciation is probably closer to "suk" as in inuksuk; however, it is uncertain how the name would be spelled today. I have relied on Dorothy Eber's Encounters on the Passage as an authority on contemporary spelling of Inuit names and place names related to the Franklin search. 19 collated and reported back to the Admiralty and to the HBC. Rae's report told of a meeting between several Inuit families and about forty white men near the shore of King William Island in 1850. Neither group spoke the others' language, but "by signs the

Natives were led to believe that the Ship or Ships had been crushed by ice and that they were then going to where they expected to find deer to shoot" (Rae, Arctic

Correspondence 274). Later that season, Inuit discovered about thirty corpses and some graves at a campsite: "Some of the bodies were in a tent or tents; others were under the boat which had been turned over to form a shelter, and some lay scattered about in different directions" (Rae, Arctic Correspondence 276). 27 Rae's report included the shocking revelation: "From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative, as a means of sustaining life" {Arctic Correspondence 276). When Rae returned to England, he was ostracized for suggesting that Britain's finest naval heroes could have resorted to cannibalism and for trusting Inuit witnesses. The problem was exacerbated because the Inuit Rae spoke to had heard about the tent site from other Inuit and had not seen the evidence themselves. In the 1860s, Charles Francis Hall interviewed

Inuit witnesses who confirmed Rae's story with first-person accounts of finding mutilated corpses. In the 1980s, Owen Beattie found a skeleton on King William Island, almost certainly from the Franklin expedition, which had been intentionally dismembered and which suggested that retreating men had carried human body parts with them as a

27 There is considerable debate about where these thirty bodies and graves were found. John Rae believed they were near Starvation Cove, on the Adelaide Peninsula. David Woodman argues that they were most likely at Terror Bay. The disagreement arose because Rae's interpreter translated the Inuit description of the location as "on the continent;" the term could indicate the mainland (i.e. Adelaide Peninsula) or could indicate King William Island as a larger land mass than a nearby island. See Woodman, Unravelling 152-93. 20 portable food source (59-62). In 1855 the Hudson's Bay Company sent out another overland expedition to descend the Back River to confirm Rae's report. On 9 January 1856, the Times reported that James Anderson and James Green Stewart had "met with Esquimaux, who corroborated the reports of Dr. Rae"; these Inuit also reported that "one man died on Montreal Island, and that the balance of the party wandered on the beach of the mainland opposite, until, worn out by fatigue and starvation, they, one by one, laid themselves down and died too. The Esquimaux reported, further, that Indians far to the north of them, who had seen the ships of Franklin's party, and visited them, stated that they had both been crushed between the icebergs" (10). Anderson and Stewart found iron kettles with the British government mark on them, English snowshoes with the name Dr. Stanley - the surgeon on the Erebus - cut into them, and a boat on which the word "Terror" was visible. Bad weather and leaking canoes forced Anderson and Stewart to turn back before reaching King William Island; however, their findings confirmed much of what Rae's

Inuit informants told him. Jane Franklin responded to Rae's report and to the Admiralty's refusal to dispatch further expeditions in her typical fashion: she enlisted Charles Dickens to refute Rae, particularly his accusations of cannibalism, and she began to raise funds for an expedition to search King William Island. She recruited Francis Leopold McClintock, a veteran of three previous search expeditions and an expert sledger, to lead the expedition. The left England on 2 July 1857 and, after an unsuccessful first year, reached King William Island in 1859. McClintock and Lieutenant William Hobson, his second-in-command, each led a sledge party. McClintock heard Inuit accounts of a ship being wrecked and sinking to the west of the island and met an Inuk woman who told him that "many of the 21 white men dropped by the way as they went to the Great River; that some were buried and some were not; they did not themselves witness this, but had discovered their bodies during the winter following" (McClintock 262-63). Both he and Hobson discovered caches of artifacts left by the retreating men. The expedition found several skeletons. And most significantly, Hobson made the famous of the cairn at Victory Point that contained the written messages from the expedition. Although the discovery of the written message was the most important piece of evidence found by McClintock's expedition, another site of remains has received nearly as much attention despite the fact that it provokes rather than answers questions about what happened. The search parties found a ship's boat mounted on a sledge near Cape Crozier. Inside the boat were two skeletons: "One was that of a slight young person; the other of a large strongly-made, middle-aged man. The former... may have been that of an officer. . . The other skeleton was in a somewhat more perfect state, and was enveloped with clothes and furs" (McClintock 294). The boat also contained an enormous quantity of goods: among the items were two loaded guns, devotional books, silk handkerchiefs, dinner knives, twine, and soap (McClintock 294-96). The sledge was pointing to the north - where the ships lay - the wrong direction for a retreat to the south. This detail has fueled considerable speculation about a possible return to the ships, about the survivors subdividing on the retreat, and about why these two men were left behind. While the sledge direction and the boat's contents are important for establishing that some men likely attempted to return to the ships, I suspect that McClintock's find is remembered not because of what it contributes, factually, to the narrative of what happened but because of

22 how it arouses the imagination.28 The two men were left with the boat, presumably because they could no longer keep up with the group. While the skeletons were not conclusively identified, the scene of the boat is oddly personal: it allows one to play out scenarios of the men's last days and to speculate about why they were left, about their relationship to one another and about the manner of their deaths. When McClintock returned to England, the issue of what happened to Franklin and his men was, for the most part, considered resolved. Hobson found the message that gave the date of Franklin's death. Inuit testimony and the trail of artifacts strewn along the King William Island coastline told the story of a disastrous attempt to reach the Back River and convinced most people that there were no survivors. McClintock was knighted. Lady Franklin turned her attention to proving that her husband's expedition had completed the final link in the Passage before he died and to commemorating him as a naval hero.

A few other expeditions, most notably Charles Francis Hall's first two expeditions, unearthed new details about what likely happened. Hall, convinced that a handful of survivors still lived among Inuit, interviewed the same Inuk - Innookpoozheejook - whom Rae met in 1854 and some of the Inuit who actually encountered Franklin survivors. Hall's work is significant because he was the first qallunaaq (non-Inuk) to record Inuit stories of contact with survivors;29 because Hall took Inuit stories seriously as evidence of what happened, he also helped ensure that stories

28 The two men who died in the boat are the subject of Geoff Kavanagh's play Ditch. In the play, he imagines that the two men were lovers and that they were left behind when one of them was injured him and was unable to travel further. 29 Throughout this project, I will often use the Inuktitut terms qallunaaq (singular) and qallunaat (plural), to refer to a non-Inuk person or non-Inuit peoples. The terms include all groups of non- Inuit and their inclusiveness makes them helpful for referring to the many different nationalities and ethnicities of those searching for the Franklin expedition. 23 were preserved both in the archive and in Inuit memory. Hall's accounts of Inuit memories of the encounter at Washington Bay and of the discovery of the corpses and

evidence of cannibalism are important not only because they contribute to reconstructions of what happened but also because they demonstrate that historical knowledge can be

archived in embodied memory. Hall's expedition and his encounters with Inuit informants suggest the extent to

which the performances with which I am concerned are not only about the search for and the loss of the Franklin expedition but are also performances of intercultural contact. It

will become clear throughout the chapters that follow that during this period of intense contact between Inuit and Europeans, the Arctic functioned as what Mary Louise Pratt

terms a contact zone. Pratt describes contact zones as "social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations

of domination and subordination - like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today" (4). Pratt uses the term contact zone rather than

frontier in "an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects

previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect," foregrounding "the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and

domination" (7). While the British search for the Northwest Passage was in many ways symptomatic of the broader project of empire building, the relationship between Inuit and non-Inuit in the Arctic in the mid-nineteenth century does not fit neatly into existing

models of colonial relations. Renée Fossett remarks that although Inuit were in contact with Europeans from approximately 1700 on, the European presence in the Arctic was not pervasive or permanent until the twentieth century (xv). Furthermore, the Arctic was not 24 (at least not after Frobisher's expeditions of the late-sixteenth century) imagined as a potential source of material or human resources: the British were not interested in extracting natural resources or politically controlling the region but wanted to locate a quicker way to travel to Asia. This difference in economic interest produced political and social relations between Inuit and qallunaat visitors that were somewhat different than

those between other contemporary groups of colonizers and colonized. Nonetheless, during the search for Franklin, several Europeans lived closely with Inuit and almost all members of search expeditions encountered Inuit at some time.30 In the chapters that

follow, we will see that many of the dynamics of colonial contact in other parts of the world influenced how intercultural relations developed in the Arctic.

History and Loss In The Archive and the Repertoire Diana Taylor argues that "Performances

function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called 'twice-behaved behavior'... performance also functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing" (2-3). Taylor's description of performance as both an object of knowledge and as a way of knowing about objects and events is not novel; however, she articulates the methodological problems encountered in excavating the performances of the past. By describing the

30 See Ann Laura Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power for a discussion of how intimate relationships between colonizers and colonized subjects allowed the political and social goals of colonial rule to be managed. While Stoler is primarily concerned with the dynamics of colonial Indonesia, her argument resonates with the development of interracial sexual relationships in the Arctic, which I will discuss in detail in chapter two. 25 archive and the repertoire as distinct but complementary ways of knowing,31 Taylor gives legitimacy to embodied knowledge as a valid source of information about the past. In order to acknowledge performance as a repository of historical knowledge, and as a source of knowledge that constantly re-emerges, rearticulating itself in the present, it is important to move away from conceptions of historical knowledge characterized by a desire to reconstruct the past and toward thinking of history as a series of events to be addressed from the present moment. Walter Benjamin contrasts historicism with historical materialism in order to make precisely this point: "Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It becomes historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary" (255). Telling "the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary" is rendered impossible in the case of the Franklin expedition: although there are some events that almost certainly happened as the men retreated, the vast disagreements between historians writing about the details of what happened demonstrate that the physical and narrative remains cannot be reassembled to tell just one story. Benjamin suggests that "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (247). Performances that responded to what happened to the expedition rarely address the "facts" of events and often outright distort what happened. However, these performances provide insight into a

3 1 See the first chapter of The Archive and the Repertoire in which Taylor draws the distinction between the archive and the repertoire. 26 series of moments when what happened called out for representation and could only be

represented through performance. Anthropologist and historian Greg Dening concurs with Benjamin, arguing that history should engage itself with the chaos of the past, not with reducing history to a

linear narrative. Dening calls his own practice ethnographic history, writing: "IfI were asked what ethnographic history may ultimately be, I would answer that it is an attempt to represent the past as it was actually experienced in such a way that we understand both its ordered and disordered natures" {Bligh 5). Dening, like Benjamin, distinguishes between approaches to history that attempt to contain the past and those that engage with the past in the present. He critiques the preoccupation with historical accuracy: "Under the

circumstances, it is not surprising that being accurate became equated with being true and that history became equated with historical facts" {Performances 55). The problem with locating history exclusively in the realm of verifiable facts is that the history produced by

this erases the complexity of events and, particularly, the nuances of how the past was experienced. History can be addressed, according to Dening, in its actuality and in its

reality: "I see a distinction between actuality and reality. By 'actuality' I mean what happened as it is known in its balance of the circumstantial and the determined, in its

typicality as well as its particularity, known for its multivalent meanings. By 'reality' I mean what happened as it is reductively known, by its determinants, known in its

simplicity of meaning, set in some hierarchy of acceptability" {Performances 60-61). Approaching history with a concern for actuality over reality is a task akin to what

Benjamin defines as the task of the historical materialist, as it requires the historian to

consider the process by which events become historical and to engage with the past in the present moment in generating history. 27 Benjamin and Dening both suggest that history exists in the tension between loss and remaining. History emerges from the remains of the past but is always marked by what has been lost of the past with the passing of time. Histories of what happened to the Franklin expedition are characterized by the loss of remains: so few material remains endured that reconstructive histories must always fill in spaces between the "beads of a rosary" with speculation. But the history of the Franklin expedition is defined by a second, perhaps more significant, relationship to loss: the history is, insofar as we can engage with it today, a history of losses. The expedition's disappearance was not just about the loss of two ships and of 129 men. It was not just about the loss of material remains like clothes, books, guns, and knives. And it was not just about the loss of written records. Jane Franklin lost her husband and the chance to grow old with him. The Admiralty lost its dream of charting the elusive path from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The British middle and upper classes lost the fantasy that naval officers could survive anywhere if they relied upon their principles and training. The illusion that British culture was superior to indigenous cultures was lost, along with the opportunity to learn how to adapt to new environments by paying attention to local populations. These losses are precisely what the performances that emerged from the expedition's disappearance addressed. It is easy to use the term loss as a catch-all, as David Eng and David Kazanjian suggest when they claim: "'loss' functions as a placeholder of sorts - what Freud calls in The Interpretation ofDreams a 'theoretical fiction'" (2). Dominick LaCapra's definition of loss in relation to absence is useful as a framework to identify the experiences performances responded to. Too often, LaCapra complains, loss and absence are conflated; however, loss differs from absence in significant ways. First, loss is "situated on a historical level and is the consequence of 28 particular events" (LaCapra 712), whereas absence is transhistorical and "is not an event" (LaCapra 700). Because loss is located in the historical past, "Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence" (LaCapra 700). Second, loss involves a specific desire which leads the person suffering a loss to search for a surrogate for the lost thing: "In terms of loss or lack, the object of desire is specified: to recover the lost or lacking object or some substitute for it... desire may be limitless and open to an infinite

series of displacements in quest of a surrogate for what has presumably been lost" (LaCapra 708). This relationship between loss and the quest for a surrogate allows performance to emerge as a specific response to the losses suffered in relation to the disappearance of the expedition. Third, while loss can be "worked through" or "made good. . . [a]bsence, along with the anxiety it brings, can be worked through only in the sense that one may learn better to live with it and not convert it into a loss or lack that one believes could be made good" (LaCapra 712). It will become clear that while

performances arise, most often, in response to specific losses, there will be moments when performances attempt to address not loss but absence; these moments stand out as disjunctive, as moments when representation fails to "work". David Eng and David Kazanjian qualify their comment that loss functions as a placeholder by clarifying that "'Loss' names what is apprehended by discourses and practices of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression" (2). In other words, loss is the object that these practices and discourses attempt to capture. While a detailed discussion of each of the ways that loss can be apprehended is outside

the realm of this introduction, three of them - mourning, melancholia, and trauma - will be critical in identifying and articulating how performance engages with loss and makes

loss visible.

29 Freud suggests that while mourning and melancholia appear to be similar responses to the loss of a loved object, they run different courses and engage the sufferer with the lost object in different ways. Mourning, according to Freud, "is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on. In some people the same influences produce melancholia instead of mourning and we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition" ("Mourning" 243). While melancholia arises from a similar experience of loss, and while the symptoms of melancholia and profound mourning are similar ("Mourning" 244); melancholia is distinguished by ambiguity surrounding exactly what has been lost and by an ambivalent relationship to the lost

object: [0]ne cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. (Freud, "Mourning" 245) Some aspect of the loss remains outside of consciousness, even when the patient knows, on some level, what has been lost. In mourning, according to Freud, the emotions felt for the lost object are straightforward, whereas "In melancholia the relation to the object... is complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence... In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with 30 each other" ("Mourning" 256). The biggest distinction between mourning and melancholia, in Freud's essay, is that mourning moves toward completion, whereas melancholia is marked by a continued engagement with the lost object. Mourning cannot be completed at once but "when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again" ("Mourning" 244-45). Once mourning is complete, the patient can become attached to new things. In melancholia this is not the case because the past cannot be laid to rest. Eng and Kazanjian further differentiate between mourning's and melancholia's relationships to the past: "Unlike mourning, in which the past is declared resolved, finished, and dead, in melancholia the past remains steadfastly alive in the present" (4). LaCapra expands on Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, particularly in relation to the course each runs. Mourning is a form of "working-through" whereas melancholia is a form of "acting-out" (LaCapra 713). While melancholia is an "arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized self... is possessed by the past," mourning "brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvestment in... life" (LaCapra 713). LaCapra links mourning with loss and melancholia with absence: mourning is only possible when losses can be "specified and named" and when "mourning turns to absence and absence is conflated with loss, then mourning becomes... scarcely distinguishable... from interminable melancholy" (716). LaCapra' s work on mourning, melancholia, loss, and absence is further relevant to this project because he explicitly connects processes of "acting-out" and "working-through" to performance: melancholia and mourning become visible through action. In melancholic performance - "acting-out" - "the past is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it 31 hauntingly returns as the repressed" (716). In contrast, mourning "involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves recognizing its difference from the present - simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it" (716). To me, LaCapra's distinction between these two types of performance - performances in which the past is relived and regenerated and performances in which the past is represented as separate from the present - suggests a correlation between melancholia and historical materialism and between mourning and historicism that brings

Benjamin's argument to mind. While Freud and LaCapra pathologize melancholia, Eng and Kazanjian argue that it can be a productive response to loss and situate melancholia as the kind of engagement with the past that Benjamin terms historical materialism. Eng and Kazanjian focus not on Freud's work in "Mourning and Melancholia" but in The Ego and the Id, in which he blurs the distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that "the work of mourning is not possible without melancholia" (Eng and Kazanjian 4). Eng and Kazanjian raise significant questions concerning the potentially generative power of melancholia, asking "can we describe melancholia as facilitating the work of mourning by creating numerous disparate bodies, places, and ideals composing the symbolic world? Might we say that the work of mourning remains possible through melancholia's continued engagement with the various and ongoing forms of loss[?]" (4-5). It is only by recognizing the inter-relation of mourning and melancholia, claim Eng and Kazanjian, that Benjamin's vision of historical materialism can be realized. They argue that "to mourn the remains of the past hopefully is to establish an active and ongoing relationship with history. This practice - what Benjamin calls 'historical materialism' - is a creative process, animating history for future significations as well as alternate emphathies" (1). 32 Historical materialism suggests that reliving an era is "to bring the past to memory. It is to induce actively a tension between the past and the present, between the dead and the living. In this manner, Benjamin's historical materialist establishes a continuing dialogue with loss and its remains - a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and most important a moment of production" (Eng and Kazanjian 1). Melancholia involves an ongoing relationship with the past and often arises when a lost object remains unknowable: the inaccessibility of the past links melancholia and trauma as responses to loss. Freud suggests that the symptoms of trauma can resemble those of melancholia (Beyond 6); however, trauma surpasses melancholia in the extent to which what has been lost remains unknown. Trauma, according to Freud, emerges when a person encounters danger and suffers a severe fright because "he has run into danger without being prepared for it" (Beyond 6). In trauma, "There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead - the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of (Freud, Beyond 23-24). Cathy Caruth, following Freud, defines trauma as "an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena" (11). Trauma is marked by the inability to fully recognize the present as it occurs and by the way that that present projects itself into the future, intruding into but remaining unassimilated by consciousness. Caruth, drawing on Freud's work in Moses and Monotheism, explains the relationship between trauma and history: "The experience of trauma, the fact of latency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that hence can never be fully 33 known, but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all" (17). Trauma is a particular relationship to the past that arises when a past event could not enter consciousness when it happened. It cannot be remembered in the moment of its occurrence. The traumatic event only exists to consciousness in its repetition in the present, but these repetitions are baffling because they refer to an unknowable past moment.

The question of whether traumatic loss is only experienced individually or can be experienced collectively is a pressing one. In Moses and Monotheism Freud suggests that trauma can impact on how a community imagines and structures its relationship to its own past. LaCapra, in discussing how communities engage with trauma, for example in addressing the Holocaust, situates trauma as a communal experience. In contrast, Caruth limits her consideration of trauma primarily to the individual experience of the phenomenon. As we will see below, particularly in the third chapter addressing encounters between Inuit and Franklin survivors, the question of whether trauma is primarily an individual or a collective experience is a critical one. In the third chapter, I will explore how performance, as the representation of a traumatic event, can be performed by different actors but will ultimately consider trauma as afflicting individuals, even if multiple individuals experience the same event as traumatic. Similarly, the final chapter, in considering how Charles Dickens' performance in The Frozen Deep responded to the loss of the expedition, raises the question of whether mourning and melancholia are also primarily individual or collective experiences. In this case, it seems that mourning can be experienced collectively but that melancholia tends to involve an 34 individual engagement with loss, although multiple individuals can have melancholic engagements with the same past event. Freud, according to Caruth, frequently employs the image of the accident as a metonym and metaphor for traumatic experience; the accident is "the exemplary scene of trauma par excellence, not only because it depicts what we can know about traumatizing events, but also, and more profoundly, because it tells of what it is, in traumatic events, that is precisely grasped. The accident, that is, as it emerges in Freud and is passed on through other trauma narratives, does not simply represent the violence of a collision but also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility" (6). Trauma frequently emerges as the result of an accident; however, the image of the accident also represents the way that the event fails to be remembered. The Franklin expedition disaster was certainly precipitated by a series of accidents - the weather was unusually cold and the ships were stuck in the ice, the tinned food brought along was probably tainted, ice damaged one or both ships, search expeditions failed to search the correct areas - but the totality of its disappearance, the way that so many material remains apparently vanished, also has the appearance of an accident. The accident of the disappearing remains - relics buried by snowstorms, ships sinking under the pressure of ice, papers strewn across the tundra - repeats the accident or accidents that doomed the ships. That the history of what happened remains inaccessible, though the series of accidents that erased its remains, is not incidental but is essential to a consideration of the ways in which one can think of the history of what happened to the Franklin expedition as the history of a trauma.

35 Performance Remains32

Trauma and melancholia both revolve around a tension between absence and presence, addressing what is not fully present to consciousness in the case of trauma, addressing what is lost but remains intimately embedded in consciousness in the case of melancholia. Both are marked by an ongoing relationship to the past and by an inability to move beyond an experience of loss. In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth explores "the ways in which texts of a certain period - the texts of psychoanalysis, of literature, and of literary theory - both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience... the chapters... explore the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it" (4). It seems to me, however, that performance, rather than literature, emerges as particularly well equipped to address the tensions between knowing and not knowing, between absence and presence, between seeing and not seeing. Performance, and theatrical performance in particular, is marked by tensions between absence, disappearance, and presence, between repetition and ephemerality, that parallels the operations of traumatic experience. The question of whether performance is fundamentally a repetition or a disappearance is at the centre of two well-cited definitions of the term. Richard Schechner's famous definition of performance as "twice-behaved behavior" (Between Theatre and Anthropology 36) seems to directly contradict Peggy Phelan's claim that "Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance... Performance's being... becomes itself through disappearance" (146). Schechner contends that performance is always a repetition, 32 I have borrowed this subheading from the title of an article by Rebecca Schneider. 36 implying that performances, in turn, can be cited, reproduced, and repeated. Phelan, in contrast, claims that performance is defined by its ephemerality, by the fact that as soon as it occurs, it vanishes; any attempt to document performance transforms it into something other than what it is. Although Schechner and Phelan seem to disagree with one another, both insist on a moment at which performance disappears. Schechner's statement allows, in fact requires, this moment: for performance to emerge as repetition, there must be a moment when it is absent before becoming present again. Phelan, in claiming that performance becomes itself through disappearance, suggests that performance requires a presence and an absence between which it can emerge. Rebecca Schneider departs from Phelan to argue that performance is both a reappearance and a way of remaining. In order to understand performance as an act of remaining, one must question the logic of an archive that defines performance as "that which does not remain" (100) and instead admit that remains "do not have to be isolated to the document, in the object, to bone versus flesh" (103). In thinking of performance as a form of bodily remains, the body "becomes a kind of archive and host to a collective memory we might situate, with Freud, as symptomatic, with Cathy Caruth after Freud as the compulsory repetitions of a collective trauma" (Schneider 103). The body, as the medium of performance, is where performance is stored after it is complete and it is the body that archives performance. Schneider continues, arguing that the body allows for performance to disappear and reappear because it provides a site for remaining and re- emergence: This body, given to performance, is arguably engaged with disappearance chiasmatically - not only disappearing but resiliently eruptive, remaining through performance like so many ghosts at the door marked 'disappeared'. In this sense 37 performance becomes itself through messy and eruptive reappearance, challenging, via the performance trace, any neat antinomy between appearance and disappearance, or presence and absence. . . Indeed performance in this light can be figured as both the act of remaining and a means of disappearance. (103) Schneider suggests that performance does not exist in a single temporal moment, as Phelan seems to argue, but that performance endures in the body as a form of remains with the potential to reappear at later moments. Performance makes what is absent present through mimesis. While mimesis is frequently thought of as imitation and theatrical mimesis as the imitation of an action (Pavis 180), Alice Rayner connects mimesis to psychoanalytic theories of loss, arguing that mimesis is the capacity not to imitate but to substitute: It is the very capacity to substitute one thing for another, to reconstitute a lost object in a present object, to transform the material objects of the world into imaginary objects, and the imaginary into the material, that characterizes the foundation of mimesis. This sense of mimesis is not a matter of visible reflection

or mirroring, nor is it the exclusive province of theatre, painting, or other representational 'arts.' It is, rather, the point in a psychic topography where the experience of loss generates the demand for a substitute. (129) The point at which the experience of loss generates a demand for a substitute occurs when the experience of loss cannot be addressed in any other way. What was lost cannot be replaced, but the space it left can be filled with a substitute, or, to use Joseph Roach's term, a surrogate. Rayner's concept of mimesis connects the process of substitution or surrogation, a theatrical process, to psychoanalytic responses to loss. 38 Substitution or surrogation can take several forms, but according to Roach, it frequently materializes in the form of an effigy. Roach suggests that to effigy "means to evoke an absence, to body something forth, especially something from a distant past" (36). The effigy "fills by means of surrogation a vacancy created by the absence of an original. Beyond ostensibly inanimate effigies fashioned from wood or cloth, there are more elusive effigies fashioned from flesh. Such effigies are made by performances. They consist of a set of actions that hold open a place in memory into which many different people may step according to circumstances and occasions" (36). The effigy is one way that the remains of past performances can reappear and a way in which performance can operate as a form of remains: the effigy holds open a place in which past events - past performances - can be not only remembered but reactivated. There is something about theatre - not as an institution but as a form of surrogation and as a practice of spectatorship - that is particularly appropriate for representing lost things. While the performances this project examines often do not fit into rigid definitions of theatre, they are linked by a particular kind of theatricality that revolves around the ability to address the absences at the core of the experiences of loss that generated them and around the type of spectatorship that this mode of double viewing - seeing what is lost both emerge and remain lost - requires. The Franklin expedition survivors desperately retreating from their ships terrified the Inuit they encountered, who believed they were seeing ghosts. Dorothy Eber records Cathy Towtongie, an Inuk woman from Iqaluit, recounting a story she heard from her grandmother: '"They were walking inland, walking the mainland - the nunamariq - 'the real land.' They were a raggedy bunch and their clothing was not well made. Their skins were black and the meat above their teeth was gone; their eyes were gaunt. Were they 39 tuurngait - spirits - or what?'" {Encounters xi). Inuit stories about encountering Franklin survivors are, in many ways, ghost stories: stories about mysterious apparitions, somewhere between life and death, appearing and then disappearing. Marvin Carlson addresses the concept of the theatrical ghost in The Haunted Stage, claiming that the ghost appears in theatre as a kind of déjà vu - the spectator recognizes what he is watching because he has already seen it. Carlson argues that this is because theatre is "the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts" (2). Theatre activates communal memory by recycling or citing that culture's past performances. All aspects of theatrical practice can be subject to ghosting, as a particular structure of re-presentation. Alice Rayner contends that theatrical ghosting is not merely déjà vu or citation but that the ghost is critical to the phenomenological structure of the theatrical event. Theatre not only stages ghosts but is, at its core, a ghostly phenomenon: The theater itself gives appearances to the unseen, the hidden, and to the chronic return of the theatrical event from nothing into something. Theatre is the specific site where appearance and disappearance reproduce the relations between the living and the dead, not as a form of representation, but as a form of consciousness. . . In this sense, the ghost is not at all a metaphor for something else

but an aspect of theatrical practice, (xvi-xvii) Theatre makes absent things temporarily present, but as they become present one is aware, as an audience member, that what one sees is not really there, is not really real. Theatre allows the ambivalence of loss - the inability to fully know what happened, the knowledge that one's survival is predicated on an incomprehensible experience - to 40 emerge but to remain itself. Rayner' s explanation of ghosts is deliberately ambiguous; in fact, she argues that to be more precise in naming or explaining ghosts would make them disappear: "Making full use of the terms ghost and haunting involves, it seems to me, their remaining in the realm of uncertainty. . . The ghost is known only by its affective presence, when one asks from a state of wonder, What am I seeing, how does this happen, where is this coming from, this 'thing' happening before my eyes? If words are successful in naming the ghost, there is no ghost" (xxiii). The ghost becomes ghostly insofar as it generates a particular kind of affect in the spectator, the feeling of uncertainty about what one is seeing, the awareness of an uncanniness surrounding what one is seeing. The double vision required to see theatrical ghosts - the recognition and confusion about what one sees - is precisely the double vision necessary for understanding how loss can both become present and remain visibly absent in performance. This project will map a series of particular moments when performance emerges as a response to the disappearance and loss of the Franklin expedition. The first chapter examines how theatrical productions on wintering search vessels not only contributed to shipboard life but also directly addressed the threats and dangers of Arctic exploration. By examining the pantomime Zero, or Harlequin Light, written and performed aboard the HMS Assistance in 1851, 1 will argue that shipboard theatre attempted to mitigate potential threats to the expedition's success by revealing, through pantomimical transformation, that ambivalent or negative aspects of Arctic life were actually familiar, friendly, or fun. The performance suggested that the Arctic was not a threatening, foreign landscape but a friendly extension of domestic space and that Inuit were potentially helpful companions, not threats to success. The second chapter examines how Charles Francis Hall "went native" while living 41 among Inuit and searching for the missing expedition. Although "going native" was necessary for his physical and social survival, it took on significance as a performance practice and engenders a set of questions concerning the role of intercultural performance in interracial relations. Hall learned that "going native" was more complicated than simply eating raw seal and sleeping in an igloo: it was also a form of interracial desire that it was crucial to avoid and repress. Hall's acts of "going native" functioned as a way of legitimating his belief that survivors from Franklin's expedition were still alive and as an embodied denial of the possibility that the missing officers engaged in cannibalism. The third chapter looks at two performances that emerged from contact between Franklin's men and Inuit. The first performance took place when thirty or forty Franklin survivors met several Inuit families who were hunting seals on King William Island. The leader of the white men performed a series of gestures and sounds that Inuit took to mean that his ship had been crushed by ice. The second performance took place after all the Franklin survivors had died. Inuit found a large tent filled with mutilated white men's corpses and one woman, searching for any valuable goods left behind, found that one man, who looked as though he was asleep, was still wearing his watch. Although she was overwhelmed by morbid feelings, she chipped away at the ice entombing his body in order to take the watch. The woman told and retold the story, keeping the watch not for its economic but for its affective value. The performances are striking not only for what they contribute to the narrative of what happened after Franklin's men abandoned the ships but also for what they communicate about the nature of the losses experienced both by Franklin's men in their final days and by Inuit who came to know what happened to the Franklin survivors before they died. The performances seem to have compelled those who witnessed them to reproduce them: these two stories survived among Inuit not only 42 because they were about encounters with Europeans but also because they related something vital about the responsibility that witnessing what happened to Franklin's men placed on Inuit as those who survived to remember the encounters. The final chapter will examine Charles Dickens' and Wilkie Collins' melodrama The Frozen Deep, written and performed in the wake of Dr. John Rae' s report that Franklin's men resorted to cannibalism. The play provided a coherent, though fictionalized, account of what happened to Franklin's expedition and finally allowed mourning to take place. The script provided narrative closure by re-drafting the Franklin saga as a conventional melodrama. On stage, Dickens, who played the lead in the show, offered himself up as a surrogate for the missing men, producing a death scene for spectators to witness and an emotionally comprehensible loss to mourn. But The Frozen Deep was most powerfully legitimated as a representation of what happened and as a vehicle for communal mourning when it was viewed by the most important spectator in England: Queen Victoria. The Queen's presence transformed the performance into an imperial spectacle that not only validated the revisionist narrative of heroic death in the Arctic but also confirmed Dickens' ascendancy as "designated mourner." The first pair of chapters examine performances that facilitated the search for the missing men, whereas the second pair considers performances that responded explicitly to the loss of the expedition. In the first two chapters, performance holds open hope that the search expeditions could succeed and that the missing men could be found alive. In the first chapter, performance imaginatively facilitates the search and in the second chapter, it literally allows Hall to search areas other Europeans could not. In the third chapter, performance responds to traumatic loss as a melancholic engagement with the past: incomprehensible losses, experienced first by the expedition's survivors and then by Inuit 43 who came into contact with them, were represented and remained part of living memory in Inuit culture. The fourth chapter demonstrates that performance can also attempt to

overcome trauma, overwriting incomprehensible loss with a coherent experience that can be mourned and set aside. What this project explores, then, are the ways that performance, and particularly theatrical performance, engaged with the multiple experiences of loss that characterized responses to the Franklin expedition's disappearance.

44 Harlequin in the Arctic The metamorphic abundance ofpantomime is the seductive essence of Victorian theatricality... In a world where gender was malleable, where history mutated with no transition into myth, where human pageants gave way to afantasia of animals, 'dreams ofbliss ' were surely indistinguishablefrom 'the horror of nightmares. ' Paradise and terror were dangerously akin in thisform whose popular climax was a transformation scene. ~ Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals 14

Officers and sailors wait expectantly on the upper deck of HMS Assistance, a British search vessel frozen in Arctic pack ice off the coast of Griffith's Island. It is 9 January 1851. The ship has been shrouded in twenty-four hour darkness since early November. The canvas housing enclosing the deck keeps the crowd of men warmer than one might expect, but when high winds blow, it is drafty enough to make it nearly impossible to hear what is happening.33 Mist rises from the men's bodies and mouths, making it difficult to see what is happening as well. Despite these conditions, the officers and men of the Assistance, Resolute, Intrepid, and Pioneer have gathered to watch three plays.34 These evenings of theatre have occurred every two weeks on the Assistance: at the beginning of the winter, a stage was erected on the deck, with a canvas proscenium arch decorated with paintings of fruit and flowers, and framed by snow statues of the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal (Markham 76-77). While the men eagerly anticipate any entertainment, 9 January is special because an original pantomime, Zero, or Harlequin Light, is to be performed for the first time.35

33 The 1850-51 season's final performance aboard the Assistance had to be postponed due to high winds {Illustrated Arctic News 55). 34 The four ships comprised a squadron under the command of Captain Horatio Austin. 35 British navy men serving in the Arctic apparently always personified the cold as Zero: Captain Robert McClure's published journal notes that "Zero, it must be observed, was invariably referred to as a veritable foe having an actual existence, and was to be combated as they would do the Arch-Enemy" (101). , who edited McClure's journal, was present for the 45 After the first two plays - Farce ofthe Turned Head, performed by the crew, and Bombastes Furioso, performed by the officers - conclude, Zero begins. The play opens with a scene familiar to the audience: the carefully painted backdrop depicts HMS Assistance "moored to a land floe, and sustaining a severe pressure from the heavy masses of pack ice, which is rushing past with fearful rapidity" {Aurora Borealis 206). Strong blue light is "thrown across the stage" (Ede 132), adding eeriness to the image of slow-moving ice crushing the ship. The band plays discordant music on drums and whistles as the imposing title character Zero enters wearing a "Full frosted wig, surmounted by a fanciful crown; long flowing beard; loose white robes with large sleeves, icicles hanging from different parts" (Ede 131). The stage directions indicate that Zero walks "majestically up and down the stage'' as "one or two ofhis Imps pass quickly

across the stage" (132). His opening speech tells the audience about a group of "boisterous Tars" wintering at Melville Bay: "With papers, plays, and soirees they defy, /Up to this moment my supremacy;/With magic-lantern and the bal masque,/They think to cheat me" (Ede 132). It is easy to imagine the delight of audience members as they watch one of their shipmates, in an enormous mask and elaborate costume, actually describing themselves and their entertainments in his opening monologue. As the play goes on, the audience's enjoyment only grows, leading a reviewer in the shipboard newspaper A urora

Borealis to comment that everyone present enjoyed the spectacular scenery, the inventive transformations, and the "fun and frolic" of the harlequinade (204-6).

This play, written by the Assistance's assistant surgeon Charles Ede, is the only surviving example of an original play written on a British search vessel during the search performance of Ede's pantomime, so it is important to take the comment that this practice was "invariable" with a grain of salt: it may have been more common on some ships than on others.

46 for the Franklin expedition.36 Zero is a testament to the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the men and officers who worked on it and performed in it. Aurora Borealis notes that Lieutenant Browne, who painted the backdrop, was hindered by a shortage of paint on board the ship and "was reduced to mixtures of 'Day and Martin,' black ink, black-lead, whitening, washing blue, glue, and other unusual ingredients, consisting of chimney-soot

and lamp-black, to complete his picture" (205). Actors amused audiences with their performances, even though many of them had never acted before. Those who played women's roles were especially noted and the actor who played Columbine in Zero was no exception: "The lady who represented Columbine did her work in excellent style: her dress, elegant figure and graceful action would have adorned the boards of Her Majesty's Theatre" (Aurora Borealis 207). Creating theatre not only occupied men's time, but also occupied their attention: advertisements, play reviews in Aurora Borealis (the shipboard newspaper printed on the Assistance) and the Illustrated Arctic News (the newspaper on the Resolute)/1 and personal responses to plays in men's diaries indicate that theatre played a central role in shipboard social life. The play begins by introducing the audience to Zero and his servants Frostbite, Scorbutus (Scurvy), and Hunger. After complaining about British sailors enjoying

themselves in his territory, Zero plots to test whether they are "true" (133) by releasing the dangers of the Arctic - his three servants, as well as a Bear and a Fox - to make them

36 Patrick O'Neill points out in "Zero and the Arctic Dramatic Tradition" that at least two other original plays were produced during the search: the others he lists are Pantomime, performed 30 January 1851 on the Advance (an American vessel) and King Glumpus, performed 1 February 1853 on the HMS Resolute (44). 37 Both ships carried printing presses. This was common practice during the search for the Franklin expedition: the printing presses were supposed to be used to print messages to be attached to balloons that would then be released in the hopes that the missing men would find them. Printing presses were frequently "misappropriated" to produce newspapers, playbills, and other documents related to shipboard entertainments. 47 miserable. When a cheerful sledge party, protected by a good spirit, sets up camp, Zero is infuriated and determines to enter the men's tent to freeze them. At this moment, Harlequin leaps through the Sun and changes Daylight into Columbine. He then transforms Zero and the Bear into two Clowns and Pantaloon. Later, Harlequin transforms the Fox into Qalasirssuaq, the young Inuk man who served as navigator and guide on the Assistance. Ede's script is vague on details of what happened in the harlequinade: this is not surprising, as Michael Booth notes "Texts for pantomimes hardly exist in the conventional sense. The pantomime author, or 'arranger' as he was known in the earlier days, had nothing to do with the harlequinade... The author's responsibility was to fit in somewhere with the manager, stage manager, machinists, lighting men, and scene painters... and accept a great deal of cutting and hacking about of his work" {Spectacular 75). Although it is difficult to ascertain exactly how the harlequinade was staged, the script and reviews reveal that the second half of the performance included a number ofjokes told by the Clowns, often at Pantaloon's expense, humorous songs, and pas de deux danced by Harlequin and Columbine. The play concludes with a sentimental air sung by the North Polar Star, encouraging the fictional sailors to continue their search, and with motivational words from one of the Clowns: "So let me say,/In Nelson's way,/England expects that every man/This spring will do his duty" (143). Despite the sense of playfulness surrounding Zero, or Harlequin Light, the pantomime demonstrates that shipboard theatre was very serious business. Ede's script and officers' accounts of its performance indicate that Zero addressed the specific anxieties afflicting members of the squadron. Only a few months before the performance, the expedition had been part of the group that found the graves of three of Franklin's men on Beechey Island: while officers were happy to find evidence of where Franklin had 48 been, the graves were an ominous sign, reminding the expedition's men of the dangers they themselves faced and of the possibility that more of Franklin's men also could have perished. Furthermore, wintering in the Arctic was, at best, terribly boring: close quarters, poor leadership, cabin fever, illness, and injuries could combine to transform a wintering ship into a socially and physically toxic space. Months of darkness and cold revealed that the Arctic was hardly the pristine, sublime terrain men imagined they would explore but was actually a foreboding prison. As the long winter came to a close, men and officers divided into sledge parties to search the areas around the ships: while the activity was a welcome change from the monotony of wintering, sledge travel was exhausting and too often fruitless. Not only were the men and officers of the squadron faced with the daily annoyances of shipboard life and with the anticipation of grueling sledge journeys, but they were also well aware of the potential dangers of Arctic exploration. By the 1850s, theatre was well established as a remedy for boredom on wintering naval vessels. Zero, or Harlequin Light demonstrates how theatre in general, and pantomime in particular, served not only as a diversion from boredom but also as a way to prevent and intervene in the social and psychological problems that could afflict wintering ships and could arise from the demands of the search expedition. This chapter will examine how dramaturgical and visual transformations, conventions that characterized nineteenth-century pantomime, allowed Ede and the men who produced and performed in Zero to respond to these problems. Pantomimes were conventionally structured in two parts: the opening and the harlequinade.38 A spectacular transition scene, the transformation sequence, marked the division between the two parts. The

38 While pantomime underwent significant changes throughout the nineteenth century, with the most notable changes being that the opening became longer and more elaborate and that less attention was paid to the harlequinade, the basic two-part structure survived. 49 harlequinade, in turn, frequently included a number of transformations effected by Harlequin, who would use his magical bat to transform objects and characters. In Harlequin in his Element, David Mayer uses the phrase "visual simile" to describe how these comic transformations operated, explaining that they assumed that "one object shared a hidden kinship with another, and that it was the job of the pantomimist to reveal this relationship" (49). This chapter will consider four transformations staged by and in Zero and how each not only contributed to the "fun and frolic" of the pantomime but also attempted to mitigate potential threats to the expedition's success by revealing, through transformation, that what appeared to be ambivalent or negative aspects of Arctic life were actually familiar, friendly, and even potentially fun. The staging and performance conventions of the "Royal Arctic Theatre" itself allowed shipboard theatricals to subtly manage men and officers' behaviour, transforming the necessity of shipboard discipline into entertainment. The use of songs sung by feminine characters in Zero symbolically transformed both Franklin's missing men from faceless victims into friends to be rescued and the arduous spring sledge journeys from painful labour into a heroic undertaking. The transformation sequence that marks the division between the opening and harlequinade - the dramaturgical centre of Zero - transformed the threats of the Arctic into familiar pantomime characters and suggested that the Arctic itself was not a threatening, foreign landscape but a friendly extension of domestic space. Finally, the transformation of the Fox into Qalasirssuaq, the ship's Inuk navigator, demonstrates how he, and perhaps Inuit more generally, was transformed in the eyes of the men of the Assistance from a "savage" into a familiar, intelligent, and skilled member of the ship's company during the winter. If the transformation is read as an isolated event in the play, it produces ambiguous and troubling readings; however, if examined in the context of shipboard life, the 50 transformation suggests that the men of the Assistance, whether by necessity or Christian altruism, were willing to move beyond contemporary discourses surrounding racial

difference in order to accept Qalasirssuaq as a member of the shipboard community.

Austin's Happy Family: Transforming Discipline

By 1851, when Zero was performed, theatre was a popular activity on British navy vessels, both in and out of the Arctic, supporting "morale at sea and. . . community

relations in port" (O'Neill, "North" 356). In 1819, Captain Edward Parry's ships HMS Griper and HMS Hecla became the first British vessels to deliberately winter in the Arctic and Parry organized theatrical performances to keep his men and officers occupied

during the long winter, calling the shipboard theatre the Royal Arctic Theatre. This term came to refer not only to the physical theatre on Parry's own ship, but also to the

performance tradition that originated on his ships. When the search for Franklin's men instigated a second major wave of Arctic exploration in the 1850s, commissioned

officers, often the very men who had served under Parry early in their careers, resurrected the name and performance conventions of the Royal Arctic Theatre.39 There was no handbook for how to produce shipboard theatre: staging traditions were passed on orally and through theatrical practice. Plays could be staged in three places: on the upper deck, between decks, or outside on nearby ice. The upper deck was generally preferred, as it was on the Assistance, because it was less crowded than the lower deck and warmer than outdoors.

39 For example, Horatio Austin, the commander of the squadron that included Assistance, had served under Parry early in his career. It is not surprising that officers searching for Franklin looked back upon Parry's experience: Parry's phenomenally successful expedition was held up as a model for how Arctic exploration should be conducted and for how shipboard sociability should be managed. 51 When a ship was prepared for a winter in the ice, the upper deck was frequently enclosed by building a wooden frame covered with stretched canvas in order to create more living space to use during the winter. Although this structure provided some shelter and was

banked with snow to provide insulation, the space was colder than areas below decks: the

Assistance's theatre featured stoves placed between the wings and in the auditorium but temperature and ventilation remained a problem during performances {Aurora Borealis 121). The stage was set up near the foremast, and the audience sat before the mainmast

(O'Neill, "North" 360). Shipboard theatres were often decorated, as the Assistance's was, with patriotic and naval emblems, leading Patrick O'Neill to comment that "The design of the theatre thus played a propaganda role and reminded the crew members that they were serving a greater good while they suffered through the severe Arctic posting" ("North" 364). The physical layout of the stage on the Assistance was typical of stages on wintering ships: a proscenium with a drop curtain that framed painted backdrops and scenery that echoed the general look of theatres at home. In the 1850s, ships went to the Arctic prepared to put on plays, equipping their libraries with scripts and carrying scenery and costumes from England. The navy outfitted its Arctic vessels with libraries that included a selection of plays; volumes in officers' private libraries supplemented these collections (O'Neill, "North" 363). Repertoires were relatively diverse, but tended to include proportionately more "light" entertainment, such as farces and extravaganzas, than serious drama and tended to include older plays that had remained in the London repertoire: for example, the plays performed on the Assistance in

1850-51 included Bombastes Furioso (an extravaganza), Charles the Twelfth (a historical drama), Married Life, The Lottery Ticket, and Farce ofthe Turned Head (all farces). Costumes and scenery were generally stock pieces that could be modified to meet the 52 needs of different plays: this saved valuable space and adapting these pieces provided more theatre-related work to keep under-occupied men busy. Each commissioned officer generally brought at least one costume to wear to masquerade balls, which were commonly held at least once a season. Theatrical properties were considered an essential part of a ship's supplies and could even take histories of their own. For example, Captain , who commanded the Assistance from 1 852-54,40 apparently removed the theatre scenery and costumes from his ship before it left England: O'Neill claims that this action demonstrates that the much-reviled captain was also anti-theatrical ("North" 358). The costumes Belcher allegedly removed were no ordinary pieces: O'Neill mentions that "Undoubtedly, the costumes on the Assistance, in 1850-51, were the finest employed in the Arctic, since Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean had presented that vessel with two chests full before they sailed" ("North" 376). While the story is perhaps apocryphal, it suggests the value placed on shipboard theatre in the Arctic and the extent of attempts made to position Arctic theatre as an extension of British cultural practices. A theatre committee, comprised of commissioned officers, oversaw shipboard theatre and took responsibility for play selection, casting, rehearsal, costuming, and scenography. Parry developed the model of the theatre committee and it was replicated on virtually every British ship that held performances. The committee would first select a theatre manager: usually a senior officer. For example, on HMS Assistance in 1850-51, Captain was theatre manager. The committee decided which plays would be staged by officers and by crew members: an evening of theatre usually included two plays, one performed by each group. Plays were selected based on availability of the

40 After the four ships under Austin's command returned to England in 1851, the squadron was dispatched in 1852 under Belcher's command. 53 script and on the "suitability of the material for the regular seamen" (O'Neill, "North" 368). The committee also supported the theatre manager in organizing rehearsals, ensuring costumes were created or modified appropriately, and overseeing set painting and other decorative tasks.

Rehearsing and building sets and costumes provided a lot of work to keep men and officers occupied; theatre was a welcome distraction during shipboard winters, which were incredibly boring. Search vessels arrived in the Arctic in the fall, set up winter quarters, and spent months frozen in the ice waiting for the sun to reappear. During three to four months of twenty-four hour darkness, extreme cold prevented men from engaging in much outdoor activity. Furthermore, once ships were settled in for winter, there was very little work to occupy men and officers as normal shipboard work routines were scaled back until spring. Considering the oppressive cold and dark, the lack of work and activity to pass time, and the ever-present threats of hunger and scurvy, it is easy to see why commissioned officers encouraged the mounting of theatrical productions as a way to occupy and maintain the morale of those serving under them.41 Sherard Osbora, the captain of the Pioneer (one of two steamships in the same squadron as the Assistance) described the boredom and homesickness his men felt and suggests how theatre helped distract them:

Monotony was our enemy, and to kill time our endeavour: hardship there was none; for all we underwent in winter quarters, in the shape of cold, hunger or danger, was voluntary. Monotony, as I again repeat, was the only disagreeable part of our wintering at Griffith's Island. Some men amongst us seemed in their

41 Theatre was the most popular of many recreational activities available to men and officers - commanding officers on most wintering ships also established schools, held athletic competitions, and encouraged men to engage in regular exercise or to learn trades or crafts. 54 temperament to be much better able to endure this monotony than others; and others who had no source of amusement: - such as reading, writing, or drawing - were much to be pitied. Nothing struck one more than the strong tendency to talk of home, and England: it became quite a disease. We, for the most part, spoke as if all the most affectionate husbands, dutiful sons, and attached brothers, had found their way into the Arctic Expeditions. From these maudlins, to which the most strong-minded occasionally gave way, we gladly sought refuge in amusements, - such as theatres and balls. (169-70) Clements Markham, a twenty-one year old midshipman on the Assistance, concurred with Osborn, writing in reference to theatrical performances: "Such were the amusements which were considered absolutely necessary, and a part of every individual's duty to promote, to drive away the ennui that might otherwise have seriously injured both the bodily and mental health of the Expedition" (79). Boredom was a danger, as Markham suggests, because it could lead to more serious problems. Bored men could grow depressed and despondent, refusing to participate in exercise or work routines: physical activity was widely believed to prevent scurvy, so this was not only a social concern but also a health concern. Boredom could also manifest itself in anti-social behaviours such as petty bickering, theft, and physical altercations. The archives of the Franklin search are littered with examples of what could happen when men and officers grew unhappy. For example, Captain Collinson of the Enterprise at one point placed all of the officers on his ship under arrest for disobeying his orders. Some of the orders the officers disobeyed appeared arbitrary and unreasonable, for example, Collinson prohibited them from smoking except when men were at their meals (Barr 243). In contrast, the men under Captain Austin's command in 1850-51 55 appear to have been the happiest to ever travel to the Arctic. The men referred to themselves using the language not of the military but of the domestic sphere, describing

Aurora Borealis as "a reflection of the harmony and good-fellowship, the order and the Christian union, which prevailed in the Expedition" and expressing the fear "that the time

is far distant before 'the peoples' of Europe will feel any of the brotherly spirit which animated 'the Austin Happy Family'" (xviii). Captain Austin is frequently cited as an

example of the ideal polar leader, because he did not have to demonstrate his authority over his men through punishment.42 Because corporal punishment frequently backfired,

improving a man's reputation among his peers for "taking it" and by escalating animosity between a man and his commanding officer, it was much more effective for a captain to

avoid having to punish his men. Theatre was one of the disciplinary tools Austin inherited from Parry and passed on to senior officers in his squadron. Mike Pearson articulates the

relationship between discipline and theatre in his overview of polar theatre, arguing that it "became an acknowledged means of maintaining morale: staging, watching, and

criticizing performances, memorizing parts, and making costumes provided those rare occasions when the whole crew could come together" (53). Disciplinary models based on surveillance and punishment were not only

ineffective, they were also unenforceable during the search for the Franklin expedition because spring sledge journeys required men and officers to work in small groups away

42 It is not incidental that Austin served under Parry - Parry is widely regarded as "one of the activist reformers of naval manners; a captain dedicated to effecting the shift away from drink, sodomy, and the lash (or rum, bum, and concertina, in the more cheerful formulation)... Religion made him conceive of his office as paternal, almost pastoral. He was supposed, he thought, to exercise moral supervision over the men, and to deliver a fatherly blend of advice and reassurance to them" (Spufford 99). 56 from their ships.43 As soon as weather permitted, a ship's crew and officers would be divided into small sledge parties that would each be assigned a region to search. Sledge journeys were arduous: it was common for a team of men to drag loads so heavy that each man's share of the weight was approximately 250 lbs. It could take forty or fifty days for men to cover four or five hundred miles of barren coastline, moving at the painfully slow pace ofjust over one mile per hour.44 Disciplinary models relying on surveillance of officers by their commander or of crew by an officer could easily collapse. It is easy to imagine the consequences of a resentful officer being paired with unhappy sailors: once away from the regimentation of the ship, it would have been easy to refuse to perform such demanding work. Sailors and officers could not be motivated by fear of punishment, as monitoring their activities away from the ship was impossible; all those involved in the search expeditions had to feel compelled to do their duties. The success of the entire enterprise depended on each search party diligently searching its assigned area. Shipboard theatre reinforced shipboard authority structures and demonstrated that following orders was pleasurable. Divisions between officers and crew were replicated in theatre organization. For example, the practice of staging two plays, one performed by officers and one performed by crew, ensured that the two groups spent their leisure time apart, since the two plays would have been rehearsed separately.45 Furthermore, the practice likely meant that performances were experienced differently by each group: an ordinary seaman would respond to seeing his messmates on stage in a different way than

43 Sledge travel was not the only occasion when small groups of sailors and officers left the ship to perform tasks alone - winter hunting also required small groups of men to work away from the ship and hunting, particularly if food was short or if scurvy was affecting men on the ship, could become essential to survival. 44 For details of how sledge travel was conducted see Collinson pp. 374. 45 Patrick O'Neill notes a few exceptional examples of sailors and officers performing together in "Theatre in the North."

57 he would respond to seeing his commanding officer perform. One can imagine that watching a commissioned officer perform a ridiculous role might have been funny to the crew because it took him "down a notch," suggesting that the officer was not as different from the crew members as he seemed, whereas the same performance could have entertained other officers because the disjunction between the officer's shipboard position and his character functioned conservatively, emphasizing his actual role on the ship. The authority that theatre committees held over theatrical production replicated shipboard authority structures as well: the committee and the manager were from the same group (commissioned officers) that was in charge of the ship. The committee exercised control over the men by making choices - what play to put on, who would be cast - that allowed the crew and warrant officers some agency rather than micro-managing every decision; this replicated how effective shipboard discipline relied on positive reinforcement rather than punishment and displays of power. Both the division between officers and men in performance and the operation of the theatre committee displayed shipboard hierarchies and were effective, as performance practices, to the extent that they produced enjoyment. In shipboard theatrical practice, co-operation and obedience promised pleasure. Theatre was different from other shipboard occupations like attending classes or practicing trades because it was necessarily collaborative. Men had to work together in order to stage a play. If men didn't learn their lines, or missed rehearsals, or failed to follow direction in building props and sets, the ensuing performance would be chaotic and disorganized: failing to fulfill one's duty would result in public embarrassment for all those involved. If men and junior officers followed the directions of the theatre manager and learned their lines, stood on their marks, and performed the play in the way it was rehearsed, they would entertain the audience and everyone would enjoy himself. If men 58 constructing sets and costumes did their jobs well and met deadlines set by the manager, the performance would visually astonish the audience. Theatrical practice enacted a clear reward system: doing one's job led to praise from one's fellow men and to pride in one's work. As such, theatrical discipline operated in a métonymie relationship to shipboard discipline: theatre was a rehearsal for "real" work, like sledge journeys, and theatrical practice demonstrated that obeying rules and, perhaps more importantly, meeting or exceeding the expectations of one's superiors, was essentially pleasurable.

Domesticating the Arctic Zero, or Harlequin Light operated within playful but highly conventionalized dramaturgical and staging practices that structured pantomime. Ede located Zero within specific pantomime traditions: the timing of the performance (pantomime was strongly associated with the Christmas season in London) and the subtitle "Harlequin Light" cite performance practices from home and situate the play in relation to British pantomime conventions.46 At the same time, Ede made significant departures from convention in his choice of opening narrative and in the before-after pairings of the transformation sequence; these modifications responded to the problems posed by depicting an all-male search expedition in a genre whose plot revolved around heterosexual romantic relationships. David Mayer explains that the opening sequence of a pantomime, usually

46 Clements Markham's review of Zero indicates his familiarity with pantomime's generic conventions: "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... Then commences the pantomime of fun and frolic, which was carried on with great spirit by the two Clowns and Pantaloon" (Aurora Borealis 204). Although the second half of a pantomime is generally referred to as the harlequinade, not as the pantomime, Markham's plot summary identifies the key formal components of mid-nineteenth century pantomime: the opening, the metamorphosis sequence, and the harlequinade. 59 drawn from history, mythology, or fairy tales, was "rigidly restricted, the plot limited to obligatory elements" {Harlequin 23). Michael Booth elaborates on the dramaturgical structure of the opening: it introduced a father figure and his servant, a marriageable young woman and her preferred suitor, disapproved of by her father. The father attempts to separate the young couple, but as the lovers are about to be parted, a "benevolent spirit, usually female, brings the opening to an end by taking the young lovers under her protection and transforming them into Harlequin and Columbine, while father and servant become Pantaloon and Clown" (Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age 198). The intervention and transformation mark the beginning of the second half of the pantomime, the harlequinade, in which Pantaloon pursues Harlequin and Columbine through a parade of shifting locations. The pantomime ended with the characters' reconciliation, usually effected by a final intervention by the benevolent spirit, and a celebration of the "triumph of true love" (Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age 198).

Ede modified the typical opening narrative in order to address the circumstances of shipboard life during the Arctic winter. The opening establishes a conflict between

Zero, an evil Arctic spirit, and a group of British sailors searching for a lost expedition, presumably Franklin's, replacing the archetypal opening narrative with a topical one.

Although Zero's tyrannical behaviour resembles the arbitrary authority exerted by the father figure, the play substitutes homosocial affiliation for heterosexual romance, staging

Zero as an obstacle not to love but to exploration. Exploration is depicted as both a lot of fun and a way to gain love and admiration upon returning home. The substitution of exploration for romantic love suggests that sailors and officers understood their relationships to one another as temporarily replacing heterosexual relationships from home. The play depicts only one form of homosocial relations: men are all bonded to one 60 another by their common purpose and by their respect for their commanding officer. Both mutiny and sodomy, two serious threats to sociability and order in the nineteenth-century navy, can be thought of as examples of homosocial desire emerging outside of the strict normative model proposed in Zero: mutiny occurs when a group of men bonds with one another in opposition to their superior officer, failing to respect the officer; sodomy occurs when two men's bond with one another is, at least temporarily, exclusive. The lack of ambiguity surrounding homosocial relations in the play seems prescriptive: by staging only one model of homosociability, the play explicitly links its version of the relationship between men and officers with happy Arctic service and, by refusing to represent any other form of homosociability in its depiction of life in the Arctic, Zero implies the impossibility of any homosocial relationship apart from that it depicts.47 Ede's modifications to pantomime conventions extend to the before-after pairings of the transformation sequence. After Zero enters the British tent to freeze the men to death, Harlequin appears by leaping through an oiled silk Sun and transforms Daylight, a good spirit, into Columbine, Zero into 1st Clown, and a Bear into a 2nd Clown and Pantaloon. By performing the transformations himself, Harlequin does tasks normally carried out by the good spirit. Ede also disrupts the conventional before-after pairings by transforming Zero into a Clown rather than Pantaloon, by including not one but two

47 Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence of how common homosexual relationships were in the Victorian navy. Until 1859, a sailor in the British Navy could receive the death sentence for a sodomy conviction, which included both homosexual rape and consensual sexual relationships between men, suggesting the anxiety surrounding the possibility that what appeared to be "normal" homosociability could actually disguise "abnormal" relationships between men. See Sean Brady's Masculinity and Male Homosexuality for its discussion of how attitudes toward and legislation regarding homosexuality developed in Victorian Britain; although Brady's study focuses on the period between 1861 and 1913, Brady also provides a compelling counter- argument to Foucault's discussion of Victorian sexuality in the History ofSexuality (see pp. 7-10) and uses pre- 1861 social and legal history to situate his argument throughout the book. 61 Clowns, and by transforming a somewhat peripheral character (Daylight) into Columbine. In the before-after economy of pantomime, which usually transformed the heterosexual pair of lovers into Harlequin and Columbine, turning male sailors (those in conflict with the patriarchal figure) into lovers would have suggested that sexual desire existed between the men before the transformation. If one understands the shipboard environment

as akin to the locker rooms and military barracks that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses in Between Men (1-2), one can posit that the conflict Sedgwick describes between male bonding and sexual desire for other men likely made this equivalence unthinkable in Ede's play. In this context, Ede's decision to transform the masculine Sun and the feminine Daylight into Harlequin and Columbine emerges as a strategic adaptation of

pantomime conventions to shipboard specificities. Advertisements and reviews in shipboard papers demonstrate a sense of playfulness surrounding gender and performance. The advertisement for Bombastes Furioso, presented with Zero on 9 January, tells readers "The only Lady in this piece has been engaged at an Enormous Sacrifice it being her first appearance on any Stage" {Illustrated Arctic News 31). Similarly, a review oí Charles the Twelfth, performed with Zero when it was remounted in late February 1851, comments "Where the young ladies could possibly have acquired the subtle knowledge they displayed in the wooful intricacy of female attire we know not, suffice it, that not a point was missing" {Illustrated Arctic News 56). Jokes like these demonstrate a winking acknowledgement of the make-believe nature of theatrical performance. By joking about the illusion produced by men dressing up as women to play female roles, these editorial comments also emphasize the all-male environment of the ships. In contrast, Zero appears to sidestep any direct questioning of gender or sexuality. Gender instead appears at the outskirts of the performance: as an 62 unacknowledged reworking of the heteronormative romance structure of conventional pantomime, as an implicit promise held out of the return home from the Arctic, and as jokes about cross-dressed navy men in the newspapers. Zero turns away from questioning normative heterosexuality and aligns its feminine characters with domesticity and

sentimentality. The feminine characters - Daylight/Columbine and North Polar Star - do not participate in the rambunctious antics of the Clowns and Pantaloon but provide the emotional underpinning of the performance, singing songs to remind audience members of why they were in the Arctic and of what awaited them at home. These songs create nostalgic identifications with the navy as an institution and with the missing men, serving to motivate audience members to enthusiastically participate in spring search expeditions.48 Daylight appears early in the play, dressed in white, with a chaplet and a fancy wand (131). Her chaplet is not described, but it seems likely that Ede used the term to refer to a wreath around her head, rather than a string of religious beads like a rosary.

Like Zero, she wears white robes that visually associate her with the surrounding Arctic landscape, but the audience quickly learns that she is a protective rather than malicious spirit. She is first seen "hovering over" the tracking party, then descends "from above" to address the audience directly (134): I dream' d, when slumber hung over mine eyes,

Of love, of hope, and Arctic enterprise, When a soft voice broke through my troubled dreams,

48 The institutional conventions of the Royal Arctic Theatre also rely on nostalgia for their legitimacy: Parry's performance practices were replicated because Parry was a naval hero, and performances in the 1850s, both in their conventions and frequently in prologues and epilogues, made sure to associate themselves with his performance tradition. See, for instance, the epilogue to Zero. 63 In tones as clear and liquid as are mountain streams

I rose, for well the music charm'd my watchful ear, Turn'd and beheld a pensive maiden near.

She did entreat me in an earnest way, But with your leave, I'll sing her simple lay[.] (134-35) Daylight's speech vividly conjures the image of her deep sleep pleasantly interrupted by the maiden, enticing the audience to imagine both the sleeping female spirit and the pleasure Daylight describes of being awoken by a pensive maiden's voice. Watching Daylight, in her white robes, with flowers in her hair, imagining her sleeping, and hearing about her dreams of the audience members themselves in their Arctic adventures must have aroused conflicting responses: audience members had not seen real women in months and must have found it enjoyable to watch Daylight and imagine her with the maiden; however, they also must have been hyperaware that what they saw was not a real woman but a man in costume.

Daylight then sings "The Maiden's Song," which is an appeal from women at home to Daylight to help the search parties find the missing men: "Bright spirit of light, grant thy powerful aid/Guide England's bold sons where the missing have stray'd" (135). The maiden imagines herself "rushfing] through the air" to encourage the search effort (135). The second verse of the song describes what women at home do while they wait for their husbands and sweethearts: "pale are our faces with love's silly fears;/Asleep or awake, we still mutter a prayer/That success may soon give them again to our care" (135). In this verse, the missing men and the searching men are conflated: it doesn't clarify whose "success" will bring the missing men back. The song ends with the maiden beseeching Daylight to help the search parties and the missing men, asking her to "Bear 64 with thee our sighs on thy life-cheering ray,/And chase with thy gay beams their sorrows away" (135). When Daylight finishes singing, she tells the audience that she promised to help the maiden, and that although she has no good news of the missing men, she will help the search party by counteracting Zero's "evil deeds" (135). Daylight's performance of "The Maiden's Song" encourages the men in the audience to imagine the women left at home by Franklin's men and reminds the audience that the missing men are not

anonymous sailors but husbands and fathers. The song likely would have called to mind one particular woman - Lady Franklin - who was, by 1850, the public face of the families of the missing men.

After Daylight's song, she protects the men until Harlequin transforms Zero and the Bear during the transformation sequence. She lingers at the side of the stage, and when Frostbite freezes one of the men's hands, she waves her hand over it to heal it. She

does not, however, do anything to actively further their search; she is, unlike Zero and his servants, ultimately a passive character. Once Daylight is transformed into Columbine, the script suggests that her role was simply that of Harlequin's dance partner; Aurora

Borealis' review of the play comments on Columbine's dress and graceful movements but provides no further details of anything she did (207). Daylight/Columbine plays a small role in the pantomime's action; however, her speech and song are critical to how the play encouraged audience members to identify with the missing men and

sentimentalized their mission in the Arctic.

The North Polar Star's song in the harlequinade mirrors the staging of "The Maiden's Song" in contrasting the antics of the harlequinade, and further develops the play's sentimentalization of the search by situating Arctic exploration nostalgically, as a patriotic, heroic duty. The audience first sees the character being carried on a sedan chair 65 from a masquerade ball. As the Clowns fight over her, Harlequin slaps the back of the chair, transforming the character from a masquerade attendee into the North Polar Star. Unlike the people coming from the masquerade, she is in "rough dress" (142). She exits the chair and steps on the 2nd Clown's toe. Stepping on the Clown's toe demonstrates that she is part of the world of the harlequinade and likely got a laugh from the audience, but it also signals that the audience's attention should shift from the Clowns to her. Like Daylight at the beginning of her own song, the North Polar Star advances to the front of the stage. The North Polar Star's relative stillness at the front of the stage would have stood out in sharp contrast to the movement and noise of the Clowns' tricks preceding it. The song reminded audience members of home but also glorified their role in the Arctic. The song, sung to the tune of "Ivy Green," would have immediately evoked associations of home to anyone in the audience familiar with the popular ballad by Henry Russell, based on lyrics that appeared in Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers. In the first lines of the song, the North Polar Star tells the audience about the courage required for men to leave home and risk their lives in the Arctic: "A noble soul has that man, I ween,/Who braveth these regions cold:/No dangers that threaten his life are seen/When he seeketh the brave and bold" (142). She then encourages the audience members to imagine how those at home idealize their mission in the Arctic: "the heart must be hard and bad indeed,/Or ruled by a coward's whim,/If it bounds not to think of the friendly deed/Perform 'd in these lands by him" (142). The North Polar Star suggests that people at home would be greatly moved when they heard about what the search parties achieved. In the second verse of the song, the North Polar Star asks the audience to think about the scope of British exploration, both historically and geographically, and reminds audience members of the reputation the British navy enjoyed abroad: "Through ages long past, the 66 British name/Has been known in every clime,/And all must trust that the well-earn'd fame/Will endure to the end of time" (142). The next lines are explicit about what the crew and officers are expected to do: "To rescue from death the friend, or foe,/Was ever the sailor's boast;/And now, 'mid the terrors of frost and snow,/His courage is needed most" (142). The members of the expedition, both men and officers, are linked by a common relationship to the past glory of the British navy and are asked to contribute to that glory by attempting to rescue Franklin's men. The final verse of the song specifies exactly what the men need to do in the spring: "Soon night will be past, and spring draweth nigh,/To gladden us all again,/When we'll seek around, with a watchful eye,/Nor at any toil complain" (143). The men were not only expected to search, but also expected not to complain about the difficulty of the search. The final lines of the song imagine the men's return home, reminding them that the women they left behind await them and that women's esteem would be their reward: "They await us in England, the beauteous, the fair,/When our dangerous task is o'er,/And who would not greater hardships dare/To be prized by them once more?" (143). The "beauteous" and "fair" who await the men are, presumably, the most important members of the group, referenced in the first verse, who would be moved to hear about what the men achieved. The song is remarkably clear in its description of what the men needed to do in the spring, of why the search was a noble and legitimate endeavour, and of how the men would be rewarded for their work. The female characters' songs sentimentalize the Arctic mission, transforming duty from drudgery into a noble task.49 Daylight's song reminds audience members that they

49 The play's sentimental view of women at home was mirrored in how women imagined Arctic exploration. Francis Spufford argues that one of the reasons why Arctic exploration captivated women's imaginations was because "the masculinity of the explorers seemed also to be of a special kind. . . it appeared to fit the sensibilities women were trained to possess. . . Endurance, 67 were searching not for faceless sailors but for men who left families behind; the North Polar Star's song reminds audience members of those they themselves left behind, cementing the identification between the searching men and the missing men. The North Polar Star's song situates the search as part of a long history of glorious naval exploration

and promises that a successful search will be rewarded. In order to understand the scope of the final song's call to action, it must be

situated in relation to the ending of the play as an entirety. The final moments outlined in Ede's script do not provide the reconciliation that normally conclude a pantomime and instead suggest that closure (of the play and of the expedition) would only arise from further action. The ending of the play situates action as a military and patriotic duty and as a way of affectively engaging with both the missing men and with those left behind at home. The North Polar Star's song reminds men of the navy's glorious past, promising both glory and heterosexual love as the rewards of success. The connection the final lines of the song suggest between the return home and the return to heterosexual love normalizes marital relations and suggests that the homosociability depicted in the play and lived on the ship was a temporary substitution necessitated by shipboard conditions, thus responding indirectly to the questions raised by Ede's modifications of pantomime conventions. After the song ends, the 1st Clown is swept up by a balloon and descends, a moment later, with a paper in his hands. He reads news from home, reminding audience members who just heard the North Polar Star's song, yet again, of home, then gives the

audience some "advice":

A fool may sometimes wisdom speak,

perseverance, resignation: all three were excellent things for every Christian soul to aim for, but all three, more particularly, formed part of the equipment with which a virtuous woman was expected to face the tribulations of her state" (103). 68 Though wanting youth and beauty; So let me say, In Nelson's way,

England expects that every man

This spring will do his duty. (143) The Clown's paraphrase of Nelson's famous signal command reiterates the song's evocation of the navy's glorious past by citing what is arguably one of the most famous examples of naval morale-building and the most renowned figure in British naval history.50 Both the song and the Clown's final lines call for further action and for a heightened effort to overcome the environment. Only by further penetrating the Arctic

and locating the missing men can the British "tars" in the play and, by extension, those in the audience, receive their promised rewards.

Harlequin Heads North

Despite the "fun and frolic" of shipboard theatre, the world outside the ship was dangerous. Starvation, scurvy, and exposure could jeopardize an expedition's success even if the men were happy, occupied, and motivated.51 Zero, or Harlequin Light stages

the threats the Arctic posed by personifying them in the characters of Zero, Frostbite, Hunger, Scorbutus, and Bear. During the transformation sequence, Harlequin transforms Zero and the Bear into two Clowns and Pantaloon, familiar pantomime characters: if one interprets the transformation sequence as a visual simile, this suggests that although Zero

50 This citation of Lord Nelson's famous signal command is not isolated; Russell Potter notes that "England Expects every Man to do his Duty" was also written on a brass plaque at the wheel of the Resolute (112). 5 1 Psychological and physical threats cannot be neatly severed: physical ailments like vitamin deficiencies and hunger could result in psychological symptoms such as paranoia and lethargy. 69 and his Bear appears to be threats, they are actually like Clowns and Pantaloon, characters

who cause mischief but are not actually dangerous. In suggesting that the threats of the Arctic - real bears, real foxes, cold, scurvy, and hunger - resemble stock characters from pantomime, the transformation sequence implies that while the Arctic appears to be very different from home, it will become familiar if the British sailors overwrite it with British

cultural practices. The Franklin expedition was not expected to fail. Pierre Berton remarks,

"Incredibly, no one had given a second's thought to the possibility that the expedition might encounter trouble. Optimism reigned. Success, it was felt, was all but certain" {Grail 145). The possibility of failure was so remote that it was not until 1848, when the

expedition had been in the Arctic for three full winters, that search efforts began. This was despite the fact that the longest any British expedition had survived in the Arctic was four winters: John Ross's ship Victory was trapped in the ice from 1829-33 and he and his men were only rescued after abandoning the ship and travelling by boat to Lancaster Sound.52 By 1850-51, public opinion on search ships remained optimistic, but privately, hopes were not as high. For instance, a fictional piece called "Franklin's Vision," published in Aurora Borealis in September 1850, imagined Franklin, still alive, dreaming of his rescuers: "What strange rough forms are these? More men with faces strange? Oh! let me dream again... Ah! can it be the well-known accents of my almost forgotten native tongue? Sweet dream, thou hast foreshadowed the future. No beauteous form tends her fair helping hand: yet, in what shape 'soever thou comest, ASSISTANCE, thou art

52 The Victory was trapped near Felix Harbour for the first two winters, then during the summer of 1831, the crew moved it 25 km. In 1832 Ross and his men abandoned their ship and travelled to Fury Point, where Parry had left a cache of supplies in 1825; that summer they attempted to escape Fury Point, but heavy ice forced them to retreat and spend the winter of 1832-33 there. 70 welcome, for wearied hope had almost vanished in the boundless ocean of despair" (18-

19). In contrast to this optimism, Clements Markham considers a range of possibilities of what might have happened to Franklin's men in the introduction to Franklin 's Footsteps: His own opinions are not favourable to the sanguine hopes entertained by many of

Sir John Franklin's safety. . . Starvation and disease may have overtaken them; but then some traces, like those of the Patagonian mission, would in all probability

have been found. On the whole, when the facts that are known are viewed simply and calmly in connection with probabilities, and as mere matter of evidence, it is

neither rash, wanton, nor ill-judged, to foster hopes which, however doomed to be disappointed, are still fairly within the bounds of reasonable probability, (vi-vii)

While Markham asserted that it was possible survivors still lived, he acknowledged that after five years missing, it was unlikely that all of Franklin's men were still living.

Finding Franklin's first winter site was an ambivalent discovery. Sherard Osborn was relieved to know that Franklin and his men had made it as far as Beechey Island with no mishaps: "Here fell to the ground all the evil forebodings of those who had, in

England, consigned his expedition to the depths of Baffin's Bay on its outward voyage.

Our first prayer had been granted by a beneficent Providence; and we had now risen, from doubt and hope, to a certain assurance of Franklin having reached thus far without shipwreck or disaster" (104). The discovery of the graves of Hartnell, Braine, and Torrington was, obviously, a disappointment; however, Osborn saw the graves and particularly the epitaphs as a sign of the presence of Franklin's spirit at the scene, writing:

"I thought I traced in the epitaphs over the graves of the men from the 'Erebus,' the manly and Christian spirit of Franklin. In thè true spirit of chivalry, he, their captain and leader, led them amidst dangers and unknown difficulties with iron will stamped upon his 71 brow, but the words of meekness, gentleness, and truth were his device. We have seen his career and we know his deeds!" (112). In calling the epitaphs words of "meekness, gentleness, and truth" and contrasting them with Franklin's "iron will," Osborn encourages his reader to imagine Franklin's indominable but kind spirit responding to the deaths of men under his command.

Osborn's reaction to the epitaphs seems strange if one recalls that Braine's epitaph, from Joshua 24.15, read '"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" and Hartnell's, from Haggai 1.7, read "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways."

The choices of biblical verses are, at best, peculiar; they "prompted some searchers and historians to believe foul play or mishap had marred that first winter" (Beattie 93). Did

Osborn not sense that these were strange words to appear on gravestones, especially ones he imagined the heroic Franklin had a hand in? Osborn's oversight suggests that he wanted to brush aside the details of the men's deaths so that he could turn back to the task

at hand: finding out what happened to Franklin. Osborn's reaction makes sense if one imagines that discovering the graves generated anxious questions - What if the same fate afflicted Osborn's own men? What if these three deaths were only the first three among Franklin's men? How did these men die? - that Osborn could not engage with if he

wanted to continue forward in his own expedition: he shifted his focus to Franklin's

heroism and continued survival.

If finding the graves produced intense anxiety, not only for Osborn but also for other members of the squadron, one can see how pressing the need to transform the Arctic from a deadly barren terrain into a hospitable territory might have become. In 1850, no one knew how Braine, Torrington, and Hartneil died, but three deaths in the first winter in the ice was a bad sign both for the fate of Franklin's expedition and for the search parties. 72 The expedition's men were, like Franklin's men, risking their lives by wintering in the Arctic, and, even worse, would need to conduct grueling sledge journeys in the spring. It was essential that the search parties did not become terrified or disillusioned with their task: they needed to believe that wintering in and searching across the Arctic were not potentially deadly and to believe that the same dangers that killed the three men on Beechey Island had not afflicted the rest of Franklin's men. Enter Harlequin...

The transformation sequence in Zero, or Harlequin Light responds to the anxiety generated by the discovery of the graves and to the concern that the Arctic was a dangerous region by revealing that the threats the Arctic posed were simply annoyances from home masquerading in polar garb. One review of Zero, or Harlequin Light notes

"Turning all the dangers and inconveniences to which we are exposed in these inhospitable climates into evil spirits that are leagued against us, [the pantomime] supposes them continually watching every opportunity to surprise an unfortunate traveling party" {Aurora Borealis 204). After transforming the insidious dangers of actual Arctic exploration into evil spirits on stage, the pantomime then shows the audience that the power of some of these evil spirits - Hunger, Scorbutus, and Frostbite - will be destroyed when good spirits - Sun and Daylight - reappear, just as the actual threats would be destroyed with the return of game to hunt and with warmer weather in the spring (Aurora Borealis 204). Harlequin can then use his magic bat to transform the remaining evil spirits - Zero and the Bear - into familiar pantomime characters, suggesting that the threats they represent are not actually dangerous but are problems of faulty perception that can be corrected through a change in attitude.

Charles Ede identified the key threats to the expedition - food shortages and vitamin deficiencies, cold and exposure, and attacks from wild animals - and personified 73 them in his cast of evil spirits: Zero, Bear, Frostbite, Iceberg, Hunger, Scorbutus, and

Fox. The list of costumes at the beginning of the play suggests that the actors playing these characters, along with the good spirits Daylight and the Sun, wore costumes that visually signified their chief characteristics. Zero appeared as the king of the Arctic, wearing regal white robes, a crown, and a full, frosted wig. He carried a thermometer that he used as a scepter. The characters who represented slow-moving but deadly threats to the body - Frostbite, Scorbutus, and Hunger - wore costumes that depicted the symptoms they inflicted on their victims: Frostbite wore a "Tight dress; upper third of body and limbs white; middle red; lower blue, passing into black; long frosted wig;" Scorbutus, a "Tight white dress, covered with purple and reddish-brown spots; mask pale, with bluish- red and blotched mouth;" Hunger, a "Long thin mask face, pale dress, loose and scanty" (131). Ede doesn't provide an explicit description at the beginning of the play of what the Bear and the Fox, which will be discussed below, looked like. Zero refers to the Bear as

"Dean's model bear" and the script notes that Mr. Dean, the ship's carpenter, made the Bear (138). The bear was likely either a movable wooden flat or a wooden frame upon which fabric or perhaps real fur was stretched, and not a costume that completely covered the bodies of the actors playing the role. The final characters, Sun and Iceberg, were likely represented by set pieces rather than by actors. The only reference to Iceberg is in the opening direction "One of the ships in a perilous situation, nipped by ice; icebergs and moving floes drifting past" (132). Similarly, Sun is only referred to in relation to the transformation sequence, when Harlequin leaps through it: the script notes that the Sun was "An oiled-silk sun which rises at the back scene" (138). In contrast to the good and evil spirits, the British sailors are simply described as a "Tracking and Travelling Party of Four" (131), indicating that imagined readers of the 74 script needed no further description of what a sledge party would look like. The audience first sees three sailors and an officer crossing the stage, singing "The sailor loves his bottle, oh!" (134); they reappear a moment later, after Daylight's song, and begin to set up camp for the night. As they pitch their tent, the men joke about the Admiralty and their rationed food, about the ventilation in their tent, and about a smoke before bed. Audience members with sledging experience would have instantly recognized the scene before them; those who had not yet participated in a sledge expedition would have seen that the hardships of sledge travel had been exaggerated and that they could expect the spring to be a fun adventure. When the men retire to bed in their tent, closely followed by the malicious Zero, the light-hearted comic banter has prepared the audience to expect not tragedy but intervention by a good spirit. The transformation sequence that follows demonstrates that Ede and the men who worked on the show were generally familiar with pantomime's staging conventions but departed from some of its dramaturgical conventions. The review in Aurora Borealis summarizes what happened during the sequence: the evil spirits (presumably Hunger,

Scorbutus, and Frostbite, since they are not mentioned in the script's description of the transformation) are "destroyed by the appearance of the more puissant 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 falling to pieces, discovers Pantaloon and Second Clown" (204). The script adds details to the reviewer's perspective, describing how the transformation begins when "HARLEQUIN leaps through the Sun... and changes (the Good Spirit) DAYLIGHT into COLUMBINE" (138). After Harlequin and Columbine perform apas 75 de deux, Harlequin slaps the ground near the tent with his magic bat and the tent disappears "leaving the CLOWN grinning and makingfaces; he sees the BEAR, becomes dreadfully alarmed, and makes offfor a gun; returns, snaps the gun, which refuses to go off; the BEAR approaches, when he succeeds infiring at it; BEARfalls, and out roll 2nd CLOWN and PANTALOON, HARLEQUIN slapping the ground near the BEAR" (138- 39).

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"Scene from the Pantomime of 'Zero'"

These descriptions and the above image allow speculation about how this sequence was staged. First, even before Harlequin appears, three of the evil spirits are "destroyed" by exposure to Daylight and Sun. We can imagine that the actors playing 76 these roles either could have had a lot of fun performing dramatic death scenes or could have simply exited the stage: the script and reviews don't reveal exactly how or when these evil spirits are vanquished. The destruction of the three evil spirits is not part of the transformation sequence proper, but in order for the play to stage the transformation of the Arctic from a dangerous to a familiar place, it is essential that audience members witness the demise of the evil spirits when Daylight and Sun appear in the spring. The transformation proper begins when Harlequin leaps through the Sun, suggesting that the Sun was transformed into Harlequin. The actor playing Harlequin likely jumped through a star trap, a trick set piece commonly used in pantomime consisting of "an aperture covered with leather slit in a way to resemble the radiating points of a star" (Mayer, Harlequin 116). The transformation of the Sun into Harlequin (and of Daylight into Columbine) indicates that Ede collapsed three stock roles into two roles in his pantomime: a benevolent agent usually transformed the young lovers into Harlequin and Columbine but in Zero, two benevolent agents become the lovers of the harlequinade.53 Harlequin then uses his magic bat to transform Zero into a Clown, a transformation that was likely performed by having the actor playing Zero shed his mask and costume in the tent, revealing the Clown when the tent disappeared. It is clear that the illustration above does not represent an actual moment in the play, as Zero and Clown do not appear on stage together, but is the artist's "summary" of key characters in the pantomime. Reviews do not indicate how the tent was constructed or how it disappeared; the simplest possibility is that the tent was a painted panel (of wood or fabric) that could have been pulled aside or laid on the stage floor. As indicated earlier, the Bear was likely made of

53 For more information about the before-after pairings of pantomime, see Mayer, Harlequin in his Element pp. 23-28. 77 painted wood: the transformation of the bear into the 2nd Clown and Pantaloon was likely achieved in a similar manner to that of Zero into 1st Clown. The transformation of Zero into the 1st Clown and of Bear into 2nd Clown and Pantaloon, is a departure from pantomime conventions that mirrors the benevolent agent-lover conflation. One would expect that Zero, as the patriarchal figure, would become Pantaloon and that a rival suitor or a secondary authority figure would be transformed into the Clown (Mayer, Harlequin 28). There is no readily apparent reason why Ede would not have transformed Zero into Pantaloon and the Bear into the Clown or why he decided to have two Clowns instead of one: it could be simply that although Ede was familiar with pantomime dramaturgy, he was not aware of how transformation pairings worked in detail or that actors in the performance were better suited to playing different roles than convention designated. Considering the before-after pairings of Zero/1 st Clown and of Bear/2nd Clown and Pantaloon allows an investigation of how the transformation sequence operated as a visual simile suggesting that the threats of the Arctic were not as dangerous or strange as they seemed. First, however, it is important to briefly describe Clown and Pantaloon as stock characters. The Clown appeared in pantomimes throughout the eighteenth century, but it was not until the early nineteenth century, when Joseph Grimaldi began playing Clown roles, that the character emerged as a principal character in pantomime. The characterization of Clown was less conventionalized than Pantaloon or Harlequin and could vary from actor to actor. Typically though, the Clown "mocked conventions and exposed social habits pretending to morality or self-conscious graciousness. He rebelled against stuffiness and tradition and did what others wished to do but never dared" (Mayer, Harlequin 44). Pantaloon, based on the Commedia dell'arte''?, Pantalone, was an old man who pursued Harlequin and Columbine, attempting to separate them through wily plots 78 (Mayer, Harlequin 43). He frequently ended up the butt of the Clown's jokes, as he does in Zero. Both Clown and Pantaloon were easily recognizable to audiences because actors had rigidly conventionalized their stock traits. David Mayer explains that the visual simile was "a way of disclosing that one thing has a hidden likeness to another" and was "the result of a transformation" {Harlequin 39). Visual similes operated based on the assumption that "one object shared a hidden kinship with another, and that it was the job of the pantomimist to reveal this relationship" {Harlequin 49). Mayer uses the phrase to describe the transformations Harlequin and Clown perform during the harlequinade; however, the term is useful for explaining the ways that audience members might have understood the transformation sequence in Zero. First, transforming Zero into Clown suggests that Zero is not dangerous but rebellious, anarchic, and fun. Zero, as ruler of the Arctic, is dressed in such a way as to suggest that he figures metonymically for the entire Arctic region. Transforming Zero into Clown suggests that while the Arctic appears to be dangerous, it is actually a place where men can, like Clown, transgress boundaries and do what others desire to do. Transforming Bear into Clown and Pantaloon suggests that the Bear is an ambiguous figure. Off stage, a bear was both a source of food and a deadly threat; the duality is echoed in how the character is split by the transformation. Bear has traits of both Pantaloon and Clown: he is a potential obstacle and danger, like Pantaloon, and he allows

for fun (through hunting) like Clown. Although it is unclear why Ede disrupted conventional before-after pairings by transforming Zero into a Clown rather than Pantaloon and transforming Bear into both a Clown and Pantaloon, the obvious lack of linear pairings allows us to consider that the pre-transformation unit of Zero and Bear and the post-transformation unit of Clowns and 79 Pantaloon might comprise the before-after of a visual simile. Both Zero and Bear are characters that belong to the Arctic and who appear to threaten the British "tars" on their search. The transformation reveals that these characters only appear to be dangerous and foreign. Although Clown has a carnivalesque quality of danger and Pantaloon is an obstacle to Harlequin's quest, pantomime conventions make it impossible that either Clown or Pantaloon could actually be dangerous.54 Furthermore, pantomime, and by extension its characters, was considered a uniquely British genre.55 John O'Brien points out the intensely nationalistic quality of pantomime in the early-nineteenth century, arguing "the expansion in the range of places to which pantomime took its spectators maps the imaginative spread of British culture in our period, its expansion outward to embrace a world and an empire" (113). Considering pantomime as a British cultural production means that suggesting a similarity between Zero and Bear and the Clowns and Pantaloon not only indicated that Zero and Bear were not dangerous but also implied that they were not actually foreign but fundamentally British. In other words, the transformation sequence suggested that the Arctic, as metonymically represented by its

54 Michel Bakhtin comments that the carnival is: [A] festival offered not by some exterior source but by the people to themselves. Therefore the people do not feel as if they were receiving something that they must accept respectfully and gratefully... This festivity demands no sanctimonious acknowledgment or astonishment such as official occasions usually expect... Instead a signal is given to each and every one to play the fool and madman as he pleases. . . carnivalesque revelry is marked by absolute familiarity. Differences between superiors and inferiors disappear for a short time, and all draw close to each other. (246) This suggests a further avenue for exploring how shipboard entertainments functioned in relation to shipboard life as an emergence of the carnivalesque in a strictly disciplined environment. A thoughtful consideration of this would require an examination of the full range of available evidence concerning shipboard theatricals during the search for Franklin and is outside the scope of this project. 55 This was not always the case: British pantomime was initially derived from French performance styles, which were, in turn, based on the Italian commedia tradition. By the late- eighteenth century, pantomime's mixed parentage had been, for the most part, overshadowed by its nationalist agenda. 80 threatening inhabitants, was not actually a foreign territory but was as domestic and British as Clown and Pantaloon. This raises the question of whether Zero actually convinced the men of the expedition that the dangers of the Arctic could be overcome by overlaying British culture on the blank landscape. Establishing a causal relationship is clearly impossible; however, anecdotal evidence, provided in print accounts of the sledge searches, suggests that the men in this squadron approached sledge travel with very positive attitudes, even compared to other first-person accounts of sledge searches conducted by other expeditions. While one cannot reconstruct how men actually felt about their drudgery, newspapers and retrospective accounts include anecdotes that indicate that authors wanted to convince readers that the men were happy during the spring search. For instance, Sherard Osborn discusses how the men of the expedition approached sledge journeys: "To be sure, we did not at once know by which route he had gone onward. The uncertainty, however, gave a spur to those about to be engaged in the searching parties, and each man thought there were especial reasons for believing one particular route to be the true one" (189). Osborn depicts the men as undeterred by the difficulty of their task and instead driven by the uncertainty of where Franklin was: because they didn't know where Franklin had gone, everyone had an equal chance of finding him. Osborn describes how the men fantasized about finding the men and rescuing them: "Hope, thank God, rode high in every breast, and already did the men begin to talk of what they would do with their new shipmates from the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' when they had them on board their respective ships; and I have no doubt they would have done as one gallant fellow replied, when I asked him if he thought himself equal to dragging 200 lbs. ? yes, sir, and Sir John Franklin too, when we find him'" (189-90). Osborn also relates how the men, 81 perhaps following the example set in the pantomime, personified the cold and described the threats of the Arctic - cold, hunger, desolation - as easily surmountable with a little imagination and willpower: They spoke of cold as 'Jack Frost,' a real tangible foe, with whom they could

combat and would master. Hunger was met with a laugh, and a chuckle at some future feast or jolly recollections told, in rough terms, of bygone good cheer; and

often, standing on some neighbouring pile of ice, and scanning the horizon for those we sought, have I heard a rough voice encouraging the sledge crew by saying, 'Keep step, boys! keep step! she (the sledge) is coming along almost by herself: there's the 'Erebus's' masts showing over the point ahead! Keep step,

boys! keep step!' (217) Osborn never explicitly states that the men related the play to their own attitudes and, considering how he reacted to the graves on Beechey Island, it is certainly possible that his text over-emphasizes how happy the men were. Yet one cannot ignore that Osborn refers to the men thinking of the cold environment as Jack Frost, a tangible foe who they, like the characters they had watched in the pantomime, could master rather than thinking of the cold as an inherent threat of the north that had to be tolerated. Osborn' s account of the sledge searches suggests that the pantomime, in its light treatment of life in the Arctic, in its suggestion of how to overcome obstacles, and in its assertion that the Arctic was not dangerous and was not that different than home, made an impression on the men that they carried in their imaginations on spring sledge expeditions.

82 Imagining Inuit The transformation of the Fox into Qalasirssuaq in the harlequinade is described only in a stage direction and produces contradictory readings when interpreted as a visual simile.56 The scene occurs during the harlequinade: "1st CLOWNfetches in afox trap, and places it at back ofstage. All run offand watch it. Whitefox enters, and thefox trapfalls. Enter CLOWNS, who open the trap. HARLEQUIN slaps the trap, and out comes E.

York" (141). E. York, a footnote to the script adds, was "The Esquimaux we had on board" (141). It is initially tempting to read the transformation as suggesting, in line with contemporary discourses on race, that Inuit were animal-like. One can take this line of thinking a step further and consider that Ede was suggesting an equivalence between Fox (a thieving character) and Qalasirssuaq, implying that Qalasirssuaq was a racially transgressive figure who posed a threat that needed to be contained. The contradiction

between these two readings will become clear: while reading the visual simile as suggesting Qalasirssuaq is like an animal suggests that Inuit are not fully human, reading

the transformation as suggesting that Qalasirssuaq poses a threat to racial categories implies that he is too European. Furthermore, reading the transformation sequence in either of these ways fails to take into account how the men on the ship seem to have felt about Qalasirssuaq. Qalasirssuaq was a helpful, friendly, valued member of the crew. His ability to guide the men through the Arctic, literally navigating waterways and islands and symbolically navigating life on the tundra, was perhaps a talisman to the men. We have

56 On the ship, the young man was called both Erasmus York (after Captain Erasmus Ommanney and the place - Cape York - where he came aboard) and by his Inuktitut name. Early transliterations of Inuit names and words into roman characters did not always reflect the nuances of Inuktitut pronunciation. As a result, Qalasirssuaq's name is usually recorded as Calahierna or Kallihirua in documents from the 1 850s. 83 already seen that Zero, or Harlequin Light responded to the anxiety that Franklin and his men had come to some harm by using pantomimical transformations to make the Arctic familiar. Qalasirssuaq's transformation from a Fox was in fact continuous with this: the transformation reveals that attitudes toward Inuit, in particular Qalasirssuaq, changed during the winter of 1850-51. The Inuk who initially appeared to be little different from an animal was transformed, in the men's minds, into not only a friendly companion but also into a potential saviour if harm befell the Assistance. While the transformation sequence bears the baggage of the first two readings - promulgating the belief that "savages" were akin to animals and the belief that Inuit "going white" was potentially threatening - it also demonstrates how close contact with Inuit could complicate understandings of race.

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Qalasirssuaq was approximately sixteen years old when Captain Austin's squadron passed by Cape York, on the west coast of Greenland, in August 1850 (Murray 84 8). Qalasirssuaq's family was at their spring camp with two other families and he agreed to show Captain Ommanney where another British ship - the North Star - had wintered and to join the Assistance as an interpreter (Murray 10)." Murray writes that upon leaving his family, Qalasirssuaq "threw himself into the hands of strangers in perfect confidence. Having arrived on board the 'Assistance,' he put off his rough native costume, submitted to the process of a good washing, and, being soon clad in ordinary European clothing, which was cheerfully contributed by the officers, the young Esquimaux with much intelligence performed the duty of pilot to the place where the 'North Star' had wintered" (10). Qalasirssuaq was "placed under the care of the Serjeant [sic] of Marines, who

instructed [him] in the rudiments of reading and writing" (Murray 12). When the Assistance returned to England, Qalasirssuaq - nicknamed Kalli by his friends on the ship (Murray 12) - went with them and, after attending school and being baptized, returned to North America as a missionary. The script and reviews reveal little about what the transformation looked like. The sequence, which occurred during the harlequinade, was likely performed using a rudimentary form of trap. Because the Assistance's, stage was on the ship's upper deck, there were limited ways to stage spectacular effects; however, the use of backdrops and of trick props likely allowed for this piece of stage magic to take place. The stage direction indicates that the 1st Clown placed the fox trap "at back of stage" (141) suggesting that the transformation relied on a trap with an opening back panel that could be placed against an opening in the backdrop. This would have allowed the Fox, probably an actor in a fox costume rather than an actor behind a painted flat (like the Bear), to go through

57 HMS North Star was a supply vessel that wintered at Wolstoneholme Sound in 1 849-50. It was sent to resupply James Ross's search expedition. 85 the trap to exit the stage and Qalasirssuaq to enter the trap to be revealed. There is little other information to fill in the gaps around this moment of transformation. It is unclear what Qalasirssuaq did after he appeared on stage: did he remain on stage for the remainder of the pantomime or did he exit fairly quickly? It is unclear whether he was wearing European or Inuit clothing. The clothing he wore is significant: if he wore

European clothing, he would have appeared as representing himself as an individual; if he wore Inuit clothing, he could have been read as a "stock" Inuit much more easily. Each possibility has implications for both Qalasirssuaq' s performance style and for how

audience members would have reacted; however, we also have no evidence about how the

audience reacted to the transformation.

These material uncertainties produce a number of questions concerning how the audience understood the transformation and how Qalasirssuaq understood his role as performer. One major problem concerns whether the audience or Qalasirssuaq understood what he was doing as "acting" in the same sense as the actor playing Harlequin, for example, would have understood his own performance practice: did Qalasirssuaq have, or appear to have, the same consciousness of himself as performer as the other actors? One can imagine that the scene could have played out in a variety of ways based on the answer to this question, with the two extreme possibilities being as follows: first, Qalasirssuaq is meant to appear completely unaware that he is on stage and is revealed in the trap as if by accident; second, Qalasirssuaq is in on the joke and gets a laugh by "hamming" up what he was doing. There is also the question of how the pantomime convention of transformation would have been understood by Qalasirssuaq as a member of a culture whose spiritual beliefs employed the idea of physical transformation in a vastly different way. I am deliberately leaving this question unanswered: first, because my primary 86 concern is for how Qalasirssuaq was represented in the scene; second, because an appropriately nuanced discussion of Inuit spiritual beliefs is outside of the scope of this chapter. Furthermore, even a detailed discussion of Inuit spiritual beliefs tells us remarkably little about how one individual, from a particular part of the Arctic, living at a particular historical moment, with a specific history of contact with Europeans, would react to the intercultural situation Qalasirssuaq found himself in: indeed it would be very much like arguing about how one of the men on the ship responded to the transformation by discussing the Church of England's beliefs about non-Christians. Since the transformation is not addressed in the archive, beyond indicating that it took place, one can only carefully speculate about how audience members and performers understood it. If one begins by assuming that the transformation operates as a visual simile, the most general and obvious similarity it suggests is a similarity between Inuit and animals. This familiar figuration appears elsewhere in the play, in stories published on the ship, in diaries and narrative accounts written by members of the expedition, and in British works on race comparing "savage" races to animals, particularly in the frequent comparison of "savages" to apes and monkeys. Mid-nineteenth century theories of race were incredibly fluid, frequently contradictory and are too complex to address here in any appropriate depth.58 It is important, however, to outline the debate occurring between monogenists and polygenists in the years immediately preceding the publication of Darwin's work in 1859. To summarize the two positions as briefly as possible, monogenists believed that members of different races were part of one human species and polygenists believed that different races were actually different biological species. The

58 For a comprehensive overview of nineteenth-century ideas of racial difference see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology. 87 debate, which had been ongoing since the eighteenth century, was fueled in the mid- nineteenth century by developments in archaeology and physical anthropology.59 Each theory had considerable implications for how to understand the difference between "civilized" and "savage" peoples; I will point out just two examples that George Stocking includes in Victorian Anthropology which locate monogenesis and polygenesis in the context of disciplinary developments and which have bearing on how to understand the performance with which I am concerned. One way for monogenists to reconcile biblical history with developments in archaeology and with the diversity of human races, was to argue that the differences between "civilized" and "savage" races was the result of degeneration:60 For those who still accepted biblical chronology, the effect of archaeological investigations. . . was to preempt almost the entire 6,000-year span for human groups who were fairly highly civilized. There was little time left 'in the beginning' for these groups to have raised themselves from savagery. On the other hand, there was plenty of time available for nineteenth-century savages to have fallen from an originally higher state; and the romantic aura of decay and destruction emanating from broken ruins, toppled monoliths, and sand-swept or vine-covered pyramids tended to sustain a degenerationist rather than a progressivist view of human history. (Stocking 71) On the other hand, polygenist thought was linked to developments in physical anthropology and suggested that there was little potential for races to either degenerate or improve, as Stocking points out:

59 See Stocking, pp. 47-77. 60 Degenerationism continued to have purchase throughout the nineteenth century as it became linked to the idea of genetic degeneration with the emergence of social Darwinist discourses. 88 [WJherever the physical anthropological viewpoint was manifest, it contained a strong polygenist impulse. On the basis of skeletal and cranial evidence, polygenists insisted that blacks were physically distinct and mentally inferior; on the basis of the racial representations on 'ancient Egyptian monuments' they argued that races had remained unchanged throughout the major portion of human history; on the basis of the mortality of whites in tropical areas they hypothesized that different races were aboriginal products of different 'centers of creation' and could never fully 'acclimate' elsewhere; on the basis of anecdotal evidence they asserted that that the hybrid offspring of blacks and Europeans were only partially interfertile. On all these grounds they argued that mankind was not one but several biological species - the number varying with different polygenist writers. (67) A few questions emerge from these two passages when we consider them in relation to the transformation sequence and in relation to intercultural contact throughout this project: Were Inuit of the same species as Europeans, or were they another species? How closely were "savage" races related to animals? Could Inuit improve to become more like Europeans? Could close contact with Inuit cause Europeans to degenerate? A story published in Aurora Borealis in October 1850 relies on the common perception that Inuit resembled animals for its comic effect. The story, likely written by the Resolute' s second master George McDougall, is about Mr. Muffs adventures when he tries to go bear hunting.61 While Mr. Muff is out, " he discovers a native of a rough exterior, who on approaching, extends his arms, as a sign of amity, and welcomes the stranger" (29). Mr. Muff wants to get away from the native, but the native "playfully

61 Mr. Muff was a recurring character in a series of stories that appeared in Punch; readers of the Aurora Borealis might have been familiar with the character from home. 89 follows him on all fours" (30). Becoming worried, Mr. Muff takes off his hat and "leaves it for the native, who now bears a strong resemblance to a bear. The native having inspected the cap with savage curiosity, appears greatly annoyed at not having found a head in it. Mr. Muff is now convinced his follower is a bear" (30). Mr. Muff finally tries to shoot the bear/native and, when his gun fails, he runs away. He hears the gun fire and "on turning round finds the bear mortally wounded, having fallen a victim to an ill-timed piece of curiosity. Mr. Muff returns, as does also his peace of mind" (32). In this story, the "native" is at first playful, then becomes increasingly aggressive, and finally murderous as his physical shape becomes more animal-like. The story reverses the transformation staged in Zero, but the degeneration of the native character into an animal suggests that Inuit and animals exist on a flexible continuum. Audience members watching Zero, familiar with the comparison of Inuit and animals in the Mr. Muff story, would have been predisposed to view the transformation of a Fox into an Inuk as suggestive of a close similarity, indeed of a progressive or degenerative relationship, between the two.

While this story seems like a silly imitation of the humorous stories found in Punch magazine, Mr. Muffs predicament reflects a real concern for men on the ship. Readers on the ship would have been familiar with the image of a mysterious figure approaching through the snow: in bad weather and low light, one would have to get very close to a stranger before being certain of whether it was a friend, an unfamiliar and potentially hostile Inuk, or a dangerous wild animal. In the story, the mystery is never solved: the reader never finds out about whether the strange figure was a human who became a bear, a human disguised as a bear, or a bear initially disguised as a human. Although Mr. Muffs anxiety is represented comically in the story, the story signals real 90 confusion over how to understand the difference between Britons, Inuit, and animals. In the story, Inuit's supposed similarity to animals is both dangerous, because it allows them to operate outside the rules governing British social relations, and comic. The lines that immediately follow the Fox being transformed into Qalasirssuaq remind the audience of the discursive similarity between Inuit and animals, underlining the visual simile. The 1st Clown asks, referring to Qalasirssuaq, "Why is he like a man with a bad cold?" When the 2nd Clown doesn't answer, the 1st Clown delivers his punch line: "Isn't he a little H(Uskey)?" (141) The joke is ostensibly a pun based on two meanings of the word husky operating simultaneously. In the line, "husky" literally refers to the scratchy voice of a person with a cold. Ede assumed that the audience was familiar with a second meaning of husky, as a reference to an Inuk or to Inuit derived from the word "Eskimo": the humour depends on audience members' familiarity with these two meanings. But the O.E.D. also notes that by 1852, a third meaning of husky had entered usage - as a reference to the dog breed.62 This third meaning suggests a further conflation of Inuit and animals, which becomes even more striking when one considers that in the 1 850s, the word "husky" was used without modifier to refer to either Inuit or the dog breed. This linguistic ambiguity collapses the difference between a dog and an Inuk in precisely the same way that the transformation sequence seems to conflate the Fox and Qalasirssuaq. Both the pun and the transformation rely on the audience's familiarity with a common discursive construction of Inuit and, when performed together, underline the supposed similarities between Inuit and animals.

62 Although the line was spoken over a year before the example cited in the O.E.D. was written, it is almost certain that the word entered oral usage earlier. 91 While interpreting the transformation as a visual simile suggesting the similarity between Inuit and animals is seductively simple, one must also consider the possibility that the visual simile pointed out a more specific equivalence: the transformation could suggest that Qalasirssuaq bore a resemblance to the Fox. In the pantomime, the Fox first appears in the opening, when he enters "stealthily" and steals a piece of pork from the sailors (137). One of the men chases him, saying, "Bring me the gun! Oh! here's a precious joke:/A fox has stolen a piece of this day's pork" (137). Inuit were frequently accused of stealing from wintering British ships. Dr. Alexander Armstrong, who served on the Investigator, wrote of Alaskan Inuit: "That they are a thieving, cunning race there can be little doubt, and they would be equally treacherous and deceitful, were their cupidity excited by anything in the hands of a weaker party. . . Although several were yesterday the recipients of our bounty, two of them made most adroit attempts at theft, by taking articles of no less magnitude than the pump-winch and an ice anchor" (110). Accounts like Armstrong's circulated among British sailors and officers dispatched to the Arctic, so although the men on the Assistance had no contact with Alaskan Inuit and, unlike the Investigator, did not have groups of local Inuit visiting their ship while they wintered, the stereotype of Inuit as thieves would have been familiar to audience members.

If we knew that Qalasirssuaq wore traditional clothing and acted like what the British crew might have thought of as a stereotypical Inuk when he appeared on stage, the equivalence of a Fox and an Inuk could make sense; however, we do not know if Qalasirssuaq was dressed in Inuit clothing or white clothing and we have no details about how he performed his role. The script provides one additional piece of information: in the stage direction, Clowns and Harlequin are indicated in all capitals, as characters in the 92 action, but both Fox and Qalasirssuaq are in regular case, suggesting that there is a dramaturgical similarity between them since neither speaks and both appear as objects rather than subjects of the drama. That Qalasirssuaq is not listed as a character in the play and that his name in the stage direction is not in capitals suggests that he was specifically playing himself rather than a stock character of an Inuk.

Yet if the transformation sequence was meant to suggest a relationship between the thieving Fox and Qalasirssuaq, reading it as a visual simile does not initially seem to make sense. Qalasirssuaq went aboard the Assistance to help with navigation and any translation necessary. While he was on the ship, he was a helpful and well-liked member of the shipboard community. Clements Markham, who initially thought little of Inuit, wrote in the final issue ofAurora Borealis that:

One of them [Inuit] has resided amongst us for more than twelve months, and though slow to learn the English language, has yet by his constant cheerfulness and good humour, and willingness to make himself useful, become a general favourite, and the remarkable accuracy of York's chart, which, though differing widely from that supplied by the Admiralty, has invariably proved perfectly correct, is no mean proof of the sagacity of these poor fellows, who depend on their knowledge of the coast, for the means of procuring food. (327) According to Markham, the men on the Assistance appreciated Qalasirssuaq for both his cheerfulness and his skills. In fact, it appears that Qalasirssuaq emerged as an essential member of the shipboard community because his knowledge of Arctic coastlines was superior to that of the Admiralty charts and of the others on the ship. There is no account of Qalasirssuaq behaving as anything less than an obedient member of the ship's crew and there is certainly no basis for accusing him of any kind of literal theft. However, the 93 two abilities that Markham highlights, Qalasirssuaq's growing proficiency in English and his skills as a cartographer and navigator, were imagined as particularly British abilities in the mid-nineteenth century. If we situate these skills as British cultural property, it is possible to see how Qalasirssuaq could be understood as appropriating actions that were not rightfully his to perform. The script provides a way of reading the staged Qalasirssuaq as potentially threatening, if one considers a joke made not about Qalasirssuaq but about the Fox. Shortly before the Fox is transformed, the 2nd Clown asks, "What foxes are easiest to shoot?" After Pantaloon suggests several incorrect answers, 2nd Clown responds, "Tame ones to be sure" (140). The lines appear innocuous unless they are read as anticipatory of the transformation that follows. If one understands the transformation sequence as utilizing pantomime's convention of the visual simile, the punch line not only implies a parallel between taming a fox and controlling a human population but also, more disturbingly, suggests that both taming and colonizing are ultimately means to violent extermination. Considering the 2nd Clown's joke as a comment on Qalasirssuaq forces one to consider that Qalasirssuaq's presence on the ship may also have provoked anxiety. In December 1850, Aurora Borealis published a letter to the editor credited to Qalasirssuaq. The letter begins by stating, "I have eaten of the same biscuit; drank of the same drink; slept under the same roof, and acted the part allotted to me, with yourselves: but yet I cannot understand you" (89-90). The letter points out Qalasirssuaq's confusion about how steam-powered ships worked, his amazement that the British never hunted but always had food and clothing, and his response to attending a masquerade ball. It ends with the lines, "All these things have puzzled me strangely; much of my curiosity has been satisfied by my friend the Serjeant, who has been very kind to me, and who is now 94 teaching me to talk through leaves. . . but much there is I cannot understand" (93). It is highly unlikely that Qalasirssuaq wrote the letter alone: Murray's biography of

Qalasirssuaq reports that when he arrived in England "he could only speak a few words, such as 'Ship,' 'Sea,' 'Very sick;' 'England, things very nice,' 'Captain very good'"

(Murray 22). The author of the letter seems to act as a ventriloquist, suggesting that Qalasirssuaq wrote it himself by using stereotypically "native" phrases like "teaching me to talk through leaves." Although it is unclear how involved Qalasirssuaq was in writing the letter, he was learning English and the letter, by raising the possibility that

Qalasirssuaq could eventually write a letter himself, emphasizes that his ability in English was developing.

In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson discusses how language functioned as a marker of national identity in the nineteenth century: "the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities" (122). This capacity is linked specifically to written language, because writing could travel and carry the idea of these imagined solidarities to other members of the imagined community: Anderson comments that "the very idea of 'nation' is now nestled firmly in virtually all print-languages" (123). Diana Taylor, in The Archive and the Repertoire, problematizes language as dividing the colonizer from the colonized and notes that in western thought "writing has become the guarantor of existence itself (xix). In the mid-nineteenth century, Inuktitut was exclusively an oral language; Inuit were widely believed to have no interest in written texts. One example of this lack of interest recurs in accounts of the aftermath of the Franklin expedition, when Inuit were blamed for the loss of the ships' records: stories circulated about how Inuit gave the books and papers from the Terror and Erebus to their children as toys (McClintock 280; Woodman, 95 Unravelling 155; McGoogan, Fatal 252). Inuit did not have access to or interest in written language, so writing could be privileged as yet another thing that separated them from the British. But Qalasirssuaq's letter suggests that the British monopoly on the use of English and, specifically, on written English was unstable. The spectacle of Qalasirssuaq learning English could have aroused a degree of tension; the letter could have worked both to exacerbate this tension by reminding readers of Qalasirssuaq's growing education and to reinforce the difference between Qalasirssuaq and the sailors by satirizing his lack of fluency in English and confusion over English customs.63 On the surface, the letter appears to point out the cultural differences between British and Inuit and to suggest that even if an Inuk eats, drinks, sleeps, and acts like a British sailor, he could never fully comprehend British culture. The letter seems to confirm that the gap between British and Inuit was unbridgeable. But the letter also refers to Qalasirssuaq's awareness of the performative nature of his role on the ship with the comment that he "acted the part allotted to [him]" (93). The suggestion that both Qalasirssuaq and the writer were aware that he was performing the role of an Inuk for a British audience allows us to read the letter as an artifact suggesting that Qalasirssuaq's performance of stereotypical aboriginaity was problematized on the ship. The idea that Qalasirssuaq was both "acting white," by learning English, and was "acting Inuit" by "acting the part allotted to [him]," allows us to consider his performance in the context of Homi Bhabha's argument concerning colonial mimicry. Bhabha argues that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject ofa difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is

63 Learning English was also a critical step in Qalasirssuaq becoming a Christian: although I am not specifically engaging with Qalasirssuaq's conversion to Christianity when he lived in England, this is clearly an area worthy of further consideration. 96 constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (122). Furthermore, Bhabha suggests that the "excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely 'rupture' the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a 'partial' presence. . . The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace" (123). Either Qalasirssuaq or the letter's author (or both of them) was aware of the theatricality of "acting Inuit" (a concept which I will return to in the next chapter) and recognized that Qalasirssuaq was performing something (although it is not quite clear what this something was) on the ship. This, combined with his potential ability to write in English placed him in an ambivalent position: he was clearly not British, but his ability to communicate like a British subject, through writing and through social performance, positioned him as part of the "fraternity of equals" (Anderson 81) constituted by shared language. Perhaps most importantly, for our purposes here, Qalasirssuaq' s ability to self-consciously perform marked him as absolutely not animal-like. Qalasirssuaq' s ability to draw more accurate maps than the Admiralty also complicated an understanding of him as a member of a "savage" race. His competence as a navigator was a problem because of how Arctic exploration was understood by those engaged in it and how it was legitimated as a specifically British pursuit.64 The glorification of the search for the Northwest Passage was predicated on the idea that the

64 Qalasirssuaq' s ability as a cartographer not only problematized accepted distinctions between savage and civilized races but also had implications for class identities. Scientific education was one of the ways that aspiring middle-class members could move up in mid-nineteenth century British social hierarchies. 97 British were charting new territory. Lisa Bloom points out British exploration narratives figured territories like Africa and Australia as blank spaces but that marking them as blank was a "discursive strategy that produced the rationale to justify the process of filling them in by the West, through the introduction of Western institutions" (2). Racialized others are erased from these narratives, in order to perpetuate the fantasy of occupying empty spaces. In the Arctic, this process "reappear[s] in the narratives of polar exploration and discovery, reducing the vital participation of Inuit men and women to subordinate 'native bearers' imagined as either 'primitive' or 'unspoiled' figures" (Bloom 3). The exploration fantasy relied on the figuration of spaces as empty: native inhabitants contesting the British presence were not welcome in this fantasy structure. Francis Spufford further problematizes the role of Inuit in the British exploration fantasy,

arguing: [T]he European perception of polar travel as an activity wholly separate - in mood and technique, aims and expertise - from the Inuit experience of inhabiting the Arctic, also indicates that the spectacles of the Inuit, living their domestic lives in a place Europeans were considered heroic for reaching, aroused a degree of tension. It is not hard to see how the Inuit presence would complicate the vision of exploring bravery predicated on the idea of an empty Arctic. (189) Bloom and Spufford' s comments demonstrate why the figuration of Inuit as animals had such purchase: it not only confirmed that the difference between them and the British was unbridgeable but it also allowed the British to view the Arctic as uninhabited. If Inuit could be imagined as natural inhabitants of the region who survived, like foxes or geese, through instinct and habit, not through intelligence or technological innovation, British exploration of the final "uncharted" region could continue unquestioned. 98 Interpreting the transformation sequence as predicated on an anxiety about Inuit appropriating British culture and thus, as a strategy of containment doesn't really ring true. The men on the Assistance liked Qalasirssuaq. Murray writes "By his amiable disposition he made himself welcome and agreeable to all the expedition" (12). We also don't know how the audience responded to the transformation: reviews of the play in Aurora Borealis and Illustrated Arctic News do not mention it. It is unclear why the transformation was not commented upon. It may have been because it was unintelligible within the conventions of pantomimical transformations: reviewers may not have known how to interpret it. It is also possible that this transformation sequence was unremarkable compared to the more spectacular transformation scene in the middle of the play. Because of the reviews' silence, it is impossible to reconstruct audience reception, but considering that audience members tended to like Qalasirssuaq, I would like to suggest that the audience might have responded to the transformation in a good-natured way, happy to see the friendly young Inuk man on stage participating in the play. Furthermore, Qalasirssuaq, unlike the British sailors and officers on the Assistance, knew how to survive in the Arctic. He could navigate, but he also knew how to hunt, build snow houses, and live off the land. While the Fox stealing the men's food in Zero may signal that Fox is a potential threat, the action can be read from the Fox's perspective: he steals the food because he has figured out the best way to survive. On Beechey Island, the officers confronted the certainty that three of Franklin's men had died and were forced to imagine that more men might have died since 1846. If the worst happened, to Franklin's men or to Austin's men, one of the only ways the men could hope to survive was by finding Inuit to help them get food and travel. The Assistance was a step ahead: if things went badly, they had Qalasirssuaq, who knew how to survive on the 99 land. If Zero, or Harlequin Light attempted to transform the Arctic into a familiar and habitable place by using the pantomime convention of the transformation, the possibility arises that the transformation of the Fox into Qalasirssuaq was a manifestation of this very strategy. A Fox - an indigenous inhabitant of the Arctic who can survive on the tundra - is transformed into Qalasirssuaq - an Inuk helper who can also survive on the tundra. By extension, this suggests that Inuit - who the British initially thought of, in line with their contemporaries at home, as little more than wild animals surviving by instinct alone - were becoming familiar to the men of the Assistance as not animal-like, but as savvy, helpful friends, and potential saviours if things went wrong. What the British initially thought of as characteristics of animal instinct, in the Fox and in the Inuit, are revealed as complex skills that could help the European men thrive in the Arctic. On the Assistance, views of Inuit were far less stable than they were in Britain and were constantly changing as the men got used to the Arctic: at times officers expressed views that would be considered highly racist by most people today and at times officers were surprisingly progressive. In examining how Clements Markham, a midshipman on the Assistance, thought of Inuit and of Qalasirssuaq what stands out is that his opinion of

Inuit varied drastically over the winter. Soon after leaving England, Markham compared Inuit with the Danish inhabitants of Greenland and proposed that these races were

fundamentally different because of their intellectual potential: To say also that the one was in a higher state of civilization than the other would be equally inadmissible, for in the ninth century, the Norman in his frail bark, crossing a vast and stormy ocean, had no greater conveniences than the Esquimaux in his kayak, on the coast of Labrador and Greenland: but the one great advantage which the Norman possessed was the superiority of his mental 100 powers; powers which enabled him as easily to form a republic on the shores of

Greenland and , as to found monarchies in England and Italy, or to plant

his banner on the walls of Jerusalem: and this advantage will alone suffice to

account for the difference between the Caucasians who inhabited Iceland and

Greenland in the fourteenth, and the Mongolians who grad [sic] out a miserable existence in Greenland and Labrador in the nineteenth century. (184-85)

According to Markham, Normans are superior to Inuit not because of different opportunities or climatic influences but because of their superior mental capabilities. Throughout Aurora Borealis and Franklin 's Footsteps, Markham reiterates his belief that Inuit are stupid, commenting that their "powers of thought are so small" {Aurora Borealis

243) and that "[w]ith no method of improving the mind, and no words in their language to express abstract ideas, the stupid and insensate state of the Esquimaux's mind forms a striking contrast to the unobscured clear horizon" {Franklin 's Footsteps 54). Over the winter, Markham changed his mind. At the end ofAurora Borealis he

wonders, "[w]hether the Arctic Highlanders in their isolated position are destined to increase, to obtain the blessings of Christianity, and to render their condition as tolerable

as the climate will admit; or whether they are fated to die off and disappear from the face of the earth, if is impossible to form a conjecture" (327).65 Here, Markham allows for the possibility of racial improvement through exposure to the religion of a superior culture. While Markham does not problematize the basic division between "savage" and

"civilized" races, his comment raises questions concerning what constitutes the difference

65 The conflation of one group of Inuit with Scottish highlanders demonstrates the levels of complexity at work here in ideas of race - the Inuit of northern Greenland, to whom Markham is specifically referring, are contrasted both with more "civilized" groups of Inuit and with the British in a similar way to how the division between highland and lowland Scots operated in discussions of Scots as a separate racial group. 101 between the two groups: at first, he thought Inuit were basically hopeless and could never improve; later, he came to believe that Inuit could, by converting to Christianity, improve their position. Markham's view of Inuit was transformed over the course of the winter. He went from thinking of Inuit as savages who were basically the same as animals to thinking of them as improvable and civilizable. No doubt this was in part because of extended contact with Qalasirssuaq. The change that occurs in Markham's opinion of Inuit indicates a final possible reading of the transformation: that the transformation sequence functions as a visual simile for a process happening on the ship. The transformation of the Fox into Qalasirssuaq is clearly ambiguous, provoking multiple readings, partially because of the erasure of the moment from the archive and partially because of the difficulty in determining how the simile operates. The transformation does, however, suggest racial progress: of animals or Fox becoming more like humans/Inuit/Qalasirssuaq. This initially seems to apply to how Qalasirssuaq developed on the ship, becoming more "white" and learning English standing in as signs of racial progress. But the suggestion of progress also might relate to the development of British thinking about Inuit. Mary Louise Pratt's formulation of "contact zones" emphasizes how "subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and 'travelees,' not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically assymetrical relations of power" (7). In this context, the transformation could signify the change in British perceptions: although they begin by thinking of Inuit as potentially dangerous and certainly irritating (both on a personal level and as an obstacle to ideas of exploring an empty Arctic), Inuit, particularly Qalasirssuaq, become increasingly familiar. The 102 transformation of the Fox into Qalasirssuaq functions as a visual simile that illustrates the process of the Arctic and its Inuit inhabitants becoming more familiar: Fox (an animal) becomes Qalasirssuaq (a familiar human) in the same way that the Arctic (an unfamiliar, dangerous space) became a familiar home-away-from-home. Theatre provided a way for the men of the squadron to attempt to understand the environment in which they found themselves and the Inuk upon whom they might one day become reliant. It allowed a foreign land and a foreign people to be incorporated into a familiar genre and a familiar form of entertainment and sociability. Qalasirssuaq living on board the Assistance was critical for both the expedition's sense of well-being and for the changes in perception of Inuit that occurred among officers. But in order for this to happen, Qalasirssuaq also had to "go white," living among and like the British sailors. While we have no first-hand account of how Qalasirssuaq understood this process, the next chapter will examine the opposite situation, of an American "going native" and the tensions underlying the process of appropriating the gestures and behaviours of another culture. In Qalasirssuaq' s case, the threat of "going white" ultimately emerged as a physical threat: although he lived among Europeans, his body bore no immunity to foreign diseases and he died in Newfoundland in 1856 "after only a few days' illness, brought on by incautiously going out to bathe with one of our other students. On the following day. . . he complained of great pain in the chest and side, and so rapid was the inflammation, that the usual remedies were unavailing" (Murray 57). In Charles Francis Hall's case, we will see that the threat of "going native" was not a threat to the body in the same way as "going white" was for Qalasirssuaq, but was an embodied threat posed by the need to maintain physical health and simultaneously control physical desires.

103 Eating and Fucking: Charles Francis Hall Imagines "Going Native" It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely polar explorer than Charles Francis Hall... A former blacksmith and engraver, he was a high-school drop-out with no scientific background, no knowledge ofnavigation, and no training in any related skills. He was, however, obsessed with the Arctic, a quality that more and more seemed to be the prime requisitefor would-be northern adventurers. He had read every available tome and article describing earlier explorations. He had studied the problems inherent in Arctic survival, including various theories about the relationship between diet and scurvy. The Eskimosfascinated him, though his attitude toward them was naive in the extreme. ~ Pierre Berton, Arctic Grail 345

Charles Francis Hall went to the Arctic in 1 860 because he was convinced that he could find survivors from the Franklin expedition alive and living among Inuit. After McClintock's expedition returned to England in 1859 with the Victory Point record, which confirmed that Franklin was dead and convinced most people that the officers and men serving under him had died either on the ships or during the march toward the Back River, Hall - already obsessed with the Arctic - grew determined to travel north to discover what really happened. According to Hall, McClintock's report should have spurred further search efforts, not ended the quest for the missing men: "Supposition alone has induced the world to believe them all dead; and, despite proof upon proof, from facts, experience, and sound logical reasoning to the contrary, the Government of England, and British naval officials, with some eminent exceptions, have discarded all idea of farther search, though the truth could now so easily be obtained, and the ground to explore so small and comparatively so easy of access!" (3). McClintock had determined that Franklin's ships had been iced in off the coast of King William Island and that the men who abandoned the ships had marched south toward the mainland: it was obvious, to Hall, that further searches of King William Island and the mainland to its south would 104 reveal what really happened to the men. Furthermore, Hall was certain that all previous

search expeditions had failed because no one had taken the time to thoroughly interview Inuit about what they knew, arguing that "neither McClintock nor any other civilized person has yet been able to ascertain the facts. But, though no civilized persons knew the

truth, it was clear to me that the Esquimaux were aware of it, only it required peculiar tact and much time to induce them to make it known" (4). Finally, Hall was "convinced that

survivors might yet be found" (4), citing a letter he received from Thomas Hickey, who served under on the second Grinnell expedition,66 that opined "some of

Sir John Franklin 's men are yet to befound living with the Esquimaux" (6). In 1 860, after securing funding from Arctic aficionado Henry Grinnell and gaining free passage aboard

the George Henry, a whaling ship captained by Sidney Budington, Hall was on his way north as self-appointed captain of the two-man "New Franklin Research Expedition."67 Hall travelled to the Arctic three times. His first expedition, which lasted from

1860-62, will be the focus of this chapter. Hall's 1864-69 expedition, which will be addressed in the next chapter, actually led him to King William Island and was his most

significant in terms of its contribution to the known facts of what happened to Franklin's expedition. His third expedition, which departed from the United States in 1871, was a

short-lived quest for the geographic North Pole: Hall died months into the expedition under mysterious circumstances.68 During his first expedition, which turned up no new

66 Hall fails to note that Hickey was a cabin boy, hardly a rank associated with authority in such matters. Kane was an American doctor who travelled to the Arctic twice in search of Franklin, first as surgeon on the Advance in 1850-51, then as captain oí the Advance in 1853-55. Both expeditions were, like Hall's, sponsored by Henry Grinnell. See Ken McGoogan, Race to the Polar Sea for biographical information about Kane and a detailed account of his two expeditions. 67 Hall hired Kudlago, an Inuk visiting the United States, as an interpreter. The expedition's complement was reduced to one man -just Hall - when Kudlago died on the way north. 68 Hall died of arsenic poisoning and it has never been made clear whether this was the result of 105 information about what happened to the missing expedition, Hall was based on the George Henry but frequently travelled with Inuit families. He became familiar with Inuit culture and lived, in many ways, like his Inuit companions: sleeping in skin tents and igloos, wearing fur clothing, and eating an Inuit diet consisting mainly of raw game. Although Hall was hardly the first European or European-American to adopt Inuit behaviours in order to survive life in the Arctic, his account of his first expedition provides valuable information about how an American with no exploration experience and no survival skills adapted to life in the north by "going native." In Post-Colonial Studies, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin claim that the negative connotations associated with "going native" indicate:

[T]he colonizers' fear of contamination by absorption into native life and customs. The construction of native cultures as either primitive or degenerate in a binary discourse of colonizer/colonized led, especially at the turn of the century, to a

widespread fear of 'going native' amongst the colonizers in many colonial societies... The threat is particularly associated with the temptation posed by inter-

racial sex, where sexual liaisons with 'native' peoples were supposed to result in a contamination of the colonizers' pure stock and thus their degeneracy and

demise as a vigorous and civilized (as opposed to savage or degenerate) race. But 'going native' could also encompass lapses from European behaviour, the participation in 'native' ceremonies, or the adoption and even enjoyment of local customs in terms of dress, food, recreation and entertainment. (106) deliberate poisoning by a disgruntled member of the expedition or the result of Hall's over-zealous self-medication. See Chauncey Loomis pp. 297-354 for details of the circumstances surrounding Hall's death, the inquiry that followed the expedition's return to the United States, and the results of the exhumation of Hall's body in 1968. 106 I have chosen to begin this discussion with Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's description of "going native" not because it is a definitive explanation of what is at stake in intercultural contact but because it situates "going native" as a set of actions performed by colonizers in relation to colonized peoples and because its suggestion of a binary reading of the term "going native" is productive in explaining how Hall understood his own actions.69 In

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's definition, "going native" is all about the colonizer: it is the colonizer who has sex with native women, it is the colonizer who watches native ceremonies, it is the colonizer who is contaminated by contact with natives. The colonized subject's role in "going native" is eliminated from their description in a way that replicates how the colonized subject was frequently erased from contact narratives, including, at many points, Hall's own. But Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's examples also suggest the extent to which "going native" is a performed practice. One "goes native" by doing something, and accounts of "going native" or narrowly avoiding "going native" are, like a theatrical script, a mediated account of a past performance. One of the problems with examining Hall's narrative comes in attempting to unpack the extensive cultural assumptions about racial difference and aboriginaity circulating in the text. In this chapter, I will attempt to situate "going native" from what Pratt calls a "contact"

69 The term "going native" originated in anthropology but has been appropriated across disciplines, particularly in history, literary studies, and performance studies. One thread of recent scholarship on "going native" has interrogated the ways in which "going native" has functioned as a performance practice in American culture. See Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (2001); Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (1998). Greg Dening also situates "going native" in the context of intercultural performance history, but uses the term to describe a methodological approach to historiography, writing that: Everyone who would represent the past must 'go native' in some way or be condemned always only to represent the present. Even the 'native' must 'go native' in finding a past. We might think we are privileged in some way towards a past by being black or white, male or female, poor or powerful, but that privilege is only toward all the others of our living present. The past to which we each 'go native' is a lot farther off and no one gets there but by giving a little. That is because there is no moment so civilised as the present moment. {Performances 124) 107 perspective (7), focusing on intercultural exchange not as a performance by colonizers for one another or for the colonized but as a performance that engages both groups and constitutes an exchange between groups. Hall's text might then be considered not as an "authoritative" account of life with Inuit but as a document archiving, albeit from only his perspective, a series of intercultural performance events. The other reason why I begin with Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin is that they imply that while "going native" includes a wide range of practices, these practices can be split into two categories: those that contaminate the colonizer (their primary example is interracial sex) and those that do not (such as watching native performances).70 While this distinction is obviously problematic, I find it fascinating because it echoes precisely how Hall imagined what he did while living with Inuit in contrast to what other qallunaat did while living with Inuit. While Hall seems to have believed that living like an Inuk was both necessary for his survival and culturally appropriate, he was outspoken in his disapproval of interracial sexual relationships, which were common between whalers and Inuit women, claiming that these relationships contaminated the Inuit race in a surprising reversal of contemporary discourses of degeneration.

70 The term degeneration, as I pointed out in chapter one, was a fluid one. In this chapter I primarily use it to refer to the implications of what Stocking calls "the degenerationist tradition of biblical anthropology" (161), a view that was popular in the first half of the nineteenth century and was revitalized in the 1860s by John Lubbock (Stocking 150-56). Stocking points out that "the traditional Christian view, which insisted on the common humanity of savages... explained their inferior status and capacity in terms of degeneration or design" (106). Implicit in this line of thinking was the potential for "civilized" people to degenerate from their higher state in the same way as present-day "savages" already had. The term degeneration was closely linked to social Darwinism by the 1880s and 1890s; Stocking points out that the seeds of social Darwinism were sown almost immediately after the publication of On the Origin ofSpecies in 1859, for instance in the work of Francis Galton (92-96).

108 Although Hall's narrative does not explicitly distinguish between different ways of "going native," an examination of how he describes his own actions and those of other qallunaat demonstrates that he imagined two distinct ways of engaging with Inuit: I will term these "acting Inuit" and "becoming savage." Throughout this chapter, I will enclose variations of three phrases in quotation marks to indicate the provisional and potentially contestable meaning of these terms. Hall's narrative clearly demonstrates that he tried to "act Inuit" through his description of his attempts to imitate Inuit actions and through how he imagined his Inuit audience responded to his mimetic performance. At the same time, Hall was also "acting Inuit" for an audience of readers at home, carefully narrating his participation in Inuit cultural practices so that readers would notice that although "acting Inuit" apparently allowed him to "pass" as an Inuk for Inuit, Hall avoided racial slippage, never forgetting that he was absolutely not an Inuk. "Becoming savage," on the other hand, suggests the forgetting of cultural codes. One way qallunaat could "become savage" was by having sex with Inuit women: Hall was vocal about his disapproval of interracial sexual relationships, arguing that they occurred when qallunaat men ignored their obligation to improve Inuit and instead gave into "base" desires. But "becoming savage" did not only occur among qallunaat. Hall claimed that Inuit were not inherently "savage" but that through exposure to Christianity and through rehearsing European and American social practices, such as drinking tea, Inuit could become relatively "civilized." On the other hand, Inuit could also degenerate, by engaging in interracial sexual relations or by reverting from Christianity to traditional spiritual practices. Hall's views on racial difference and degeneration are articulated throughout his text not in a coherent argument but in how he narrates his own responses to particular examples of slippage that he witnessed; his attitude toward "becoming savage" seems to emerge prominently at 109 moments when racial categories blurred and when people engaged in practices that were "below" their expected level of civilization. Furthermore, in Hall's text, examples of "becoming savage" most often emerge at moments when people - Inuit and qallunaat - ignore what they know they "should" be doing and instead give into physical desires (most often for sexual relations).71 The threats implicit in "becoming savage" and the performative nature of this set of practices emerge in Hall's account of a theatrical performance that he watched aboard the George Henry. The performance began as what Hall thought of as a conventional Inuit performance - men taking turns drumming on a keeloun (skin drum) accompanied by women singing - but was interrupted when one of the whalemen - called young Smith - entered in blackface makeup and women's clothing. The performance continued, incorporating both Inuit drumming and American songs, and concluded with Inuit women and whalers square dancing together. Hall usually told readers about how he participated in both shipboard and Inuit performances and typically included, even when he observed rather than participated in performances, a description of how he responded to what he watched. In this case, however, Hall depicts himself as a passive audience member, sitting apart from the group, and includes little to indicate how he interpreted what he saw. One way to address this silence on Hall's part is to consider what the performance might have signified for him. I will tentatively suggest that the "theatrical" on the George

71 The idea of degeneracy gained most currency at the end of the nineteenth century: Middle-class morality, manliness, and motherhood were seen as endangered by the related fears of 'degeneration' and miscegenation in scientifically construed racist beliefs. Degeneration was defined as 'departures from the normal human type... transmitted through inheritance and lead[ing] progressively to destruction.' Degeneracy, brought on by environmental, physical, and moral factors, could be averted by positive eugenic selection of, negatively, by eliminating the 'unfit' or the environmental and more specifically cultural contagions that gave rise to them. (Stoller 62) 110 Henry, by recalling Inuit spiritual rituals, by staging the possibility of interracial desire through its citation of minstrelsy, and by enacting how interracial sexual relationships might have developed at shipboard square dances, made Hall's anxieties concerning "becoming savage" visible and that this might be one reason why his account of the performance is silent on his participation and response. The final section of this chapter will consider "acting Inuit" and "becoming savage" in the context of Hall's broader mission in the Arctic. The particular ways that Hall "went native" were not incidental but formed a critical part of how he legitimated his mission in the Arctic. By demonstrating that a white man with no survival skills could thrive among Inuit, Hall showed that it was possible that some of Franklin's men had also survived among Inuit by "acting Inuit." Hall also demonstrated that it was possible (apparently, since we have only Hall's silence on the matter to tell us) to live with Inuit without engaging in sexual relationships with them, showing that it was possible to "go native" without "becoming savage," that is, without giving into "inappropriate" desires.72

72 Mary Louise Pratt's remarks on the problematics of reading Alexander von Humboldt's narrative of his travels in América (1814-25) raise important questions to be asked in reading Hall's narrative, which is in many ways part of the same genre of exploratory travel writing: What hand did Humboldt's American interlocuters have directly and otherwise, in the European reinvention of their continent? To what extent was Humboldt a transculturator, transporting to Europe knowledges American in origin; producing European knowledges infiltrated by non-European ones? To what extent, within relations of colonial subordination, did Americans inscribe themselves on him, as well as he on América? Such questions are difficult to answer from within bourgeois, author-centered ways of knowing texts - which is why it is important to ask them, not just of Humboldt but of all travel writing. Every travel account has this heteroglossic dimension; its knowledge comes not just out of a traveler's sensibility and powers of observation, but out of interaction and experience usually directed and managed by 'travelees,' who are working from their own understanding of the world and of what the Europeans are and ought to be doing... Who knows what their assumptions and expectations were? The conventions of travel and exploration writing (production and reception) constitute the European subject as a self-sufficient, monadic source of knowledge. That configuration virtually guarantees that the interactional history of the representation will turn up only as 111 Years after Dr. John Rae's unpopular report was published, the spectre of cannibalism still hung over the expedition. If some of Franklin's men had survived, as Hall's narrative premised, it would have been impossible for readers of Hall's book to forget the insinuation that these men had survived by consuming human flesh, raising the question of whether anyone would have wanted to find survivors if the discovery proved that the most respected men in the British navy "became savage." By showing that it was possible for a white man to live among Inuit without indulging in sexual relations with Inuit women, Hall showed that it was possible to choose how to "go native" and that "going native" did not mean giving into physical temptations. After briefly examining how representations of cannibalism often relied on sexualized imagery, allowing us to consider interracial sex and cannibalism as part of a continuum of behaviours associated with "becoming savage," I will argue that Hall demonstrated that it was possible that some, if not all, of Franklin's men could have avoided "savage" desires, not only for Inuit women but also for the consumption of human remains, surviving not only physically but also culturally.

"Acting Inuit" As Berton's epigraph indicates, when Hall travelled to the Arctic, he was utterly unqualified for polar exploration. His expedition was poorly provisioned. He had none of the skills - sledging or snowshoeing, navigation, hunting - that had aided explorers like John Rae and William Kennedy who had travelled, as Hall planned to, lightly. His preparation for his expedition included camping on a hill behind Cincinnati's observatory,

traces, or through the 'travelee's' own forms of representation, such as autoethnographic materials of the sort mentioned at points throughout this book. (135-36)

112 devouring narratives of Arctic exploration, and meeting with as many explorers and whalers with Arctic experience as he could. His only qualification, as Berton suggests, was his obsession with the Franklin expedition. He was convinced that rescuing Franklin survivors was his mission and expressed this conviction in the introduction to his narrative: "In one word, then, it seemed to me as if I had been called, if I may so speak, to try and do the work" (3).

Considering Hall's lack of preparation, it was probably fortunate that his initial plans were derailed early. When he reached Northumberland Inlet, where the George Henry would hunt for whales, he planned to find a crew of Inuit to accompany him, by boat, to Igloolik (a distance of approximately 800 km). From there, he hoped to reach King William Island before winter set in.73 Despite warnings from Captain Budington and Koojesse, an Inuk Hall befriended and who appears throughout his narrative, that his plan was impossible, it was only after his small boat was destroyed by a storm in late September 1860 that Hall realized it would be impossible to travel to King William Island in 1860. Instead, he decided to use the George Henry as a base and spent the winter visiting nearby Inuit settlements and travelling with Inuit on multi-day expeditions. Hall adopted a number of Inuit behaviours, such as sleeping in tents and igloos with Inuit families and wearing fur and skin clothing, but eating Inuit food was the primary activity he identified as necessary to ensure his survival in the Arctic and it was by eating Inuit food that Hall tells readers he felt the most like an Inuk. Eating Inuit food meant getting over his repulsion with raw meat, overlooking cultural differences in eating practices, and actually learning how to eat raw meat. Before addressing Hall's accounts of

73 It took McClintock's expedition two years to reach King William Island because of poor weather and ice. Hall's belief that he could make it to the region before winter set in demonstrates his naivete.

113 learning to eat Inuit food, it is important to briefly mention structural anthropologist

Claude Lévi-Strauss' well-known theorization of "raw" and "cooked." Lévi-Strauss argues that the distinction between raw and cooked food is analogous to the division between nature and culture. He describes a "culinary triangle" composed of raw, cooked, and rotten food, which is a semantically empty field that reveals only how specific societies understand the relation of the three terms:

We will start from the hypothesis that this activity [cooking] supposes a system which is located. . . within a triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked and the rotted. . . No doubt these notions constitute empty forms: they teach us nothing about the cooking of any specific society, since only observation can tell us what one means by 'raw,' 'cooked,' and 'rotted' and we can suppose that it will not be the same for

all. (587) Lévi-Strauss points out that what constitutes "raw" food as opposed to "cooked" food is culturally determined. What is remarkable in Hall's text is that he observes precisely the same phenomenon determining his own attitude toward what Inuit ate. Watching Inuit eat whale meat, Hall writes: My opinion is, that the Esquimaux practice of eating their food raw is a good one - at least for the better preservation of their health. To one educated otherwise, as we whites are, the Esquimaux custom of feasting on uncooked meats is highly repulsive; but eating meats raw or cooked is entirely a matter of education... When I saw the natives actually feasting on the raw flesh of the whale, I thought to myself, 'Why cannot I do the same?' and the response to my question came

114 rushing through my brain, independent of prejudice, 'Because of my education -

because of the customs of my people.' (110) While it is easy to criticize Hall's attitude toward Inuit life and customs today, it is vital to recognize that at the time he was writing, his cultural relativism was very progressive. This is clear if one compares Hall's words to a passage that appeared in an anonymous article entitled "Peuples ichtyophages et créophages" in the French journal Magasin

Pittoresque in 1854: "The Eskimo, the Fuegians and, more rarely, the Hottentots, eat raw meat with an altogether bestial gluttony. . . The Fuegian devours anything he finds, rotten fish, great molluscs and octopuses that are entirely decomposed. The Australian eats reptiles raw... These singular deviations from the habitual practices of civilization indicate that these nations have fallen to the last degree of mindlessness" (qtd. in Jahoda 18). This passage indicates that the desire to eat "raw" or "rotten" food is a sign of the difference between "civilized" and "savage" races and is, furthermore, a sign that races that eat these foods have degenerated from an earlier state of civilization. I point out this contrast not to excuse what seem today to be highly problematic attitudes toward Inuit and intercultural contact operating in Hall's text but to indicate that, for his time, Hall was

doing something quite radical by living among Inuit. In early September 1860, shortly after his arrival in the Arctic, Hall watched Inuit eat whale meat and was shocked by their "gluttony": "the quantity taken in one day - enough to last for several days - is what astonishes me! They are, in truth, a peculiar people" (100). Yet as Hall "stood upon the rocky shore observing the busy natives at work carving the monster," he started to think that the whale ligaments "looked white and delicious as the breast of a turkey!" (1 10) He quickly decided to overcome his

"education" and joined in the feast: 115 Taking from the hands of Ugamg his seal-knife, I peeled offa delicate slice of this spinal ligament, closed my eyes, and cried out 'Turkey!' But it would not go down so easy. Not because the stomach had posted up its sentinel to say 'no whale can come down here!' but because it was tougher than any bull beef of Christendom! For half an hour I tried to masticate it, and then found it was even tougher than when I began. At length I discovered I had been making a mistake in the way to eat it. The Esquimaux custom is to get as vast a piece into their distended mouths as they can cram, and then, boa constrictor-like, first lubricate it over, and so swallow it quite whole!... Therefore I tried the Esquimaux plan and succeeded, but that one trial was sufficient at the time. (110-11) In this passage, Hall describes his first unsuccessful attempt to eat the ligament and how his clever observation of the way Inuit ate it allowed him to succeed, but he provides no information about whether he asked his companions if he could participate in the event or how he thought Inuit understood his participation. Although Hall's narrative indicates that he switched from observing the feast to participating in it and eventually figured out that he needed to imitate how Inuit ate the ligament in order to eat it, Hall's account of this encounter tells readers that it took him half an hour to notice that he was not eating like the Inuit he was with, suggesting that Hall had not yet learned that he needed to act as an active spectator to Inuit culture in order to successfully participate in it. Similarly, his silence on how he thought Inuit understood what he was doing suggests that he did not perceive what he was doing as a social performance for an Inuit audience. As we will see, Hall seems to have quickly learned that in order to participate in Inuit life, he had to become more skilled at reading Inuit responses and at imitating Inuit actions. By 30 October 1860, Hall suggests that he was getting better at imitating Inuit and 116 was becoming more accepted by Inuit. He describes attending a seal feast in a tent and finding his friend Koojesse seated at the back of the tent between two pretty girls. He joined the threesome, who were "engaged in doing full justice to a dish of smoking-hot seal-blood!" (140). At first Hall thought that Koojesse seemed ashamed at being watched eating the dish; however, he apparently relaxed when Hall "expressed a readiness to partake of any food they had to spare" (140). One of the women gave Hall a piece of seal vertebrae, surrounded by meat, which he ate. Then Hall decided to try the seal-blood: On first receiving the dish containing this Esquimaux stew, I hesitated. It had gone the round several times, being replenished as occasion required; but its external appearance was not at all inviting... But I screwed up courage to try it, and finally, when the dish came again to those by my side, I asked Koojesse, 'Pe-e-uke?' (Is it good?) 'Armelarng, armelarng' (Yes, yes), was the reply. All eyes were fixed upon me as I prepared to join with them in drinking some of their favourite soup. Now the custom of the Esquimaux in drinking seal-blood is to take one long s-o-o-o-p - one mouthful, and then pass the dish on to the rest till the round is made. I followed suit, and, to my astonishment, found the mixture not only good, but really excellent. (14O)74 Hall attempted to participate in the feast but actually became the centre of attention, with all eyes fixed on him. Unlike when he ate the whale ligament, here he watched what others did before joining in and he imitated what they did as precisely as he could. He also recognized that with everyone in the tent watching him, he had to demonstrate that he enjoyed the dish. Hall tells readers that by showing his audience that he liked the seal

74 See Bennett and Rowley pp. 86-94 for Inuit perspectives on food sharing. 117 blood, he ingratiated himself to the group and particularly to his hostess: Seeing I was pleased with it, she who presided at the feast instantly made ready a pretty little cup, which was clean outside and in, or clean as an Esquimaux can make it, and filled it with the hot seal-blood. This I sipped down with as much satisfaction as any food I had eaten in my life; and, in return for the friendly act of my Innuit hostess, I gave her a highly-coloured cotton handkerchief. She was in ecstasies with it, and the whole company joined with her in expression of kindness and goodwill toward me. Clearly I had ingratiated myself with one party of the

natives here, and this I was determined to do in like manner elsewhere. (140) Receiving the special cup of seal-blood and giving the woman the handkerchief seems to mark the moment as an intercultural exchange. Yet while Hall's demonstration of pleasure at the seal-blood and the woman's "ecstasies" over the handkerchief indicate that the exchange made both happy, the woman's gift also set Hall apart - he was given

special recognition for doing what Inuit do normally. While drinking the seal-blood appeared to include Hall in the community, it also marked him as an outsider.

In order for Hall to succeed in his mission - of travelling across the Arctic to interview Inuit about Franklin's missing men - he had to eat Inuit food: eating raw meat was both a physical and a social necessity. It would have been impossible for Hall, even with Inuit help, to have carried sufficient food for the extended journey to King William

Island: it was essential that he grow accustomed to eating food that could be obtained while out on the land. Furthermore, Hall quickly came to suspect that fresh meat prevented scurvy: when he returned from his first extended trip with Inuit, in February

1861, he found that some of the whalemen were suffering from scurvy. He commented, "forty-three days in an igloo among Innuits was, in my opinion, the best cure for them" 118 (190). While Hall made no new discovery here - explorers like John Rae had long suspected that fresh meat prevented scurvy - it is significant that during almost nine years in the Arctic he never suffered from the disease.

Hall had no survival skills, apart from those he gained by reading books about exploration. He could not hunt or navigate on the tundra. When travelling, he was completely reliant on Inuit and he knew it. On 10 January 1861 Hall left the George Henry for his first extended trip with Inuit. He took some of his own food with him - preserved mutton, salt pork, sea-bread - and his own bedding, but he had no tent, no hunting gear, and no gun. He shared the food he brought with his Inuit companions and, after ten days, the group's food supply ran dangerously low due to bad weather and poor hunting. Ebierbing, an Inuk man with whom Hall developed a close friendship, went back to the George Henry for supplies, and when he returned, Hall recognized that he had only

survived because of Ebierbing: "I was by his side grasping his hand, and, with a grateful heart, thanking him for the really good deed he had performed in thus coming alone with

the relief I saw before me" (180). The success of Hall's expedition depended on him receiving Inuit help and could be jeopardized if he upset his guides. In September 1861, Koojesse demonstrated this to Hall. While traveling by boat in Frobisher Bay, searching for relics of the sixteenth-century Frobisher expedition,75 Koojesse refused to stop to allow Hall to examine the shoreline. Hall does not tell readers why Koojesse did not want to stop: it could have been out of spite, but it also could have been because stopping would have prevented the Inuit from getting to hunting or fishing areas they wanted to

75 One of the most significant discoveries Hall made during his 1860-62 expedition was identifying the site where 's vessels had landed during his three expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578. The landing spot had been long forgotten in England but Inuit oral history included what turned out to be accurate accounts of the visits and allowed the landing place to be conclusively determined. 119 reach (Loomis 124). Hall was upset by Koojesse's refusal, recording that Koojesse "curtly and even savagely replied, 'You stop; I go'" (383). Remembering that Koojesse's words were likely translated for Hall, it is important to recognize that Hall's description of Koojesse replying "savagely" is his interpretation of Koojesse's tone in the context of how Koojesse's refusal prevented Hall from doing what he wanted to do. Hall tells readers that he was "forced to smother [his] anger, and submit to the mortification of being obliged to yield before these untamed children of the icy north" (383). Furthermore, Hall relates that he recognized Koojesse was making a particular point, writing, "I was completely at the mercy of Koojesse and his companions. He especially would do just as he pleased; and if I attempted to show opposition or express a determination to do as I might wish, ominous looks and sharp words met me. Several times I felt obliged to submit, for I knew my life was wholly in their hands" (382-83). Hall's frustration emerges as he implicitly contrasts himself, as a "civilized" explorer hoping to find valuable historical evidence, with the "untamed children of the icy north" and finds, despite his belief that his goal is more important and that he is more "civilized" and "adult" than his companions, his supposed cultural authority as a member of a "civilized" race does not give him any real authority over Inuit. Hall's response to Koojesse was fairly typical of what happened when his goals were in opposition to Inuit's; even his sympathetic biographer Loomis writes that Hall "usually admired the Eskimo's independence, but when it interfered with what he wanted to do, he was angered; independence then seemed irresponsibility" (124). Hall's response to Koojesse during the boat expedition demonstrates that although he had learned that imitating Inuit behaviours, especially those related to eating and feasting, gave him limited access to what Stephen

120 Greenblatt terms "mimetic capital" (6),76 it did not necessarily give him any power over his companions. Hall was certainly not the only explorer to adapt to life in the Arctic by adopting indigenous practices. Hudson's Bay Company employees, because they often lived and worked closely with indigenous peoples, were particularly likely to reject European practices in favour of indigenous ones. John Rae, the HBC factor who heard stories of Franklin's men from Inuit, thrived during extensive travel in the Arctic by becoming an expert hunter, by using dogsleds and snow shoes instead of man-hauled sledges, and by learning to build igloos to avoid carrying heavy camping gear (Rae, Arctic Correspondences xciii-xcviii). William Kennedy, the son of a HBC trader and a Cree woman, was selected by Lady Franklin to lead one of her search expeditions. Kennedy's 1851-52 expedition aboard the Prince Albert failed to uncover any sign of the missing men; however, Kennedy and his men survived an arduous 2000 km trek after their ship became trapped in ice, in large part because they wore skin and fur clothing - warmer than navy-issued clothing - and used dogsleds for easier travel.77 Hall's expedition differed from Rae's and Kennedy's because while Rae and Kennedy relied on Inuit behaviours that they had learned, Hall relied on his Inuit companions themselves. Furthermore, unlike Rae and Kennedy, Hall did not adopt Inuit behaviours simply

76 In Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt uses the term "mimetic capital" to describe the "multiple sites of representation and the crowd's movement among them" that are linked to the "problem of the assimilation of the other" (6). Greenblatt conveys the sense that "mimesis, as Marx said of capital, is a social relation of production. I take this to mean that any given representation is not only the reflection or product of social relations but that it is itself a social relation, linked to the group understandings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts that exist in other spheres of the culture in which it circulates. This means that representations are not only products but producers, capable of decisively altering the forces that brought them into being" (6). Greenblatt usefully reminds us that Hall's ways of "acting Inuit" were not stable representations of what Inuit were but also produced both Hall's and Inuit's understandings of each other. 77 See Cooper pp. 159-166 for a description of Kennedy's expedition. 121 because they were practical, he was highly conscious of the performative nature of his imitation.

Hall was aware of the dual audience for whom he was performing, comprised of the Inuit who actually watched him and of imagined readers at home. When Hall attended a seal feast in April 1861 with a group of Inuit he was visiting, he was very alert to how his performance was received by the others in the igloo, who were relative strangers to him:

Lastly came - what? Entrails, which the old lady drew through her fingers yards in length. This was served to every one but me in pieces from two to three feet long. I saw at once that it was supposed I would not like to eat this delicacy; but, having partaken of it before, I signified my wish to do so now; for, be it remembered, there is no part ofa seal but is good. I drew the ribbon-like food through my teeth Innuit fashion; finished it, and then asked for more. This immensely pleased the old dames. They were in ecstasies. It seemed as if they thought me the best of the group. They laughed - they bestowed upon me all the most pleasant epithets their language would permit. I was one of them - one of the honoured few! (235-36) Hall assumed that he was initially excluded from eating the entrails because his companions thought that as a qallunaaq, he would not like them. Hall not only ate the entrails, which he was not supposed to like, but he did it correctly, in "Innuit fashion." The old women responded by laughing and by praising him. Hall took the old women's laughter as a sign that he had been accepted as one of the group, telling readers that the old women's laughter was a sign of inclusion. At the same time, Hall's italicization of

"delicacy," his description of the Inuit elders as "old dames," and his remark that he has become one of the "honoured few" by eating the seal entrails suggest that he recognizes 122 the irony at work in his description of the feast: his readers at home would hardly think of raw seal entrails as a delicacy or of elderly Inuit women as "dames"78 and they likely would not have much wanted to be one of the "honoured few" included in the feast. What Hall does through these satirical gestures is indicate that even as he suggests the possibility of intercultural sociability being facilitated at the feast, he also recognizes that many of his readers will see the scene of the Inuit feast as evidence of Inuit barbarism. Michael Taussig's description of how mimesis operates in scenes of intercultural contact illuminates the ambivalence with which we must read Hall's imitation of Inuit actions and the possible ways that Inuit perceived his attempts at imitation. Taussig describes the mimetic faculty as "the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other" (xiii). Mimesis is a reciprocal action and always raises the question, which Taussig asks in discussing the example of Darwin's first contact with Fuegians, of "Who is mimicking whom, the sailor or the savage?" (76-77). In the colonial encounter, mimesis can be "understood as redolent with the trace ofthat space between, a colonial space par excellence. . . so mimesis becomes an enactment not merely o/and [sic] original but by an 'original'" (Taussig 79). Finally, it is a tricky phenomenon, "Pulling you this way and that, mimesis plays this trick of dancing between the very same and the very different. An impossible but necessary, indeed an everyday affair, mimesis registers both sameness and difference, of being like, and of being Other" (Taussig 129). Taussig forces one to inquire whether the feast scene can be understood as reciprocally mimetic: Hall apparently attempts to fit into the group by demonstrating his ability to imitate how Inuit eat seal entrails, but one must ask whether the Inuit responses - "ecstasies," laughter, "pleasant

78 See O.E.D. "dame," definitions 1 and 2. 123 epithets" - might not be an Inuit imitation of Hall's (perhaps overly enthusiastic) demonstration of pleasure at what he ate.79 The point here is not to determine precisely how Inuit responded to Hall's performance, but to indicate the many receptive possibilities that arise if one attempts to reconstruct the embodied performance which

Hall's text documents.

While Hall became, after spending almost a year in the Arctic, a much more skilled reader of Inuit reactions, it is also possible that his assumption that the women's laughter is a sign of his acceptance into the group is a misreading of their response to his attempt at imitation. When he left these Inuit shortly after the feast, he had forgotten his own fur clothing and borrowed reindeer trousers, mittens, and socks from a man named

Seko. The trousers he borrowed were far too small and an Inuk woman had to slit them with her knife to help him fit into them. Hall described how he tried to move in the too- small pants and how his new friends reacted to seeing him:

But on attempting to move, I was as if in a vice. I could not walk, I could not run, nor could I seat myself; I could only waddle and tumble down! On the ice in front

of the igloos I tried to get on, but you, my reader, should have been there to have seen and enjoyed the sight I presented, and to have heard the ringing, side-splitting

laughter of this generous-hearted and kind band of Innuits at the grotesque figure I

cut in old Seko's skin-tight breeches... long after our departure, on my looking back, I could see the merry lot still watching, and apparently enjoying the fun I

79 Mary Louise Pratt uses the phrase "mutual appropriation" to describe a similar event in Mungo Park's narrative of his travels in Africa. She relates "Park's arrival interrupts the local ritual, which then reconstitutes itself around him. He appropriates and is simultaneously appropriated by the ritual, required to play a role to satisfy people's curiosity, in exchange for satisfying his own. His role is a passive one, however, in which his own agency and desire play little part... This is not conquest, but anti-conquest" (80).

124 had created. (237)

Here the source of the laughter was Hall's ridiculous appearance in the trousers: he obviously did not fit into them and could not move gracefully in them. Wearing the too- small trousers turned into a comic performance in which Hall's attempt to look like an

Inuk only illustrated his physical difference. Returning to the feast scene, one is reminded of Homi Bhabha's phrase "almost the same, but not quite" (123) in considering the women's laughter at Hall's attempt to imitate Inuit eating habits. The situation Hall finds himself in might well be a reversal of the situation Qalasirssuaq, the Inuk translator and navigator discussed in chapter one, found himself in on the Assistance. Bhabha points out that colonial mimicry is not simply a performance practice, but is a "complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power" (122). It is the "desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite... the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (122). While I do not wish to engage with the specific political dynamics of Bhabha's argument at this point, I would like to use Bhabha's suggestion that mimicry functions as a disciplinary strategy to query whether Hall's performance of "acting Inuit" complicates

Bhabha's assumption, in the above passages, that colonial mimicry is primarily enacted by the colonizer on the colonized. In Hall's case, the binary of colonizer/colonized is not quite reversed but is perhaps disrupted. Hall thought of himself primarily as an explorer and secondarily as a missionary: a simplistic reading of his role in relation to Inuit would locate him as a colonizer. Yet we have already seen that Hall's mimicry of Inuit was necessary for his social and physical survival in the Arctic: in many situations his actual 125 social power compared to limit is closer to that of a colonized subject. This suggests that there is a potential counter-reading of the women's laughter: the old women may have laughed at Hall eating seal entrails not because his imitation was successful but because it highlighted the difference between him and them, underlining the naivete of his attempt to fit in through mimesis. Considering Hall as a (perhaps reversed) "mimic man," to borrow another of Bhabha's phrases, suggests that "acting Inuit" is an impossible performance for Hall to achieve. Anne McClintock describes the problem for Bhabha's mimic man as follows: "The mimic men are obliged to inhabit an uninhabitable zone of ambivalence that grants them neither identity nor difference; they must mimic an image that they cannot fully assume. Herein lies the failure of mimicry as Bhabha sees it, for in the slippage between identity and difference the 'normalizing' authority of colonial discourse is thrown into question. . .Mimicry becomes 'at once resemblance and menace'" (63). If colonial mimicry is always a failure, if it is impossible to "authentically" perform, we must consider that the laughter at Hall's attempt at mimicry could have been in recognition of this failure: the Inuit women might have been laughing not because Hall was one of them but because they recognized that he was absolutely not, and would never be, one of them. Hall's fantasy of "almost the same, but not quité" also operated in relation to his imaginary audience of readers at home. Hall straddles a fine line between collapsing racial difference - telling his readers that if they saw him, they would not be able to differentiate him from an Inuk - and reinforcing his readers' assumptions about "savages." Toward the end of the narrative, Hall describes how he imagines his readers would react to entering an Inuit home: When a white man for the first time enters one of their tupies or igloos, he is 126 nauseated with everything he sees and smells - even disgusted with the looks of the innocent natives, who extend to him the best hospitality their means afford. Take, for instance, the igloo in which I had an excellent dinner on the day last mentioned. Any one fresh from civilization, if entering this igloo with me, would see a company of what he would call a dirty set of human beings, mixed up among masses of nasty, uneatable flesh, skins, blood, and bones, scattered all about the igloo. He would see, hanging over a long, low flame, the oo-koo-sin (stone kettle), black with soot and oil of great age, and filled to its utmost capacity with black meat, swimming in a thick, dark, smoking fluid, as if made by boiling down the dirty scrapings of a butcher's stall. He would see men, women, and children - my humble self included - engaged in devouring the contents ofthat kettle, and he would pity the human beings who could be reduced to such necessity as to eat the horrid stuff. The dishes out of which the soup is taken would turn his stomach, especially when he should see dogs wash them out with their long pliant tongues previous to our using them. But I will not multiply particulars. (476-77) In this passage, Hall invites his reader to imagine entering the igloo with him, situating himself as a tour guide who can interpret the scene for his reader. His emphasis that his imagined reader is entering an igloo "for the first time" and that he is "fresh from civilization" implies that once his reader grows accustomed to Inuit life, the scene will appear less shocking. Yet the passage does nothing to convince the reader that the initial reaction Hall predicts - nausea at the sights in the igloo, disgust with the Inuit present - will change with extended contact. Hall's extensive description of what can only be termed "remains" - unidentifiable flesh, skin, bones, and blood - around the igloo and in the filthy pot on the stove makes it clear that Inuit, unlike Europeans, do not distinguish 127 between, to borrow Lévi-Strauss' s triangular formulation, "raw," "cooked," and "rotten" foods. Rather than rectify misguided southern perspectives on Inuit as "savages," as Hall initially seems to suggest he will, he reinforces circulating discourses concerning racial difference, particularly in collapsing the difference between Inuit and animals. Not only is the Inuit home unrecognizable as a human home, it is shared with dogs who, quite literally, take part in the meal with the Inuit by cleaning the bowls with their tongues before they eat. For readers familiar with John Rae' s report, the passage, particularly Hall's use of the word kettle, rather than dish or pot, to describe the serving vessel, would have cited Rae' s infamous description of the kettles filled with human remains that suggested that Franklin's men had resorted to cannibalism.80 One question that repeatedly arose in criticisms of Rae' s report concerned how Inuit would have recognized that the remains were human and not animal. In Hall's passage, this ambiguity is reversed: if Hall's reader assumes that the remains in the igloo and in the pot are animals and not humans, it is not because of any clarification on Hall's part but because the reader assumes that Hall, as a "civilized" person, would not resort to cannibalism. By raising the possibility of unintentional cannibalism, by failing to identify what kind of animal remains are in the igloo, and by indirectly citing Rae' s report, Hall also might have reminded many readers

80 While my interest in this chapter is primarily in how Hall's narrative demonstrates and plays with nineteenth-century discourses on cannibalism, a considerable body of critical work has been published in the last twenty years concerning the relationship between cannibalism, imperialism, and class. In her introduction to Eating Their Words (2001), Kristen Guest situates a wide variety of recent considerations of cannibalism in literary studies, arguing that although "Until fairly recently, literary scholarship often relegated the theme of cannibalism to the margins of critical discourse... Now, rather than relating cannibalism to contemporary events or a particular period's interest in sensationalizing its others, critics have begun to rethink how representations of cannibalism help us to produce, contest, and negotiate our identity as subjects" (1). Guest identifies Maggie Kilgour's study of cannibalism in From Communion to Cannibalism (1990) as the "seminal study" that led scholars to reconsider representations of cannibalism in literature (1). 128 familiar with Arctic exploration narratives of another famous case of possible accidental cannibalism: the possibility that Richardson, Hepburn, and Hood unintentionally ate human flesh during Franklin's near-disastrous 1819-22 expedition. Although the first lines of the passage imply that Hall will show readers how Inuit "really" are rather than reinforcing initial visceral reactions to the material conditions of Inuit life and although he tells readers that he devoured the contents of the kettle along with his Inuit companions, the passage makes the difference between Hall and Inuit clear. Though Hall can "act Inuit" by eating the same kind of food as Inuit, the fact of his writing the passage and narrating not only what happened during the feast but also an imagined reader's disgusted reaction to the feast situates him as an outside commentator as well as a participant. In the description, Hall appears to accept what is happening around him as normal, telling readers that he eats like the Inuit and avoiding any overt expression of repulsion toward his Inuit companions. But the act of gazing around the space as an outsider, demonstrating his awareness of how southern readers might react, demonstrates that he, unlike Inuit, is aware that there are other ways to live and that he recognizes that this is not how "civilized people" live. The same cultural relativism that allowed Hall to overcome taboos and eat raw whale ligament early in his expedition also allowed him to demonstrate that although he "acted Inuit," he could return to seeing Inuit life as a "civilized" person should when he returned to "civilization." Although Hall "acted Inuit" he had not "become savage." Imitating Inuit eating habits was pleasurable when Hall was on the land with Inuit, but when he was on the George Henry, he was clear that eating Inuit food was strictly a necessity. His representation of his own attitude toward "acting native" changed depending on his surroundings and companions in the narrative. While Hall was living 129 among limit, he rhapsodized about eating venison: "I bit off a mouthful of the saddle- piece: it was good. I took a morsel of the other; it was delightful; its flavour was a kind of sorrel acid; it had an ambrosial taste! it fairly melted in my mouth!" (438) In contrast, when the George Henry's men's rations were reduced during the second winter in the ice, many men began to supplement their diets with "black skin" (whale skin), leading Hall to remark: "I do not think it can be said that any of us ate 'black skin'. . . and other Innuit food because we really liked it. Some wise person has said that man should not live to eat but eat to live" (422). When Hall is among Inuit - performing for an Inuit audience within the text of his narrative - he takes great pleasure in eating Inuit food; however, when he is on the ship - performing for the qallunaat men on the ship - Inuit food becomes strictly a necessity for survival.

"Becoming Savage" The fear of "becoming savage" emerges as a haunting, lurking anxiety in Hall's text, manifested in his belief that interracial sex was immoral, in his criticisms of Inuit who chose "degeneration" over "improvement," and in his denunciations of Inuit spiritual practices as corrupt and potentially exploitative. What these three concerns have in common is not only that they each involve, as we will see, cultural practices enacted on the body but also that they each arise in and as performance. In this section, I will first describe how Hall's anxieties emerge through examples that he includes in his text and will then situate how each becomes visible in one particular shipboard performance that occurred on the George Henry. Hall went to the Arctic already convinced that miscegenation corrupted Inuit and his opinion did not change during his years in the north. Loomis quotes from one of 130 Hall's journal entries, written before he left for his first expedition, which makes Hall's views on interracial sex clear. Hall heard the story of "the disgraceful conduct of a well- known Commander (not unknown to history) who during a winter in the Arctic Regions turned his vessel into a !" (52). Loomis notes that although Hall left a blank space in his journal, his next comment clarified what this commander did: "What was it that brought destruction upon Sodom & G? This was damnable to thus treat the untutored Esquimaux. The males were indignant at the outrages committed upon their wives and daughters by CIVILIZED (?) WHITE MAN: O, my countrymen! Instead of lifting that poor benighted people by teaching virtue and civilization, you carry devils and damnation to them" (52). In this journal entry, Hall imagines Inuit men's anger at white men's sexual exploitation of their wives and daughters and suggests, without yet having been to the Arctic, that interracial sex corrupted not only the women involved in it, but the entire culture. According to Hall, whalers' higher level of civilization obligated them to improve Inuit, not to take advantage of them sexually. Once Hall arrived in the Arctic, he articulated his argument against interracial sexuality by claiming that women who became sexually involved with white men and their mixed-race children were socially disadvantaged among Inuit. Early in his first expedition, Hall met a woman named Puto who had a "white" child. Hall writes that: This woman had once been considered handsome, and even now showed some signs of her former beauty. She was about 35 years old, and though she had a hard time of it alone, supporting herself and child, yet she was generally cheerful, smart, kind, and industrious... Owing to some cause or other which I could only surmise, Puto suffered more from various privations than the other women. She was often a week with hardly anything to eat, and in consequence, her poor child 131 was nearly starved. (154-55) Hall does not further clarify what the cause of Puto's privations was, but his comment suggests that she suffered because she had no husband and that her relationship with a white man may have socially ostracized her. Hall met Puto again, this time living at the whaling depot, and notes "This woman was very badly off, her husband being dead, and she had but scant means of providing for herself and offspring" (290). Puto, unable to support herself, had been forced to abandon her Inuit lifestyle, at least temporarily, and rely on the help of the whalers. As I suggested earlier, it is virtually impossible to determine if Hall himself ever slept with an Inuk woman. He lived closely with Inuit men and women, often sleeping with Inuit families under communal skin blankets in what he called the "general bed" (175). He was certainly aware that it was possible for intimate relations to occur in close quarters. Hall recounts sleeping in an igloo with just Tookoolito and Punnie, two Inuit women with whom he spent a great deal of time, and being unable to sleep because he had cold feet. When he told Tookoolitoo his problem, she warmed his feet on her (presumably naked) body: Quick as thought, Tookoolito, who was distant from me just the space occupied by little Punnie (that is, Punnie slept in the middle), got down to the foot of her bed; thence she made passage for her hands directly across my feet, seizing them and drawing them aslant to her side. My modesty, however, was quieted when she exclaimed, 'Your feet are like ice, and must be warmed Innuit fashion! ' Tookoolito then resumed her place beneath her tuktoo furs, intermingling her hot feet with the ice-cold ones of mine. . . My feet now were not only glowing warm, but hot throughout the remainder of the night. When I awoke in the 132 morning, as near as I could guess, there were no less than three pairs of warm feet

all woven and interwoven, so that some difficulty was experienced to tell which were my own. (175-76) Chauncey Loomis writes that this story serves as "an example of his innocence; it would not have occurred to him that the story could be misconstrued" (97). On the other hand, I would argue that Hall's remark that his modesty "was quieted" demonstrates that he was well aware that he was treading on dangerous ground by placing his feet against Tookoolito's body. Loomis claims that it is unlikely that Hall engaged in sexual relations with any Inuit women because his "piety, although not clearheaded or profound, was genuine and strong, and there is something incorrigibly asexual in his personality and mind as they are revealed in his writing. . . Close as Hall came to the Eskimos, there was always something in him that kept him separate from them, and sexual intercourse with an Eskimo woman would have struck him as somehow demeaning" (97-98). Loomis' claim demonstrates the danger of collapsing Hall the person with Hall's depiction of himself in his narrative and journals: although Hall was strongly invested in criticizing

interracial sexual relations, this neither proves nor disproves Loomis's assertion that it is unlikely that Hall ever had intimate relations with Inuit women. The history of Inuit- qallunaat relations in the Arctic is littered with examples of European and American men who had children with Inuit women and whose personal papers do not document these relationships: if Hall did have a relationship with an Inuk woman, it would be very surprising if any record of this relationship existed in the written archive.81

81 For example, both Robert Hood and George Back, who served under Franklin during his first overland expedition, apparently had romantic relationships with an Inuk woman, Green Stockings, who they apparently dueled over. Green Stockings apparently bore Hood's child. The story of the duel and the child does not appear in records of the expedition but was recalled by 133 In one sense, Hall's disapproval of interracial sexuality was a product of the time in which he lived. Peggy Pascoe points out that in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, miscegenation laws: [P]rovide a virtual map of the changing legal definition of race and offer clues to a

major reformulation of the notion of racial difference that emerged in the late

1800s... During this period, western state legislators significantly expanded the original southern prohibitions on marriages between blacks and whites by adding

new groups - first Native Americans and then Asian Americans - to the list of those prohibited from marrying whites. (10) In 1 860, when Hall left New London for the Arctic, anti-miscegenation laws were in place in most states, with laws specifically prohibiting intermarriage between Native Americans and whites in place in eight states.82 During the 1860s, three more states -

Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon - enacted similar laws. The fear of miscegenation - whether in the form of interracial sexual activity or

marriage - was not a specifically American anxiety. Anne McClintock points out that in Victorian Britain "Métissage (interracial unions) generally and concubinage in particular, represented the paramount danger to racial purity and cultural identity in all its forms. Through sexual contact with women of color European men 'contracted' not only disease but debased sentiments, immoral proclivities and extreme susceptibility to decivilized states" (48). The fear of miscegenation hardly prevented it from occurring. Numerous studies of colonial relations during this period have interrogated the ways that interracial

Hepburn, who told it to William Kennedy and Joseph René Bellot when they served together on the Prince Albert during the search for Franklin. See Wiebe pp. 34-38. 82 The eight states specifically prohibiting intermarriage between Native Americans and whites were Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. 134 sexual relationships formed a critical aspect of how colonial governance was imagined and enacted: for instance Ann Laura Stoler's study of the interrelation of intimate relationships and colonial power in the colonies that make up present-day Indonesia examines the "contingent and changing affiliations of colonizer and colonized, European and white, as political subjects... From this vantage point, [the case studies she explores] reconsider the spaces of colonial governance: why some intimate sites were more politically charged and relevant to rule than others" (12-13). Both McClintock and Staler emphasize the immense sexual fascination displaced onto colonized bodies. McClintock identifies that "long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination - a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears" and that "Within this porno-tropic tradition, women figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess. Folklore saw them, even more than the men, as given to a lascivious venery so promiscuous as to border on the bestial" (22). Stoler adds: No subject is discussed more than sex in colonial literature and no subject more frequently invoked to foster the racist stereotypes of European society. The tropics provided a site for European pornographic fantasies long before conquest was under way, with lurid descriptions of sexual license, promiscuity, gynecological aberrations, and general perversion marking the Otherness of the colonized for

metropolitan consumption. (43) The conflict between desire for and fear of colonized bodies was not resolved or tidily displaced in the mid-Victorian period, as Stoler points out: "imperial contestations over métissage suggest nothing linear about these developments. Rather, class distinctions,

135 gender prescriptions, cultural knowledge, and racial membership were simultaneously invoked and strategically filled with different meanings for various projects" (84).

Hall never explicitly mentions interracial sexual activity occurring between Inuit women and the men of the George Henry, but the frequency of miscegenation between

Arctic whalers and Inuit women during the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century has been documented. Mid-century American whalers spent extended periods of time living closely with Inuit: Inuit men and women were hired to work for the ships and often lived aboard ships during the winters. It was common for crews and officers to engage in relatively long-term (i.e. lasting a full winter or even, particularly in the case of whaling captains, multiple winters) relationships with Inuit women and these liaisons frequently produced children. Lorris Elijah Borden, a Canadian surgeon who travelled to aboard DGS Neptune in 1903, commented that: It was customary, so I was told, for these whalers, when they were tied up for the

winter to take an Eskimo woman on board as a companion to while away the long winter months. Captain Comer [American captain of the Era, who had spent a

number of winters in Hudson's Bay] was no exception. . . A goodly number of children, who at the slightest glance, gave evidence that they were not pure

Eskimo led me to believe that the practice of a woman companion had been fairly

general. It was often hard to determine the other part of their ancestry as at times members of the whaling crew had been of many nationalities. (66-67)83

83 Borden's observation of the diversity of whaling crews is supported by statistical evidence: Margaret Creighton notes that "seafaring as a whole was an enterprise involving many races and nationalities" (8). While whalers operating out of New London, like the George Henry, tended to include fewer "seamen of color" than whalers operating out of other ports, such as New Bedford, Creighton notes that in 1858 12% of seamen on whalers out of New London were "of color" 136 W. Gillies Ross' study of relations between whalers and Inuit confirms that Borden's observation was accurate. Ross writes that although "sexual intercourse between whalemen and Eskimo women was restricted by the severity of the climate and the lack of privacy in snow houses and ships' forecastles" (119), sexual relationships were common and resulted not only in mixed-race children but also in the spread of venereal diseases - particularly gonorrhoea and syphilis - among Inuit (120-21). , the captain Borden referred to above, compiled a record of births near Cape Fullerton (on the west coast of Hudson's Bay) between 1889 and 1911 which indicated that almost half of the children born during this period had non-Inuit fathers (Ross 122). Although Hall was most vocal about his disapproval of miscegenation and his worry for mixed-race children, he also took issue with other signs of racial hybridity. While Hall suggests that Inuit could be "improved," particularly through exposure to Christianity, he seems to have found it deeply problematic when this conversion process stalled, resulting in Inuit occupying a permanent liminal place between cultures. For an Inuk to appear "civilized" or potentially "civilize-able" and then to choose not to fully improve was equivalent, Hall seems to suggest, to "becoming savage." When Hall met Tookoolito (the Inuk woman who "innocently" warmed his feet) he tells readers he was happily surprised to discover that she behaved immediately like a "civilized" woman. Tookoolito and her husband Ebierbing had travelled to England and while there they adopted many British habits, which they continued to practice upon their return to the

Arctic. Hall describes the first time he saw Tookoolito:

(213) and that 21% of crew members were not American (216). By 1878, 30% of New London crew members were not American (216). 137 While intently occupied in my cabin, writing, I heard a soft, sweet voice say, 'Good morning, sir.' The tone in which it was spoken - musical, lively, and varied - instantly told me that a lady of refinement was there greeting me. I was astonished. Could I be dreaming? No! I was wide awake, and writing. But, had a thunder-clap sounded on my ear, though it was snowing at the time, I could not have been more surprised than I was at the sound ofthat voice. I raised my head: a lady was indeed before me, and extending an ungloved hand. . . The doorway in which she stood leads from the main cabin into my private room. Directly over this entrance was the skylight, admitting a flood of light, and thus revealed to me crinoline, heavy flounces, an attenuated toga, and an immensely expanded 'kiss- me-quick' bonnet, but the features I could not at first make out. . . But, on turning her face, who should it be but a lady Esquimaux!... She was the Tookolito [sic] I had so much desired to see, and directly I conversed with her, she showed herself to be quite an accomplished person. She spoke my own language fluently, and there, seated at my right in the main cabin, I had a long and interesting conversation with her. (133-34) Hall's description of Tookoolito's arrival in his cabin, particularly his image of an apparently "civilized" woman - wearing a crinoline and a bonnet, speaking pleasantly in English - appearing to him, immediately suggests the importance of this moment as a component of his narrative of contact with Inuit. Hall tells readers that he was not initially sure whether her voice came to him in reality or in a dream. This, combined with his description of the light shining down on her from the skylight suggests that Hall imagined her as a spiritual figure, sent to him through some kind of divine intervention. The mystery surrounding Tookoolito's appearance is heightened by the ambiguity initially 138 surrounding her racial identity - her bonnet, by hiding her face, also hides her race - and Hall is at first confused about whether she is white or Inuk, "civilized" or "savage." Hall quickly clarifies that although Tookoolito is Inuk, she has become partially "civilized" through contact with Europeans in England and he then describes how Tookoolito has learned the "civilized" pastime of knitting and has acquired a taste for that "soothing, cheering, invigorating emblem of civilization - T-E-A!" (138) From her first appearance, Tookoolito is established as a racially hybrid subject; however, it is also immediately clear that Hall hopes that this racial hybridity is a stage Tookoolito will pass through on her way to becoming fully "civilized." Hall dreamt of Tookoolito becoming a missionary among Inuit, a hope which arose from the conflation of domesticity, "civilized" femininity, and Christianity. Because Tookoolito spoke English and had adopted many white behaviours, particularly those typically associated with feminine domesticity, such as knitting, Hall hoped that she could teach other Inuit about "civilized" customs, including Christianity, and thus improve her people. Hall tells readers his plan for Tookoolito to "help" other Inuit, which he developed immediately after meeting her: In all the places around Northumberland Inlet she has lived, and done what she could to improve her people. A singular fact relative to dressing her hair, keeping her face and hands cleanly, and wearing civilization dresses - others of her sex, in considerable numbers, follow these fashions imported by her. This shows to me what one person like Tookoolito could accomplish in the way of the introduction of schools and churches among this people. (136) Hall seems to have believed that conversion of Inuit was not only possible but also highly desirable. In the context of Hall's own modest beginnings (Loomis 27-28), this belief in 139 improvement through conversion marks him as part of a larger movement simultaneously occurring among British missionaries. George Stocking describes how (often self- educated, much like Hall) British missionaries understood their encounters with

"savages:" Although they were full of the spirit of self-abnegation and Christian love, these

motives were compromised somewhat by an aggressive ethnocentrism. When confronted with peoples whose cultural values seemed at polar variance, they assumed that because they themselves had risen from ignorance and low estate by their own exertions and by embracing vital Christianity, the natives to whom they

offered education and the word of God would do likewise. When these

expectations were frustrated, they were quite capable of portraying fallen savage man in rather bleak terms, whether to vindicate their own disappointed efforts or to extort those at home to greater ones. (87-88)

In tracing out Hall's description of his relationship to Tookoolito, the extent to which he falls into the pattern described by Stocking will become apparent.

Hall quickly began his attempts to convert Tookoolito and seems to have taken any opportunity available to teach her about Christianity. He recounts a conversation in which she attempted to explain why Inuit leave family members alone to die and in which Hall tried to convince her that Christian practices were more compassionate and ethical.

Hall apparently told Tookoolitoo: "On Christmas day I gave you a good book - the

Bible. That book is the Word of God. It tells you and me - everybody - to visit the sick, the afflicted, the widow, the helpless, the poor" and then tells his readers:

Kindly I proceeded, to the best of my poor ability, to show her wherein it was

wrong thus to leave the sick - the dying. Her astonishment at what I said seemed 140 as great to her as was mine at her recorded remark. . . In my arguments with Tookoolito I told her it was not to be wondered at that she and her people believed many unreasonable things, when there had been no one to teach them better - no one to tell them of the Bible. I told her that some people of America and in England believed a great many ridiculous things, but that did not make them true; told her that I only wished to do her good; that whenever I could kindly show where they - her people - were doing wrong, I should do so; that if she or her people could prove to me her or their ways were all the best, then I would be one to do as Innuits did. (165) While Hall suggests in this passage that he is open to being converted to Inuit beliefs, it is unlikely that this was ever a real possibility. Although Hall often deferred to Inuit when it came to their survival or hunting skills, in the case of spiritual differences, he had the ultimate authority - the Bible - on his side and could always refer Tookoolito to it, as he did in the above passage. Hall seems to indicate, in his hope that Tookoolitoo would teach other Inuit to be "civilized," that Tookoolito's ways of "acting white" - drinking tea, wearing white clothes, and especially learning to read the Bible - could permanently change her and make her more "civilized." Hall never, in his narrative, recognizes that Tookoolito "acted white" in ways that nearly mirrored how he "acted Inuit:" Tookoolito drank tea, Hall ate seal; Tookoolito wore a crinoline, Hall wore fur trousers; Tookoolito read the Bible, Hall attended shaman ceremonies. Hall never acknowledged that "acting Inuit" could lead him to become more like an Inuk, yet his account of his actions toward Tookoolito's conversion suggests that he believed that by "acting white" Tookoolito would become more like an American or European.

141 During Hall's second expedition, Tookoolito's child became very ill and she openly rejected Hall's help, refusing medicine he provided and participating in Inuit spiritual ceremonies.84 Tookoolito, according to Hall, returned to Inuit beliefs because the shaman, or angakkuk^ told her the spirits (tuurngait) were angry with her for abandoning her religion and were making her child sick in order to punish her. In the time between the two expeditions, Hall returned to the United States with Tookoolito and her husband Ebierbing. The shaman's accusation, that Tookoolito had abandoned Inuit spiritual beliefs, seems likely to be a direct result of her association with Hall and with the perception that she had "gone white." The published account of Hall's second expedition, edited by J.E. Nourse, describes the ceremony conducted to cure the baby's illness: So strong had been the persuasions of the women of the party, and so fully under the power of their people's law were even Ebierbing and Too-koo-li-too. . . that during this temporary failure of the power of [Hall's] medicines, these parents gave themselves fully up to this superstition. [Hall's] notes show how sincerely grieved he was at the risk to which this giving up of medicine was subjecting the child; how tried in spirit he was at their degrading subjection, and yet how helpless he was to afford relief. Too-koo-li-too, when almost persuaded to let the child again have relief, pleaded that she and her husband would be cursed by the Innuits; and told Hall plainly that if the an-ge-ko were not obeyed they would all desert him. The whole of this matter was still the more trying, because, although there were some singular phenomena for which Hall says he could no more

84 Tookoolito had participated in Inuit spiritual ceremonies since meeting Hall, see Hall pp. 526; however, this was one of the first times that Inuit and Christian/American practices were openly in conflict for Tookoolito. 85 Hall records angakkuk as angeko or an-ge-ko in his narrative and journal. Angakkuit (plural version oí angakkuk) is the spelling used by Dorothy Eber in Encounters on the Passage. 142 account than for like things in the spirit-rappings in his own country, the actions of the an-ge-ko could generally as plainly be seen through as was his object. (244) While it is impossible to separate Nourse's reading of Hall's journals from Hall's own response to the event, the narrative makes it clear that Hall disapproved of Tookoolito and Ebierbing's belief in the angakkuit ceremony. Loomis describes Hall's reaction to Tookoolito' s decision to live according to Inuit beliefs: "As the months passed and she continued to live under what Hall considered to be a superstitious regimen, his annoyance sometimes flared into anger - at her and her culture. He did not like to be reminded that her Christianity was only a late and superficial modification of her native beliefs" (198). Although neither Hall, nor Nourse, nor Loomis tells us precisely what Hall found so problematic about Tookoolito' s return to Inuit spirituality, I suspect that considering Hall's investment in converting Tookoolito to Christianity, the problem lay in two things: the injury to Hall's pride at his failure to convert Tookoolito and Tookoolito' s decision not to be converted to Christianity and therefore "civilized." Tookoolito's actions were problematic for Hall because although it seemed that "acting white" could lead to "becoming civilized," she in fact demonstrated the impossibility of Hall's hopes. Her liminal position between Inuit and white culture was just that, not a stage toward racial improvement.

Tookoolito's return to Inuit spiritual practices was likely even more problematic for Hall because, his narrative suggests, he was convinced that angakkuit were often corrupt and that they performed fraudulent ceremonies in order to exploit Inuit. Hall's narrative includes a number of examples oí angakkuit ceremonies that he seems to mention in order to highlight his own ability to "see through" them: I will include just one which both illustrates Hall's perspective as an observer and indicates how Hall came to 143 believe that one of the problems with Inuit spirituality was that it linked sexual "exploitation" to religious practice.86 Angakkuit ceremonies, as noted by Hall and in recent accounts of Inuit culture, were a central part of Inuit life until early in the twentieth century. Dorothy Eber remarks that during the mid-nineteenth century:

Shamans were the regulators of the Inuit world, the mediators between humans and the spirit realm. They were said to fly through the air to faraway places, assume animal forms, cure human sickness, and make animals plentiful when people were hungry. They gained their powers through inheritance or a 'calling' or rigorous initiation. They were assisted by tuumgait, their spirit helpers, who were the souls of animals but could also be souls of inanimate objects such as

rocks, mountains, or icebergs. A shaman might receive tuumgait through inheritance, as a gift from his tutor at the time of initiation, or he might have to suffer greatly to induce a spirit to come to him. (Encounters xvii) Shaman ceremonies frequently took place in qaggiq, which were large buildings "used principally for feasting and dancing" at larger camps (Bennett and Rowley 227). Simon Inuksaq's description of shaman ceremonies is included in Bennett and Rowley's Uqalurait: "They would meet in a qaggiq; the shaman would be there. . . The shaman would do the performance at this time. We would see different things. The shaman would change in many ways - only half of his fingers would be there at times. The shamans are able to see what we normal people cannot see. They could do impossible things and they

86 An evidentiary problem plagues Hall's accounts of witnessing Inuit ceremonies: Hall's representation of the events he witnessed suggests that he was watching "authentic" ceremonies, that is, that Inuit changed nothing about what they were doing in response to Hall's presence as witness. Because the only account we have is from Hall's perspective, it is critical to note that his presence might well have fundamentally changed any of the performances he describes. 144 are able to take away the fears of the person who is not well" (381-82). While Inuksaq's account emphasizes what the shaman could do and Eber' s remarks concern how one became a shaman, Hall's account, in contrast, emphasizes the performative aspects of the ceremony. When Hall first met Mingumailo, a shaman, in November 1860, he says he was skeptical: "It appeared to me that he was one of those who lived upon the credulity and ignorance of his race" (142). After this first impression, Hall went with Mingumailo to his tent, following him because Hall was apparently "desirous of witnessing some of the farther acts of this curious and important personage" (142). The ceremony that was to be performed, as far as Hall understood it, was intended to communicate with Kudlago, an Inuk man who had recently died.87 After he entered the shaman's tent with Koojesse, who was related to Kudlago, he described what happened for his readers: Now commenced the solemn exercises of the peculiar worship of these people. Mingulamilo sat facing us. He began by rapidly clapping his hands; so rapidly, indeed, that it was impossible to count the strokes. Then he accompanied this clapping by some metaphorical expressions beyond the power of ordinary intelligences to divine; and, indeed, no one but an angeko is considered capable of divining them... Of course, I demeaned myself accordingly, and was as quiet and serious a listener as any one there. Occasionally the angeko would cease his voice and the motion of his hands. Then all became still as death. Presently, with renewed vigour he would recommence his services, patting his hands - which were moved around during the operation - now in a circle, now before my face,

87 Kudlago was the man who died during Hall's trip north and who was supposed to act as Hall's translator during his expedition. 145 now before Koojesse's.... Every now and then, with his eyes staring into the farthest recesses of the tent, he would become fixed as marble, and looking quite

hideous.

At such times Koojesse was brought into active use. He was directed, as much by the angeko's signs as by the sudden and sharp words uttered, to fix his eyes upon this point of the tent, then that, but more particularly to where it was said, by the wizard, "Kudlago 's spirit shook the skin coverings.''' Poor Koojesse! I could not help pitying him, though myself hardly able to control the laughter reigning within me. There he sat, large drops of perspiration streaming from his nose (Esquimaux sweat profusely only on the nose), and as earnest as though life and soul were the issue. (142-43) During the first part of his account of the ceremony, Hall suggests that although Koojesse believed in the ceremony and earnestly participates in it, Hall himself recognized that Mingumailo was not genuinely communicating with the dead Kudlago. Hall "demeans" himself accordingly in order to witness the ceremony, which seems to have meant pretending to believe in what Mingumailo was doing. The suggestion is that Hall saw the performance not as authentic or spiritual but as grotesque, evidenced in Mingumailo' s "hideous" frozen poses, and manipulative, intended solely to convince Koojesse that "life

and soul were the issue."

The real purpose of the ceremony, according to Hall, became clear after this. He tells readers "The climax was at hand. A grand finale was to take place, and this was done with a sprinkling of clear words in Esquimaux, just enough for Koojesse and myself to understand. The angeko spirit spoke: 'He was in want. The kodluna {white man) could relieve his wants. Would not the kodluna give the spirit one of the double-barrelled guns 146 in his possession?'" (143). Hall first suggests that the ending of the ceremony was, to him, obviously theatrical and implies that the shaman's use of Inuktitut was a strategic choice meant to ensure that Koojesse and Hall understood what he wanted. Then the shaman came to what, to Hall, was the real purpose of the ceremony: to ask for a gun for himself in the guise of a demand from the spirit. Hall was not fooled: This was enough. I saw through the scheme in a moment; but, though astounded at the impudence of the proposition, I betrayed nothing to show surprise. I merely turned to Koojesse, and quietly asked if that was really the angeko's meaning. The reply, in subdued tones, was 'yes;' whereupon I farther asked if this man would be very useful in my future explorations to King William's Land; and on being answered in the affirmative, I said aloud, 'Well, if Angeko goes with me next season, he shall have a gun - one of my best.' This made the wizard-man leap for joy; for he thought, as I afterward found, that I meant to give it him at once. (143) The shaman's request, and Hall's response to it, is fascinating because of how Hall's account assumes Mingumailo's intention was for Hall to believe he spoke for the spirit and that his performance was authentic. Hall, assuming he was a more skilled reader of Mingumailo's performance than Koojesse, tells his audience that he saw through the performance and recognized that the entire ceremony had been a performance designed for Mingumailo to make his veiled request for a gun. Rather than calling Mingumailo's apparent bluff, Hall used the request as an opportunity to secure help with his own mission, transforming Mingumailo's attempt to exploit him into an exchange of goods for services that would benefit Hall. While this interaction could be discussed in far greater detail, I bring it up primarily to demonstrate how Hall became convinced that Inuit

147 spirituality was often fraudulent, in contrast to his own religious beliefs, which he shared with Inuit only to "improve" them, not to exploit them. The commodification of spirituality that Hall found reprehensible in Mingumailo's performance is linked, through Hall's narrative, to the commodification of sexuality. Hall tells readers that Mingumailo, having gotten what he wanted, dropped the pretense of the spiritual ceremony and was thrilled that he had "accomplished a great feat in charming a kodluna into giving him a gun as recognition of his magical power" (144). Hall's comment suggests that he recognized that he may have misread Mingumailo's performance: the point of the ceremony may have had nothing to do with Hall getting to witness an "authentic" Inuit ceremony or with communicating with Kudlago's spirit but may have been intended, from the beginning, to charm Hall into giving Mingumailo a gun. Mingumailo then offered Hall a number of goods, to demonstrate his joy at being given the gun: "So complete was his happiness, that he told me I should have the choice of his two wives, all his tuktoo skins (reindeer furs) that I might need, and sealskins for making boots, and other articles in abundance. That he had great riches of this description, probably obtained from his credulous worshippers, was evident from the rolls of beautiful skins I saw around me" (144). In Hall's text's imagining of Mingumailo's perspective, the wives are just another example of valuable goods, obtained through Mingumailo's manipulation of "credulous worshippers" (of which Hall was one). When one of the wives entered the tent, Mingumailo again offered his wives to Hall. Although

Hall tried to explain that he had a wife at home: This, however, neither satisfied his ideas about matrimony, nor, as it appeared, those of his wives; for both of them at once decked themselves out in all the smiles and blandishments that they possessed. I asked them if they really 148 coincided in the offer their husband had made, and was immediately told they

gladly did. However, I was about again declining the offer, when the angeko suddenly made a sign to Koojesse, leaving me alone with the proffered wives. I uttered a few kind words to them, and, giving each a plug of tobacco with a

friendly grasp of the hand, left the tupie and went toward the boat. (144) Hall's account of his first encounter with Mingumailo outlines a triangular relationship between Inuit spiritual practices, commodity exchange, and extra-marital sexuality for his readers, in which a spiritual ceremony is intended for the gain of a gun, in which a gun can be exchanged for a woman, and in which rejecting a woman can be mitigated through the gift of tobacco and "kind words."

Although Hall refused to accept Mingumailo's offer of one of his wives, he did not openly criticize the practice of exchanging wives at this point in his narrative. During his second expedition, however, he actively helped Tookoolito avoid becoming the object of this form of sexual exchange. A different angakkuk, Artooa, told Ebierbing

(Tookoolito's husband) that spirits had told him that the two men had to exchange wives. Hall intervened by telling Tookoolito to prepare "for her ordeal by clothing herself in layers of skins. 'In fact,' as Hall wrote, 'she was as it were mailed from neck to ankles'" (Loomis 187). When Artooa arrived, he was unable to get Tookoolito's clothes off. After

Tookoolito rose to make breakfast, Artooa "got up and stomped out of the igloo. That day there was a frenzy of ankooting as he cast taboos about him" (Loomis 188). Although it is impossible to determine whether Hall was in fact as heroic in this situation as he depicts himself and how much agency Tookoolito had in the plan, the story makes Hall's

149 disapproval of wife-swapping, particularly when it appeared to be the result of the machinations of an angakkuk for his own purposes, clear.88 Obviously Hall's responses to Inuit spiritual practices and his perception of their relationship to both commodity exchange and sexuality could be discussed in far more detail; however, I would like to make just one more point about how Hall wrote about these practices before moving on to address the performance that occurred aboard the George Henry. Hall's account of the ceremony focused on the performance conventions that Mingumailo relied upon and on how Hall read these conventions differently than Koojesse did. Hall's account did not relate what he thought the ceremony meant as much as it described a performance practice designed to generate a response in the spectator, who Hall imagined to be Koojesse. Hall explains Mingumailo' s gestures - the rapid clapping, hand movements directed at Hall and Koojesse, motionlessly staring into space - and his vocal performance - metaphorical expressions (presumably in an incomprehensible language, rather than the Inuktitut Hall indicates he used later), sharp tone, a limited use of Inuktitut - at length; however, the narrative separates the performance from its meaning: Hall makes no attempt to move beyond his initial assumption that Mingumailo was a fraud and was trying to manipulate Koojesse until Hall tells readers that the entire performance was designed for Mingumailo to ask for the gun. Since Hall severs the performance conventions from any culturally specific meaning,

88 According to Bennett and Rowley, spouse exchange did occur among Inuit: "Spouse exchange involved a temporary exchange of partners by two married couples... many were the result of necessity: the need of a couple to conceive a child; the need of a hunter for a woman to accompany him on an arduous hunting trip when his wife was about to give birth; or the need of a traveller departing on a long voyage to take along someone with kin in the region he was planning to visit" (128). See Bennett and Rowley pp. 128-29 for Inuit perspectives on spouse exchange. See also Stocking pp. 197-208 for his discussion of how Victorian anthropologists understood "primitive promiscuity."

150 they come to signify not legitimate spirituality but spiritual corruption; the performance conventions then gained the potential, I will argue in a moment, to signal the link between spirituality, commodity exchange, and sexual performance that Hall found problematic when they were reproduced in a different intercultural situation. Throughout Hall's years in the Arctic, he remained an outsider during angakkuit ceremonies and refused to participate in rituals that appeared linked to what his narrative suggests is corrupt spirituality. While Hall was willing to participate in feasts and social performances, he staunchly refused to "become savage" by participating in religious rituals that he saw as spiritually empty; however, it will become apparent that as Hall's perception of Inuit culture become more nuanced, sociability and spirituality were not as easily severed as he seemed to hope. In Hall's narrative, intercultural performance emerges as a site of intense anxiety: while Hall's own performances, of eating Inuit food for example, had no permanent consequences, they were still potentially transgressive of social taboos; Inuit performances of "acting white" could transform Inuit, as Hall hoped for Tookoolito, into "civilized" subjects but could also cause stagnation rather than progress; spiritual performances held, as seen in Mingumailo's performance, the potential to corrupt social relations. One intercultural performance that took place on the George Henry provides a way to address how the problematic aspects of "going native," suggested by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, could become visible and be enacted as "becoming savage." The "theatrical" incorporated the performance conventions of Inuit spiritual ceremonies, suggested interracial sexual desire and the desire for racial appropriation in its citation of blackface minstrel performance, and enacted how interracial sexual relationships might have actually been instigated on whaling ships during shipboard square dances. Hall 151 apparently didn't participate in the event, and while there are any number of reasons why he might have chosen not to participate or why he might have told readers he did not participate, in the context of my argument that Hall strategically chose how to "act native" without risking "becoming savage," I will propose that the performance, by making Hall's anxieties concerning intercultural sociability and performance visible, did not include space for Hall to safely participate as anything but a passive observer. Clearly this reading is speculative, as Hall provides no information about why he didn't participate, whether he wanted to participate, or how he responded to what he watched. Yet considering that Hall usually participated in shipboard entertainments and, as his description of Mingumailo's performance indicates, often told his readers about his strong responses to performances he watched, his silence regarding his lack of participation and his response to the performance is noticeable enough that it is worth paying attention to.89 The performance on the George Henry took place in the cabin of the ship on 26 November 1861. By this time, the ship had been in the Arctic for almost a year and a half. Captain Budington had not planned to spend the winter of 1861-62 in the ice, but the ship's path was blocked by ice. Loomis notes that by December 1861, Hall's journal indicates "incursions of cabin fever [were already] eroding the minds of the men aboard the George Henry" (137). In November, Inuit traded their summer tents for winter igloos and were spending considerable time aboard the ship, as was usual when whaling ships wintered near Inuit settlements.90 As a veteran of many Arctic expeditions, Budington was aware of the dangers of cabin fever and encouraged the members of his crew to distract themselves with theatrical performances, singing, parties, dances, and socializing with

89 For example, Hall participated in a square dance held on the George Henry on 16 July 1860 in Holsteinborg, Greenland and danced with Inuit women (Hall 56). 90 See Eber, When the Whalers Were Up North. 152 Inuit: it is unclear whether Budington attended the "theatrical," but he almost certainly

sanctioned it.

On 26 November, the cabin of the ship was filled "to its utmost capacity with Innuits and the ship's crew" (Hall 428). With twenty nine officers and crew on the George Henry and at least fifty Inuit guests, the cabin would have been very crowded indeed (Hall 430). When Hall entered the cabin, he immediately decided to make his way "to the little after-cabin, and there seated [him]self so as to have a full view of what was going on" (428). When Hall first arrived, '"Jim Crow,' the son of Artarkparu, occupied the centre of the cabin, and was performing on the 'keeloun,' while the other Innuits were seated all around, the female portion singing to the music" (Hall 428). Hall provides no additional information about Artarkparu's son: it is unclear if the man was always known by the nickname "Jim Crow," by Hall or by the entire crew, or if Hall only used the nickname to describe the man at this particular performance. The nickname, as a reference to the song "Jump Jim Crow," cites the American minstrel tradition and thus works to foreshadow Henry Smith's performance in blackface, which Hall describes shortly after.91 "Jim Crow" was playing the keeloun, an instrument "made by stretching a thin deerskin, or the skin of a whale's liver, upon a wooden or whalebone hoop about thirty inches in diameter, forming something not very unlike the tambourine known in

91 Robert C. Toll argues that the song apparently originated when Thomas D. Rice, one of the first "blackfaced white American performers" to tour the United States (27), saw: [A]n old Negro, his right shoulder deformed and drawn up high, his left leg gnarled with rheumatism, stiff and crooked at the knee, doing an odd-looking dance while singing: 'Weel about and turn about and do jus so;/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.' Aware that any 'peculiar' song or dance had great public appeal, Rice recognized this as excellent material for a stage act. He learned the song and dance, added new verses... made himself up to look like the original... and took to the stage. His new act created a public sensation and took him on a triumphant tour of major entertainment centers, including dancing 'Jim Crow' in New York City in 1832 and in London in 1836. (28) Toll notes that Rice's "Jump Jim Crow" was the first blackface act to "win widespread fame" and was also "the first clear instance of a minstrel using an Afro-American dance" (43). 153 this country. It is held, however, by a handle, and the player strikes, not the skin, but the hoop, accompanying his music by an uncouth sort of dance" (428). The seated women sang along with the rhythm of the keeloun. Hall doesn't tell readers what the whalers and other Inuit men were doing at this point, and it is unclear whether they observed, as Hall did, or participated. It seems likely that since Hall watched from an after-cabin, the other men were closer to the performance than Hall was. Involvement in the performance grew as other men joined in with a tambourine and a triangle. Hall doesn't indicate whether the men who began playing were whalers or Inuit, but the instruments were American rather than Inuit in origin, adding a second element of interculruralism to the performance: "The keeloun was accompanied by a tambourine made by Mr. Lamb. Another instrument was a triangle, a steel square pendent from a tow string and struck with an iron spoon" (428). The keeloun was passed from "Jim Crow" to Annawa, who went through the "'sweating' process, playing the instrument and dancing the ridiculous figures that are indispensable, according to Innuit ideas, his music being accompanied by a full chorus of native female voices" (428-29). The celebration seems to have been picking up steam: men (presumably all Inuit) were passing the keeloun around, women were singing, at least one Inuk man was wildly dancing. Franz Boas, Hall's near contemporary, provides a description of what Annawa's dance might have looked like in his description of how Inuit danced while playing the kilaut (a variant spelling referring to the same drum-like instrument): "The dancer remains on one spot only, stamping rhythmically with the feet, swinging the upper part of his body, and at the same time playing the kilaut. While dancing he always strips the upper part of the body, keeping on only trousers and boots" (195).

154 The drum dancing and singing that Hall and the whalers witnessed were fairly common entertainments among Inuit during the winters. When large groups of Inuit wintered together, they would often build qaggiq in which the whole group could socialize. Both social performances and spiritual ceremonies would take place in qaggiq. Bennett and Rowley include Martha Tunnuq's description of the variety of activities that took place in a qaggiq: "We would have our celebrations in the qaggiq, and also we would all gather in the qaggiq when the weather was poor. They would have drum dances there and play taptaujak [blindman's bluff], before we were introduced to Christianity. We would do our celebrations in there and it was truly a part of our lives then. . . After there was a good hunt we would gather in the qaggiq and have feasts there" (363). During Hall's second expedition, he attended a number of social events in qaggiq and at one he attempted to play the keeloun himself, without expressing any apparent anxiety about his participation (Nourse 99). Yet while his narrative usually attempts to distinguish between performances that were for entertainment and performances that were part of spiritual practice, the two were not necessarily distinct. Not only did both kinds of performance take place in the same space, they also frequently made use of the same performance conventions. For example, Hall's narrative of his second expedition includes the following story of how "On entering their new igloos the Innuits renewed their performances of the key-low-tik [Hall's or Nourse's spelling of keeloun in the second narrative] and of an-koo-ting" (Nourse 101). Whether the conflation of keeloun playing and angakkuit ceremonies is a result of Nourse's intervention as editor or appears in Hall's journals is unclear; however, the construction of this sentence suggests that the division between the two practices is not as clear as Hall seems to have hoped: the act of entering new igloos is marked with both "entertaining" and "spiritual" rituals. Returning 155 to the performance on the George Henry, it is possible to see the Inuit performance - of drum dancing and singing - as perhaps suggestive, to Hall, of the link between entertainment and spirituality and of the performative quality of Inuit spirituality that he found problematic earlier in his expedition. This raises the question of whether Hall, if the performance did remind him of shaman ceremonies, could have imagined a way of participating in the "theatrical." If one recalls that Hall found racial degeneration troubling, both when Tookoolito rejected Christianity and when he thought of mixed-race children, one can hypothesize that what happened next on the George Henry might have added to Hall's spectatorial anxiety. Hall tells readers that while Annawa was playing the keeloun and dancing, "there came bouncing into the very midst a strapping negress, setting the whole house in a roar of laughter. It was young Smith dressed in this character" (429). Henry Smith, one of the George Henry's seamen, rambunctiously entered the space with a blackened face and wearing women's clothing and immediately disrupted the performance. For American members of the crew, Smith's appearance would have immediately cited blackface minstrelsy. It is less clear how Inuit might have reacted; Hall remarked that "some of the

Innuit women were much frightened" and that one woman, Jennie, who was also an angakkuk, "tried to put as great a distance as possibly between herself and the negress, believing the apparition to be an evil spirit" (430). It is impossible to reconstruct Jennie or the other women's reaction, but Boas notes that among some groups of Inuit "A favourite performance is one in which a man, with blackened face and with a thong tied around his head, writhes and makes odd grimaces" (170). One possibility is that the Inuit members of the audience read Smith's entrance as signalling a familiar, but perhaps scary, performance from their own cultural repertoire. 156 Smith's entrance interrupted what was happening and was the first clear instance of whaler participation in the performance. Smith was quickly integrated, however, taking the tambourine to play. Hall comments "he soon did full justice to the instrument, his or her sable fists soon knocking a hole through the whale's liver skin with which it was covered" (429).92 Smith breaking the skin of the tambourine suggests that his performance was almost violent in its intensity and that the rhythmic music seemed to reach a fevered pitch. But the performance changes direction slightly when the "negress was next called on to act as drummer. Ooksin held the keeloun while she performed 'Yankee Doodle,'

'Hail Columbia,' and other pieces with admirable skill and effect, using two iron spoons for drum-sticks" (430). Here, Smith seems to become more controlled as he plays songs which, to Hall and likely to most of the whalers, were recognizably American rather than an imitation or appropriation, as Smith's playing of the tambourine might have been, of

Inuit music.93

The citation of minstrelsy implicit in Smith's appearance in blackface requires us to take a step away from the whaling ship to locate the tradition of blackface minstrelsy in

92 Hall's mention that the tambourine, made by the third officer Mr. Lamb, was made with whale's liver skin suggests the extent to which the whalers adapted to life in the Arctic by making use of local materials. 93 These two songs, with their strong patriotic connotations are worthy of further consideration. It is unclear whether Smith performed the songs as a relatively innocent demonstration of American "culture" for Inuit, as a patriotic demonstration for his fellow whalers, or whether the songs may have signaled, for Hall or for any of the spectators, the threat of American colonialism in the Arctic. Eric Lott points out that it was the song "Yankee Doodle" that was sung to quell a theatre riot at the Bowery Theatre in New York in 1834; the song operated as a talisman "meant to keep the British and reformist, that is to say class as well as abolitionist, threats to the republic at bay" (133). The particularities of the riot Lott mentions are further interesting in relation to minstrelsy in the Arctic, as the riot was one of a long series of anti-abolitionist riots that occurred in 1834. A crowd of about 4000 people stormed the Bowery, where Edwin Forrest was starring in Metamora. Forrest's performance as the "last of the Wampanoags" is a key example of the trend toward staging tragic depictions of the extermination of aboriginal Americans. This begs the question, outside the scope of this project, of why generic representations of African Americans and peoples differed so dramatically in the antebellum U.S. 157 antebellum America first, then to consider what might have happened when these cultural tropes were relocated to the Arctic. The antebellum minstrel show was a flexible, mutable performance form that incorporated adaptations of African-American dances and music into a very loose dramaturgical structure. Robert C. Toll points out that the minstrel show's "blend of Afro- and Euro-American musical and dance styles, which later became common in American popular culture, began on the frontier and was first given wide exposure by minstrels" (Toll 42). Early minstrelsy was, according to Toll, defined in one sense by the appropriation of black culture by white performers: "Mendings of black and white dances pervaded early minstrelsy and help account for its appearance of uniqueness. The normal direction of the adaptation, however, was from blacks to blackface, and the 'borrowers' were white men who consciously learned from blacks" (Toll 43). The relationship between minstrelsy and performers' and audience members' attitudes toward black people is difficult to articulate in any specific way. Toll argues "From the outset, minstrelsy unequivocally branded Negroes as inferiors. Although it offered its audiences no heroic white characters, it provided even more certain assurances of white common people's identity by emphasizing Negroes' 'peculiarities' and inferiority" (Toll 67). He then goes on to remark that although minstrels were fundamentally ambivalent about slavery until the mid- 1850s (75), this changed in the late- 1850s, when minstrelsy began to serve as a pro-slavery vehicle: "With all indications that slaves were unhappy or mistreated purged from the shows, minstrels in the late 1850's incessantly hammered out their simplified rationalization: on the plantation Negroes were happy, contented, and fulfilled; off it, they were ludicrous and/or helpless

158 incompetents. Blacks needed the plantation. Racial subordination did not conflict with the American Creed. It was the nation's gift to Negroes" (Toll 88). While Toll's work, published in 1974, is a significant consideration of blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott's study of the antebellum minstrel show in Love and Theft suggests that Toll does not go far enough in examining what was at stake in ambivalent depictions of black people in minstrel shows. Lott argues "Minstrelsy brought to the public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood. The minstrel show was less the incarnation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic figure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences" (6). Blackface minstrelsy, according to Lott, was not a simple manifestation of racist sentiment but a set of performance conventions that allowed the anxious ambivalence that characterized white Americans' attitude toward black Americans to be accessed and staged. Lott suggests that minstrelsy responded to an ambivalent desire for black bodies and cultural practices and from the need to simultaneously express and ridicule this desire: Minstrel performances often attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed - minstrelsy's mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation... It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and

pleasure. (6)

159 In other words, an intense cross-racial desire existed in the antebellum United States, a desire both to appropriate black culture and to possess black bodies, and minstrelsy's ambivalence - its simultaneous celebration and ridicule of black culture - expressed this desire and provided a way for the desire to be displaced and contained into relatively "safe" performances without the permanent consequences of, for instance, actual miscegenation. Smith's performance did not constitute, it is obvious but important to note, a minstrel show, but his black face cited the performance conventions of blackface minstrelsy. Because Hall provides no biographical information about Smith, it is impossible to determine how familiar Smith was with minstrelsy, what part of the United States Smith was from, or what his experience with black culture had been before he went north. Furthermore, with the exception of Hall and Budington (who may or may not have been present at the performance), we have almost no information about the qallunaat members of the audience and their experience with watching minstrel performances. As such, it is critical to be tentative in discussing what the relocation of minstrelsy might have meant aboard the George Henry. Lott makes it clear that while blackface minstrelsy was a highly ambivalent performance form, it operated in relation to anxieties concerning racial difference and provided a way for structures of interracial desire to be enacted, even if they were not explicitly addressed. While the relationship between Inuit and qallunaat during the height of American whaling in the Arctic was almost unrecognizably different from the relationship between black and white Americans in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, domestic anxieties surrounding miscegenation likely travelled to the Arctic, even if these anxieties were managed and enacted differently in relation to Inuit women. 160 Although Hall includes no mention of it, one can argue that there is a strong possibility that at least some of the men in the audience on the George Henry either had sexual relationships with Inuit women or wanted to. In relocating the cultural tropes of minstrelsy to the Arctic, the performance's enactment of interracial desire must also be resituated as potentially reflecting the desire for both black and Inuit bodies, for both black and Inuit culture. While it is impossible to conclusively reconstruct what the performance meant, for Smith, for whalers, or for Inuit, I would like to play out one way that it might have functioned as part of the shipboard entertainment. Smith's dancing may have incorporated elements of "black" dances, as Toll suggests was common practice; however, his incorporation of the tambourine and the keeloun into his performance suggests that he was engaged with and responding to the performance he interrupted. Although Hall is vague on what Smith's performance looked like, it seems possible that his dancing, tambourine playing, and drumming incorporated both the physicality of the minstrel imitating black performance and elements of Inuit dancing and musical performance. Smith, in performing a blackface imitation of Inuit drum-dancing while playing "Yankee Doodle" and " Hail Columbia," might have been engaged in a doubled act of minstrelsy: his performance imitated the blackface minstrels he had seen or heard about at home (who themselves were appropriating what they saw in black culture) and his performance appropriated the Inuit performance conventions going on around him. Furthermore, because we have only Hall's account of both Smith's performance and of the Inuit performances that preceded it, it is impossible to determine where the "hall of mirrors" of mimicry ended: we must consider the possibility that Inuit were performing what they thought the whalers expected Inuit performance to look like or that Smith might have been mimicking how whalers participated in Inuit performances. 161 Finally, one must keep in mind Anne McClintock's warning against collapsing different forms of mimicry: "Different forms of mimicry such as passing and cross-dressing deploy ambiguity in different ways; critical distinctions are lost if these historically variant cultural practices are collapsed under the ahistorical sign of the same. Racial passing is not the same as gender cross-dressing; black voguing is not the same as whites performing in blackface; black minstrelsy is not the same as lesbian drag" (65). Each of the mimetic acts that may have occurred during the "theatrical" must, in other words, be considered as a particular deployment of racial (or gender) ambiguity. It is appropriate that it is difficult to parse out how mimicry operated within Smith's performance and the "theatrical" as a whole, because the overdetermined quality of the performance reflects the problems that emerge when we attempt to move out from the performance to ascertain how minstrelsy's enactment of interracial desire might have operated on the George Henry. Lott suggests that minstrelsy enacted a "fascination with and attraction to black men and their culture," and signalled a desire for miscegenation, often "in oblique and displaced form" (57). In other words, the desire to imitate black men went along with a desire to have sex like black men, that is, with black women. If one assumes that some of the whalers were either having sex with or wanted to have sex with Inuit women, one must ask whether their desire was a desire to have sex with a particularly attractive specific Inuk woman, with Inuit women in general, or with a woman who was simply not white. Was the desire to have sex with black women, which Lott argues was lurking in minstrel performances, displaced into a desire to have sex with a man dressed as a black woman - raising the question of whether the performance staged the possibility of men in the audience desiring Smith's doubly marked body - or into a desire to have sex with an Inuk woman? Or was the desire to have sex with Inuit women

162 more simply a desire to have sex with available women? I raise these questions not to suggest that the archive of the performance will provide any answers, but to point out the range of possibilities circulating in Smith's deployment of minstrelsy, if one considers minstrelsy as an enactment of interracial desire. If Smith's citation of minstrelsy raised and failed to resolve questions about interracial sexual desire, the "finale" of the performance staged one way that this desire could be acted upon. The "finale" was "a dance by two Innuit ladies and two of the ship's crew, the music being furnished by Bailey with his 'viddle'" (430). Although Hall does not describe how the four people danced, his remark that they were accompanied by fiddle music and the even pairing of men and women suggests that the dance was likely a modified form of square dance, rather than four people performing solo dances like those that accompanied the keeloun earlier. Hall himself had participated in a square dance with Inuit women while the George Henry was in Greenland and provides almost a page of description of this dance (55-56); however, he provides only the above sentence to describe the square dancing in the "finale." Furthermore, he makes no mention of whether any one else joined in the dance or whether any dancing happened after the "theatrical" proper ended: one does not know if there was an opportunity for Hall, or anyone else present, to participate in the dance. Hall's relative silence could, of course, be the result of any number of things: for example, he might not have thought his readers would have wanted to read multiple descriptions of shipboard square dances or the "finale" might not have been as spectacular as Hall expected (he includes the word "finale" in italics in his narrative, which might indicate that he is being satirical in calling the dance a "finale"). However, Hall's participation in a shipboard square dance during his second expedition, combined with the implicit citation of interracial desire located in Smith's blackface 163 performance, suggests that the dancing might have caused Hall some anxiety, which might explain his reticence. While Hall danced with Inuit women at the square dance held in 1 860, in 1 866 he attended a square dance aboard the Ariseli Gibbs and, instead of dancing with Inuit women, he danced with a man who was apparently dressed in drag:

Nourse records that "when some of the crew and a few of the Innuit women were dressed like civilized ladies, Hall had to make his choice between dancing and speech-making; preferring the former, he led off with the first mate of the ship" (Nourse 289). While Nourse' s account situates the choice as being between dancing and speech-making, the real choice was between dancing with a qallunaaq man in women's dress and an Inuk woman: Hall chose to dance with a man. This raises the rather obvious question of what changed between 1 860 and 1 866. 1 suspect that Hall became aware that square dances were not just entertainment but that they performed a critical role in how interracial sexual relationships were instigated aboard whalers. Square dancing was one of the most popular pastimes on Arctic whaling ships throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. L.E. Borden, the surgeon on DGS Neptune, which wintered beside the American whaler Era in 1903-04, noted that on both ships "it was the dances, held at intervals, which allowed every one to shake off any inhibitions and thus remove those hostile attitudes which were developing" (84). Dances not only diffused tension between whalers during long winters in the ice but also served as an outlet for heterosexual desire: while a square dance did not ostensibly promise sex, close physical contact with women would have been a hot commodity during the cold winter on a ship and one can imagine that square dances were one place where sexual relationships could have been initiated. Dances were also one way that whalers could mitigate the threat of "going native" posed by interracial sex. The fear of "going native" 164 was widespread among whalemen in contact with indigenous women; Margaret Creighton proposes that this concern sprung, in line with contemporary attitudes described earlier among colonizing groups, from racial prejudice against "savages" and from anxiety that sex with a native woman could corrupt a man who should remain chaste for his partner or potential partner at home (Rites 157-58). Square dances made Inuit women less "native" in sailors' eyes, refiguring them as appropriate sexual partners in two ways. First, Hall indicates that Inuit women were dressed as "civilized ladies" at the 1866 dance; whalers frequently brought southern clothing north and gave it to Inuit women to wear at shipboard social events.94 Second, while clothing made Inuit women look "civilized," their knowledge of social dance steps let them "act civilized." Knowing the conventionalized dance steps marked the women as temporarily part of the same social group as the whalers, since they shared the whalers' embodied, social knowledge. Square dances were social events where white men could get to know Inuit women and where Inuit women could "act white," where courtships might have been initiated, and where existing couple might have displayed their relationships publicly. Situating interracial square dancing as one potential precursor to interracial sexual relations allows one to further hypothesize about why Hall did not participate in the performance. The dance enacted the "danger" of miscegenation, recalling Bert O. States' comment that "Put bluntly, in theater there is always a possibility that an act of sexual congress between two so-called signs will produce a real pregnancy" (20). In Hall's eyes, interracial dancing couples might have been enacting and making public the interracial sexual relationships that he believed corrupted Inuit and resulted when whalers had "become savage."

94 See Eber, When the Whalers Were Up North pp. 1 14-22 for a description of how Inuit women thought of southern clothing; see Comer, An Arctic Whaling Diary pp. xxvii for a photograph of two Inuit women dressed for a dance in southern dresses.

165 The performance on the George Henry, while apparently innocuous, might have subtly signalled the aspects of intercultural sociability and Inuit culture that Hall found problematic: by reminding him of shaman ceremonies that he saw as exploitative and corrupt, by relocating the desire for racial collapse and black bodies latent in minstrelsy to the Arctic, and by enacting through square dancing the actual interracial sexual relationships that he was opposed to, the "theatrical" may have tapped into Hall's anxieties about "becoming savage."

Mimesis and Franklin I will conclude my discussion of Hall's first expedition by connecting how Hall "acted Inuit" and how he rejected "becoming savage" with his self-proclaimed mission in the Arctic. Hall "acted Inuit" by doing precisely the same things that he imagined Franklin's men did in order to survive and avoided "becoming savage" in order to demonstrate that it was also possible that Franklin's men had not "become savage" during their time in the Arctic. Hall was convinced that Franklin survivors were living among Inuit and had survived because they had adopted Inuit ways of life. Michael Robinson explains that Hall "identified the Eskimos as their probable saviors. These 'Iron Sons of the North,' he suggested, had taken in survivors of the Franklin party and taught them how to live in the Arctic. As he imagined it, the officers and crew had adapted themselves to the Eskimo way of life after they discovered that it would be impossible to escape from the Arctic" (68-69).95 While Hall's belief was plausible enough to convince his backers to

95 Hall's belief that Inuit would have taken in Franklin survivors and helped them survive is an example of the colonial fantasy of the "friendly Inuit." He assumes that Inuit would be compliant with European and American exploration fantasies without taking their own agency into account. See Bloom pp. 1-14 for an overview of how polar exploration was predicated on the assumption 166 fund the expedition, it was only a hypothesis. During his first two Arctic expeditions, however, Hall proved that it was possible that Franklin survivors could have lived among Inuit by himself doing exactly what he imagined they did: befriending Inuit, living among them, and eating Inuit food. Hall went to the Arctic - like many of Franklin's men - with no northern exploration experience, insufficient supplies and skills to survive for any extended period of time, and no first-hand knowledge of Inuit customs or of Inuktitut. Despite his lack of preparation and qualifications, Hall survived among Inuit, on and off, for almost a decade.

Although Hall mimicked what he saw Inuit do, he was also engaged in a second mimetic relationship: he was imitating what he imagined Franklin's men did. He conflated his own goals with those of the missing men in describing his mission in the Arctic: "to effect the purpose I have at heart - to carry out successfully what I have undertaken to perform - to visit King William Island and lands adjacent - to continue and complete the History of Sir John Franklin and his renowned expedition, I must learn to live as Esquimaux do!" (Loomis 87-88). By living like an Inuk, Hall hoped to discover what happened to the missing expedition and thus to complete the narrative of what happened. He also suggested that his expedition would not only complete the history of what happened but also continue the history begun by Franklin and his men. Hall's extended performance situated him as an effigy for the missing men. An effigy, according to Joseph Roach, consists of a set of actions "that hold open a place in memory into which many different people may step according to circumstances and occasions... performed effigies - those fabricated from human bodies and the associations of the compliance of non-white men (primarily Inuit, but also African Americans and American women) in the project. 167 they evoke - provide communities with a method of perpetuating themselves through specially nominated mediums or surrogates" (36). Hall believed he was "called" to go to the Arctic to search for the missing men; this "calling" served to nominate him as a surrogate for the missing men. In Roach's formulation, "the community finds a surrogate victim for itself from within itself; then it finds an alien substitute, like an effigy, for the surrogate" (40). Hall's assertion that he was "called" to find the missing men seems to be closer to self-nomination; the community of people invested in discovering what happened to Franklin's men had, as described at the beginning of this chapter, already assumed that the men were all dead by the time Hall was "called." Nonetheless, Hall, believing that there were survivors to be found, imagined what they might have done to survive and tried to replicate their imagined actions. While it is impossible to determine what Hall based his fantasy upon, it could have originated in narratives of near-tragedies of Arctic exploration; Loomis notes that Hall "purchased and borrowed all the books he could find that in any way concerned the North; he read Humboldt, Scoresby, Barrow, Parry, Ross, Franklin, Richardson, Beechey, Back, McClure, and, of course, Kane" (42). While several of these works include anecdotes of Inuit assistance, as Loomis recognizes, the most important of these to Hall was likely Elisha Kent Kane's account of his second expedition, published in 1856, which detailed how after his ship was beset in the high Arctic for two winters, he and his men survived because of the aid of Inuit hunters from Etah.96 In large part, however, Hall's particular way of imitating what Franklin's men might have done seems to have been his own invention: this may be because he, unlike the explorers whose narratives he had read,

96 See Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search ofSir John Franklin, 1853, '54, '55; McGoogan, Race to the Polar Sea pp. 222-43. 168 chose to live among Inuit and, during his first expedition, had the option of returning to the George Henry at a number of moments. The stakes for Hall were simply not as consistently high as they would have been for the men he imagined he was searching for: to put it bluntly, Hall knew how he was getting home, unlike the missing men in his imagination. Hall's performance of "acting Inuit" was necessary, he believed, to ingratiate himself to Inuit and ensure that he could travel to King William Island. It emerged from his response to the loss of the expedition and from his deep desire to find what was lost. But while "acting native" was a practical necessity, it also allowed Hall to draw the missing men into presence through his own actions. Alice Rayner explains mimesis as not simply an imitation or a mirroring but "the very capacity to substitute one thing for another, to reconstitute a lost object in the present object, to transform the material objects of the world into imaginary objects, and the imaginary into the material, that characterizes the foundation of mimesis... It is... the point in a psychic topography where the experience of loss generates a demand for a substitute" (129). By "acting Inuit" - performing the same actions he imagined the survivors did - Hall made himself into a substitute for the missing men, filling the empty space left by their disappearance with his own performance. His performance did not locate the missing men; however, it demonstrated that the missing men might still be alive, that those lost in the Arctic could, at least potentially, become un-lost. Hall's refusal to "become savage" and his criticism of "becoming savage" have implications related to his search for the missing men. As we have seen, one of the principle behaviours that constituted "becoming savage," to Hall, was engaging in miscegenation. Franklin's men were accused of "becoming savage" in another way: by 169 engaging in cannibalism. It is unclear whether Hall was aware of the extent of the backlash against John Rae' s report, but considering how widely he read on Arctic exploration before he left America, it is difficult to believe that he was not aware of the accusation Rae levelled against the missing men. Cannibalism, according to Kristen

Guest, [H] as traditionally been viewed as a powerful signifier of the boundary between

civilization and barbarism, an opposition which, once established, underwrites enterprises of religious, economic, and cultural colonization or, alternatively, ostracism and exclusion from organs of political and social power... the opposition between civilization and savagery expressed in the notion of cannibalism has frequently been evoked to define a threatening other that must either be assimilated or annihilated. While it is evoked to justify extreme actions by designating absolute difference, however, this opposition ironically suggests the uncanny relatedness between the body of the self and the body of the other. ("Cannibalism" 108) Cannibalism became a particularly anxious issue when it existed not among "savage" others but when it lurked at the boundary between "civilization" and "savagery." As will become clear in the final chapter, the backlash against Rae' s report, led by Charles

Dickens, revolved around not the fact of cannibalism but the accusation that high-ranking officers in the British Navy had committed such a transgression. If the missing men, particularly the missing officers, gave into the desire to consume human flesh in order to survive, they would have "become savage," that is permanently contaminated by their forgetting of cultural taboos.

Hall recognized that discourses of cannibalism were overwritten with assumptions 170 about class and rank: it was more problematic for a high-ranking commissioned officer to engage in cannibalism than for a ordinary seaman or a warrant officer to do the same. During his second expedition, he heard Inuit stories concerning evidence of cannibalism among Franklin survivors. Although Hall seems to have taken these stories at face value, he was convinced that senior officers, particularly the man Inuit called Aglooka, who Hall believed was Francis Crozier, refused to consume human flesh and was relieved when Inuit oral history supported this belief. For example, Nourse includes a story Hall recorded of Inuit meeting Aglooka at Igloolik: "Crozier was the only man that would not eat any of the meat of the Koblunas as the others all did. Crozier and the three men with him were very hungry, but Crozier, though nearly starved and very thin, would not eat a bit of the Koblunas, - he waited till an Innuit who was with him and the three men caught a seal" (Nourse 589).97 To Hall, the point of the Inuit story was that a senior officer had refused to give into cannibalistic desires even when the men around him did. This story was apparently corroborated, for Hall, by a second story which he heard from Oeula, Shooshearknuk and Artooa, who heard it from their cousin Tooshooarthariu, who said he had helped Aglooka by catching seals for him. Nourse recounts the story: "When he [Tooshooarthariu] first found Crozier and the three men with them, Crozier' s face looked bad - his eyes all sunk in - looked so bad that their cousin could not bear to look at his face. Their cousin gave Crozier a bit of raw seal as quick as he could when he first saw him. Did not give any to the other three, for they were fat and had been eating the flesh of their companions" (Nourse 591). The two stories indicate that Hall became aware of the possibility that cannibalism could have occurred among Franklin survivors but that, even when faced with Inuit testimony, he was able to reconcile cannibalism with his belief in

97 Hall consistently changed Aglooka, in Inuit stories, to Crozier in his fíeldnotes. 171 the essentially "civilized" quality of senior officers by pointing out that at least one man - Aglooka - had not engaged in the transgression. An analogy between miscegenation and cannibalism operates here. Miscegenation and cannibalism both occurred when a "civilized" person made a (usually intentional) mistake in recognizing boundaries: in miscegenation, a man mistook a native woman for an "appropriate" sexual partner; in cannibalism, one mistook human flesh for "appropriate" food. The link between sexuality and consumption is deep-rooted in early- modern depictions of "savage" cultures, as Gustav Jahoda argues: "In the writings of European moralists about the deadly sins of the flesh, lechery and gluttony have usually been coupled" (17). In particular, cannibalism was frequently depicted with sexualized imagery in early modern visual culture: "there can be no doubt that strong sexual elements entered into the portrayal of cannibal feasts" (Jahoda 102). More specifically, cannibalism was frequently visually and textually represented using images and iconography that suggested "deviant" or abnormal sexual practices (Jahoda 127). "Deviant" sexuality, of which miscegenation was one manifestation, was, like cannibalism, the result of degeneration that allowed one to indulge inappropriate appetites and to mistake cultural boundaries.98

Hall performed his identification with the Franklin survivors through "acting Inuit" in the same way as he imagined they did and proved, through the fact of his own survival among Inuit, that it was possible that Franklin's men could have survived by "acting Inuit." He also demonstrated, through his refusal to engage in interracial sex, that it was possible to live closely among Inuit without "becoming savage." Hall's ability to

98 See also Peter Hulme "Introduction: The Cannibal Scene" in Cannibalism and the Colonial World pp. 24. 172 reject interracial sexual desire demonstrated that it was possible that Franklin's men survived in the Arctic without indulging in "deviant" appetites, either for Inuit women or, more problematically perhaps, for consuming human flesh. While Inuit stories of cannibalism could have challenged Hall's belief that survivors had not "become savage," Aglooka's apparent refusal to participate in cannibalism reinforced Hall's belief that one could avoid "becoming savage" even under extreme circumstances. By "acting Inuit," Hall created and held open a space in which Franklin's men could be imagined to have survived and remained civilized, although living among Inuit. Hall's performance thus repudiated both the accusations of cannibalism and the widespread belief that all of Franklin's men had died, proposing, through mimetic performance, the possibility of a different ending to the story of what happened to Franklin's expedition.

173 All the Dead Voices [I]fghosts hover where secrets are kept and demand that secrets come outfrom the crypts oftime, they are everywhere... Some secrets can waitforever. Some compel their ghosts to appear, and the ghosts are impatientfor the living to set them right, do themjustice, and release them into time. Theatre is where ghosts best make their appearances and let communities and individuals know that we live amid secrets that are hiding in plain sight. ~ Alice Rayner, Ghosts xxxv

Charles Francis Hall records accounts of two performances - two series of performances, really - which illustrate Diana Taylor's suggestion that performance "functions as an epistemology. Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing" (3). Each of the performances arose from an encounter between Franklin survivors and Inuit, and took on a life of its own apart from and following from the moment of encounter. The performances, staged first by Franklin's men for Inuit, then by Inuit for one another, then for Hall, are among the most compelling remains left by the Franklin expedition." The first performance took place when a group of thirty or forty Franklin survivors met several Inuit families who were hunting seals on King William Island. The qallunaat used gestures and a few words of Inuktitut to tell the hesitant Inuit that they had friendly intentions. The leader of the white men - named Aglooka by Inuit100 - told Inuit

99 Dorothy Eber documents Inuit oral traditions that are likely about other meetings between Inuit and Franklin survivors. For example, Inuit report that a group of eight or ten white men visited an Inuit camp near Terror Bay: the Inuit offered them food and water and set them up in an igloo. Returning to the igloo later that winter, Inuit found the men had all died (Eber, Encounters 76-78). Stories of Inuit visiting white men on a European ship that eventually sunk also still circulate among Inuit; see Eber, Encounters pp. 91-107. Charles Francis Hall includes other accounts of encounters that he recorded during his second expedition, among these is an account of Inuit meeting Crozier long after the ships were abandoned; see Nourse pp. 255-60. 100 Aglooka is Hall's anglicized spelling of the Inuktitut name Abiluktuq, which means "long strides" (Eber 43) or "he who takes long strides" (Woodman, Unravelling 195). Hall's spelling of the name, rather than the Inuktitut spelling, is conventionally used to refer to the leader of the qallunaat who met Inuit at Washington Bay. 174 that they were trying to get to Iwilik (Repulse Bay). Then, after miming that he and his men were hungry, the leader performed gestures and sounds that Inuit took to mean that his ship had been crushed by ice. The two groups spent some time together, then the Inuit left the white men and continued their seal hunt. Approximately twenty years later, in 1869, one of the Inuit present at the meeting with Aglooka recreated his performance for Hall. Aglooka's performance broke from the conventions he previously used to communicate with Inuit: the strangeness and ambiguity of his performance's relationship to the event of the ships being crushed survived in the 1869 reproduction. The second performance took place after all the qallunaat had died. Inuit found a large tent filled with white men's corpses; the area surrounding the tent was littered with bodies and graves. An Inuk woman heard about the tent site and went with her husband to search for any valuable goods left behind by the qallunaat. She found that one of the bodies, which she suspected was an officer's body, was strangely undisturbed: in contrast to the mutilated corpses in the tent, this man looked as though he was just asleep. The woman assumed that this officer was the final survivor and that he had survived by consuming the flesh of his dead companions. She also noticed that this man was still wearing his watch and, although she was overwhelmed by morbid feelings, decided to chip away at the ice entombing his body in order to take his watch. The woman told and retold the story, keeping the watch not for its economic but for its affective value as a memento of the encounter with the dead officer. These paired events - Aglooka's enactment of the ship being crushed and Owwer's recreation of his gestures, the woman taking the watch and repeating the story - are striking not only for what they contribute to the narrative of what happened after Franklin's men abandoned their ships but also for what they communicate about the 175 nature of the losses experienced both by Franklin's men in their final days and by Inuit who came to know what happened to the Franklin survivors before they died. The performances are not "original" but are re-citations of earlier events: they are performative in Richard Schechner's sense of "twice-behaved behaviour." Aglooka's performance was necessitated by the previous event of his ship being crushed by ice and his failure to save the ship. The woman's performance, the act of taking the watch, was performative because of how her actions reproduced what she imagined the officer did before he died: her chipping away at the ice around the man's body recreated the officer's act of chipping away at his shipmates' flesh. Both initial events were moments when men failed to fulfill their responsibilities to others and bore this burden as a condition of their survival - Aglooka abandoned his ship, the unnamed officer consumed human flesh. Both series of performances have a quality of incomprehensibility: they address the previous events - the ship sinking, the act of cannibalism - by evoking them, but neither performance reveals the "facts" of the previous event. Nonetheless, both performances somehow compelled those who witnessed them - Owwer and the unnamed woman - to reproduce them. Stories of encounters with Europeans were usually remembered and passed on by Inuit, because until the twentieth century such encounters were relatively rare. This chapter will argue that these two performances survived among Inuit not only because they were about encounters with Europeans but also because they related something vital about the responsibility that witnessing what happened to Franklin's men placed on Inuit as those who survived to remember the encounters.

Joseph Roach, drawing on the work of Pierre Nora and Paul Connerton, takes the term "kinesthetic imagination" from the vocabulary of dance historians and applies it to performed social memory. He writes that: 176 Human agents draw on the resources of memory stored up (but also reinvented) in what I will call, stretching an old term to fit my purpose, the kinesthetic imagination... As a faculty of memory, the kinesthetic imagination exists interdependently but by no means coextensively with other phenomena of social memory... The kinesthetic imagination, however, inhabits the realm of the virtual. Its truth is the truth of simulation, of fantasy, or of daydreams, but its effect on human action may have material consequences of the most tangible sort and of the widest scope. This faculty, which flourishes in that mental space where imagination and memory converge, is a way of thinking through movements - at once remembered and reinvented - the otherwise unthinkable, just as dance is often said to be a way of expressing the unspeakable. (26-27) The events that tell us what happened to Franklin's men endured because they were remembered in and through performance - through the reproduction of Aglooka's gestures and through the repetition of the woman's story. In the archive, however, the performances become severed from the bodies that first produced them and are only accessible through Hall's narrative, which presents prior performances - Aglooka's gestures, the woman taking the watch - as they were reproduced in Owwer's gestural performance and Tookoolito's translation of the woman's story. As Roach suggests, embodied performance is a site where memory is archived and transmitted. While truths stored in the body might be the truths of "simulation, of fantasy, or of daydreams," in the case of the encounters between Franklin's men and Inuit, one of the principle ways that the experiences of the survivors and of the Inuit who encountered them have remained is in embodied performances.

177 The Crack in the Ice

In 1869, after living among Inuit for almost a decade, Hall met two Inuit men - Owwer and Teekeeta - who told him about encountering a bedraggled group of British officers and men approximately twenty years earlier near Washington Bay (known to Inuit as Teekeenu). David Woodman notes "Of all the verbal Inuit traditions, the tale of the meeting with survivors on the march is the only one which has been universally accepted among historians" {Unravelling 124). Although the encounter almost certainly occurred, Hall was unable to determine when it happened, writing in his journal: I now request the whole company to take hold & see if they can make out the year - how many years ago since the 4 Innuit families met Crozier and party... The result 25 winters ago. Ow-wer & Tuk-ke-ta make out 9 to the time Dr. Rae came to Pelly Bay [in 1854]... I get them to try again. The result, 5 winters after seeing Aglooka, Dr. Rae came to Pelly Bay & this makes it out that the paper found by McClintock corresponds with what the Innuits of this country know" (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 141). David Woodman comments on Hall's remarks: "little faith can be placed in this dating method. The first result gave 1844, a year before Franklin sailed... The second attempt, based on Rae's meeting with the Pelly Bay Inuit in April 1854, gave a more amenable date - 1849. Rae himself was told that the white men had been seen 'four winters past,' giving 1850 as the year of meeting" {Unravelling 141). It is unclear when this meeting happened: this poses considerable problems if one attempts to use the story to establish a chronology of events. It is similarly difficult to ascertain who Aglooka was. The name Aglooka meant "he who takes long strides" and "could legitimately be given to any tall purposeful white 178 man" (Woodman, Unravelling 195). Hall assumed Aglooka was Francis Crozier, the captain of the Terror and the commander of the expedition following Franklin's death. David Woodman suggests that Hall was hasty in making this assumption and suggests that Henry Le Vesconte, the most senior lieutenant on the Erebus (following Graham Gore's death, which occurred sometime before Fitzjames wrote the 1848 message left at Victory Point) is a likely candidate for Aglooka {Unravelling 160). Without going into the details of Woodman's argument, it is important to note that Aglooka was the name by which Crozier was known when he was in the Arctic serving under Parry in the 1820s; Crozier acquired this name by trading names with an Inuk boy (Woodman, Unravelling 195). If Crozier died before the survivors met Inuit near Washington Bay, his successor probably would have become known as Aglooka (Woodman, Unravelling 243). The ambiguity concerning which of Franklin's men were present at Washington Bay creates problems if one attempts to read the story as evidence of the "facts" of what happened after the ships were abandoned. The uncertainty concerning when the encounter occurred or who Aglooka was does not diminish the fact that the story Hall heard from Owwer and Teekeeta is remarkably consistent with other Inuit accounts of a meeting between Franklin survivors and Inuit.101 Hall records the two men's recollections of travelling with their own and two other families and seeing a strange sight in the distance: Tuk-ke-ta and Ow-wer now tell me that they with Too-shoo-art-thar-u [sic] and Mong-er...were on the west shore of Kikituk (K.W.L.) [King William Island] with their families sealing, & this a long time ago. They were getting ready to move -

101 See Eber, Encounters pp. 80 for an account of what was likely the same meeting, told to her by Mark Tootiak who heard the story from his stepfather Nicholas Qayutinuaq, who in turn heard the story from his grandfather. 179 the time in the morning & the sun high - when Tuk-ke-ta saw something in the distance on the smooth ice that looked white & thought it was a bear. The company had got all ready to start travelling on the land. Soon as Tuk-ke-ta saw this something white, he told his companions of it, when all waited, hoping it was a bear. As they watched, the white object grew larger, for it was coming down

towards them. They saw the white thing moving along in the direction of the coast, turning in a kind of circling way just as the little bay turned. At length they began to see many black objects moving along with what they had first espied as white in the distance. The object that they 1st had seen as white proved to be a sail

raised on the boat & as this got nearer saw this sail shake in the wind. On seeing what they did, the object grew plainer and they thought of white men and began to

be afraid. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 124-25) Owwer and Teekeeta's story begins as the story of an ordinary day of hunting interrupted when Teekeeta saw an unfamiliar sight. The assumption that the white object in the distance is a bear is reminiscent of the Mr. Muff story printed in Aurora Borealis. Unlike Mr. Muff, however, the Inuit were excited when they thought the object was a bear, because a bear meant food. When they realized that the strange object was actually a group of unfamiliar people moving a boat over the ice, they became afraid that they were

about to encounter qallunaat. As the white men approached the Inuit, two of the strangers moved ahead of the group to meet the Inuit. Owwer and Tooshooarttharu left their families on the land and headed across the ice to meet the white men. Owwer and Teekeeta told Hall that both

groups were hesitant as they drew close to each other: As the company of men (strangers) & what they were drawing got quite near, 2 180 men came on ahead of all & were walking on the ice & were getting quite near

where the Innuits were standing looking out, which was on the land, the 2 men (Koblunas) came walking up to where they were. Too-shoo-art-thar-u and Ow-wer started to meet them, walking there on the ice. When they came to a crack in the ice, they stopped for the two white men to come up. Then the 2 white men came close to Ow-wer and Too-shoo-art-thar-u. One had a gun which he carried in his arms. The crack in the ice separated the meeting natives. The man that carried the gun stopped behind - a little back, while the other man came as close up to Ow- wer and Too-shoo-art-thar-u as the crack in the ice would allow him. The man that came up to the crack had nothing in his hands or on his shoulder. As he stopped, he cried out 'C'hi-mo'. The first man that came up then spoke to the man a little behind, when he laid the gun down and came up at once along side the 1 st man. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 125) The two groups each sent a pair of representatives to greet the others. It is not likely an accident that the Inuit stopped at the crack in the ice: as a physical boundary, the crack prevented the white men from getting too close and promised a few extra moments to retreat if the encounter grew hostile. The leader of the white men was empty handed, but his companion carried a gun. The Inuit may have been carrying spears: according to Hall's published account, they laid down their spears when the qallunaaq laid down his gun (Nourse 406). Both groups seem to have had friendly intentions but were wary enough to carry weapons as insurance if things went badly. The white man seems to take the lead in the encounter, calling out "C'hi-mo" as a greeting. The word, which is more commonly spelled teyma or taima, was understood by Europeans as a greeting used by Inuit when greeting other tribes and to mean "friend" (Woodman, Unravelling 339; Eber, 181 Encounters 43). The greeting and the laying down of weapons indicated to each group that the other was friendly. Considering how space was deployed in the encounter allows one to glimpse the theatricality of the moment: the crack in the ice is both a physical and a performative boundary. The crack is literally a space between water and solid ice, sitting above the boundary between snowy land and frozen water, immediately above a beach. Greg Dening suggests that the beach serves a special role in colonial encounters: beaches are "marginal spaces in between land and sea" on which "everything is relativized a little, turned around, where tradition is as much invented as handed down, where otherness is both a new discovery and a reflection of something old" {Bligh 111). The crack in the ice marks a spatial division that signifies racial and cultural division, suggesting that the meeting takes place in a literal and metaphoric "contact zone." The crack, however, is not a permanent boundary: it can be literally crossed and symbolically transgressed. After each group recognized that the other was not a threat, the leader of the qallunaat tried to tell the Inuit that he and his men were hungry: The 1 st man then showed that he had an oo-loo when he stooped down beside the

ice crack which divided the white men from the Innuits & began cutting the ice with a peculiar kind of circling motion with the oo-loo (Civilization mincing-knife or Innuit women's knife). This peculiar motion now showed by Ow-wer with his oo-loo on the snow floor of the igloo. At the same time, or rather right after this man had made these "drippings" or "scratchings". . . on the ice, he put his hand up to his mouth and lowered it all the way down his neck and breast, as if to say he wanted to get something to eat. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling

125) 182 In this passage, the two performances - 1848/49/50 and 1869 - come together: Hall only knows what Aglooka did because he watches Owwer perform the same actions. Owwer not only replicated Aglooka's performance: he also recreated the excessive quality of Aglooka's performance. Aglooka's actions are marked by a performative surplus, which suggests something about the over-determined nature of the entire encounter. Aglooka uses his knife to cut the ice on the ground, then uses the ice chips as props to indicate food, then pretends to eat the ice chips in order to indicate that he is hungry. If Aglooka was desperately hungry, which he probably was, one must ask why he bothered to make prop food and did not, instead, mime the action of eating. It is possible that Aglooka attempted a simpler mime and that his gestures were not understood, leading him to try something else, or that his gestures were considered unremarkable. That Owwer's story, as recorded by Hall, does not tell us whether Aglooka attempted a first gesture before making the prop food suggests that one must remember that Hall's account of Owwer's performance and of Owwer's recollection of Aglooka's performance might not be complete: aspects of either performance may well have gone unremarked upon in the archive.

After this, Aglooka and the second man apparently moved along the crack to a place that was narrow enough to cross. Hall retells what Owwer and Teekeeta told him: "On the 2 Kabloonas (white men) getting to them, the 1st man, who was Aglooka, spoke to them saying 'Man-nik-too-me', at the same time stroking 1st one and then the other down the breast, and also shook hands with each, repeating 'Man-ik-too-me' [sic] several times. The other man with Aglooka did all the same in stroking the breast, shaking hands & speaking 'Man-ik-too-me'" (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 125-26). Aglooka and his companion's behaviour suggests their familiarity with Inuit culture and 183 demonstrates that they were attempting to communicate across cultures. Boas notes that he had observed that among Inuit, stroking another man's breast was a sign of reconciliation, often performed to resolve a feud (174). Aglooka might have been familiar with this interpretation of the gesture and may have combined it with what he believed was the equivalent gesture - the handshake - in British culture. Aglooka likely used the word "man-nik-too-me" to mean "we are friends." He probably got this idea from other British explorers' accounts of contact with Inuit, perhaps from John Ross, who was greeted by Inuit using this phrase in 1830 (Eber, Encounters xiv). Leopold McClintock reported meeting a group of Inuit in May 1857 who greeted him by repeatedly tapping him on the breast and saying "Kammiktoomee," which McClintock interpreted to mean "We are friends" (261). Interestingly, McClintock was wrong about what "kammiktoomee" meant: it does not mean "we are friends" but "do it smoothly, not aggressively" (Eber, Encounters xiv). Nonetheless, Owwer and Teekeeta did not seem to have been put off by Aglooka' s greeting. When Aglooka tried to explain something more complicated, however, his message became unclear and the Inuit spectators had a more difficult time interpreting

what he meant:

After this salutation Aglooka tried to speak with them, but of all he then said, they could only make out one word I-wil-ik. Here some 1 5-20 minutes have been spent in Ow-wer's describing in pantomimic way just how Aglooka appeared and repeating his words... Aglooka pointed with his hand to the southward & eastward & at the same time repeating the word I-wil-ik. The Innuits could not understand

whether he wanted them to show him the way there or that he was going there. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 126) 184 Aglooka knew little Inuktitut but knew that Inuit called Repulse Bay Iwilik. Repulse Bay was frequently visited by whalers and large groups of Inuit congregated there in the spring and summer to assist whalers: it would have been a logical destination for the retreating men. However, Aglooka did not know enough Inuktitut to communicate his intention: the Inuit weren't sure if he was looking for directions or if he was simply telling them his plans. His hand gesture - presumably pointing in the direction of Repulse Bay - didn't help his audience understand his intention. It is significant that Hall notes that Owwer spent fifteen or twenty minutes recreating what Aglooka did and said: even though Aglooka' s intention was unclear, his gestures survived to be replicated at length. We don't know what Owwer found fascinating about Aglooka's performance: it may

simply have been that Owwer found Aglooka's inability to communicate entertaining. I would like to suggest, however, that there was something about Aglooka's performance that compelled Owwer to replicate everything he remembered about the encounter for Hall years later. In order to examine this possibility, it is necessary to consider what

Aglooka did next. Aglooka tried to tell the Inuit what happened before he met them. In this part of the performance, Aglooka used minimal language and gesture in an attempt to tell Inuit that his ship (or ships) had been crushed by ice: He then made a motion to the northward & spoke the word oo-me-en, making

them to understand there were 2 ships in that direction; which had, as they supposed, been crushed in the ice. As Aglooka pointed to the N., drawing his hand & arm from that direction he slowly moved his body in a falling direction and all at once dropped his head side ways into his hand, at the same time making a kind

of combination of whirring, buzzing & wind blowing noise. This the pantomimic 185 representation of ships being crushed in the ice. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in

Woodman, Unravelling 126) The Inuit heard Aglooka speak the word "oo-me-en" (likely meant to be umiak, Inuktitut for ship), watched him gesture to the north, then interpreted his gestures and sounds to indicate that he was referring to ships lying to the north that had been crushed by ice. What is first striking is the content of Aglooka's performance: the record left at Victory

Point made no mention of the ships' condition and certainly didn't tell readers that the ships had been crushed. It is possible that the ships were broken by ice by April 1 848 and that this may have precipitated the abandonment. Alternately, the ships may have been in good condition when they were abandoned in 1848, then damaged when the ships were re-boarded at a later date. Inuit oral history includes a number of stories concerning Inuit visiting ships (stories vary concerning whether there were people on board the ships)102 and then witnessing the sinking of one of these ships: these stories support the idea that the ships were re-boarded at some point (Woodman, Unravelling 218). In either case, by the time Aglooka met Inuit, at least one of his ships had been badly damaged or destroyed by ice.

Aglooka's performance is further remarkable because of how he represented the event of the ship or ships being crushed. Hall uses the term "pantomimic" to describe the performance: he is not referring to generic qualities but to Aglooka's (and Owwer's) reliance on sound and movement over language. Aglooka did not rely on any of the performance tactics that he used earlier in the encounter. He did not use props to represent ice and boat, as he did when he used ice chips to represent food. He did not use his knife

102 See Nourse pp. 255-60 for accounts from Pelly Bay Inuit concerning contact with Franklin survivors and concerning the ships. 186 to draw images in the ice on the ground, even though he had already carved the snow to create the ice chips. He did not use his hand and arm to represent boat and ice. The representational conventions he used earlier had two things in common. First, they each would have represented both the ice and the boat on relatively equal terms: both as objects, both as images, both as parts of a gesture. Second, each would have positioned Aglooka outside of the event of the ship being crushed: Aglooka would have been an omniscient observer representing the event rather than a subject affected by the event. Aglooka also chose not to use words to describe what happened: he used the word "oo-me-en" to indicate that he was referring to a boat, but no other words. It is not a stretch to imagine that someone who knew the Inuktitut words "man-nik-too-me" and "c'hi-mo" also might have known the Inuktitut word for snow or ice. Aglooka was also with a man who likely could have translated the story of what happened to the ships for the Inuit. Owwer and Teekeeta reported that after Aglooka' s performance of the ships being crushed, he "spoke to one of his men, a short man with a narrow face, prominent nose... The small man that Aglooka told to speak with the Innuits could talk so that they could understand him better than they could Aglooka" (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling ill). Tookoolito and Ebierbing, who were present when Owwer and Teekeeta told Hall their story and acted as interpreters during this meeting, told Hall that they were "almost certain this man was Capt. Penny's Dr. (McDonald) whom they have seen in this country" (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman, Unravelling 111). If the small man was Dr. McDonald, he had previously served as surgeon on a whaler: while he probably would not have become fluent in Inuktitut, it is easy to imagine that on a whaler, likely living closely with Inuit, he might have learned the words for ship or ice. This raises the question of why Aglooka apparently did not ask this man to explain what 187 happened to the ships earlier. Aglooka's decision not to use the representational tactics he had used earlier or to have a translator attempt to explain what happened suggests that his gestural performance was not meant to simply communicate that the ships had been damaged by ice. From Hall's description of Owwer's recreation of Aglooka's performance, it seems that Aglooka used his entire upper body to represent the ship being crushed, with his torso becoming the mast of the ship and his hand and arm becoming the hull. Aglooka moved his "body in a falling direction" and at the same time "dropped his head side ways into his hand;" the gesture suggests that Aglooka's body bore the impact of the blow to the ship. In the gesture, Aglooka's body became the ship being crushed. The gesture also suggests what happened to Aglooka when the ship lurched under the impact of the ice: the sudden blow knocked him to the ground. The ice responsible for the destruction is physically absent from Aglooka's performance, evoked instead through sounds of whirring, buzzing, and blowing wind that suggest stormy weather and ice pushing against the body of the ship. Aglooka's performance did not show his audience the ship being crushed by the ice; instead, Aglooka embodied and recreated what someone inside the ship would have heard and felt as the ship was squeezed by the ice. The British sailors were close to death from starvation, exhaustion, and scurvy when they met the Inuit. Of the 105 men who abandoned the ships in April 1848, only thirty or forty met the Inuit: more than sixty men had been left behind or had died before the two groups met. Aglooka and his men must have suspected that they would not survive to make it home. Encountering Inuit could have saved them, if the Inuit helped them acquire food or if the Inuit were able to pass on news of meeting qallunaat to search parties. It was essential for Aglooka to tell Inuit that he and his men were heading to 188 Repulse Bay, so that this information could be passed on to potential rescuers. It was, similarly, necessary for Aglooka to let Inuit know that he and his men needed food. In contrast, passing on the story of the boats being crushed by ice would not have helped Aglooka and his men survive. Yet Aglooka seems to have felt compelled to communicate the experience of his ship or ships being crushed. This suggests that there was something about the manner in which Aglooka experienced the event of the ships being crushed that cried out for representation. The event of the ships being crushed could not be represented using the performance conventions Aglooka had used earlier in the encounter and Aglooka could not simply try to tell Inuit that his ships had been crushed using words. Aglooka's performance exceeded conventional definitions of mimesis as the imitation of an action, but was mimetic in Alice Rayner' s sense of the word: Aglooka's performance arose when

"the experience of loss generatefd] a demand for a substitute" (129). Mimesis, in Aglooka's performance, arose from an incomprehensible experience of loss and emerged not as imitation but as surrogation. Cathy Caruth describes trauma as an event that "is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor" (4). Trauma is "always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed experience and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language" (Caruth 4). The traumatic event becomes known through repetition; however, repetition is always marked by its inability to reproduce the original event as it occurred. The distance between original and 189 repetition replicates the distance between lost and present object that Rayner refers to when she writes that mimesis is "the very capacity to substitute one thing for another, to reconstitute a lost object in the present object" (129) and arises when the experience of loss generates a demand for a substitute. In other words, the loss that demands a substitute is a loss that cannot be fully known; it is a loss that arises from a trauma. The destruction of the ships was certainly disastrous, but can it be thought of as traumatic in Freud's or Caruth's sense? Because we do not know when the ships were destroyed, whether they were badly damaged, or even who Aglooka was, any attempt to determine how the experience of the ships being crushed constituted a trauma to Aglooka will be highly speculative. Furthermore, although Hall records Owwer's recollection of Aglooka's performance, we have no way of knowing whether other men, officers or crew, also attempted to communicate with the Inuit and, if they did, what experiences they might have been attempting to share. The experience of losing the ships, of abandoning them to march across the tundra, might well have been traumatic for other men as well, but we have no way of knowing this from Hall's account of Owwer's story. Despite these uncertainties, I would like to hypothesize that it is possible that the loss of the ships, as it was represented in Aglooka's performance remembered by Owwer, was somehow incomprehensible and unassimilable and that this is why the event had to represented not as it "really" happened but through embodied, gestural performance. The structure of Aglooka's performance, as reproduced by Owwer, suggests the structure of representations of traumatic experience articulated by Rayner. A ship in the Arctic was not just a mode of transportation but symbolized home and civilization in an incredibly hostile environment. Officers and men were responsible for the vessel: the decision to abandon ship automatically resulted in a court martial upon 190 returning to Britain. Dan Simmons, in his fictional account of Franklin's expedition, writes "Abandoning ship was the lowest point in any captain's life. It was an admission of total failure. It was, in most cases, the end of a long Naval career. To most captains. . . it was a blow from which they would never recover" (424-25). The ship also literally protected the men from the harsh environment: officers knew that leaving the shelter of the ship to march across the tundra would result in casualties, men succumbing to

exhaustion, frostbite, injuries, or vitamin deficiencies. As discussed in chapter one, disciplinary relations on Arctic ships differed from

those on ships dispatched elsewhere because officers' authority over the men was frequently enacted not as military discipline but as familial discipline. On happy ships,

officers became like fathers to the men, educating them and socializing with them. Shipboard communities resembled happy families more than military units, with men thinking of officers as kind patriarchs who took care of their physical, social, and spiritual needs. Failing to save the ships from the crushing ice was not just a failure to protect them from damage: it was a failure to protect the men for whom officers were responsible. What if the event of the ships being crushed seemed, to Aglooka, to have been the catalyst of the disastrous events that followed: the abandonment (or re-abandonment), the painful march south and east, the almost certain and painful deaths the men faced after meeting the Inuit? Ice crushing the ships, permanently and severely damaging them, would have eliminated the possibility of sailing the ships out of the Arctic if the ice locking them in eventually melted. If relations between men and officers were deteriorating, as Mordecai Richler imagines in Solomon Gursky Was Here, the damage to the ships could have been a last straw, resulting in a total breakdown of discipline. The moment when the ships were destroyed was the moment when a series of individually 191 surmountable problems became fatal: by failing to protect the ships, he failed to protect his men from the elements, failed to appropriately discipline his men, and ultimately failed to save his men's lives during the impossible march. Aglooka's gesture of dropping his head into his hands can be understood not only as a gesture that represented the physical damage to the ship but also as a gesture that signified his defeat and his failure to perform his duties. If Aglooka experienced something that can be thought of as trauma, it occurred, I suspect, when the ships were damaged and was constituted by the way that the consequences ofthat event projected themselves, incomprehensibly, into the future. Aglooka's performance was characterized, like Hall's performance of "acting Inuit," by surrogation. Aglooka's gestural performance created an effigy which held open "a place in memory into which many people [could] step according to circumstances and occasions" (Roach 36). Hall's performance of "acting Inuit" produced an effigy for the missing men by reproducing the same actions he imagined they completed; the performance held open a space in which the men were not completely lost, even though Hall could not actually know what had happened to them. Aglooka's performance held open a moment that he could not fully address - a moment that encapsulated his failure to adequately protect his men and his decision to attempt to survive by abandoning the ships. The effigy Aglooka generated provided a framework in which the repetitions necessary for traumatic experience to approach consciousness could take place. Aglooka's performance remained with Owwer and re-emerged when Owwer recreated it for Hall. It is not surprising that the story of encounter with white men was preserved in Inuit oral history. Owwer remembered the encounter not in narrative form but as an embodied performance: in order to tell Hall about Aglooka's performance, he acted it out. Aglooka's performance was ambiguous: it communicated very little about 192 the facts of how the ships were damaged by ice. Yet there was something about Aglooka's performance that Owwer not only remembered but also felt compelled to re- produce. One can only hypothesize about why Owwer recreated this particular part of Aglooka's performance. But if Aglooka's performance represented a traumatic experience, the replication of the performance can be understood as part of the structure of traumatic experience: trauma compels repetition and does not require comprehension of the event being repeated. Cathy Caruth claims that stories of trauma have at their core "a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis ofdeath and the correlative crisis oflife: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival" (7). Aglooka's ships had been destroyed by ice and he was leading his men on a death march across the tundra. Aglooka survived the ships being destroyed, and had so far survived scurvy and disease; however, he likely felt a sense of responsibility for the deaths that had already occurred on the march and must have known that it was unlikely that he or his men would survive to reach help. Aglooka's survival between the moment of the ships being damaged and the meeting with Inuit was defined by his identity as a captain who had lost his ship, who was responsible for a number of his men's deaths, and who knew that more deaths would soon follow.

While Teekeeta and Owwer's stories were remarkably internally consistent and agreed with other stories of the meeting at the crack in the ice, there was considerable uncertainty over how the two groups parted. Hall records Teekeeta saying: Saw Aglooka next morning - that is next morning after first meeting him. Aglooka came along side of Innuits [sic] tents - A CORRECTION. The Innuits took down their tents early the next morning & as they proceeded on their journey passed by 193 Aglooka' s tent. Aglooka was standing on the outside of his tent when the innuits [sic] passed it. Aglooka tried to make them stop - put his hand to his mouth and spoke the word 'Net-chuk' or 'Nest-chuk' (seal). But the Innuits were in a hurry - did not know the men were starving. (Hall, Fieldnotes, qtd. in Woodman,

Unravelling 129-30) Hall had earlier heard that Aglooka had visited Inuit in their tent the morning after the two groups met; Teekeeta's later account had the Inuit leaving as the qallunaat awoke. This uncertainty highlights a more problematic question: did the Inuit know that the men were starving? Teekeeta's account cited above suggests that the Inuit did not; however, Hall's published version of the story claims that the Inuit left the men "although supposing that they were abandoning starving men" (Nourse 406). Teekeeta probably recognized the white men were starving, but may have lied to Hall because he suspected, correctly, that Hall would react with anger. The Inuit decision to leave the white men although they were starving was not callous. Four hunters could not have supported their own families and thirty or forty starving men: helping the Franklin survivors would have guaranteed both groups' starvation. But the Inuit did choose to leave the white men, knowing that this would improve their own chances of survival. Owwer survived because, after witnessing Aglooka's performance and recognizing the dire situation that faced Aglooka and his men, he decided to leave the qallunaat and continue hunting. Aglooka's gestures generated an effigy that held open the space in which he failed to save his ship and his men. When the effigy was reactivated, through Owwer' s kinesthetic recreation of Aglooka's performance, it held open a different space: the space in which Inuit, making the decision to survive, left Franklin's men behind. 194 Cracking the Ice The season after the limit met Aglooka, they returned to King William Island to look for the qallunaat or, if the white men could not be found, to scavenge for any valuable goods they might have left behind. The Inuit found a campsite, likely the same campsite at Terror Bay that Rae heard about, which Innookpoozheejook (who spoke to both Rae and Hall) described for Hall: "Three men, one of whom was Tee-kee-ta, first saw the tent. It had in it blankets and bedding, a great many skeleton bones and skulls, the flesh all off; nothing except sinews attached to them; the appearance as though foxes and wolves had gnawed the flesh; some bones had been sawed with a saw; some skulls had holes in them" (Nourse 405). One of the most powerful and frequently reiterated stories about this tent site is not an account of the discovery of the remains, and does not contribute any new information to the narrative of what happened. Hall heard this story from an old woman - Ookbarloo - in 1864. Tookoolito brought Ookbarloo to Hall after she told Tookoolito about a watch, resembling Hall's own watch, which she had seen while at Pelly Bay during the winter of 1853-54. Ookbarloo saw a woman wearing the watch and learned that it "once belonged to one of the many Kob-lu-nas that had died near Neitchille" (Nourse 595). I03 The unnamed woman was the mother-in-law of Innookpoozheejook, the man who told Hall about the tent site. J.P. Nourse, who edited Hall's notes from his second expedition, rarely reproduced Inuit stories Hall recorded in full, tending instead to incorporate them into the narrative as he imagined Hall heard them. It appears, however, that Nourse reprinted this

103 Woodman notes that "Neitchille" was used by explorers to refer to the entire Boothia Peninsula (Unravelling 332). 195 entire story from Hall's notes, signaling that the editor sensed the story's affective power.

Hall's account of the story is as follows: She and her husband went to a big tent not very far from Neitchille, and among the frozen mass of human bones and bodies that were lying around in it she saw one Kob-lu-na body that had a bright white (probably silver) chain around the neck. She knew at once what the chain was for, as some of the other Neitchille Innuits had just come into possession of several watches and chains, which she saw. The body of this man was lying on one side, and was half imbedded in solid ice from head to feet. The way the chain was about the neck and running down one side of the body indicated that the watch was beneath it; and therefore, to get at the watch, she found a difficult and disagreeable task before her. Neither she nor her husband had any instrument with them that they would use for any such purpose as was desired; therefore, while the husband was seeking around, in and about the tent, collecting such things as he fancied would best suit him, she procured a heavy sharp stone, and with this chipped away the ice from all round the body till it was released. Continued old mother Ook-bar-loo, in a truly sorrowful tone of voice: This woman told her that she could never forget the dreadful, fearful feelings she had all the time while engaged doing this; for, besides the tent being filled with frozen corpses - some entire and others mutilated by some of the starving companions, who had cut off much of the flesh with their knives and hatchets and eaten it - this man who had the watch she sought seemed to have been the last that died, and his face was just as though he was only asleep. All the while she was at work breaking the ice near the head, especially the ice about the face, she felt very, very bad, and for this reason had to stop several times. She was very careful 196 not to touch any part of the body while pounding with the sharp stone. At last, after having pounded away the ice from around and under the body, her husband helped her to lift it out of its icy bed. Still she was troubled to get the watch from the frozen garments with which the body was completely dressed. Finally, the watch and key and chain were obtained entire; and the woman now keeps them very choice, in commemoration of the terrible feelings she had when getting them from the dead Kob-lu-na, whom she dug out of the ice with nothing but a heavy,

sharp stone. (Nourse 595-96) The woman and her husband had gone to the tent site to look for valuable goods. When they entered the tent, they entered a macabre space, confronted, according to Hall's translator Tookoolito, with evidence of cannibalism.104 The woman recognized that the corpses had been deliberately mutilated and, apparently, understood the mutilation to have been carried out by the starving survivors. She recognized that the state of the bodies told the story of how desperate the men had become before they died. In contrast to the disfigured corpses, the man with the watch was in good condition - his body was not mutilated and he looked as though he was only asleep - and the woman took this to mean that he was the last man to die. The implication was that the man survived because he ate human flesh and that he was at least partially responsible for the mutilated state of the other corpses. The watch was very valuable to the woman and was worth taking. She had seen other Inuit with similar watches and while the story does not tell us exactly what the woman wanted the watch for, one can speculate that it had a certain value as a status

104 Survival cannibalism occurred, although rarely, among Inuit. The practice of food-sharing helped prevent starvation, but in extreme cases, cannibalism was a last resort. See Bennett and Rowley pp. 89-94 for Inuit perspectives on cannibalism and starvation. 197 symbol in the community and that the woman might have been able to trade it with other Inuit or sold it to qallunaat in order to acquire other goods like food, tobacco or tools.105 Inuit sold a number of Franklin relics to qallunaat searchers; for example, John Rae recorded that he bought "a small silver plate with 'Sir John Franklin K.C.B.' engraved thereon, a star of the Hanoverian order of Knighthood, and a number of Silver spoons and forks, on which are marked the initials of several of the officers ?? both ships" {Arctic Correspondence 288). Rae does not indicate what he gave Inuit in exchange for these particular items; however, it is possible that the woman heard that qallunaat items could

105 The encounter between the Inuk woman and the British watch is immediately reminiscent of Olaudah Equiano's description of his encounter with a watch during his voyage from Barbados in The Interesting Narrative ofthe Life ofOlaudah Equiano. Henry Louis Gates reads the moment in the following manner: A watch, a portrait, a book that speaks: these are the elements of wonder that the young African encounters on his road to Western culture. These are the very signs through which Equiano represents the difference in subjectivity that separates his, now lost, African world from the New World of 'white folks' that has been thrust upon him... The watch, he fears, can see, hear, and speak, and appears to be quite capable of and willing to report his actions to his sleeping master once he awakes. The watch is his master's surrogate overseer, standing in for the master as an authority figure, even while he sleeps... But Equiano is up to much more. Under the guise of the representation of his naive self, he is naming or reading Western culture closely, underlining relationships between subjects and objects that are implicit in commodity cultures. Watches do speak to their masters, in a language that has no other counterpart in this culture, and their language frequently proves to be the determining factor in the master's daily existence. ..Equiano, the slave, enjoys a status identical to that of the watch... He is the master's object, to be used and enjoyed, purchased, sold, or discarded[.] (Gates 155) Yet there are significant differences between Equiano's narrative and the woman's story, and although Gates' reading of the watch is compelling, it ultimately does not bring us closer to understanding what the watch meant to the woman. The woman knew what a watch was because she had seen other Inuit with watches: the watch's value was not determined as much by its function in British culture but by its value to Inuit as a commodity. The signifying power of the watch in British culture was broken with the man's death: the watch's signification changed first to a symbol of social and economic status, then to a symbol of the woman's abhorent action. Much of the power of Gates' reading of the watch in Equiano stems from the argument that Equiano, as a slave, occupied the same object position as the watch; the woman, in contrast, seems to already consider herself a subject. Ironically, it is also impossible to ascertain what the watch meant to the woman by examining the discursive choices made in her story because her story is not, like Equiano's, told in her own words but comes to us thrice mediated: first by Ookbarloo, then by Tookoolito, then by Hall. I am more concerned, here, with exploring the woman's story as a remainder of a past performance that is now inaccessible, not as a text that can be read to reconstruct past significations 198 be sold to explorers and might have hoped to have made an economic gain by taking the item and selling it. Actually taking the watch proved to be a difficult and gruesome act for the woman. She had to use a heavy stone to chip away the ice that entombed the man's body. The story's language suggests the violence of her actions: she had to pound at the ice to break it and she almost certainly damaged the man's frozen flesh in the process by hitting it with the stone. Once she broke the ice away, she was faced with another problem: the man's clothes were also frozen and held the watch fast. The story is silent on how she dealt with the problem of removing the watch from the frozen clothing: the silence suggests that there might have been something unspeakable about the act. While the woman was careful not to touch the body with the rock while she was breaking the ice, removing the watch from the clothing likely would have required her to actually touch the man's body with her hands. Hall thought that in Inuit culture, the possessions of a dead person seemed to be considered untouchable if the objects were present when the person died, for example, he wrote that "Knowing it to be repugnant to his [Ebierbing's] feelings to touch anything belonging to an igloo covering the dead, I spared him all pain on that score by digging down unassisted" (448-49). Hall was initially shocked by what seemed to be Inuit "inattention" for the dead, noting during one of his first visits to an Inuit encampment: "One of the first things attracting my attention, close to the tents, was the skeleton of an Innuit, or Esquimaux woman, just as she had died some three years before! She had been sick, and was left to take care of herself. The remains of her tent - her skin bedding, her stone lamp, and other domestic articles, were still by her side. This inattention to the sick and dead is a custom of the Esquimaux" (84). Hall later came to moderate his view, 199 seeing Inuit practices concerning death as the result not of "inattention" but of complex social codes. When Tookoolito's child died, Hall records that she had to rush out of the igloo with the child's body in her arms because if she failed to do this, everything inside the igloo would have become worthless and could not have been used again (Nourse 265). It is unclear whether the same taboo would have applied to qallunaat belongings; however, the belief that there was a taboo attached to using dead people's belongings may have contributed to the woman's "dreadful, fearful feelings."106

At the same time, the woman's desire for the man's watch was stronger than her repulsion for what getting the watch required her to do. She was overwhelmed by the horror of breaking the ice around the man's face and had to pause several times, but she still was able to take the watch. She did not want to touch the man's body with her hands, but she probably did so in order to remove his clothes. The woman's actions and ambivalence about those actions precisely replicated what one might imagine the man experienced before he died. The woman recognized that the man was probably the last person to die and knew that this meant he had survived by eating human flesh. Bodies, even in the tent, would have frozen quickly. Getting edible flesh from the bodies would have required the man to scrape and hack away at his companion's frozen bodies. The woman, by scraping away the ice surrounding the man's body, likely damaging his flesh in the process, did to the man's body exactly what he did to his companions. Both the man and the woman broke taboos in order to get what they needed. The man decided to eat human flesh in order to survive. The woman chose to do violence to the man's corpse in order to acquire an item of significant material and social value. Both

106 See Bennett and Rowley pp. 221-24, for Inuit perspectives on their death and burial customs. Bennett and Rowley also include Boas and 's observations regarding Inuit attitudes toward death and dying. 200 the man and woman mutilated corpses in order to get something to ensure their survival. Each of them, at least temporarily, had to see a human body not as a corpse to be mourned but as an object that gave them access to a valuable commodity. Each of them committed a deliberate act of misrecognition: they mistook bodies for things. We do not know how the man felt after he consumed his companions' flesh, but we do know something about what the experience of taking the watch did to the woman. It changed her, compelling her to keep the watch and to retell the story of how she got the watch. The watch was transformed, like the man's body, by her act: the man's body was transformed from a body into a commodity and the watch was transformed from a commodity into a relic that commemorated the terrible thing she did to get it. The story of taking the watch became a story about the choice to treat a human body as a commodity in order to ensure survival. The woman's story is a double narrative: it is the story of both the man's and the woman's choices to survive. The woman's story, as recorded by Hall, describes her relationship to her own past action and to the dead man's body. It is also a story, albeit a heavily mediated version, of what happened in the tent before the men in it all died. Through the story, as recorded by Hall, as translated by Tookoolito, as retold by Ookbarloo, as told by the woman, we can trace out something about the experience of Franklin's men before their deaths, although because of the levels of mediation and the missed encounter between the woman and the man, it is impossible to know to what extent the story is "true" or "complete." The narrative structure of Hall's account stages the repetition at the heart of traumatic experience by inferring that the man resorted to cannibalism in order to survive and then by describing the woman's mutilation of the cannibal's corpse in order to get the watch. But the story does not tell us what the woman's experience of making the choice was like. 201 The crucial event - the moment of choice - remains doubly inaccessible in Hall's

narrative: we do not know what the man felt as or after he chose to become a cannibal and

we do not know what the woman felt in her moment of decision. This absence is critical

in retroactively considering the experience as traumatic: the "missed-ness" of the

encounter remains. Rebecca Schneider argues that theories of trauma reveal that "it is not presence that appears in performance but precisely the missed encounter - the reverberations of the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten" (104). The woman's story overlooks the moment of choice. This absence is mirrored in

her incomplete knowledge of the man's actions: she knows what he did, but she does not know what he experienced. The decision to consume human flesh remains inaccessible to

her and to Hall's readers: while the woman damaged a human body in order to survive, she did not actually consume the man's flesh. While her choice and her action structurally replicate the man's choice and action, taking a watch is not the same thing as eating

human flesh. The woman's story, therefore, is a story of an encounter - with the man's body - and of a missed encounter with cannibalism.

Survival

Both encounters are ultimately about passing on what it means to choose survival and about the burden imposed by that survival. Cathy Caruth's interpretation of Freud's

story (and Lacan's interpretation) of the dream of a father whose child has died

illuminates what is at stake for the trauma survivor. Freud tells readers that:

A father had been watching beside his child's sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door

open so that he could see from his bedroom into the next room in which the 202 child's body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it... After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught

him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: 'Father, don 'tyou see I'm burning? ' He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that... the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child's

dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them. {Dreams

509) Caruth argues that "the trauma that the dream, as an awakening, reenacts is not only the missed encounter with the child's death but also the way in which the missing also constitutes the very survival of the father. His survival must no longer be understood... merely as an accidental living beyond the child, but rather as a mode of existence determined by the impossible structure of the response" (100). Owwer and his companions chose to leave Aglooka and his men. The fact of Owwer' s survival to recreate Aglooka's gestural performance is inherently linked to his choice to leave Aglooka behind. Similarly, the woman chose to damage the man's corpse in order to take his watch. By doing this, she understood something about what the man experienced. Her survival beyond the encounter with the corpse was not as a woman with a valuable watch but as a woman who knew what it was to choose survival. Owwer and the woman performed the impact that their encounters with Franklin's men had on them by recreating Aglooka's action and by keeping the man's watch. Owwer's re-creation of Aglooka's performance and the woman's repetition of the story of the watch not only account for Owwer and the woman's encounters with Franklin's men but also preserve the actions of Aglooka and the officer in the tent. But the performances also reproduce the absences at the centre of the prior events. Owwer's re-creation of 203 Aglooka's performance tells us about Aglooka's experience of the event, but it does not tell us what it was about Aglooka's experience that called out for representation. Repeating Aglooka's performance does not reveal why Aglooka and his men abandoned their ships or how Owwer felt about leaving the qallunaat behind. The woman telling the story of the watch and showing it to people conjures up the moments when the man chose to become a cannibal and when she chose to damage his corpse, but the story does not tell us about what happened to the man's conscience after he consumed his companions' flesh or about the damage the woman did to his corpse. In reiteration, the moving power of Owwer's performance and the woman's story is reinforced and the places where silence is embedded in the original events remain open. Cathy Caruth writes that in stories of trauma, "it is the inextricability of the story of one's life from the story of a death, an impossible and necessary double telling, that constitutes their historical witness" (8). Perhaps because both performances are structured around silences, around absences, they allow us to hypothesize about Franklin's men's experiences without returning to the familiar problems provoked by the lack of evidence of what happened. Traumatic repetition emerges as a vital form of historical knowledge, one which incorporates rather than denies the processes of forgetting and erasure that characterize both performance and memory. Historical knowledge arises from how these two encounters preserve through performance the moments of elision, absence, and ambiguity for which material remains fail to account.

204 The Designated Mourner The designated mourner. I am the designated mourner. I have to tell you that a very special little world has died, and I am the designated mourner. Oh yes, you see, it 's an important custom in many groups and tribes. Someone is assigned to grieve, to wail, and light the public ritualfire. Someone is assigned when there's no one else. ~ Wallace Shawn, The Designated Mourner 5

On 4 July 1857, after extensive and publicized negotiations, Queen Victoria finally sat in the audience at the Gallery of Illustration to watch a private performance of Wilkie Collins' and Charles Dickens' melodrama The Frozen Deep.101 The other members of the audience were impressive: Prince Albert, King Leopold of Belgium, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, Hans Christian Andersen, and William Makepeace Thackeray were among the guests. The Frozen Deep, which exploited the public's immense fascination with the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, depicted a lost Arctic voyage and dramatized its men's rescue and heroic return home. The play opened six months earlier, on 5 January, for an audience of servants, tradespeople, and friends in the theatre at Dickens' Tavistock House. Four private performances followed, on 6, 8, 12, and 14 January, for audiences made up primarily of Dickens' invited guests. When playwright Douglas Jerrold (best known for his 1829 naval melodrama Black-Eyed Susan) died on 8 June, Dickens decided to remount the play as a benefit for Jerrold's widow and unmarried daughter. Through Colonel Phipps, the Queen's Equerry, Dickens asked Queen Victoria

107 In the title of the play, the "deep" refers to the depths of sea to which ships sink. The title suggests that the deep is frozen; it is impossible for the ships (the fictional ships in the play and Franklin's real ships) to sink to the bottom of the sea. While Franklin's ships were lost and presumably wrecked, they are also suspended between elements: they are unable to fully sink. Metaphorically, the title suggests that Franklin's expedition was, epistemologically and affectively, suspended between life and death: the loss could not be mourned because it had not fully entered consciousness.

205 to support the benefits, despite knowing that she would not attend a benefit for an individual. She, as expected, refused, but asked Dickens to bring the play to Buckingham Palace. Uneasy about the "social position of his daughters under such circumstances,"

Dickens asked the Queen to attend a private performance at the Gallery of Illustration instead (Brannan 66). I08 The command performance went off well and the Queen's approval transformed the play from a private theatrical that allowed Dickens to enact a fantasy of heroic self-sacrifice into a highly visible performance that served as "the last great public catharsis of [the] tragedy" (Potter 139), producing a compelling counter- narrative of the fate of the expedition and providing, through Dickens' performance, a surrogate for Franklin, a victim who could be mourned and memorialized by the theatre- going nation. Jane Franklin lurks, somewhat unsurprisingly, around the margins of The Frozen Deep.i09 After Dr. John Rae's infamous report appeared in the Times on 23 October 1854, alleging that Franklin's men had resorted to cannibalism to survive, Jane Franklin was, understandably and simultaneously, irate and devastated. She wanted Rae repudiated and her husband vindicated. Through her friend Carolina Boyle, she asked Charles Dickens to come see her. On 19 November 1854, Dickens turned up at Lady Franklin's front door and, although no record of what they discussed has survived, the meeting ended with Dickens agreeing to help restore her husband's reputation. A debate ensued in the pages of Household Words, the weekly paper Dickens edited, between Dickens and Dr. Rae, ostensibly revolving around the issue of whether Franklin and his men could have

108 Dickens' daughters Katie and Mary performed in the play as Rose and Clara, respectively. Acting in a play at Buckingham Palace was problematic because the girls had not yet been presented in society. 109 There is no report of whether Jane Franklin actually saw The Frozen Deep. 206 resorted to the "last resource." This chapter will argue that the debate over cannibalism also signalled a problem of witnessing. Rae' s report was based on Inuit testimony and Dickens was convinced, along with much of the British middle class, that Inuit were

"savages," illegitimate witnesses who were incapable of producing a believable narrative of what happened. Without a legitimate and coherent account of what happened, the event of the Franklin expedition's disappearance remained unknowable. And because the disappearance was unknowable, refusing to enter representation as a conventional exploration narrative, the loss of the expedition could only be engaged through melancholia and could not be mourned.

The Frozen Deep provided a coherent, though fictional, account of what happened to the expedition and allowed mourning to take place. Although Wilkie Collins wrote the first draft of the play, The Frozen Deep was, from the beginning, Dickens' pet project. He and Collins, who acted in the play in the role of Aldersley, the rival of Dickens' character

Wardour, communicated frequently while Collins worked on the script, then Dickens made drastic revisions to Collins' script before directing, producing, and starring in the production. The script provided narrative closure by re-scripting the Franklin saga as a conventional melodrama relying on dramaturgical devices such as foreshadowing, dramatic irony, and anagnorisis to generate suspense and then catharsis in audience members. In order to consider the full extent of Dickens' theatrical intervention, one must consider how the play might have operated in performance. Dickens played Richard Wardour, a deeply flawed, unlikable character tempted by the lures of cannibalism and revenge, who is ultimately redeemed and given a highly affective on-stage death.

Dickens, as Wardour, functioned as a surrogate for the missing men, producing a death scene to witness and an emotionally comprehensible loss to mourn. The play transformed 207 audience members into witnesses to twin losses - the onstage death of Wardour and the offstage death of Franklin, for whom Wardour/Dickens was a surrogate - and thus effectively replaced the illegitimate Inuit witnesses who knew what "actually" (in Greg

Dening's sense) happened to Franklin's men with legitimate British spectators who knew what "really" happened.

The full power of The Frozen Deep to challenge the authority of Rae's report and to allow for mourning to take place emerges only by considering the command performance on 4 July. Dickens' and Collins' script produced a compelling and palatable counter- narrative that overwrote the deeply unpleasant reports of cannibalism. Dickens' performance provided audience members (and cast-members) with a "real" death to mourn, with a "real" emotional experience of loss and resolution. The Frozen Deep was most powerfully legitimated as a representation of what happened and as a vehicle for communal mourning only when it was viewed by the most legitimate spectator in England: Queen Victoria. The public performances that followed the command performances, in London and then in Manchester, allowed the public to mourn the loss of the expedition by shedding tears for the loss of a surrogate - Richard Wardour - who had been implicitly recognized as a legitimate surrogate for Franklin by Queen Victoria. The Queen's presence transformed the performance into an imperial spectacle that not only legitimated the revisionist narrative of heroic death in the Arctic but also confirmed

Dickens' ascendancy as "designated mourner." This chapter will conclude by considering the inauspicious remount of The Frozen Deep in 1 866. While there are any number of reasons why the play might have done poorly - changes in audience taste, flawed acting - and while it is impossible to reconstruct audience reception, one way of interpreting the play's relative commercial failure, only nine years after its triumphant run, is to argue that 208 in 1866 the play may have failed to speak to public sentiment in the way it did in 1857. It is possible that by 1866, The Frozen Deep was no longer relevant as a vehicle for public mourning precisely because it succeeded in providing the public with a way to mourn the loss of the expedition during its 1857 run.

The Contents of the Kettles

In his reports to the Hudson's Bay Company and the Admiralty, Dr. John Rae wrote: "From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evidence that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative, as a means of sustaining life" {Arctic Correspondence 276). Rae, basing his statements on the accounts of Inuit who had heard about a macabre campsite from Inuit who visited it, claimed that Franklin's men had resorted to cannibalism in their final days and that human remains, found in kettles, and dismembered bodies, seen around a campsite, were evidence of this sad fact. Rae did not intend for his report to be published; he was thrust into the public eye when it appeared in newspapers on 23 October 1 854 and became the target of scathing criticism as the public responded to his claims. Janice Cavell points out that "When Rae's news was first published, journalists and the reading public did not immediately assume that there could be no truth in what the Inuit said. While questions were raised about the second-hand nature of the account, initial responses, both public and private, did not deny the possibility that the story was true" (214). Furthermore, Cavell notes that the initial public response, as represented by newspaper coverage, was also strongly critical of the Admiralty (206). Dr. Richard King, an accomplished explorer and geographer, had long petitioned the Admiralty to dispatch search parties to the Back

209 River and his requests were repeatedly ignored:110 "press reactions centred on the accuracy of King's predictions and the guilt the Admiralty had incurred by ignoring him; the allegation that the lost explorers had committed cannibalism was not at first subjected to scrutiny. Instead, it was implied that the desperate straits to which Franklin's men had been reduced proved the magnitude of the Admiralty's crime: had proper care been taken, such horrible events could never have taken place" (Cavell 206). On 30 October, the Times published a letter to the editor calling Rae "deeply reprehensible either in not verifying the report which he received from the Esquimaux, or, if that was absolutely out of the question, in publishing the details ofthat report, resting as they do on grounds most weak and unsatisfactory" (10). Reverend Edward Hornby, whose brother had served on the Terror, wrote the letter and followed it with a private letter to Rae, in which he clarified that his objection "lay, not to your publishing your report, but only those details of it which allege that cannibalism was resorted to by the sufferers as a means of support"

(3 November 1 854, Times 7). Cavell points out that press criticism began to focus on Rae only after the publication of Hornby's letter (207); complaints centred, as Hornby's first letter did, on Rae' s apparent poor taste in publishing the report, on his reliance on unreliable Inuit testimony, and on the accusation of cannibalism.1"

After Rae's report was published, he visited Lady Franklin to extend his condolences: she received him "with ominous frigidity" (McGoogan, Fatal 210) and when he told her he never meant for his report to become public she replied, "Such allegations... should never have been committed to paper in the first place" (McGoogan,

1 10 See Hugh N. Wallace, The Navy, the Company, and Richard King: British Exploration in the Canadian Arctic, 1829-1860. 1 1 1 Cavell argues that it was only after Dickens' Household Words articles appeared that the debate crystallized solely around the question of cannibalism (212).

210 Fatal 21 1). Lady Franklin's concern was not only with the accusation itself, but also with the impact Rae's conclusions would have on future search efforts. Jane recognized that the initially ambivalent public response to Rae's report had to be contained and that Rae's report's authority had to be challenged in order to preserve her husband's reputation and to justify more search expeditions. Jane Franklin decided that Charles Dickens was an appropriate ally against Rae and when she requested a meeting with him, "the desperately busy author dropped everything" to visit her (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 340). Lady Franklin may have contacted Dickens because of his family connection to the navy: his father had been a naval clerk. She may have approached Dickens because he was the best-known writer in England at the time and because Household Words was an ideal venue for a rebuttal of Rae's report."2 She also may have thought of Dickens because his well-publicized views on "savages" qualified him to write the rebuttal she imagined. On 1 1 June 1853, Dickens had published an article entitled "The Noble Savage" in Household Words in which he stated "I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth" (337). Bernth Lindfors claims that Dickens, in writing this article in response to watching a touring Zulu performance troupe, "was not really recommending genocide. He was very much the Victorian pragmatist striving to puncture an inflated Romantic conception of the dignity of 'primitive' peoples. . . Dickens did not suggest that such peoples be exterminated; rather, he wanted them 'civilized off the face

1 12 See Cavell pp. 219-23 for information about how Jane Franklin fared in public opinion following Rae's report. 211 of the earth.' He believed in cultural, not literal, genocide" (76-77). Lindfors argues that

Dickens' reaction to the performance was consistent with other published responses, which in making "numerous comments on [the Zulus'] smell, their bizarre modes of dress (and undress), their noises, their monotonous songs, rapid incantations, and wild, demoniacal dances... betray[ed] an arrogant assumption that the Zulus were overgrown children of nature who had not yet developed the inhibitions, self-discipline, and manners. . . They were savages pure and simple, primitives in the raw" (77); however, Dickens' broader views on savagery were harsh, even among his contemporaries. James

E. Marlow argues that: His own thinking consistent with that of Rousseau, Dickens saw the dominant ideology of English society suppressing and perverting the better parts of men. Earnest men like Doyce [in Little Dorrit] lived true to the nature that was within them rather than in step with the society around them. Thus Dickens attempts to identify the cream of civilization with those who develop their God-given human propensities to be useful. His rejection of the notion of the Noble Savage is typical of his thinking. To Dickens the savage was rarely noble and never natural. ("English Cannibalism" 654) Kristen Guest further elaborates on the anxious relationship between savagery and civilization in Dickens' thinking: "Dickens's position is thus one in which the division between 'civilization,' or benevolence, and 'savagery' always threatens to collapse into the kind of cultural relativism based on custom that Montaigne describes" ("Cannibalism" 112). While we do not know why Jane Franklin contacted Dickens, we do know that her expertise at strategically managing her husband's career before his disappearance had proven critical in her efforts to further the search for his expedition and that she was a 212 skilled tactician when circumstances dictated it was necessary: Lady Franklin may have recognized that Dickens, because of his ability to deploy racist sentiment to great rhetorical effect, was precisely the right person to disprove the Inuit testimony in Rae' s report. When Dickens went to see Jane Franklin, he was already aware of Rae' s accusations, having written to Mrs. Richard Watson on 1 November that: Dr. Rae's account of Franklin's unfortunate party is deeply interesting; but I think hasty in its acceptance of the details, particularly in the statement that they had eaten the dead bodies of their companions, which I don't believe. Franklin, on a former occasion, was almost starved to death, had gone through all the pains ofthat

sad end, and lain down to die, and no such thought had presented itself to any of them. In famous cases of shipwreck, it is very rare indeed that any person of any

humanising education or refinement resorts to this dreadful means of prolonging life. In open boats, the coarsest and commonest men of the shipwrecked party have done such things; but I don't remember more than one instance in which an officer had overcome the loathing that the idea had inspired. Dr. Rae talks about their cooking these remains too. I should like to know where the fuel came from. (qtd. in

Stone, Night S) The letter rehearses virtually all the arguments Dickens would later make in his published response to Rae's report, particularly his reliance on analogy as evidence and his class- driven argument that instances of survival cannibalism occurred exclusively among common seamen and that officers would never resort to such a thing. It was apparently only after meeting with Lady Franklin that Dickens determined to write about cannibalism in Household Words; on 20 November, Dickens wrote to W.H. Wills, his 213 assistant: "I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism, and might do an interesting little paper for the next No. on that part of Dr. Rae's report, taking the arguments against its probabilities" (qtd. in McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 340). John Rae's report did not cause Dickens to become interested in cannibalism. As Ian Stone explains in considerable detail in The Night Side ofDickens, Dickens had been obsessed with cannibalism since he was a child and, although cannibalism became a more prominent theme in his writing after The Frozen Deep, he had already begun to explore the sensational potential of cannibalism narratives in his fiction before the publication of Rae's report. In "The Long Voyage," a piece first published in Household Words in 1853, Dickens drew on a story he read as a child in the weekly periodical the Terrific Register that he then re-discovered, as an adult, in a parliamentary report. "The Long Voyage" includes two separate narratives linked by the theme of cannibalism. The first narrative, directly based on Dickens' childhood reading, concerns a group of convicts who escape from a penal colony. As the men die, the survivors resort to cannibalism, but one man acquires an "inappeasable relish for his dreadful food" (370). He is recaptured and escapes a second time, with another prisoner who plans to kill and eat."3 The second narrative tells the story of the shipwreck of the Grosvenor and focuses on a seven-year old boy who the survivors care for."4 Although the survivors all die, "to Dickens the pathos is suffused with the joy of seeing the natural heroism and self-denial of ordinary human beings. The story is for him incontrovertible evidence that men are not by nature 'solitary monsters.' But of course the ordering of stories in 'The Long Voyage reveals the

1 13 This story also inspired Dickens' characterization of Magwitch in Great Expectation. 1 14 The Grosvenor was wrecked off the coast of South Africa in 1782 on its way from Ceylon to England. Of the one hundred twenty three people who survived the shipwreck, only eighteen made it to Cape Town. 214 intention to weight the point" (Marlow, "Sir John" 98). Dickens was already concerned with the theme of survival cannibalism and the question of what circumstances could drive men to resort to it before he prepared his response to Dr. Rae. Dickens' response appeared in two parts, published on 2 and 9 December 1854."5 In it he criticizes Rae's report on a number of grounds, focusing on the question of cannibalism and arguing that "there is no reason whatever to believe, that any of its members prolonged their existence by the dreadful expedient of eating the bodies of their dead companions" (361). Dickens begins his article by praising Rae's ability as an explorer and absolving him of responsibility both for the accusation of cannibalism and for the report's publication: Before proceeding to the discussion, we will premise that we find no fault with Dr. Rae, and that we thoroughly acquit him of any trace of blame. He has himself openly explained that his duty demanded that he should make a faithful report, to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Admiralty, of every circumstance stated to him; that he did so, as he was bound to do, without any reservation; and that his report was made public by the Admiralty: not by him. It is quite clear that if it were an ill- considered proceeding to disseminate this painful idea on the worst of evidence, Dr. Rae is not responsible for it. It is not material to the question that Dr. Rae believes in the alleged cannibalism; he does so, merely 'on the substance of information obtained at various time and various sources,' which is before us all. (361) Dickens discharges Rae of responsibility for his report's publication and for its content, claiming that he only did his duty in reporting what he heard from Inuit witnesses. At the

115 Dr. Rae responded to Dickens' article on 23 and 30 December 1854. All four articles, Dickens' two and Rae's two, were titled "The Lost Arctic Voyagers." Dickens then reprinted Rae's original report on 3 February 1 855 under the title "Sir John Franklin and His Crews." 215 same time, his condescension is palpable in the insinuation that Rae, by only fulfilling his duty to report, was incapable of discerning that his witnesses were not reliable. His contempt for Rae' s naïveté is implicit throughout the two articles in his total dismissal of Inuit testimony as valid evidence. Dickens argues that Rae' s story was improbable, first because of problems with

Inuit as reliable witnesses and second, because past cases of cannibalism demonstrated that only demoralized men, not heroic English officers, resorted to cannibalism in extreme cases of privation. Dickens claims that Rae's interpreter was "under a strong temptation to exaggerate" (362) and that communication between European explorers and native interpreters was, according to Franklin's account of his 1819-22 expedition, "not altogether satisfactory" (362). In other words, intercultural communication was often ambiguous, misleading, and unreliable. After pointing out apparent logical errors in Rae's report, for instance asking what fuel the men could have used to cook flesh in their kettles (362) and suggesting that bears, wolves, or foxes could have mutilated the corpses that

Inuit found (362), Dickens then hones his argument to focus on problems with Inuit as believable witnesses. Calling the story Rae cited an "incoherent Esquimaux story, collected at 'various times' as it wandered from 'various sources'" (362), Dickens accuses Inuit of having set upon the survivors themselves:

Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin's gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux

themselves. It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of

savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has

appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed 216 and sprung upon him. There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilization all innate depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds all innate virtue. We believe the savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man - lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying - has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature. (362) In reciting his earlier diatribe against the "Noble Savage," Dickens reactivates his earlier call for extermination of savage races as fundamentally threatening, by suggesting that Inuit were responsible for the loss of Franklin and his men. Dickens manages both to demonize Inuit, reinforcing his accusations of savagery and depravity, and to provide Inuit with a motive for lying to Rae about the evidence of cannibalism."6 Dickens runs into trouble, however, as his accusation that Inuit "set upon" Franklin and his men implies that the English explorers could not defend themselves against a mere group of savages. He imagines an alternative narrative, both to cannibalism and to an Inuit attack, which explains what happened to Franklin's men. In this fantasy, Franklin's men passively accept their fates after having "reached that point of starvation where there is little or no pain left." Once "descended so far into the valley of the shadow of death... [the men] lay down side by side, calmly and even cheerfully awaiting their

1 16 Jen Hill argues that Dickens "actively sought to implicate Inuit" in Franklin's men's fate by reversing: [T]he charge of cannibalism - thus far only implied - back onto the 'savage' . . . Far from simply misinterpreting the fate of Franklin, Dickens accused the Inuit of actively participating in Franklin's end... In this graphic reversal of the editorial policy responsible for the benevolent representations of nose-rubbing, cheerful fat natives in earlier pieces on Arctic exploration in Household Words, Dickens's adjectives divide Inuit and English into different categories of weakness, with the Inuit as morally weak and the English as physically weak. (122-23) 217 relief from the world" (362-63). By suggesting that Franklin's men died peacefully and by making the Biblical reference to the "valley of the shadow of death," Dickens allows readers to envision their final moments as characterized by Christian patience and acceptance rather than marred by conflict among themselves or with Inuit. Dickens supports this fantasy by again citing Franklin's account of his first expedition, in which Franklin, according to Dickens, "so affectingly describes... [how] the bodies of the dead lay within reach, preserved by the cold, but unmutilated" to demonstrate that "the sufferers had passed the bitterness of hunger and were then dying passively" (364). The first part of Dickens' response is rhetorically compelling but logically incoherent: he moves from arguing that Rae's report was the result of intercultural miscommunication, to accusing Inuit of lying about cannibalism to cover up their complicity in the men's deaths, to imagining the final survivors dying passively with no contact with Inuit at all. It ultimately did not matter that Dickens' argument was rife with internal contradictions and based on an astoundingly racist attitude toward Inuit, even for the mid-1850s."7 By invoking the inherent heroism of the lost Arctic explorers who were "carefully selected for the service" and were "no doubt far above the average" (365), Dickens made it virtually impossible to contradict his argument without also criticizing the lost men. In the second part of Dickens' response, published on 9 December, he refutes the accusation of cannibalism through analogy, outlining examples of cannibalism among sailors and arguing that in these cases, men were already debased and demoralized, lacking strong leaders like Franklin. By citing examples ranging from the French frigate

1 17 As Cavell points out, attitudes toward Inuit changed toward the end of the decade, in large part because of Dickens' compelling response to Rae's report. Dickens' own feelings toward non- Europeans became more negative throughout the decade, in part because of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-59, which I will discuss below as potentially mediating public responses to The Frozen Deep's performances in July and August 1857. 218 Medusa to the American sloop Peggy,,"8 Dickens situates cannibalism as the result not only of character weakness, but also of class and national weakness. He does not deny that cannibalism occurs, but situates it as a phenomenon that exists outside of the Empire proper and occurs among marginal subjects: French and American sailors might resort to cannibalism, as might demoralized seamen; however, English subjects, like Franklin and his carefully selected officers, never could. Readers who became familiar with this formulation in Household Words would have been predisposed to recognize that cannibalism was shorthand for class and racial otherness in The Frozen Deep.

Cannibalism was also, according to Dickens, more likely to occur when men were stranded at sea rather than on land, as Franklin's men were: "the influence of great privation upon the lower and least disciplined class of character, is much more bewildering and maddening at sea than on shore... even men who might be in danger of the last resource at sea, would be very likely to pine away by degrees, and never come to it, ashore" (391). Dickens then reaches the full height of his rhetorical command, contrasting reason with experience and civilization with savagery:

In weighing the probabilities and improbabilities of the 'last resource,' the foremost question is - not the nature of the extremity; but, the nature of the men. We submit

that the memory of the lost Arctic voyagers is placed, by reason and experience,

high above the taint of this so easily-allowed connection; and that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar

118 The Medusa ran aground on 2 July 1816 off the coast of Mauritania and 146 of its passengers and crew were evacuated to a raft. On the raft, which Géricault famously painted, fighting broke out, resulting in a number of deaths. By the fourth day, some survivors resorted to cannibalism. The Peggy left the Azores on 24 October 1765 bound for New York with a cargo of wine and brandy. As the crew's rations ran low, they held a lottery to determine which member of the crew to kill for food. The lottery was rigged and resulted in the men shooting a black slave and consuming his flesh and organs. 219 endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber. (392) Here, Dickens underlines the contrast between what reason and experience tell his readers - that Franklin's men could never resort to the 'last resource' - and what Inuit told Rae. Dickens' reasoning and affective appeal produce legitimate 'evidence' of what happened to the men and effectively discounts Inuit testimony. What is remarkable about Dickens' denial of the probability of cannibalism is his obvious fascination, one could even say obsession, with the cannibal scene."9 Jen Hill explains: Dickens may relate the tales as evidence of the relative rarity of cannibalism, but the sheer number of cases he chronicles would seem instead to indicate a thriving cannibal culture. No fewer than twenty separate incidences are spread across nine pages, each full of descriptions of practicing cannibals who are 'delirious,' 'ferociously wild' 'raging mutineers'... One might explain his hyperbolic repetition as a hysterical underlining of the racial otherness of the cannibal, but this seems reductive. Emphasizing instead the repetition of the tales themselves brings to light Dickens's investment in the affective mechanics of cannibal tales, as well as in their ideological content. (126-27) Russell Potter also points out the internal contradiction in Dickens' writing on cannibalism in Household Words: "publicly, [Dickens] condemned such a thing as

1 19 For an overview of cannibalism in Dickens' work and life see Harry Stone, The Night Side of Dickens pp. 1-268. The most obvious examples of cannibalism as a theme and motif in Dickens' fiction arise in Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist; however, cannibalism arises, as Stone shows, in many if not most of his other works. 220 impossible, while at the same time citing as evidence a lengthy litany of the most depraved and disturbing instances of cannibalism known, revealing a fascination that exceeded all necessity" (145). As the discussion of The Frozen Deep will further demonstrate, Dickens was highly aware of the sensational appeal of the cannibal tale and exploits it to generate interest among readers and audience members.

What was at stake in Dickens' defense of Franklin against accusations of cannibalism? Marlow points out that although Dickens' childhood fascination with cannibalism stemmed from the dread of being eaten, after 1854 "He was no longer concerned only about being the victim of cannibalism; the close identification he made between himself and Franklin suggests that the opposite dread had grown strong within him" ("English Cannibalism" 651-52). Marlow argues that this other dread "puts Dickens's defense of Franklin in a different perspective. Above all else, Franklin epitomized a man of enterprise, will, and energy. This is the deep personal level upon which Dickens needed to exonerate Franklin; for Dickens was himself a man of awesome energy and will power. . . A great deal was at stake for him in the exoneration of Franklin: nothing less than the possibility of heroism" ("English Cannibalism" 652). Dickens identified with Franklin because he recognized himself in his own imagination of and in representations of Franklin: if Franklin could give into cannibalistic urges, so could

Dickens himself. Furthermore, the possibility that Franklin could have consumed human flesh called the very division between civilization and savagery into question; if Franklin:

[C]ould be brought to the level of the lowest savage in a vain struggle for survival, there would be no hope that normal Englishmen would not choose to survive at

whatever cost. If this were the case, the assumed differences between the West and the 'uncivilized world' would be false. With these expressed differences gone, 221 identity would disintegrate, and with a sense of identity would go the very meaning of life as the West had attempted to predicate it. (Marlow, "English Cannibalism" 652-53)120 While Rae countered Dickens' argument point by point, he could not compete with Dickens in the court of public opinion and his argument, while logical and supported by his own experience, was not emotionally compelling. For instance, Rae argues that Dickens based his response on the belief that Franklin and his men never could have gone against unspoken codes of moral conduct and instead suggests that Franklin's men might not have lived up to Dickens' imagined ideal: Much stress is laid on the moral character and the admirable discipline of the crews

of Sir John Franklin's ships. What their state of discipline may have been I cannot say, but their conduct at the very last British port they entered was not such as to make those who knew it, consider them very deserving of the high eulogium passed upon them... To place much dependence on the obedience and good conduct of the comparatively uneducated seamen, if exposed to the utmost extremes of distress, when their superiors, without having any such excuse, have forgotten themselves on a point of such vital importance, would be very unreasonable. (45 8) m While Dickens' idealization of Franklin, his officers, and his men was appealing, it was not, according to Rae, accurate: Dickens' argument was flawed because it was based on a vision of Franklin's men that evidence (from their conduct in the final port) and historical

120 Marlow' s description of the relationship between cannibalism and the collapse of "civilized" identity is a feature of much contemporary scholarship on cannibalism in literature. See, for example, Maggie Kilgour "The function of cannibalism at the present time" in Cannibalism and the Colonial World. 121 Fitzjames' journals, which were sent back to England with the five men who were discharged in Greenland, indicate that while the ships were at , four sailors attempted to desert after drinking whisky smuggled on board the Erebus (Cavell 216-17). 222 precedent did not support. This, combined with Rae' s argument that naval discipline had frequently broken down in "extreme cases of privation" (458), gave the appearance that Rae was "suggesting that Franklin's officers were incapable of maintaining order, and that his crews were a lustful rabble, likely to have rebelled almost as soon as the ships were abandoned. Presumably, the cannibals had been sailors and the officers their victims" (Cavell 217). Cavell points out that while Rae's argument was logical, it did not help his popularity: "In a time of heated class disputes, this implication would not have endeared Rae to the mass of his countrymen, and his gratuitous slurs against dead men did nothing to promote the idea that he would not make accusations without good reason"

(217) Rae draws on his own experience of living among Inuit to counter Dickens' characterization of Inuit as lying savages and to argue that Inuit oral history was accurate. He uses anecdotal evidence, describing Inuit recounting the story of another group of Inuit meeting John and James Ross: "they described so perfectly the personal appearance of Sir John Ross and Sir James Ross - although the men spoken with had not seen these gentlemen - that any one acquainted with these officers could have recognized them. The natives on one point set me right, when they thought I had made a mistake" (435). Rae mirrors Dickens' argument with his example of Inuit truthfulness and accuracy. By highlighting his familiarity with Inuit culture, however, Rae actually played into Dickens' argument about racial difference and inadvertently positioned himself as a racial other. Hill points out that Dickens' "invocation of racialized stereotypes foregrounded Rae's own foreignness. As a Scot who worked for a commercial monopoly, he was not, in fact, English, nor was he pledged to the patriotic, empire-building aims of the military... Thus when... Rae responded to each of Dickens's hyperbolically patriotic claims by pointing to 223 his experience in the Arctic, the shadow of the savage - perhaps even the cannibal - lay across his words" (123). Before Rae's response was even published, Dickens had already conditioned readers to see a link between believing Inuit claims and being outside of accepted structures of xenophobia and imperialism: "To accept the variousness of Inuit explanation, Dickens implied, would be to call into question not only racial categories, but all things precious to Victorian middle-class readers" (Hill 122). The impact of Dickens' first two articles was far-reaching and immediate: "It increasingly seemed essential that the Inuit story should be rejected in order to protect the explorers' reputations. On the subject of cannibalism, a rigid, hostile cast of mind became common. Rae's rebuttal of Dickens. . . did little to remedy this and, in fact, only exacerbated the situation" (Cavell 214-15). Though Rae's argument is compelling today, in 1854 he didn't stand a chance against Dickens. He could not compete rhetorically, and his position as a Scotsman and as an employee of the HBC located him outside of Dickens' rigid definition of middle-class Englishness. Stone argues that Dickens was, unlike Rae:

[A]ble to interweave reporting of facts with a moral stance that would secure approval from most of the middle class readership ??Household Words... he did not research the subject, the survival of man in the arctic, thoroughly and in his articles comprehensively demonstrated his fundamental ignorance of it. This did not matter. He was certainly no worse and, probably much better informed than many of those who rushed into print on the topic and there seems little doubt that his readership was satisfied. ("Kettles" 14) Potter summarizes how the debate crystallized in public opinion: "for the readers of Household Words there were two choices: side with the embattled Dr. Rae, who trusted 224 the words of savages, or with Mr. Dickens, who gave articulate voice to the denials that rose like mantras on the lips of British men and women... And indeed, as he doubtless knew he would, Dickens won the argument in the public's perception" (108). At the same time, however, Potter claims that the apparent conclusion of the debate over cannibalism "only drove the horror and repugnance of the 'last dread alternative' into a deeper - and more terrifyingly fruitful - region of the public unconscious than it had hitherto occupied" (108). While I agree with Potter that the Household Words debate failed to resolve the question of what happened to Franklin's men and generated the need for the question to be publicly re-engaged in The Frozen Deep, I suspect that the problem that remained to be resolved was not only, and perhaps was not even most importantly, about cannibalism. In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud suggests that in cases of melancholia, the patient "is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious" (245). The relics Rae retrieved during his expedition confirmed that Franklin and his men were likely dead, but they were mute: they did not tell the English public about what actually happened to the missing men: the loss of the expedition remained outside consciousness. Inuit accounts of finding mutilated bodies were denied because Inuit, as "savages" were not trustworthy witnesses: although Inuit were not mute, they were silenced by Dickens' response. Sarah Moss clarifies the link between accusations of cannibalism and the illegitimacy of Inuit as witnesses to argue that the epistemological problem of not knowing what happened to the expedition developed into a set of anxieties concerning race and imperialism: 225 [T]he idea of cannibalism and the idea of Inuit testimony... [begin] to collapse into each other. It is unspeakable that the British Navy should have resorted to eating each other and unbearable that savages who will not write things down should be the

ones to tell the Times about it. All savages lie... and no gentleman eats a colleague; these things are simply not admissible and will not be admitted. There is an imperial need for everything that happens to be collated and to make sense in the metropolis,

and the idea that Franklin's story might exist only in Inuktitut, only in places that the British have not yet mapped, is as intolerable as the idea that a hundred and thirty five of the Navy's finest men might have been so changed by their experience of a foreign land that they ate each other. (143) The problem with cannibalism was not just about the accusation itself, but was equally about the Inuit who made the accusation. While Dickens' arguments in Household Words did much to ensure that Inuit accounts were not taken seriously, the debate in Household Words also highlighted a bigger problem: the public still did not know what was lost. And without bodies to bury or legitimate narratives of loss to recount, the missing men could not be mourned: the loss of the Franklin expedition could only be engaged with melancholically. Following the debate in Household Words, the question of what happened appeared publicly closed,122 but by 1856, perhaps because the conclusion of the Crimean War

122 It was not closed to Dickens: he and Wilkie Collins collaborated on The Wreck ofthe Golden Mary in 1856, a story that concerns a shipwreck and "cannibalistic obsessions" (Stone 8). On the Golden Mary, the example of Captain Bligh's denial of cannibalistic urges is used to relieve the shipwreck's survivors and "They are grateful, it seems to be reassured that a boatload of men far less civilized than themselves could reject that 'last dread alternative'" (Marlow, "Sir John" 101). Marlow notes "Dickens means the readers as well as the characters to be strengthened in their faith in civilization. It is understood that the readers, like the survivors, would recognize the narrator's decision to tell about the Bounty because of the 'one momentous point often in my 226 meant that the public's gaze was no longer directed away from the Arctic, the question had resurfaced and demanded attention. Russell Potter argues that in 1 854, the public failed to mourn the loss of the expedition: in 1856, the "British public awoke anew to the old, festering anxieties that Rae' s evidence had only heightened... Readers and show- goers... now had little recourse, save the speculative and vague imaginings in the press; there was no longer any public font at which these tears could be shed. Dickens, at a single stroke, took the first step in establishing a new venue for this unreleased tension by preparing The Frozen Deep" (138-39). Potter argues that the play became "the quintessence of the Franklin drama, the last great public catharsis of this tragedy, a moment both enticing and elegiac in which the 'lost Arctic voyagers' could be rescued... by means of representation" (139). While I agree with Potter's claim that the play provided a venue for public catharsis, I would like to examine precisely how the play allowed this to happen. The Frozen Deep addressed the fundamental problem posed by the Household Words debate by creating a knowable event that filled in the narrative void that emerged in 1854.

Melodramatic Certainty The Frozen Deep concerns a lost Arctic expedition that closely resembles, but is not explicitly identified with the Franklin expedition. Two ships, the Sea Mew and the Wanderer, have set off for the Arctic and have become trapped. The men and officers patiently wait in huts, but as the health and morale of the expedition deteriorate, the commander of the expedition, Captain Ebsworth, decides to send a group of able-bodied thoughts.' For the narrator as for the author who is the spokesman for his age, these are the precise terms: cannibalism is the 'one momentous point often in my thoughts'" (Marlow, "Sir John" 101). 227 men to the nearest fur settlement for help. The expedition, unlike Franklin's expedition, is rescued and returns home. The Frozen Deep's plot concerns a love triangle between two officers, Richard Wardour and Frank Aldersley, who both love Clara Burnham, who waits in England for her fiancé Frank, thus containing the theme of Arctic exploration within the framework of a fairly conventional melodramatic love story.123 The play sets up the parallels between Franklin's expedition and the fictional expedition, and employs melodramatic dramaturgical conventions in order to finally conclude the Household Words controversy. The prologue, which Dickens wrote and performed, reminds the audience of the Franklin expedition but also suggests that the play will rewrite the actual story as fiction. Dickens, his voice underscored by soft music and surrounded by "Mists and darkness," asks the audience to "Pause on the footprints of heroic men,/Making a garden of the desert wide/Where PARRY conquer'd and FRANKLIN died" (97). The performance begins with an acknowledgement that Franklin and his men are dead; however, Dickens quickly suggests that the play can bring the missing men back through representation and that this representation might reveal the secrets of the expedition:

. . . [Tjhat hearts as true (Though nothings of the air) may live for you; Nor only yet that on our little glass A faint reflection of those wilds may pass,

But, that the secrets of the vast Profound Within us, an exploring hand may sound[.] (97)

123 Although it is outside the scope of this chapter, it is essential to note that while Dickens was involved in revising, rehearsing, and performing The Frozen Deep, his marriage was breaking up. The play's romantic theme engrossed Dickens (Stone 275). 228 Dickens hopes that the play will imaginatively resurrect the lost heroes and, if it could not perfectly represent what happened, it could reflect it, so the audience could witness the lost men's heroism. Dickens continues, suggesting that the play could assuage the melancholia associated with the loss by dispelling gloom and providing a way for the missing men to come home, albeit through theatrical representation: Vanish, ye mists! But ere this gloom departs,

And to the union of three sister arts

We give a winter evening, good to know That in the charms of another show,

That in the fiction of a friendly play, The Arctic sailors, too, put gloom away, Forgot their long night, saw no starry dome, Hail'd the warm sun, and were again at Home. (98) In this passage, Dickens suggests that a fictional representation of the happy Arctic can overwrite the actuality of Arctic gloom, both for the audience present and for the missing men. Indeed, Dickens seems to be referring, in the final three lines, to the well-known practice of staging theatricals in the Arctic as a way to dispel the gloom of winter on a ship and to be suggesting that Franklin's men themselves might have put on plays for this very reason. The prologue declares that theatre has a remarkable ability to transform a bad situation into a good one, both creating a happy image of the Arctic on stage and a palatable vision of what actually happened to Franklin's men. At the same time, Dickens' qualification that the gloom will depart for just an evening and his concession that what the play presents is fiction acknowledge that there is a limit to what the play can do: the overwriting is only temporary. 229 Opening not in the Arctic but in a "pleasant room in a country-house with an old fashioned bay window" (101), The Frozen Deep begins by introducing the women left behind by officers of the expedition: Rose Ebsworth, the daughter of Captain Ebsworth; Mrs. Steventon (Caroline), the wife of Lieutenant Steventon; Lucy Crayford, sister of Lieutenant Crayford; and Clara Burnham, fiancée of Frank Aldersley. The characters would have immediately reminded audience members familiar with Arctic exploration of the Franklin expedition. Not only does the name Frank evoke Franklin, but, as Russell Potter notes, the play also suggests parallels between Richard Wardour and Francis Crozier, the commander of the Terror, and between the four women in the play and the famous triad of Lady Franklin, Sophia Cracroft (Franklin's niece), and Eleanor Geli (his daughter). Potter remarks that: Captain Francis Crozier, the commander of the Terror and second-in-command of

the Franklin expedition, was indeed in love with a woman who had scorned his interest - and that woman, of all people, was Lady Franklin's niece and constant companion, Sophia Cracroft. And along with Lady Franklin and Sophia, Franklin's daughter Eleanor formed the third person of the tragic trinity of womanhood that would have been familiar to any followers of the Franklin saga; all three had stood together on the pier when the Erebus and Terror departed in 1845. In one sense, Collins and Dickens simply added a fourth figure to an already well-known public grouping, though some of the emotional interconnections were largely unknown to the public. (143) While Potter makes a valid point, it is important to note that The Frozen Deep's female characters did not precisely depict the three real women: while Rose Ebsworth, whose father is missing, is in the same situation as Eleanor Geli, Mrs. Ebsworth, who appears to 230 be the Jane Franklin character, is married to a lieutenant, not to the commander of the expedition and Clara Burnham, unlike Sophia Cracroft, spurned her officer (Wardour) in favour of another (Aldersley). The decision to begin The Frozen Deep by presenting the women left behind, rather than the missing men, replicated the way that the actual missing men remained "visible" in England during the search through the visibility of the women who waited for them. Jane Franklin had become the public face of her missing husband through her campaigns to continue and fund search efforts and represented the other families left behind by the expedition through her public performance of loss, for example, in her careful choices of wardrobe, as discussed in the introduction. I suspect that it was in part through watching the women left behind that the British public came to understand what the loss of the expedition meant and that by beginning The Frozen Deep with the fictional women, Collins and Dickens structurally reproduced the public's relationship to the missing men. In act one, the audience learns that Clara has become increasingly despondent since news of her fiance's expedition stopped arriving. Lucy tells the other women that Clara, already "naturally excitable and nervous" (104), is "still wasting, still growing paler and paler... talking by day, in a manner that shocks and alarms me" (106). Clara's melancholic disposition is caused, the audience is first led to assume, by her fiance's disappearance, suggesting that those left behind by Franklin's expedition were, like Clara, susceptible to melancholia. The audience learns, however, that Clara has a secret. Clara discloses, her speech underscored by a piano playing first "Those Evening Bells" and then "River, River," that years before, Richard Wardour was about to set sail for Africa and proposed to her. When she did not respond to his proposal, he assumed that she had consented. While he was away, she fell in love with Frank Aldersley and became engaged 231 to him. When Wardour returned and learned she was in love with another man, he told her "The time may come when I shall forgive you... but the man who has robbed me of you shall rue the day when you and he first met" (113). The audience then discovers why Clara is so tortured: Aldersley and Wardour are members of the same Arctic expedition, serving on different ships, and she is distraught that "one chance syllable between them might discover everything!" (115). The tension is heightened when Clara's childhood nurse, Nurse Esther, who claims to have the power of "second sight" - a kind of psychic power - enters, introduced by the song "Wandering Willie." The song, based on a Robert Burns poem, was played to introduce Nurse Esther when she appeared earlier in the act (104); its repetition reminds audience members of her Scottishness and reinforces her ethnic difference from the other women. Nurse Esther tells the women that she has had a vision: "Doos the Sight show me Frank? Aye! and anither beside Frank. I see the lamb i' the grasp o' the lion. I see your bonnie bird alone wi' the hawk. I see you and all around you crying bluid. The stain is on you!" (1 16). Nurse Esther sees Frank, whom she envisions as a lamb and a "bonnie" bird, threatened by Wardour, who is represented as a lion and a hawk. A stage direction suggests that Nurse Esther's second sight might not be authentic: she enters the scene early enough that she could have overheard the end of Clara's confession to Lucy.124 The play's skepticism about second sight is made clear in the third act, when Nurse Esther's visions are explicitly criticized. Spiritualism became part of public discourse surrounding

124 Dickens and Collins differed on how to characterize Nurse Esther. Collins' characterization of Esther in his first draft suggested that she actually had the second sight, making her a far more threatening character. Dickens worried that supernatural aspects would overshadow the central suspense of the plot - the conflict between Wardour and Aldersley - and rewrote Nurse Esther's entire part to emphasize that her second sight was not real. See Nayder, Unequal Partners pp. 60- 99 for a detailed discussion of the changes Dickens made to Collins' draft. 232 the Franklin expedition when Lady Franklin famously consulted mediums for news of her husband (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 299) and was approached by William Coppin, a former sea captain, whose dead daughter had apparently been communicating with his living children and had given them news of John Franklin.125 Nurse Esther's vision, legitimate or not, closes the act and foreshadows the events that will happen in the Arctic. Her final lines, combined with Clara's confession, and the repetition of the same song -

"Those Evening Bells" - that accompanied the beginning of Clara's confession, heighten the tension leading into act two, reinforce the importance of Clara's past as a factor in the present situation, and generate suspense about what will happen to Aldersley. Act two opens on a ramshackle hut somewhere in the Arctic, in which the Sea

Mew's men have taken shelter. Clarkson Stanfield, the Royal Academy artist, painted the drop sets for acts two and three as a "personal favor" to Dickens (Brannan 57). The backdrop depicted the hut, with a door in the flat that opened to show the "bleak polar prospect, where the snow is seen tofall incessantly, as often as the door is opened' (119). The hut is depressingly run down, on one side there are two sleeping berths with a "rude fire" on the other side is a doorway, blocked by a piece of old sail cloth, behind which is an inner hut. The stage description notes "Icicles haveformed in the interstices ofthe walls'" (119). The audience quickly learns that the interior conditions mirror the men's physical conditions: even Captain Ebsworth is so ill with "freezing pains" that he cannot

125 Apparently Louisa ("Weasey" or "Weasy") Coppin had made writing appear on a wall in her former home, reading "EREBUS AND TERROR, SIR JOHN FRANKLIN, LANCASTER SOUND, PRINCE REGENT'S INLET, POINT VICTORY, VICTORIA CHANNEL" (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 301). In the United States there was another famous case of spiritualism related to the missing men: Maggie and Kate Fox, of Rochester, New York, claimed that "spirit rapping" was engendered in their presence - they could ask questions and spirits would respond with a snapping sound. The spirit rapping was a hoax: the girls had double-jointed toes that they could snap like fingers. 233 leave his bed (121). After some comic business involving the cook, aptly named John

Want, the able-bodied men and officers from the Wanderer arrive and Lieutenant

Crayford tells the men that Captain Ebsworth has determined "we should make another, and probably a last, effort to extricate ourselves. The winter is coming on, game is getting scarcer and scarcer, our stock of provisions is running low, and the sick... are increasing in number, day by day. We must look to our own lives, and to the lives of those who are dependent on us - and we have no time to lose" (127). Crayford explains that a detachment of men will attempt to travel to the closest fur settlement "from which help and provisions may be dispatched to those who remain here" (128). Since every able- bodied man would (obviously) volunteer for the journey, the crew decides to draw lots to determine who will go and the officers decide to roll dice. The morose Wardour refuses to roll the dice for himself, so Aldersley rolls for both men. When Wardour gets a two and Aldersley gets an eight, it appears that Wardour will stay behind and Aldersley will go: one can imagine the short-lived relief of the audience at this happy twist of fate keeping Wardour from discovering Aldersley's true identity. As the departing men prepare for their journey, Wardour cuts up Aldersley's bunk for firewood and discovers that Aldersley has carved his own and Clara's initials into the wood. Wardour questions

Aldersley and realizes that he is, in fact, Clara's new fiancé and, therefore, his own arch- nemesis. At that very moment, Captain Helding enters the hut and announces that his second lieutenant has injured himself in a fall. Wardour immediately volunteers to go in his place. As they leave the hut, Crayford warns Aldersley not to "risk hardships [he is] unfit to bear" (140) and suggests that "While you can stand, keep with the Main Body"

(141). The act closes as Wardour ominously replies to Crayford: "While he can stand, he keeps with Me" (141). Here, Dickens and Collins dramaturgically echo the ending of act 234 one, which ended with Nurse Esther's "vision," by again foreshadowing the harm that Wardour will do to Aldersley.

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"A scene from 'Frozen Deep'" When act three opens on a "Cavern on the Coast ofNewfoundland, opening at the side, on another Cavern" (145), it quickly becomes clear that the detachment that departed at the end of act two was successful and that the men have reached safety.126 John Want, the cook, clarifies where they are: "I think I should have preferred staying at the North Pole... Another man in my place might be inclined to say that this Newfoundland Cavern was rather a sloppy, slimy, drafty, seaweedy sort of a habitation to

126 That Collins and Dickens set the final act in Newfoundland, a British colony, rather than in Greenland, which was where British ships departing for or returning from the Arctic would normally have stopped, suggests the extent to which Arctic exploration, as depicted in the play, is linked to the broader project of British imperialism. 235 stop in" (145). John Want sits opposite Nurse Esther, whom he describes as "only a cracked old woman. Always a going on about her Second Sight!" (146). John Want's line draws together the first and third acts, specifically reminding audience members of Nurse Esther's final speech in act one, prompted by her second sight, in which she envisioned Wardour destroying Aldersley. This, combined with Wardour's discovery of Aldersley's identity and final lines in act two, strengthens the expectation that despite the expedition's rescue, something has befallen Aldersley. The third act privileges dramaturgical efficacy over exploration reality in order to have the women meet the men in Newfoundland: Mrs. Steventon, Rose, Lucy, and Clara have travelled to Newfoundland "to meet [the expedition] on its return from the miserable North Pole" (147).'27 Clara has been told that the exploring party divided into two groups, that one group is still missing, and that Aldersley is among those men. As soon as Lucy and Crayford are left alone, however, Lucy discovers the truth - the only missing men are Wardour and Aldersley - and the audience's expectations that something terrible happened in the Arctic are apparently confirmed. The song "River, River" is reprised, which was played for the first time when Clara described her relationship with Wardour, and he enters the cavern clothed in rags: "his hair is tangled and grey; his looks and gestures are those ofa man whose reason is shaken, and whose bodily powers are sinking fromfatigue" (155). He is clearly starving and says "Throw me some bones from the table. Give me my share along with the dogs" (155). He then tells Steventon and

127 While women, generally only the wives of commanding officers, sometimes accompanied their husbands as far as Stromness, the last port of call for ships crossing the Atlantic, it was less common for wives to travel to meet their husbands on their return. One exception occurred in 1846, when Jane Franklin travelled to the west coast of the United States hoping "to hear that Sir John had emerged into the Pacific Ocean, and so to greet him and share his moment of victory" (McGoogan, Lady Franklin 's 276). 236 Ebsworth, who don't recognize him, about having been shipwrecked and drifting in an open boat: "I can't get the wash of the sea out of my ears. I can't get the shining stars all night, and the burning sun all day out of my brain. When was I wrecked?...When did the gnawing here {touching his breast) and the burning here {touching his head) first begin? I can't tell ye'. I have lost all reckoning of it" (156). Wardour's obvious confusion and his story of shipwreck references the stories of shipwreck Dickens cited in Household Words (as one of the few situations in which men grew so debased as to resort to cannibalism) and would have underlined the possibility that Wardour had resorted to survival cannibalism. Finally, Crayford, recognizing him, asks "Why are you here alone? Where is Frank, you villain! Where is Frank?" (157). Crayford voices the audience's assumption: that Wardour has killed Frank and returned alone. His appetite, for bones rather than real food, suggests that he has degenerated into a savage animal. When Clara enters the cavern, Wardour recognizes her and "Turns instantly, and breaks his way out ofthe cavern" (157). This gesture seems to confirm how demoralized and inhuman Wardour has become: one assumes that he has run off because seeing Clara has made his guilt at what he has done to Aldersley unbearable and that he leaves so abruptly because he has completely forgotten all rules of polite society. Wardour returns, "breathless and staggering," bearing Aldersley in his arms and telling Clara "Saved, saved for you!... He's footsore and weary, Clara. But I have saved him - 1 have saved him for you\ I may rest now - 1 may sleep at last - the task is done, the struggle is over" (158). In this moment, both the characters' and audience members' expectations are disproved and the situation is revealed as the exact opposite of what everyone was led to believe: Wardour, far from being a murderer or, worse, a cannibal, has actually rescued Aldersley, sacrificing his own strength and health in order to bring 237 him back to Clara. Wardour recounts how he was tempted to kill Aldersley and how a voice called him back from this brink to save Aldersley for Clara instead:

There was a time when the fiend within me hungered for his life... I took him away alone - away with me over the waste of snow - he on one side, and the tempter on the other, and I between them, marching, marching, till the night fell and the camp- fire was all aflame. If you can't kill him - leave him when he sleeps - the tempter whispered me - leave him when he sleeps! I set him his place to sleep in apart; but he crept between the Devil and me, and nestled his head on my breast, and slept here. Leave him! Leave him! - the voice whispered - Lay him down in the snow and

leave him! Love him - the lad's voice answered, moaning and murmuring, here, in his sleep - Love him, Clara, for helping me! love him for my sake! (158-59) The voices Wardour heard - the "tempter" and Aldersley - battled and the voice calling for Wardour to love Aldersley, in a Christian, brotherly, sacrificial sense, won. Aldersley completes the story: "He has given all his strength to my weakness; and now, see how strong / am, and how weak he is! Clara! I held by his arm all over the ice and snow. His hand dragged me from the drowning men when we were wrecked. He kept watch when I was senseless in the open boat" (159-60). Dickens and Collins exploit the power of a dual reversal: Wardour is transformed from a bad into a good man when he overcomes the temptation to kill Aldersley and instead nurtures him; the characters' and audience members' suspicions concerning Wardour are similarly reversed as they realize not only that he did not kill his arch-rival, but also that he sacrificed himself to save him. The scene's affective power does not stop there: the happiness at Clara and Aldersley' s reunion is marred by the realization that Wardour is actually dying. Wardour's final speech and his on-stage death is highly pathetic: 238 Forgotten you? [spoken to Clara] (Lays his hand on Frank's head.) - Should I have been strong enough to save him, if I could have forgotten you? Stay! Some one was here and spoke to me just now. Ah! Crayford! I recollect now. (Embracing him) Dear Crayford! Come nearer! My mind clears, but my eyes grow dim. You will remember me kindly for Frank's sake? Poor Frank! Why does he hide his face? Is he crying? Nearer, Clara - 1 want to look my last at you. My sister, Clara! - Kiss me, sister, kiss me before I die! (160) Dickens and Collins resolve the homosocial rivalry that existed between Wardour and Aldersley and provide closure to the rivalry through Wardour' s death. At the end of the speech, when Wardour calls Clara a sister, he signals that he has accepted his love for her will never be requited and that his romantic desire has changed into brotherly - Christian - love. Wardour's final speech evokes stock melodramatic deathbed speeches, but its simplicity and its naivete - "Why does he hide his face? Is he crying?" - demonstrate that Dickens and Collins carefully calculated every line to ensure maximum emotional impact.128 Not only is the ending highly affecting, it is also completely conclusive. The audience and other characters know exactly what has happened: no questions are left unanswered about what occurred when Wardour and Aldersley were lost together, either concerning what events transpired or what Wardour's internal struggle was like. Wardour

128 One must not rule out the possibility that the audience may have responded to these lines by recognizing their comic potential and their pathos. Jacky Bratton points out that: Twentieth-century ears hear the apparent naivete, the huge simplicity of nineteenth- century melodrama's voice as irresistibly comic; if the melodramatic mode is indeed still part of our sensibility, we must be committing the cardinal melodramatic sin of distorting its message when we try to suppress that laughter, or misunderstand its meaning. In their own time early melodramas easily accommodated the comic response, without embarrassment; it was, indeed, vital to the genre, as it should be to our understanding of it. ("Contending" 38) 239 is able to say goodbye to everyone important to him - Aldersley, Crayford, and Clara. The audience can easily guess what will happen after the play ends - the group will return to England, Clara and Aldersley will marry, and Wardour will be forgotten. The play provides complete closure and catharsis and it is this finality that allowed it to intervene in and resolve the epistemological problems that developed during the Household Words debate.

The British public's inability to know what had happened to Franklin's expedition emerged as the most troubling hangover from the Household Words debate. Although it is tempting to argue that the play's intervention in the debate is primarily as a response to Rae' s accusation of cannibalism, the play engaged with the loss of the expedition in a more complex way.129 Alice Rayner claims "Trauma is characterized by the impossibility of an event, in its singularity, to enter any representation" (26). While I am highly reluctant to argue that The Frozen Deep is a sign of the working-through of collective trauma, in order to discuss the play as a specific response to the loss of the expedition it is helpful to consider what Collins and Dickens did not represent in The Frozen Deep. Dickens was obsessed with accurately depicting life in the Arctic, for example replacing "a cask for Collins' table - an object which the explorers did not carry on their sledges when they abandoned their ships - and a hammock for the wooden 'bed place' that Collins had assigned to John Want... common seamen, like John Want, slept in hammocks" (Brannan 75). Dickens likely knew, from his extensive reading on the subject, that virtually every Arctic expedition encountered Inuit at some point. Yet no Inuit appear in The Frozen Deep; in fact, the play never acknowledges that the Arctic has

129 That The Frozen Deep was not primarily concerned with cannibalism is also supported by Harry Stone's placement of his discussion of the play - in The Night Side ofDickens, he mentions the play in his section on cannibalism but discusses it in depth in the section on passions. 240 any human inhabitants. The Frozen Deep addresses cannibalism, both employing it as a comic device and ultimately denying that it could occur among English officers.130 There are repeated suggestions of cannibalism in the second act, first when John Want, whose name suggests appetite, feeds the men the ambiguously named "bone soup" that he has cooked, then when the crew members' names are placed not in a hat but in Want's soup pot to determine who will leave the hut. Cannibalism is invoked more ominously by Wardour at the end of the act, when he tells Aldersley to come with him "over the road that no human footsteps have ever trodden, and where no human trace is ever left!" (140-41). The suggestion is that no trace of Aldersley will be left behind because Wardour, consumed by desire for Aldersley's fiancée, will instead consume Aldersley's remains. Russell Potter argues that the bone soup suggests accidental cannibalism and subtly refers to the unwitting cannibalism that likely occurred during Franklin's 1819-22 expedition. In The Frozen Deep "the link between these dis-jointed, desiccated animal bones and human bones must have been more than merely one of form"; although the bones John Want serves are presumed to be animal bones, "the line between the two... was a source of considerable and anxious ambiguity" (Potter 160-61). While Potter claims that the play's references to cannibalism suggest deep and unresolved anxiety, Jen Hill argues that the play's repeated references to cannibalism allow Dickens to "insist on the impossibility of cannibalism at every turn" (136). The conventions of melodrama and Arctic narrative "come together to disallow any deviation from the anticipated ending... whether or not Wardour is a cannibal is not so interesting as how the impossibility of his cannibalism is

130 Cannibalism also emerges figuratively, in the "class cannibalism" that Lillian Nayder suggests is present in the play's depiction of Nurse Esther, see Unequal Partners pp. 60-99. 241 revealed" (Hill 135). The script underlines the impossibility of cannibalism among officers and reiterates Dickens' argument about cannibalism in Household Words when Aldersley relates how he and Wardour drifted in an open boat after the shipwreck: Dickens noted in both his 1 November letter to Mrs. Watson and in the second part of his response in Household Words that cannibalism was most likely in exactly this situation. If Wardour did not resort to cannibalism in this most extreme circumstance, the possibility that he, or any British officer, could ever become a cannibal is absolutely refuted. While Dickens' and Collins' suggestions of cannibalism throughout the play allow for contradictory interpretations, it is clear that the question of cannibalism was hardly outside the play's representational frame. Though The Frozen Deep does not represent Inuit, it does not elide racial difference. In fact, the play confirms that racial otherness is a sign of a faulty ability to see the truth, of a false witness. The key example of this is in the play's treatment of Nurse Esther's second sight. At the beginning of act three, John Want tells Nurse Esther, "No woman but a Scotch woman would set any vally by a second hand eye. And, like other second hard articles, it's mostly made up of bits that she picked up here, and bits that she picked up there; and then she goes and pieces them together, sometimes right and oftener wrong" (146). Her belief in second sight is linked both to her gender and to her Scottish ethnicity. The speech references John Rae and his report for audience members familiar with the Household Words debate: Rae was, like Nurse Esther, Scottish and was also racially suspect because of his closeness to Inuit. Want's description of second sight, furthermore, actually describes the way that Rae heard and pieced together Inuit testimony based on second-hand stories. Lillian Nayder remarks that Nurse Esther functions as a surrogate for Inuit, taking their place as a target of racialized hyperbole, 242 and notes that this is an unsurprising substitution, considering the Scots were often portrayed in the nineteenth century as "a savage people to be civilized by the English" {Unequal 69). Yet if the play was meant to indirectly castigate Inuit by representing the "savagery" of a Scottish woman and the illegitimacy of her second sight, one must ask why Collins and Dickens did not simply put Inuit characters on stage and depict them, for example, attacking the travelling party. The decision to erase Inuit from the Arctic landscape was nothing new: many contemporary narrative and visual representations of the Arctic depicted it as empty of human inhabitants. The erasure of indigenous peoples from representations of the Arctic tended to arise in response to the anxiety provoked by the Inuit presence in relation to the ideals of polar exploration. Francis Spufford describes this phenomenon in his comparison of John Everett Millais's painting The North-West Passage (which depicts a domestic interior, full of naval memorabilia, in which a young woman reads to an old man) to polar travel narratives, writing that narratives "allow little more role to the Arctic's natives than the painting does, when it comes to the explorers' success or failure at traversing the landscape. The Eskimos belonged in descriptions of the region, in accounts of its natural history, word-paintings of its scenery. They did not belong in the stories of discovery and achievement" (188). Lisa Bloom concurs with Spufford, arguing that polar exploration narratives: [LJiteralized the colonial fantasy of a tabula rasa where people, history, and culture vanish. The absence of land, peoples, or wildlife to conquer gave polar exploration an aesthetic dimension that allowed the discovery of the North Pole to appear above political and commercial concerns... The process of erasure characteristic of colonialist texts, however, does reappear in the narratives of polar exploration and 243 discovery, reducing the vital participation of Inuit men and woman to subordinate 'native bearers' imagined either as 'primitive' or 'unspoiled' figures. (2-3) What representational possibilities would have been open to Collins and Dickens, if they had chosen to put Inuit characters on stage? Inuit could have appeared as friendly, bumbling characters, their naivete about British ways providing comic relief. They could have been guides or servants to the explorers, reflecting the role Inuit and other indigenous peoples frequently played in exploration narratives. They could have been depicted as "savages," threatening the success of the British expedition with their violent, selfish tendencies, theatrically confirming Dickens' criticisms from Household Words. Providing Inuit with active roles in the play would have given them agency that Dickens certainly would have thought unsuited to "savages." Presenting Inuit as passive figures would have risked citationality: for audience members to watch Inuit watching the British expedition deteriorate would have echoed their actual role as witnesses to the Franklin tragedy. Putting Inuit on stage would have affirmed their presence in the Arctic and would have underlined the actual absence of the British, reinforcing the anxious likelihood that Inuit witnessed what the British failed to see.

Instead of depicting Inuit in the Arctic, Dickens and Collins staged an empty Arctic that could be conquered by the British and suggested, through details like the cask and the hammock, that their vision of the Arctic was authentic. Furthermore, the dramaturgical conventions of melodrama allowed them to present an expedition that was very much like the Franklin expedition, which was almost lost in the same way as Franklin's might have been, but provided the narrative and cathartic closure that the actual narrative of the

Franklin expedition's disappearance did not allow. Dickens and Collins rewrote the ambiguous and morally disturbing story of the disappearance and of possible cannibalism 244 among its final survivors as a conventional melodrama, and this allowed them to situate the story within acceptable morality and comprehensible emotional registers. David Mayer argues that melodrama provides "a metaphor through which to approach disturbing subjects temporarily... [and] tames those subjects, offering relief as the problem recedes or, at the very least, becomes emotionally intelligible, congruous, and less menacing" ("Melodrama" 151). Melodrama satisfied audiences by simultaneously affirming conventional morality and conforming to dramaturgical expectations: the villain would challenge the hero and heroine, but ultimately, the play would end with the hero and heroine reunited and the villain punished. Melodrama responded to: [A] world where things are seen to go wrong, where ideas of secular and divine justice and recompense are not always met, where suffering is not always understandable... [with] emotional, rather than intellectual, answers to a world where explanations of why there is pain and chaos and discord are flawed or deeply and logically inconsistent... It offers [spectators] emotional satisfactions and emotionally validates the factual world as they have experienced it. For such spectators it is helpful and reassuring to depict a world which may be explained in comparatively simple terms of good and evil. (Mayer, "Melodrama" 148) Mayer's assertion that melodrama responded to spectators' need to emotionally understand the world certainly provides one way of understanding why melodrama was an appropriate genre for addressing the incomprehensible loss of the Franklin expedition: it allowed Dickens and Collins to provide an emotionally satisfying and conclusive explanation for an apparently incomprehensible event. Jeffrey Cox points out precisely why melodrama was able to provide such satisfaction, arguing that melodrama relied on a set of staging and acting techniques that gave audience members a "real" experience. Cox 245 Claims that nineteenth-century melodrama was realistic not in the sense that it accurately depicted real life but that melodramatic realism had more to do with "a set of techniques developed to make the audience feel as if it is experiencing along with the characters the tensions, fears and joys evoked by the situation on stage. It is not a pictorial but an experiential realism" (170). Melodrama was "capable of overwhelming an audience's sense of distance and judgment, but it [was] exactly this ability to transport the audience that gave melodramatic theatre its sense of reality: people felt the action on stage in a visceral way" (Cox 170). We have already seen that the script of The Frozen Deep operated by carefully manipulating suspense and tension to heighten audience interest and then climaxed with a reversal that was designed to seem surprising but was in fact incredibly predictable. By the time the denouement - Wardour's affecting death - came, the audience had no lingering questions about the plot, no nagging worries about characters' motivations and was able to completely surrender to the pathos of the death scene, experiencing catharsis and emotional satiety. In order to investigate precisely how The Frozen Deep engaged the audience, we must turn to Dickens' performance as

Wardour and consider how he was, almost singlehandedly, the catalyst of the cathartic responses that characterized audience members' - and actors' - reactions at the end of The

Frozen Deep.

Mourning an Effigy The affect generated at the end of The Frozen Deep can only be understood by considering Dickens' performance as Richard Wardour. Dickens was intimately involved in every aspect of the production, and this allowed him to carefully control how audience members received his performance. His acting, which critics noted as a departure from 246 what many professional actors were doing on stage at the time, seemed understated, passionate, and believable. For many audience members, for other cast members, and, perhaps, for Dickens himself, the line between Wardour and Dickens virtually collapsed at the end of the play - Dickens was so thoroughly identified with Wardour that it is not clear who the audience was crying for when Wardour died. Wardour both was and was not a representation of Franklin, just as Dickens both was and was not Wardour: the dual surrogation operating in Dickens' performance allows us to consider how the performance emerged as a response to the absence of the real Franklin and addressed Dickens' and the audience's need to mourn the loss of the expedition. Dickens had produced and performed in other plays at Tavistock House, including Twelfth Night pantomimes for his children and family friends and Wilkie Collins' melodrama The Lighthouse in the summer of 1855, but had attempted nothing that matched the scale of The Frozen Deep. The theatre at Tavistock House was located in the schoolroom and usually only needed to seat about twenty five people. Dickens, anticipating much larger audiences for The Frozen Deep, built an addition to the room to increase the size of the stage and to provide more room for spectators. He also had new gas lines installed, to achieve the complicated lighting effects he imagined (Brannan 57). Because Dickens had determined how the stage would be laid out, had the ability to dictate his own ideas for set design to Clarkson Stanfield and William Telbin (who painted the scenery for the first act), and was intimately involved in all technical aspects of the production, the revisions he made to Collins' text not only supported his own political and social views (as in the changes made to the characterization of Nurse Esther) but also ensured that the text, set design, and stage technology worked together seamlessly, "achieving a harmony that the reviewers regarded as remarkable" (Brannan 247 55). Similarly, Dickens cast the play carefully, encouraging Collins to consider individual actors' abilities in creating their roles, and revising the text to reflect his casting choices: Dickens faced relatively few problems with his actors. He had avoided potential problems partly by assigning the only difficult male roles, aside from Wardour's, to the most experienced men and partly by tailoring the roles to fit the natural abilities of the men. He gave the only difficult subordinate roles, those of Lt. Crayford and John Want, to Mark Lemon and Augustus Egg, both of whom he had worked with in several other plays... Dickens had encouraged Collins to consider Lemon's natural ability while developing Crayford's characterization. Dissatisfied with Collins' development, Dickens retailored the role to fit the idea that he had designated in his letter. (Brannan 51) Not only did Dickens dictate casting and characterization, he also led his actors through what was, for an amateur production, an intense rehearsal process. Rehearsals began with his family on October 17 (his son Charley played Steventon; his daughters Katie and Mary played Rose and Clara) and with the rest of the cast by November 7 (Brannan 53). Dickens held a minimum of two rehearsals each week, and sometimes as many as four (Brannan 53). Dickens' absolute control over every aspect of the production allowed him to micro-manage how his own performance would appear, from the blocking of other actors around him, to the way other characters responded to Wardour, to the music that highlighted the play's emotional moments. In other words, Dickens was in a position to foreground how audience members would respond to his performance as Wardour before he even began acting his part. It is necessary to be tentative in accepting contemporary reviewers' remarks that Dickens' acting was a departure from the conventional melodramatic acting of the mid- 248 nineteenth century. David Mayer points out that Victorian acting was an ever-evolving aesthetic that responded both to changing public tastes and to the material conditions surrounding particular performances: "Victorian actors were conscious that acting styles were changing over time to meet the circumstances in which melodrama was viewed. The 'size' of melodramatic performances could be affected by such variables as the interior dimensions of theatres, the actors' distance from the audiences, [and] theatre lighting" ("Melodrama" 151). Although it is difficult to pin down precisely how Victorian melodramatic acting differed from acting for different genres or evolved over the century, Mayer argues that Victorian melodramatic acting was characterized by an expansive physicality, supported by other elements of the performance, particularly background music:131 "Stance and gesture were used by actors to illustrate and heighten the emotional substance of the drama and to express feelings which cannot be stated in words. Actors' gestures could travel far from the body, extending, elaborating, holding a movement, because they were supported by incidental music which gave tempo and sustaining duration to the gesture" (Mayer, "Melodrama" 152).132 Despite the variability and complexity of melodramatic acting conventions, reviewers watching The Frozen Deep noted that Dickens' performance as Wardour departed from conventional acting styles

131 Mayer's argument about the physicality of Victorian acting relates to Jacky Bratton's argument that the mimicry of other actors and "enacted reminiscences" of past performances should be given a critical role in how "history is continuously and developmentally used within the theatrical profession" (131). See "Anecdote and mimicry as history" in New Readings in Theatre History pp. 95-132. 132 Caryl Flinn argues, in discussing the critical role of music in melodrama, "The melos of melodrama, then, picks up where something else leaves off, veering in the direction of what might appear to be pure surfeit or excess... Critics have argued that, along with other non-referential signs like performance, gesture and rhythm, music indeed does take over for melodrama's linguistic deficiencies. Though not able to operate mimetically, music can, in the words of Richard Dyer, gesture towards a 'something better' that he and others have associated with a Utopian impulse" (108).

249 and created a more realistic impression of the character. The relatively small theatre at Tavistock House, even after Dickens' renovation, meant that the actors' gestures and facial expressions did not have to travel as far as they would have in a larger theatre: actors' performances could be more understated in the more intimate space. Dickens seems to have exploited this, using detailed gestures and facial expressions to communicate the inner turmoil consuming Wardour. The smaller space also meant that the actors in The Frozen Deep did not have to be as vocally powerful in order to be heard by audience members; this allowed Dickens to avoid vocal conventions that had emerged from the need to project in larger spaces that came to characterize how melodramatic actors of his time spoke. The reviews that provide the most detail about Dickens' performance are reviews of the performance at the Gallery of Illustration in July, not of his performance at Tavistock House or at the New Free Trade Hall in Manchester, so it is difficult to say how his performance evolved over the course of the year and whether he adapted his performance to meet the demands of the three different venues. One of the most interesting reviews of the play, by John Oxenford, the critic for the Times, attempts to explain the appeal of Dickens' performance. Oxenford's review, published 13 July 1857, is useful because he saw the play performed at both Tavistock House and the Gallery of Illustration: [W]e feel that if Mr. Dickens had had to describe in narrative form the situations of the Frozen Deep, instead of acting them, he would have covered whole pages in recording those manifestations of emotion, which, not having his pen in hand, he now makes by the minutest variations of voice and gesture. Where an ordinary artist would look for 'points' of effect he looks for 'points' of truth. A specimen of humanity in which every twitch of every muscle can be accounted for is to be 250 presented with all the elaboration of actual nature, no matter whether it be admired or not. When Richard Wardour tells the story of his disappointment in love there is ample opportunity for much noisy grief and many a stride to the footlights, but Mr. Dickens dares to keep down his voice through the whole of the narrative. The effect may be monotonous - but what ofthat? He who talks not for the sake of display, but simply that he may relieve his mind from an oppressive and almost humiliating burden, will necessarily be monotonous.... such a man as Mr. Dickens presents - a man strong in the command of his voice, but weak in suppressing the language of his eyes and facial muscles, a man whose constant attempts to hide the internal storm by slight simulations of good fellowship, only renders more conspicuous the vastness ofthat which he would conceal- a man who has a habit of losing his temper in a manner that mere external circumstances do not warrant - such a man is a just object of terror. (12) Dickens did not fall back on melodramatic conventions - the noisy grief, the stride to the footlights - to emphasize Wardour' s heightened emotional state, but instead trusted that the power of the story's words - Oxenford is referring to Wardour telling Crayford the story of how he discovered Clara's engagement to another man - and his own celebrity would hold the audience's attention. Oxenford points out that Dickens did not use his voice or his gestures to demonstrate Wardour' s anguish but instead seemed to embody and vocalize "real" anguish, giving the audience the impression not of an actor performing a role but of a person "really" feeling the emotions Wardour felt. Peter Brooks describes how melodrama employed embodiment to produce meanings that were often inaccessible to representation by other means: Melodrama constantly reminds us of the psychoanalytic concept of 'acting out': the 251 use of the body itself, its actions, gestures, its sites of irritation and excitation, to represent meanings that might otherwise be unavailable to representation because they are somehow under the bar of repression. . . It is, of course, in the logic of melodramatic acting out that the body itself must pay the stakes of the drama: the body of the villain is publicly branded with its identity, exposed in a formal judgment scene, then, if not put to death in hand-to-hand combat, driven from the stage and banished from human society; while the body of persecuted virtue is at first expressionistically distorted, as in a hysterical conversion, then is rewarded, feted, married, and emblazoned with all the signs of the public recognition of its nature. (19) Brooks, in describing the signifying power of the body, seems to focus on this phenomenon as it occurs within melodrama: on stage, the villain's body is branded and the virtuous character is emblazoned, and the audience reads these visual signs as communicating the play's evaluation of the characters' worth. Dickens, in the scene described in Oxenford's review, told audiences what Wardour had suffered in losing Clara through the dissonance between his words, his voice and his body. While Dickens' voice was monotonous and subdued, he used his eyes and facial muscles to betray how Wardour really felt: the "lying" voice and the "honest" body together gave the impression of a man who was keeping his emotions barely under control. The Daily News' reviewer also noted the nuanced nature of Dickens' performance, providing details of the gestures and actions Dickens developed in order to characterize

Wardour:

His voice, though always admirably modulated, is almost the least exponent of the passion represented; each muscle of the face, each motion of the hands, lends its aid 252 to tell the story; his pathos is as touching as his rage is terrifying; the tender pressure of his lips on the board bearing the carved name of his love, after a stolen glance round to see that he was unobserved, was as perfect as the quick frantic loading of the gun and the unsuppressible howl of exultation when he finds his rival in his

power. (13 July 1857) This review again indicates that Dickens was aware of how his text combined with gesture and vocal characterization to give audience members the impression of a character. What seems to be happening is that Dickens rejected using conventionalized melodramatic signifiers of despair or anger (the back of the hand to the forehead, the pulling out of hair) to indicate Wardour's emotions to the audience but instead developed new signifiers for his character's state (kissing the board, loading the gun) that, because they were unfamiliar to audience members as melodramatic conventions and because they responded to the material specificities of the play, gave a heightened impression of realism.

Wardour's death scene was remarked upon less, but one can get a sense of how audiences responded to it. The Manchester Times claims that Dickens rejected sensational acting in favour of real passion; it was "the absence of all stage trick... which made the scene so true, so full of reality... It was too real for applause. There was scarcely a hand until the close of the act, when the cheers burst forth" (22 August 1857). The Manchester Times ' reviewer recognized that the melodramatic actor had "to make inconsistencies appear truths, and yet if he tones down the colouring beneath a certain level he may probably commit as much mischief as in tearing 'the passion to tatters'" (22 August 1857). Dickens apparently straddled this fine line, giving the impression of real but not overwrought passion in the final moments of the play. This resulted in audience 253 members' attention being completely absorbed by the performance, to the extent that they didn't respond normally - with applause - until after the play ended. This effect peaked in Manchester, where Dickens reports that even the stagehands and carpenters were taken in by his performance: "It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand - as at Manchester - and to see the hardened Carpenters at the sides crying and trembling at it night after night" (Letter to Mrs. Watson, 7 Dec. 1857, qtd. in Johnson and Johnson 306). In the same letter, Dickens shared a story about Maria Ternan's reaction to his performance.133 Ternan, who played Clara in the performances in Manchester, was completely devastated by

Wardour's/Dickens' death: When we came to that point at night, her tears fell down my face, down my beard (excuse my mentioning that hateful appendage), down my ragged dress - poured all over me like Rain, so that it was as much as I could do to speak for them. I whispered to her, 'My dear child, it will be over in two minutes. Pray, compose yourself - 'It's no comfort to me that it will be soon over,' she answered. 'Oh it is so sad, it is so dreadfully sad. Oh don't die! Give me time, give me a little time! Don't take leave of me in this terrible way - pray, pray pray!!' Whereupon Lemon, the softest-hearted of men, began to cry too, and then they all went at it together. I think I never saw such a pretty little genuine emotion in my life. And if you had seen the poor little thing, when the Curtain fell, put in a chair behind it - with her mother and sister taking care of her - and your humble servant drying her eyes and

133 Ternan's mother and sister also acted in the play at Manchester: Mrs. Ternan played Nurse Esther and Ellen Ternan played Lucy Crayford. It was shortly after the Manchester run of The Frozen Deep that Dickens' romance with Ellen Ternan grew serious; he split from his wife in May 1858. It is an interesting coincidence that Ellen Ternan's character, Lucy Crayford, has foresworn romance because she is in love with a married man. 254 administering Sherry (in rags so horrible that they would scarcely hold together), and the people in front all blowing their noses, and our own people behind standing about in corners and getting themselves right again, you would have remembered it for a long, long time. (Letter to Mrs. Watson, 7 Dec. 1857, qtd. in Johnson and Johnson 306-07) What Dickens' letter indicates is that Wardour's death scene engulfed audience members, actors, and stagehands in a communal experience of grief. While the audience's response is fairly predictable, the tears of the stagehands and actors are surprising and raise the question of why Dickens' performance generated such a strong response from members of the company and crew. Dickens "forgot himself in the final act, becoming overwhelmed by his own performance. Nina Auerbach points out that this idea of "authentic" performance characterized Dickens' view of the craft:

For Dickens, the only authentic theatre was himself. . . His hostility to the actual theatre, his compulsion to expose its meretriciousness, was more than professional rivalry; it was a symptom of a typically Victorian, and perhaps particularly masculine fear. . . If audiences turned from man to performer, from word to show,

the commonwealth would lose itself in chaos. . . For Dickens and other Victorian

heroes, the theatre was suspect unless it was a testament to his solitary sincerity. ("Before" 8) Emily Allen suggests that Dickens' uneasy relationship to theatricality pervades much of his work, particularly The Old Curiosity Shop, which Allen argues "exhibits a persistent ambivalence about performance" {Theatre 107). Although Dickens' more transgressive "characters are often metamorphic role players with multiple selves, selves that parody 255 the notion of a single, unified core of personality" {Theatre 107), Allen claims that female performance in The Old Curiosity Shop is particularly problematic because it challenges the idea of a "pure, essentialized female self {Theatre 109). Allen ultimately concludes,

"While theatricality may be at ideological odds with the construction of a naturalized female identity, the latter actually enables the former by offering a conservative and stabilizing counterbalance" {Theatre 109). In performing in The Frozen Deep, Dickens, who was suspicious of the lack of sincerity on professional stages and ambivalent about the relationship between theatre and nature, allowed himself to be taken in by his own role, forgetting, it seems, that he even was acting. A much cited anecdote relates how absorbed Dickens was in his own performance in act three, when he left the stage to get Aldersley: "during the last act he rushed from the stage in anguish, he tossed the other men aside like a charging bull, often leaving them black and blue" (Johnson and Johnson 16). Even when Dickens was not visible to the audience, he stayed so engaged in his role that he endangered his fellow actors. Bert O. States describes this phenomenon, writing that in moments when the line between actor and character blurs, "It is not that the actor steps out of character in such moments but that he finds the fissure in the text that allows him to make his unique contribution: he self-creates the real ground of his character's ideality" (164). The line between Wardour and Dickens collapsed, not only for the audience members and cast members but also, at least occasionally, for Dickens.

What States calls the "fissure" in the performance is, in the case of Dickens' performance in The Frozen Deep, a moment when the operations of surrogation become visible. Joseph Roach argues that "In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through 256 death or other forms of departure... survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates" (2). One way that surrogation addresses absence is through the creation and, often, destruction of an effigy. Roach describes this process: [T]he sacrificial victim must be neither divisive nor trivial, neither fully part of the community nor fully outside of it; rather, he or she must be distanced by a special identity that specifies isolation while simultaneously allowing plausible surrogation for a member of the community. This occurs in a two-staged process: the community finds a surrogate victim for itself from within itself; then it finds an alien substitute, like an effigy, for the surrogate. (40) Roach's formulation, which he bases on René Girard's concept of sacrifice and violence in Violence and the Sacred, allows one to describe how Dickens responded to the loss of the Franklin expedition by, like Charles Francis Hall in chapter two, nominating himself as a surrogate and then creating an effigy, an alien substitute - Wardour - who could be sacrificed in his place. Wardour is not meant to be Franklin. He is not the commander of his expedition, but is the second lieutenant. He is not cheerful and friendly, as Franklin was known to be, but is moody and antisocial. He is also, unlike Franklin, heteronormative surplus: unlike the other officers in the play, he does not have a woman to go home to, and this marks him as outside of the social order of the play. When Wardour dies, he does not leave behind a wife, a fiancée, a daughter or a sister. Although Wardour is the son of a gentleman (1 1 1),'34 the play also suggests that he is racially ambiguous. After serving in Africa for two years, Clara describes him by underlining his "dark" and dangerous

134 Although Dickens and Collins specify that Wardour is a gentleman's son, this does not necessarily imply anything positive about his character: Franklin himself was a merchants's son. 257 character, suggesting that his time in Africa caused him to "go native": "I tremble when I think of his face. It comes across me in my dreams and makes me as frightened in the darkness as a child. How dark it is now" (113). The stage directions indicate that the lights were dimmed as Clara spoke these lines (113). Wardour's obvious differences from

Franklin allowed Dickens to drive the final nail into the coffin of Rae's cannibalism accusations. Wardour appears to be villainous, extremely jealous, morally suspect, but he is, foremost, an officer in the British Navy. Even though he is tempted to kill Aldersley because he is his romantic rival, even though he knows he will not be caught, even though he is perhaps going mad from hunger and exhaustion, even though he finds himself adrift in an open boat with Aldersley, Wardour still does not resort to cannibalism. Dickens' and Collins' argument about Wardour as a potential cannibal is clear: no British officer, no matter how tempted and desperate he became, no matter how much of a rogue he was, would ever give into the desire to consume human flesh. There are always gaps between the absent member of the community, the surrogate, and the effigy when surrogation takes place. Surrogation creates collective memory precisely because it "rarely if ever succeeds. The process requires many trials and at least as many errors... The intended substitute either cannot fulfill expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus" (Roach 2). In order for Wardour to function as a surrogate for the missing Franklin, Wardour does not need to resemble Franklin apart from being, like Franklin, an officer. Because Wardour is an officer, he is like Franklin in that he would never resort to cannibalism and is capable of heroic self-sacrifice. Dickens, by playing Wardour, produced an effigy that attempted to fill the space left empty when Franklin and his men disappeared. By producing an event that was comprehensible and conclusive, Dickens filled the narrative absence left when 258 the expedition disappeared. Likewise, by producing a death scene which audience members could witness and mourn, Dickens as Wardour filled the space that, up until that point, had been held open by melancholic attachment to the missing men. The play provided a death for the audience to witness and a corpse for the audience to mourn. Audience members were not only crying for Wardour' s death, which they witnessed, but also for Franklin's death, which they could not witness. And while what the audience saw was not real, the feelings the play generated were.135 Cox notes that melodramatic realism worked by providing audience members not with a view of how the world really was but with an authentic emotional experience: in melodrama "we come away having had a 'real' experience, having 'really' felt something while we were in the theatre" (171). States argues, "The ritual in theater is based in the community's need for the thing that transpires in theater and in the designation, or self-designation, of certain individuals who, for one reason or another, consent to become the embodiment of this thing" (157). The audience needed to mourn the loss of the Franklin expedition, and The Frozen Deep responded to this need by providing a surrogate victim who could die on stage and

135 Ann Cvetkovich's discussion of how sensation novels generated affect is instructive here. She argues: The sensation novel, and sensationalism more generally, makes events emotionally vivid by representing in tangible and specific terms social and historical structures that would otherwise remain abstract. Sensationalism works by virtue of the link that is constructed between the concreteness of the 'sensation-al' event and the tangibility of the 'sensational' feelings it produces. Emotionally charged representations produce bodily responses that, because they are physically felt, seem to be natural and thus to confirm the naturalness or reality of the event. The tangibility (and hence 'realness' or 'naturalness') of feeling or nervous response is invested with significance as a sign of the concreteness or reality of the representation... Sensational events often turn on the rendering visible of what remains hidden or mysterious, and their affecting power arises from the satisfaction or thrill of seeing. Sensationalism's use of the visual, of the relation between the hidden and the seen, contributes to its capacity to make the abstract seem concrete. It rests on the assumption that the immediately perceptible, because it can be seen or felt, is real and true and natural because perception itself is natural. (23-24)

259 could be mourned instead. Roach notes "The effigy is a contrivance that enables the processes regulating performance... to produce memory through surrogation" (Roach 36). The Frozen Deep produced a death to be mourned, by engaging an effigy (Wardour) to be theatrically sacrificed in the place of the actual Franklin, and in doing this, produced a memory of mourning that, while generated by the on-stage death of Wardour, produced a virtual experience of mourning Franklin and his men's presumed deaths.

Imperial Spectatorship The Frozen Deep intervened in the debate over cannibalism by making it impossible to even imagine a British officer engaging in cannibalism and laying aside the question - which Dickens was so concerned with in his Household Words articles - of what actually happened to Franklin and his men. Dickens had ended the second part of his response to Rae' s report by imploring his readers to forget the question of what happened and to turn toward imagining the missing men, lying dead in the snow, and to memorialize what the men stood for:

Utilitarianism will protest 'they are dead; why care about this?' Our reply shall be, 'Because they ARE dead, therefore we care about this. Because they served their country well, and deserved well of her, and can ask, no more on this earth, for her justice or her loving-kindness; give them both, full measure, pressed down, running over. Because no Franklin can come back, to write the honest story of their woes and resignation, read it tenderly and truly in the book he has left us. Because they lie scattered on those wastes of snow, and are as defenceless against the remembrance of coming generations, as against the elements into which they are resolving, and the winter winds that alone can waft them home, now, impalpable air; therefore, 260 cherish them gently, even in the breasts of children. Therefore, teach no one to shudder without reason, at the history of their end. Therefore, confide with their

own firmness, in their fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their

religion. (392-3) In this passage, Dickens sets out precisely what he attempted to do in The Frozen Deep: because Franklin would not return to tell what happened, it was Dickens' responsibility to create a narrative of what happened that would allow Franklin to be remembered not necessarily as he actually died but as he really was: firm, strong, dutiful, and courageous. Only by creating an event to be mourned, by producing a body to metaphorically bury, could attempts to memorialize Franklin be stabilized in a coherent response. By the time the play was performed in Manchester, Dickens seemed to have achieved his goal of creating a theatrical representation that allowed communal mourning and memorialization to take place and allowed the public to lay aside the troubling questions that still circulated around what had actually happened.

While audience members reacted to Wardour's death with sadness and tears throughout the play's run, in Manchester audience responses apparently developed into a communal expression of grief and cathartic tears. Brannan notes, based on Dickens' recollections of the performances at Manchester, that "The tears were apparently more numerous at Manchester than they had been earlier; Dickens had mentioned several times that his audiences had been 'strongly affected,' but had not remarked on any event comparable to that at Manchester" (73). Potter also comments on the heightened responses to the play in Manchester, noting that moving the play to the two thousand seat New Free Trade Hall could have dwarfed the production but that "remarkably, the actions that unfolded on this most modest of stage sets electrified all who beheld them, and the 261 public outpouring of emotion at this event exceeded any other of its kind, becoming almost a double memorial - to Franklin, as much as to Jerrold" (147). Potter continues, asking, "Could it have been Dickens's performance only, or that of the actresses engaged for the Manchester performances, that had such a striking effect on the crowd? Or must Franklin's own loss, so lately in the public eye, have been the great, displaced sorrow that, like some ice-choked river overflowing its banks, found its necessary and inevitable outlet in these otherwise modest performances?" (147). By comparing public sorrow over

Franklin's disappearance to an "ice-choked river overflowing its banks" Potter implies that it was the run of The Frozen Deep, the cumulative effect of the performances, that caused the crowds in Manchester to respond to the play in the way they did. Brannan concurs with Potter's reading of the crowds' responses, suggesting that the "tears and the pathos of which they were the sign" were the "climactic effect of all the performances" (73). Brannan claims that the pronounced audience response in Manchester was a result of audience members' awareness of how the play had been received by previous audiences at earlier performances:

Reviewers noted that the Tavistock House audiences had been comprised of 'the highest celebrities in law, literature, art, and fashion.'... When Queen Victoria and

her party. . . watched the performance, they knew what the response of 'the highest celebrities' had been. The responses of the 'celebrities' and of the aristocracy had

been widely publicized before anyone with a ticket watched a performance. . . Finally, the Manchester audiences had had opportunities to read about the

enthusiasm of all the London audiences. Unless the mid-Victorians were much freer

from the compulsion to conform than their modern counterparts, there must have

been a cumulative band-wagon development to help make the Manchester 262 performances 'the finest of all the representations.' (73) While knowledge of how previous audiences had responded to the play certainly influenced audience members' responses and anecdotal evidence certainly supports Brannan's and Potter's conclusion that public response to the play peaked in Manchester, both of them suggest that the growth in the play's popularity grew relatively steadily and imply that responses grew more homogenous and demonstrative as the run of the play continued. Neither addresses the question of how the command performance on 4 July shaped or changed public response, except to suggest that it increased the play's popularity.136 The command performance marks the moment when The Frozen Deep was transformed from a private theatrical into a public performance. During the private performances at Tavistock House, audience members responded as individuals in a communal space. While the play evoked the loss of Franklin's expedition when performed at Tavistock House, it was only after the command performance that The Frozen Deep emerged as what Potter calls an outlet for the "great, displaced sorrow"

136 Another factor may well have influenced reception at the command performance and at performances that followed: news of the Indian Mutiny, which began in May 1857, was reaching Britain in early July. See Christopher Herbert, War ofNo Pity pp. 1-5 for an overview of the Mutiny. By mid-July, London newspapers were expressing concern that Delhi, which had been held by mutineers since May, might not fall back into British hands quickly; see the Times 23 July 1857 pp. 8 and 25 July 1857 pp. 8. Dickens, like many of his contemporaries, responded to news of the Mutiny by calling for the "extermination of the Indian race" (Nayder, "Class" 693: in October 1857, he wrote that to Angela Burdett-Coutts that if he "were Commander in Chief in India" he would "do [his] utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested" (qtd. in Nayder, "Class" 694). Dickens responded to the Mutiny in his fiction, particularly in the short novel "The Perils of Certain English Prisoners," co-written with Collins, which appeared at Christmas 1857 and in A Tale of Two Cities. Nayder remarks that "The Perils" both "represents and misrepresents the Indian Mutiny, retelling the story of the sepoy's revolt as a story of class conflict and social rebellion" ("Class" 695). Dickens' response to the Mutiny in his October letter and in "The Perils" suggests that early reports of the insurgency also might have influenced Dickens' performances in and audience responses to The Frozen Deep in July and August. 263 caused by Franklin's disappearance. By watching the play, Queen Victoria changed the play from a "private" response to loss, written and performed by Dickens and Collins for an audience of invited guests into a publicly sanctioned ritual of mourning, legitimating the script's dismissal of the question of cannibalism and granting the play's affective ending the status of public memorial. The difference from private to public is not only a function of audience composition or venue - admission to the audience at both Tavistock House and at the Gallery of Illustration performances was relatively exclusive, and the Gallery of Illustration was, like Tavistock House, a long rectangular room rather than a typical auditorium - but is a difference in how the play generated meaning for an imagined public.137 The Queen's royal gaze publicly legitimated the play's message and knowledge that the Queen had watched and enjoyed the play allowed spectators' responses to stabilize and coalesce as a display of grief, catharsis, and mourning for the missing expedition. Dickens was well aware that audience composition impacted how the play would be received and carefully chose audience members to invite to the Tavistock House performances. It was very important, early in the run, that the audience members were drawn from the highest echelon of society to which Dickens had access - if we recall that the problem with Inuit testimony was that Inuit were illegitimate witnesses, the need to ensure that spectators to Dickens' revision of what happened were legitimate becomes pressing. Dickens began inviting friends and influential acquaintances as early as 10 October 1856 (Brannan 60). Dickens also displayed a "highly unusual desire to publicize

137 Gillian Russell points out that private theatricals in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century "could be very public indeed" (192). The practice expanded in the second half of the eighteenth century when the "elite and gentry household also featured significantly as a venue for sociability in the form of balls, masquerades, concerts, card parties and private theatricals" (192). 264 an amateur theatrical" (Brannan 63), inviting reviewers from the Times, the Morning Chronicle and the Illustrated London News to the performances. The Times' review of the performance, which appeared on 7 January, noticed that the production stretched the definition of a "private" theatrical: "It would be absurd to apply the term 'private' to the theatrical performances that take place at Tavistock-house, the residence of Mr. Charles Dickens. The host, who is likewise the principal performer, is the most popular writer of the day; the audiences comprise the highest celebrities of law, literature, art, and fashion" (7). The Examiner's review of the Tavistock House performance suggests that the fact that the audience was carefully selected by Dickens meant that audience members' expectations were, to an extent, predetermined: "They went, it is true, willing and expecting to be pleased, but few, we suspect, were prepared for the pleasure in store for them" (17 January 1857). Audience members went to The Frozen Deep as a social obligation, attending a theatrical event for which they had few aesthetic expectations. While reviewers were clear that audience members at Tavistock House were pleased, they do not provide a sense that the play received a homogenous response, only a positive one. The command performance was well publicized both before and after it occurred. The Times announced the performance on 24 June: "Her Majesty has commanded a private representation of Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama The Frozen Deep. It will be given on Saturday week at the Gallery of Illustration" (5). The Times then reported on 6 July that: Her Majesty and the Prince Consort, accompanied by His Majesty the King of the Belgians, the Princess Royal, Princess Alice, Princess Charlotte of Belgium, the Prince of Wales, Prince Alfred, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, the Count of Flanders, and the Prince of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, honoured the amateur performance, under the management of Mr. Charles Dickens, of Mr. Wilkie 265 Collins's drama of The Frozen Deep, at the Gallery of Illustration in Regent-street,

with their presence on Saturday evening. (8)

The audience at the command performance not only included Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, but representatives from virtually every European royal family and was a veritable

"who's who" of mid-nineteenth century imperial power. This was the most legitimate audience one could imagine for a play designed to repudiate accusations of cannibalism and to restore Franklin and his officers' status as British heroes.

Members of the audience on 4 July responded enthusiastically. Georgina Hogarth, who played Lucy in the play, reported that "The Queen and her party made a most excellent audience- so far from being cold, as we expected, they cried and laughed, and applauded and made as much demonstration as so small a party (there were not more than fifty) could do" (qtd. in Brannan 67). Following the performance, the Queen wished to thank Dickens personally for the performance and sent for him; unfortunately: "Before her messenger reached him, he had changed into comic dress for the farce, which was to follow, and he bluntly refused her first and then her repeated request to appear before her. . . The Queen must have been amused rather than angered by Dickens' refusal, because the next day she instructed Colonal Phipps to write Dickens a letter thanking him for the pleasure he had given her and expressing her admiration of his acting and of the play" (Brannan 67). The Queen and her entourage's presence in the audience and their evident enjoyment and approval of the performance had the effect not only of validating the aesthetic merit of the performance but also of sanctioning its implicit closure of the question of cannibalism. Having the most important eyes in the world gaze upon Dickens' and Collins' depiction of the heroism of naval officers facing dire conditions in the Arctic had the effect of legitimating the performance as the real narrative of what happened, 266 effectively replacing the illegitimate Inuit witnesses who found evidence of cannibalism with the most legitimate spectators in the world, and replacing the unknowable event of Franklin's men's actual deaths with Wardour's fictional but emotionally real onstage death.

Queen Victoria "took her pleasures both liberally and seriously, and she bid her subjects to do the same" (Allen, "Communal" 60). The British public was fascinated by watching the Queen watch theatre. Michael Diamond notes that when the Queen went to watch Jenny Lind sing in May 1 848 "The vast opera house was filled with the court and the aristocracy, and an audience who were equally anxious to see the Queen and to hear Jenny Lind. Each woman was basking in the approval of her own admirers, and in the adulation accorded to the other" (255). I38 Diamond suggests that the relationship between the Queen and Jenny Lind was mutually beneficial: "Not only did the royal patronage add to Jenny Lind' s glory, but the Queen, accompanied by Prince Albert, was associating herself with a unique standard of elegance" (255). Emily Allen suggests that imperial spectacle had immense social and political power, arguing that "While the Victorians may have been a 'performing society' in their love of theatre, spectacle and state pageantry, they also can be said to be 'performing society', or at least forming one idea of the social, in their collective attendance at or attention to state spectacle" ("Communal" 60-61). Allen uses the example of the carefully choreographed public spectacle celebrating

Princess Louise Caroline Alberta's marriage to the Marquess of Lome in 1871 to ask "What is at stake in terms of national identity formation when English crowds turn out for what is essentially a command performance of group affect? What happens when pleasure becomes a national duty, who takes part in this performance, and where and how does it

138 Jenny Lind was a Swedish opera singer. 267 take place?" ("Communal" 60). Queen Victoria wielded an enormous amount of power as a spectator, both modelling middle-class taste, as in Diamond's example, and appearing as "the mother of enjoyment, urging her subjects towards serious pleasure and rational play," as Allen suggests ("Communal" 68). As both examples demonstrate, the Queen was also well aware of how her spectatorship constituted a performance: by watching Jenny Lind perform, the Queen demonstrated her difference from the King of France, who had lost his throne earlier that year, performing the "blessings of a well-balanced constitutional monarchy" by participating in the popular performance (Diamond 254); at her daughter's wedding, as Allen suggests, the Queen participated in the production of a "very public enactment of [spectators'] 'private' Englishness... a form of national feeling that could be both collective and individual at once" ("Communal" 62). Because the command performance of The Frozen Deep was ostensibly private and was for an extremely limited audience, most members of the interested public had to content themselves with imagining the Queen's response. It is difficult to believe that rumours of how the Queen and her party responded to the play - of the Queen's laughter, tears, and applause, as noted by Georgina Hogarth - did not rapidly circulate among interested members of the middle class and aristocracy. I suspect, furthermore, that the

Queen's imagined response had the power to predispose how future audience members would approach the play. Envisioning the Queen watching the performance meant imagining and enacting the model she set both for how audiences were to respond to the play and for how the nation was to respond to the event of the Franklin expedition's disappearance. Emily Allen argues "If the nation is not just a place, an imagined community, but a set of collective practices, or ritualized performances, then viewing the royals in celebration was an important and identifying practice" ("Communal" 73). The 268 Frozen Deep produced an account of the loss of the Franklin expedition that the Queen, and by extension, the British public, could witness and mourn. The Queen's gaze transformed The Frozen Deep from a private amateur theatrical into an imperial spectacle that was capable of legitimating Collins' and Dickens' text as the most "true" version of what happened and of validating the affect generated by Dickens' performance as actual mourning. Future spectators' response to the play was conditioned, more than Potter or Brannan acknowledge, by the knowledge of the Queen's response and by knowledge that she had tacitly approved of Dickens' performance and Dickens' and Collins' text. This meant that audiences had an expectation of how to respond to the play and had a sense that displays of emotion were appropriate. This is not to say that responses were completely homogenized from performance to performance, particularly between the performances at the Gallery of Illustration and those at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. The Times noted that at the 1 1 July performance at the Gallery of Illustration, the first "public" performance, the audience was "select as well as numerous, and the humblest constituents of which pay 5s. for their places, [and was not as] apt to indulge in those noisy demonstrations of delight that are so freely given by the mixed assemblage of an ordinary theatre" (12). Oxenford, the reviewer, notes that while audience members responded positively, the response - even to a single performance - seems to have been mixed between emotional and intellectual responses: But never was there a feeling of deeper and more genuine admiration than was left

by Mr. Charles Dickens in the minds of his auditors at the conclusion of Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama the Frozen Deep. There was literally a gasp of applause when the curtain descended, and the conversation that ensued during the interval that preceded the farce was composed of a laudatory criticism of details. To gain the 269 cool, deliberate approbation of such an audience was no small triumph... When such as these not only murmur forth their admiration, but discuss the causes of it,

who among an audience could raise a dissentient voice? (13 July 1857 12)

In this passage, Oxenford notices that while the audience initially seemed to respond communally and emotionally, with a gasp of applause at the end of the play, there was

also intellectual conversation taking place, at least among the members of the audience seated close to the reviewer, discussing the details of the performance. It seems that the heightened emotional responses of audience members and actors in

Manchester were the result of a snowballing public response, which grew not smoothly from January to August but was heightened by the command performance. Furthermore,

it is impossible to read the public response in Manchester without also considering the other factors - the space, the employment of professional actresses instead of Dickens's

family members, the substantially larger audience, the theatrical culture in Manchester - that certainly impacted audience response in ways that are impossible to reconstruct.

However, it does appear, judging from Dickens' and reviewers accounts of audience responses, that by the time the play closed in Manchester, it had effectively allowed audience members to mourn the loss of Wardour as a surrogate for Franklin and provided not only dramatic closure within the dramaturgical structure of the play, but also psychological closure on the larger problem of what happened to Franklin's men.

The Frozen Deep in 1866

Two years after The Frozen Deep's triumphant run, Francis McClintock returned to

England with the Victory Point record, which indicated that Franklin died almost a year before the ships were abandoned and thus exonerated him of charges of cannibalism. 270 Although the Victory Point record provided closure to the question of whether Franklin had resorted to survival cannibalism, Marlow points out that after 1859, Dickens only grew more concerned with the danger of cannibalism. It became clear to Dickens that the real issue "was neither the behavior of men who were never civilized nor even the behavior of civilized men like Franklin in a savage world; rather the issue was the savage behavior of men in what purported to be the civilized world" (Marlow, "English Cannibalism" 655). Dickens' obsession with cannibalism shifted from the question of survival cannibalism in foreign lands to a concern with class cannibalism, with the ways that "In metaphoric forms, cannibalism was the social norm in England" (Marlow, "English Cannibalism" 655). While McClintock's report "successfully refuted" survival cannibalism in the Arctic, in A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood "a host of displaced or metaphoric cannibals remind us that. . . the political, social, economic, and psychological forms of the solitary monster still haunt the shores of his imagination" (Marlow, "Sir John" 102).

As I indicated in the second chapter, after McClintock returned in 1859, most people in England were content to presume that Franklin's men were long dead. Although the question of cannibalism remained concerning the men and officers, the Victory Point record demonstrated that Franklin himself had died without giving into the temptation of consuming human flesh. In the summer of 1 860, Jane Franklin, accompanied by her devoted niece, decided to leave England to travel abroad and ended up spending two years circumnavigating the globe, travelling to the United States, Japan, and Singapore, among other places. In August 1860, Eleanor Geli, John Franklin's only child, died of scarlet fever. In 1866, Matthew Noble's bronze statue of Franklin, the first of two memorials to Franklin erected in London, was placed in Waterloo Place. By the time the 271 The Frozen Deep was remounted at the Olympic Theatre, it appeared that the British public had accepted the circumstances surrounding Franklin's death and that those closest to Franklin had either died or moved on with their lives.

While the professional remount of the play was not a total flop, it was nowhere near as successful as the amateur performances nine years earlier. Wilkie Collins revised the text for the first professional production, in particular re-working the relationship between Clara and Wardour to make their love a "more ambiguous, adult passion" (Peters 278). He also eliminated Nurse Esther, giving Clara her "gift" of second sight, which the Times noted as his "principal alteration" to the script (29 October 1866 10). These changes failed to entice audiences: Collins' biographer, Catherine Peters, notes, "The first night went well; but on the professional stage the ten-year-old play seemed old-fashioned, and it was a financial failure" (278). Collins wrote to Nina Lehmann explaining why he thought the play was unpopular: "the enlightened British Public declares it to be 'slow.' There isn't an atom of slang or vulgarity in the whole piece... no female legs are shown in it; Richard Wardour doesn't get up after dying and sing a comic song; sailors are represented in the Arctic regions, and there is no hornpipe danced, and no sudden arrival of 'the pets of the ballet' to join the dance in the costume of Esquimaux maidens" (qtd. in Peters 278). Collins blamed the play's relative failure on its lack of sensational and entertaining elements to please audience members: audiences in 1866, according to Collins, wanted comedy, dancing, women in costume, and vulgarity.

The review of the remount that appeared in the Times on 29 October 1866 was tepid. It began by reminding readers of the play's genealogy, and erroneously claiming that "The performances [in 1857] were strictly private, but the names of some of the leading performers were public property, and few were the persons eminent in literature 272 or art who were not invited to enjoy an exhibition that was of its kind perfect" and telling readers that "the Frozen Deep has at last found its way to the boards of a public theatre" (10). One problem with the play, according to the reviewer, resulted from moving the play from an intimate "drawing-room" to a larger public theatre: the "want of action which was scarcely felt at the private performance was evidently noticed by the Olympic audience" (10) and the play apparently only caught the audience's attention in the final act, "which would be effective under any circumstances" (10). It seems that the reviewer is suggesting that the play's "want of action" could be overlooked in a smaller space, where audience members could pay attention to the nuances of the performance, but that in a larger space the play's lack of action bored the audience. The reviewer fails to mention the Manchester performances in 1857, when the play apparently captivated an audience of two thousand people. That the reviewer noted that the play lacked action could signal that Collins' interpretation of audience response was correct: the play's lack of spectacle did not entertain the audience in 1866. Alternately, the perception that the play lacked action could indicate that the script failed to engage audience members in another way. I suspect The Frozen Deep appealed to audiences, in part, because of how it balanced conflicting audience expectations: although the play encouraged audience members to suspect, along with the characters, that Wardour is a cannibal, audience members familiar with Dickens' well-publicized views on Rae's report would have also known that Dickens would be unlikely to create a fictional officer who would resort to the "last resource." Watching the play for the first time, audience members were likely interested in how Dickens and Collins would demonstrate the impossibility of Wardour' s cannibalism. For audience members in 1857, who did not know whether Franklin had engaged in cannibalism, there were real-life stakes in how Dickens and Collins 273 demonstrated this impossibility because the play drew clear parallels between Wardour and Franklin; for audience members in 1 866, who knew that Franklin had not become a cannibal, the question of Wardour's cannibalism was limited to its dramatic consequences within the play. A second problem resulted from Mr. Neville's failure to recreate the passion of Dickens' performance. The reviewer compares the two actors, and found that Mr. Neville, "though always earnest and energetic, does not begin to give a distinctive colouring to the part till he comes to the third act, when his 'makeup' is capital, and the death very skilfully [sic] elaborated" (10). This apparent praise is back-handed, as the reviewer also remarks that in the final act, Neville's only job was "to join the hands of the lovers, and die with becoming tardiness, while the rest of the dramatis personae stand weeping round" (10). In contrast, Dickens was "remarkable" as an "actor of character" and had produced a more exciting performance in 1857 (10). The reviewer notes: "if we remember right, the frenzy with which, as Wardour, he chopped down Aldersley's bedstead to make firewood, was one of the finest 'bits' in the piece" (10). Neville was unable to capture Wardour's frenzy as well as Dickens did. If, as I suggested earlier, Dickens' identification with Wardour and his ability to "forget himself on stage was one of the things that allowed him to function as a surrogate for Franklin, and if this production of a surrogate was central to how the play generated affect and meaning for its 1857 audiences, the reviewer's complaint that Mr. Neville's failed to replicate Dickens' passion was not simply an expression of nostalgia for a idealized past performance but signals that Mr. Neville's performance did not allow the cultural work the play performed in 1857 to take place in 1866. Eng and Kazanjian's interpretation of Freud's concept of mourning provides a 274 Suggestion for why audience response to the play changed so much in only nine years. They write that mourning is "a psychic process in which the libido is withdrawn from the lost object. This withdrawal cannot be enacted at once. Instead, libido is detached bit by bit so that eventually the mourner is able to declare the object dead and to move on to invest in new objects" (3). After mourning is complete, the mourner moves on. Other things engage his or her interest. Mourning does not need to be repeated and the mourner does not need to return to the past. In mourning, "the past is declared resolved, finished, and dead" (Eng and Kazanjian 3). In 1857, The Frozen Deep provided a compelling and palatable counter-narrative that overwrote Rae' s report and produced a surrogate victim to mourn in place of the missing men. Queen Victoria's gaze legitimated Dickens' version of events and gave permission for the British public to mourn the Franklin expedition via The Frozen Deep. In descriptions of the Manchester performances in particular, there is the sense that the audience was mourning something larger than Wardour's onstage death and that the scene stood in for the inaccessible deaths of Franklin and his men. By performing Wardour's death night after night, Dickens incited the public he was concerned with addressing - the upper-middle class and aristocracy, the literary and artistic elite - to declare that the question of what happened was "resolved, finished, and dead." Both Wilkie Collins and the Times' reviewer believed that the 1866 remount failed to engage audience members in the same way as the 1857 performances did. If the 1857 performance indeed allowed mourning to take place and for the question of what happened to be considered closed, the relative failure of the 1866 performance can be understood, paradoxically, not as a sign of its artistic failure but as a sign of the extent of the play's success in 1857. If The Frozen Deep served, in 1857, as Franklin's public funeral, there was no need to bury him for a 275 second time in 1866.

276 Conclusion: Franklin Remains

Franklin haunts this study, lurking at the margins of both the performances I address and of my text itself, never really coming into focus, never really becoming the centre of attention. In certain ways, this seems appropriate: while the search for Franklin might have begun as a search for an individual man, the performances that intervened in the search for the expedition and responded to the realization that the expedition was lost were not as much about Franklin as they were about searching for and losing other things. During the search, the name Franklin came to function as a multiple signifier for idealized naval masculinity, for the British colonial interest in the Arctic, for the victory of civilization over a savage land. As it became clear that the expedition had ended in disaster, the loss was not only the loss of 129 men, but was the loss of these visions:

Rae' s report suggested that officers could have resorted to cannibalism; Hall revealed that Inuit had indeed witnessed what happened; the lack of written records meant it was impossible to fully incorporate the loss of the expedition into the narrative of polar exploration. But performances, particularly The Frozen Deep, came to fill this gap, producing a fictional and theatrical version of what happened that allowed the public to move forward, at least temporarily.

Margaret Atwood comments that "Because Franklin was never really 'found', he continues on as a haunting presence; certainly in Canadian literature" (16). Canadian re- tellings of what happened, in both literature and performance, reveal the extent to which the narrative produced in the 1850s and 1860s, epitomized by The Frozen Deep, is unstable and problematic, exclusive and partial. Gwendolyn MacEwen's verse drama Terror and Erebus, first broadcast in 1975, includes an Inuk, Qaqortingneq, who reminds 277 audience members that Franklin and his men were not, as Dickens and Collins suggested, alone in the Arctic. Mordecai Richler's 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here imagines that a Jewish assistant surgeon, Ephraim Gursky, was the sole survivor of the expedition and lived among Inuit as the leader of a Jewish-Inuit religious sect; Richler points out the links between Arctic exploration and missionary impulses and draws attention to how the idea of a Christian (or convert-able) Arctic has come to be normalized in exploration literature and in northern history. Geoff Kavanagh's play Ditch, first produced as part of the SummerWorks Festival in 1993, challenges the heteronormativity implicit in Arctic narratives, by imagining that the two men whose skeletons were found in the boat on King William Island by McClintock's expedition were lovers. By focusing on just two men and on the mundane details of what they likely suffered before they died, the play works against the historiographie impulse to reduce the end of the expedition to a list of skeletons found and to ignore the lived experience of the men. Finally, Don Druick's play, The Frozen Deep, workshopped by Nightwood Theatre and produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in 2003, examines Dickens' motives in producing the play and questions how the professional and personal relationship between Collins and Dickens has been represented in accounts of their individual and collaborative works. What all the above works suggest is the continuing ability of performance (and literature) to address what was lost and the potential for theatre to challenge the heteronormative, Christian, civilizing narrative of what happened that The Frozen Deep proposed. This is not to suggest that performance emerges as unproblematically rectifying the violent racism implicit in Dickens' play or of reconciling the role that the search for Franklin played in the colonization of the Arctic. The complicated relationship between Inuit and qallunaat cultures, which emerges in this project in the questions of how 278 visitors to the Arctic understood Inuit they encountered, of how Inuit experiences became historical evidence, and of how intercultural performance facilitated the search effort, has become a critical environmental, political, and cultural issue. That the problematics of intercultural contact that emerged during the Franklin search are alive and well today is clear if we consider a story that made international headlines in May 2009. Governor General Michaèlle Jean, in the wake of the European Union's ban of the import of seal products, ate a piece of seal heart during a visit to Rankin Inlet, NU. Press coverage included a number of "graphic" images of Jean helping gut the seal and eating raw meat with blood on her fingers. Responses to her gesture were mixed, with officials from PETA and the European Union harshly criticizing her actions. The Globe and Mail reported on 30 May 2009: "Ms. Jean's decision to help butcher the blubbery mammal at a festival was derided as "bizarre" by the Belgium-based European Union, and compared by environmentalists to Neanderthalism and wife battery." In contrast, many "ordinary" Canadians praised Jean's cultural relativism and open-mindedness in letters to the editor and online comments. By eating seal meat in order to demonstrate her solidarity with Inuit and her recognition of Inuit traditional culture, Jean also, very publicly, played out the trope of "acting Inuit" through her act of eating raw meat, reproducing Hall's performance from almost 150 years earlier. That Jean's act was capable of generating so much fascination in the press demonstrates to me that the role of performance in negotiating intercultural contact - the difference between an "us" and a "them" in relation to the north - is as powerful, if not more powerful today than it was in the years immediately following Franklin's disappearance.

279 Works Cited

Periodicals

Daily News (London)

Examiner (London)

Household Words

Illustrated London News

Manchester Times

Times (London)

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