Crossing Lake Aylmer (3hs. a.m.)

A train of men and sleds navigate an icy crevasse in Lake Aylmer, in the middle of the Arctic night. Sir George Back's depiction of this scene realistically though artistically conveys the trials endured by explorers of the time period, as well as the starkly "other" landscape that the Arctic represented.

This image portrays an icescape with distant mountains. The Arctic sun is low on the horizon, and smoke-like clouds extend in a widening mass from the far right of the image to the upper left corner. A long line of men with dogsleds attempt to go around a crevasse in the ice that extends from the lower right to the upper left. Two men wait by a sled (packed with a chest, kettle, basket, and blanket), one with his head in his hands. There is a sizeable hole in the ice to their immediate right.

The Royal Geographic Society (RGS) was established in 1830. It "increasingly took responsibility for both promoting polar research and publishing the results"; furthermore, "one of the first expeditions the Society supported was that of Sir George Back to the Canadian Arctic in 1832” (David 63-6). The RGS also produced the Proceedings Journal and then the Geographical Journal in order to record expeditions, provide illustrations, and provide information for new explorers, as well as to provide interim reports on those expeditions (David 63-6).

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.

In his book, The Arctic in the British Imagination (2000), Robert G. David writes:

In contrast to [the] art of the familiar, Arctic art depicted an ‘otherness’ in which dissimilarities outweighed similarities . . . and the condition of the people was more akin to prehistory than pre-industry. In depicting wild, untamed scenes few concessions were made to convention. (29-30)

Defying convention in the way David describes, Crossing Lake Aylmer evades strict categorization as picturesque, sublime or true-to-nature. Instead, the image includes elements from all three genres: the human figures give scale and anthropic "interest," and our viewpoint is slightly elevated; the lowering clouds and jagged crevasse offer mute, awful presence; and yet, the nearly even split between earth and sky, the appearance of the sun, and the overall tone of quietude subverts any great sense of drama. The labour that went into this type of expedition is strongly suggested, however, by the long line of men and sleds, and particularly the pair in the foreground who appear to be resting—this is, after all, three a.m. Back writes of that day:

The 25th was dark and gloomy, but our stray Indian failed not to come in with the pemmican [food]. A fog, that had been more or less prevalent for the last fourteen hours, became rather thicker as night drew on; but . . . I started at 10pm . . . Shoes were soon perforated [by the ice], as well as the pieces of reindeer skin with the hair on which had been fastened round them as a slight protection to the feet. (Narrative 292)