View to Seaward from Montreal Island

Another instance of meta-imagery in Sir George Back's work, View to Seaward from Montreal Island illustrates a quiet moment in the expedition and records without any great aesthetic flair both the landscape of the Canadian Arctic and the variety of people involved in the expeditions.

The frame is split between a rocky shore bordering an icy sea and an expanse of gray sky, with clouds scudding low on the horizon. Five people sit around a pot on an outcropping of rock to the far left: One appears to be a woman, another is reclining on his/her side facing away from us, and one is sitting and looking almost at the viewer. Walking towards this group is a man in a tall hat, carrying a case—perhaps an artist, either Back himself (thus a self-portrait) or E.N. Kendall, an artist who accompanied Back on another trip.

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 "The Rock Record and Romantic Narratives of the Earth," Noah Heringman writes:

The rocky landforms of Romantic poetry . . . famously resist reading, generating images that articulate the otherness of the physical through the literal and metaphorical opacity of rock. This aesthetic response to the materiality of rocks and landforms is, however, inseparable from the emerging economic category of natural resources. … [Shelley's] model of an ‘infinite mine,’ with its latent natural history, generates what might be called a historiography of the earth. (53)

In keeping with these observations, George Back's often picturesque and/or sublime diction is mitigated, or made more complex, by his sharp geological observation, which both buttresses his validity as an experienced explorer and offers data for future economic exploitation by his mother country. In the case of this image, it is not merely the diction that subverts the picturesque or sublime, but the scene itself in its unimpressive view and calm, didactic tone. Indeed, breaking from his usually embellished descriptions, Back notes:

The coast here was much lower and shelving than the precipitous and bold one we had left; but we observed the same naked and round-backed rocks as at Point Beaufort; differing, however, in color, the latter being composed almost entirely of light flesh-tinted feldspar and splintery quartz, whilst these consisted wholly of a dark gray feldspar with minute granular quartz, and perhaps hornblende. Among the debris on the beach, it was not a little surprising to find fragments of limestone, though no rocks of that formation had yet been passed. (Narrative 398)