The British Journal for the History of Science (2021), 54, 277–299 doi:10.1017/S0007087421000522 RESEARCH ARTICLE ‘Ancient lore with modern appliances’: networks, expertise, and the making of the Open Polar Sea, 1851–1853 Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund1 and John Woitkowitz2* 1ERC Arctic Cultures Project, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Email: nklk2@ cam.ac.uk and 2ERC Arctic Cultures Project, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. *Corresponding author: John Woitkowitz, Email: [email protected] Abstract This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of trans- national networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane’s and Petermann’s campaigns did not con- stitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and con- tributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world. On the evening of 14 December 1852, the American Navy surgeon and explorer Elisha Kent Kane addressed a large crowd who had gathered at a meeting of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGSS) to hear from an ‘Arctic celebrity’.1 Following an introduction by the society’s president, George Bancroft, Kane took his audi- ence on a tour of polar exploration history, as well as recent developments in what was increasingly being referred to as the field of physical geography. Kane introduced his listeners to the observations of past Arctic explorers, set out theories of geological and maritime formations, and cited reports of animal life throughout the circumpolar world. In the lecture, Kane sought not only to entertain with an account from his Arctic travels, but also have his audience arrive at one main conclusion: an Open Polar Sea free of ice and rich in maritime life existed, and could be found via the Smith Sound region between the northern reaches of Ellesmere Island, Canada and the western 1 ‘Geographical society – Dr. Kane’s lecture’, New York Daily Times, 14 December 1852, p. 5. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 02 Oct 2021 at 06:56:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000522 278 Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund and John Woitkowitz cost of Greenland.2 Surrounded by applause, Bancroft thanked Kane for presenting his expedition proposal and praised him as a ‘scientific and excellent gentleman’ having earned the respect of his ‘countrymen’. Before adjourning the meeting, the members of the AGSS unanimously approved resolutions to support Kane’s expedition towards the Open Polar Sea through Smith Sound. The lecture at the AGSS and the society’s approval of Kane’s proposed project was an important step towards what would become the second Grinnell expedition which left the US in 1853. The search for an Open Polar Sea, however, attracted intense interest far removed from the congregations of the American learned societies. At the same time, across the Atlantic, the London-based Prussian cartographer and polar neophyte August Petermann stepped into the fray of Arctic geography to advo- cate for an expedition towards the Open Polar Sea. Theories espousing the existence of an Open Polar Sea, a mythical body free of ice atop the world, had been popular amongst European cartographers since the sixteenth cen- tury. Early modern European cartographers and natural philosophers, as well as whalers, inscribed the central Arctic Ocean with sweeping utopias of transpolar shipping routes, or a site for spiritual validation.3 While Indigenous peoples of the circumpolar world trav- elled and lived on coastal formations of sea ice for hunting and fishing, the European gaze envisioned a space commensurate with global commercial and imperial progressiv- ism.4 By the mid-nineteenth century, the pull towards an Open Polar Sea was linked to attempts to construct global climatic theories and to the high-profile disappearance of the Erebus and Terror under the command of John Franklin. Kane and Petermann believed that John Franklin’s lost expedition, which left England in 1845, had reached the Open Polar Sea, and was now unable to return south. Locating John Franklin’s lost expedition was the official aim of Kane’s second Grinnell expedition as well as of Petermann’spro- posed expedition, and their rescue projects were remarkably alike. They presented similar geographical theories in support of their projects, they drew on a shared body of resources, and they lobbied overlapping networks of people and societies for financial and cultural support. Yet the polar campaigns and geographical research of Kane and Petermann have been treated as largely separate projects.5 In addition, Kane and Petermann have typically been perceived as contrasting historical actors, one being a travelling surgeon–explorer and the other a landlocked geographical theorist. In this art- icle, we reconsider the polar campaigns and physical geographies of Kane and Petermann to highlight the existence of a transatlantic network of polar researchers in the mid- nineteenth century. In doing so, we draw on recent literature in the history of science that has problematized the portrayed relationship between the field and the armchair and extend these insights to polar research. As this article shows, rather than working in parallel, Kane and Petermann’s expedition proposals and theoretical understandings of the Open Polar Sea were developed in an international nexus of science, personal ambitions and imperialistic visions of the Arctic space, and each navigated challenges and opportun- ities provided to them through the portrayed boundaries of the field and the armchair. 2 Elisha Kent Kane, ‘Access to an Open Polar Sea along a North American meridian’, Bulletin of the American Geographical and Statistical Society (1853) 1(2), pp. 85–102. 3 Adriana Craciun, ‘The frozen ocean’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (2010) 125(3), pp. 693–7; Michael F. Robinson, ‘Reconsidering the theory of the Open Polar Sea’, in Keith R. Benson and Helen M. Rozwadowski (eds.), Extremes: Oceanography’s Adventures, Sagamore Beach: Watson Publishing, 2007, pp. 16–18. 4 Claudio Aporta, ‘The trail as home: Inuit and their pan-arctic network of routes’, Human Ecology (2009) 37(2), pp. 131–46; Michael Bravo, North Pole: Nature and Culture, London: Reaktion Books, 2019, pp. 18–29. 5 Philipp Felsch, Wie August Petermann den Nordpol erfand, Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2010; Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Robinson, op. cit. (3). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 02 Oct 2021 at 06:56:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087421000522 The British Journal for the History of Science 279 By way of a comparative case study of two advocates of Arctic exploration in search of the mythical Open Polar Sea, this article is centred around three interventions: the rela- tionship between the armchair and the field, the necessity of adopting transnational approaches to polar research, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects. In a first step, we situate the history of Arctic exploration and the debate over the Open Polar Sea within the broader historical context of nineteenth-century American expan- sionism and imperial Arctic science. Kane’s organization of the second Grinnell expedition and the search for the Open Polar Sea is closely tied to personal ambition and a push to expand commercial, scientific and political interests into the Arctic regions. As with Kane, Petermann also sought to draw on imperialistic impulses of governmental and private funders in Britain to mobilize support for his proposed venture and his cartographical theories. In a second step, we interrogate how Kane and Petermann each sought to por- tray themselves as authoritative experts on Arctic phenomena when seeking to secure backers in an international