Creation Date
1828
Height
12 cm
Width
19 cm
Medium
Genre
Description
Two rowboats fearlessly navigate massive, strangely shaped blocks of ice without any apparent trouble. Such an image, depicting both the threat of untamed nature and the successful human exploration of that nature, results in an uncanny combination of implicit danger and imperialist (as well as pragmatist) confidence. It was undoubtedly important to convey this sense of certainty, especially given the danger of such expeditions and the limited success the British Empire had in the north country.
The image portrays a sea dark with swells—no whitecaps—interrupted by large, sharp-edged, wildly-shaped icebergs that have been carved out at their bases by the incessant motion of the waves. Two boats navigate the sea, approaching the viewer. In the foreground boat a man stands in the stern with the rudder oar; both boats are upright and undisturbed. Clouds are building in the background, and two shafts of sunlight fall in straight, vertical columns from the upper right.
Stuart C. Houston notes that:
The world’s greatest naval power and its underemployed navy after the end of the Napoleonic Wars found the continued presence of large blank areas on the world map an irresistible challenge. John Barrow, the powerful second secretary to the Admiralty, had strong backing from the newly important scientific community to renew the search for the Northwest Passage after a long wartime hiatus. (xiv)
In addition to simply providing visual aids for a travel narrative, then, Back’s images must be seen as integral to the literal illustration of those “large blank areas” that Britain wanted to conquer. Expedition imagery during the Romantic period addressed other needs as well, including the translation of “otherness”—which the Arctic so easily exemplified in its comparatively uninhabited starkness—into a culturally understandable, and thus accessible, space for national expansionism and the application of identity. Furthermore, in ostensibly drawing accurate portrayals of the landscape (which Franklin frequently confirms), Back created scientific records designed to both titillate and inform the British public and scientific community.
Franklin's textual description tends towards the factual rather than the aesthetically interpretive, a move which both suggests his greater interest in facticity as well as Back's correspondingly aesthetic predilections. Franklin writes:
It [was] necessary to penetrate into the pack, and keep by the side of the reefs; but in doing so, the boats were exposed to no little danger of being broken in passing through the narrow channels between the masses of ice which were tossing with the swell, and from which large pieces frequently fell. (Franklin 169-70)
Meanwhile, this image is one of Back's most sublime: its arrangement of strange, threatening icebergs which curve into jagged points over and around the explorers present an evironment evocative of much more awe and danger than Franklin’s litotic description would suggest.
Publisher
John Murray
Collection
Accession Number
Thordarson T 1872
Additional Information
Bibliography
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