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The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859 I.S

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The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859 I.S ARCTIC VOL. 38, NO. 2 (JUNE 1965) P. 89-103 The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859 I.S. MACLAREN’ ABSTRACT. The aesthetics of the Sublime and the Picturesque comprised the perceptual baggage with which earlynineteenthcentury British ex- plorers and travellers combed the globe. As important to their identificationof space as measurements of longitude andlatitude, these two schemata governed the ways in which the Canadian Arctic was described and depicted during the British search fora Northwest Passage from 1819 to 1859. During the last ten years of this period, when the majority of mariners travelled and resided in the arctic archipelago, more and more fanciful representations appearedon the aesthetic map that their writing and painting were charting. These more fanciful mappings openeda wider discre- pancy between perception of landscape and environmental reality, which invited disastrous consequences for the searchers, but in the face of the growing ditionthat Franklin’s crewshad been consumed by arctic nature, theneed to mask the terror of the realm by invoking modes describ- of ing and depicting European nature became paramount. The adaptationby means of the genial Sublime andthe Picturesqueof the land, rather than the traveller, if it did not provide what can be considered a realistic pictureof the North today, nevertheless fortified British optimism and moralesuffi- ciently to see the search for Franklin through to a successful conclusion. Key words: arctic exploration 1819-59, the Sublime, the Picturesque, aesthetic mapping RÉSUMÉ. Les esthttiques du Sublime et du Pittoresque comprenaient le bagage perceptuel dont les explorateurs et les voyageurs de la Grande Bretagne au debut du dix-neuvihme sihle ratissaient la Terre. Aussi important que leur identification de l’espace comme mesure de longitude et de latitude, cesdeux schtmas, celui du Sublime et celui du Pittoresque, ont gouverne les moyensde deCrire et de depeindre l’Arctique canadien pendant la recherche britannique d’un passagedu Nord-Ouest entre 1819 et 1859. Pendantla derniire deCennie de cette #riode, quand lamajoritt des marins voyageait et demeuraitB l’archipel arctique canadien, de plusen plus dereprhntations fantasques ont apparu sur la carteesthttique que leur eCriture et que leur peinture portaient.La divergence entre la perceptiondu paysage et la realite de l’environnementttait le rbultat de cemouvement et a in- vite aux conSequences desastreuses pour les marins eux-memes; Cependant,en se rendant compte que I’Quipe de Franklin avait&t la proie de la nature de l’Arctique, lebesoin de dtguiser la terreur de ce domaine en invoquant des manieres de deCrire et de peindre selon schtmas les euro@ns est devenu d’une supreme importance; l’adaptation du paysage plut& que celledu voyageur, par les moyensdu Sublime affable et du Pittoresque,si elle ne pouvait pas donner ce qui peut &re considereun vrai portraitdu grand Nord d’aujourd’hui, a nhnmoins renforce l’optimisme et le moral des Britanniques suffisament pour voir & ce que la recherche de I’expCdition perdue de Franklin fut complet&. Mots cl&: l’exploration de l’Arctique canadien 1819-1859, le Sublime,le Pittoresque, la carte esthetique Traduit par: M.E. MacLaren et Thtrese De Serres INTRODUCTION numerous guidebooks by such self-proclaimed guides as Wil- liam Gilpin (Barbier, 1963) and William Wordsworth (1970) From 1818 to 1859 the British Admiralty waged a concerted appearing to tell the traveller where to go and what to see. campaign to discover a Northwest Passage. It was only oneof By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, British ex- a series of mammoth enterprises on the part ofthe British na- plorers, likeless adventurous British travellers, werewell tion that were undertaken inorder to know the world intimate- versednot only in astronomical computations for charting ly. During the same period, of course, Charles Darwin sailed landscapes,but also intwo important and widely known in HMS Beugle to South America, uncovering evidence that aesthetic principles used to chart landscapes and seascapes - would lead to a new understanding of the historyof life on the the Sublime and the Picturesque. Just as the measurements of planet. David Douglas made his herculeantrips on the Pacific latitude and longitude told theexplorer where he stood relative slope of North America, discovering the mighty sugar pine to Greenwich, so the description of new tracts as more or less and thousandsof other species. Thomas Huxley sailed in HMS sublime or picturesque permitted him to identify thenew lands Rattlesnake to Australiaand explored anatomical identities relative to those British and European scenes familiar to him that would rend Victorian notions ofa harmonious relation be- and to his readership. The deployment of these aesthetic prin- tween natural processes and moral ends. David Livingstone ciples formed a crucial part of geographical discovery in the would shed light on the interior of the earth’s darkest con- North from the time of Samuel Hearne’s three overland treks tinent. (1769-72). The geographicalcharacter of the vast subcontinent The extraordinary feats of these great British explorers often was being defined, except in the more prosaic and factual of overshadow the more modest travels of a great number of the postjournals kept by fur trade factors, only partiallyby the early nineteenthcentury Britons. Tours to Europe had been environment’s own features; it was being defined as well in viewed since Renaissance times as a vital part of any English terms of, if in contrast to, known geography. “The geography gentleman’s education, but toward the end of the eighteenth of any place,” Watson (1969:lO) has argued, “results from century the focus of the Grand Tour shifted slightly from the how we [want to] see it as much as from what may be seen touring of continental art galleries and historicalsites to the de- there. ” Not surprisingly, the discovery of the North entaileda scription and depictionof Europe’s geographical wonders and similar process of identification that combined human expecta- beauties. Then, in the last decades of the century, continental tion and fact, illusion and empirical reality. hostilities kept most English tourists at home; consequently, It has been arguedby Gombrich (1960) that the visual world toursaround their ownisland became fashionable, with can be represented only by known and widely held schemata ‘Department of English, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5 90 I.S. MAcLAREN or modes of perception. In the case of the nineteenth-century was affirming England’s belief in its own imperial destiny by British explorer in the Arctic, the known schemata for stamping foreign tracts as English in appearance; he was con- representing nature in prose and pictures were the Sublime and ducting his travels/explorations in a sufficiently orderly man- the Picturesque. They would permit him, figuratively speak- ner to be able to perceive the composed qualities of nature; ing, to draw aesthetic maps of the Arctic that other Britons and, most importantly, he was nourishing his own aesthetic could read sensibly. Thus, they acted as the Linnaean system identity as an Englishman, which required sustenance in pro- for botannical identifications did for the naturalists among the portion to his temporal distance from the gentle hill-and-dale explorers and as the astronomical computations of latitude and topography ofhis Home Countries or the more rugged but still longitude did for the astronomers among them. Allsuch composed lacustrine beauty of his English Lake District. systems are, loosely speaking, taxonomies or schemata - in short, metaphors, but metaphors that, because of the authority AESTHETIC RESPONSES TO THE NORTH UP TO 1849 vested in them by a society, become accepted as the most ac- curate measurements of the external world. During the first two decades of the Admiralty’s assault on The Sublime referred to the geography of vastness - vast the Northwest Passage (1818-37), British explorers naturally open space whose dimensions defy definition or even imagina- discovered countless sublime landscapes, as Loomis (1977) tion. Open stretches of ocean or prairie, perilous mountain has demonstrated. But it would be a mistake to overlook the peaks or abysses, thunderstorms or tornadoes - nature in its many picturesque views that they recorded and the function extreme habits threatening human welfare and inspiring fear played by them. One instance must suffice for present pur- and wonder - were regarded as the sublime qualities of the poses. Fort Enterprise (Fig. l) was erected in autumn 1820 on external world. In 1756 Edmund Burke (1958) had dissemi- a site chosen in part for aesthetic reasons by John Franklin and nated the notion of the Sublime among British readers. It had the officers of his first overland expedition (MacLaren, been an item in the aesthetic baggage of travellers to the Swiss 1984a). Robert Hood, the midshipman who did notsurvive the and Italian Alps since the mid-sixteenth century. Burke’s tundra crossing in 182 1, considered ‘ ‘the beauty of the situa- treatise made an understanding of it an indispensable item tion” at Fort Enterprise to have “far exceeded our most (Monk, 1960). sanguine expectations” (Hood, 1974:79). “We could not have The Picturesque grew out of the habit of viewing tracts of selected,” wrote John Richardson to his mother, “a more con- land as if they were landscape paintings. A prospect or view- venient or beautiful spot. The
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