Western View From Near Mount Barrow

A somewhat confounding image of men and their tents in a dense fog, Western View from near mount Barrow is perhaps as close to the so-called Arctic Sublime that Sir George Back comes in his work; and yet, other aspects of the sublime, such as fear, awe, and immensity, are notably missing.

This image depicts an icescape in fog. The immediate foreground features a prominent rock jutting out of the ground to the left, next to what appears to be a large vertebra. The center portion of the frame—the subject—is a man with his back to us, setting up or entering his tent. A sleeping roll rests on the ground to his right, and other supplies lie grouped to his left. Walking figures recede into the foggy background on either side: three to the left of the tent, one to the immediate right, and three more to the far right, near a boat. It is difficult to discern what the other figures are doing.

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.

One of Back's most intriguing images, Western View From Near Mount Barrow refuses to wholly submit to Romantic aesthetic paradigms even as it is clearly susceptible to their influences. In Technologies of the Picturesque (2008), Ron Broglio accurately suggests that

Inscriptions such as writings, drawings, paintings, maps, and figures change the ‘stuff’ found in nature into simple, distinct objects with characteristics that humans can comprehend. The move from things (with their opaque materiality) to objects (as intelligible and abstract sums) brings nature into culture and imbues elements of nature with a halo of social meaning. (15)

Yet it is unclear—literally—whether Back's image makes anything remotely intelligible. In fact, it seems to employ the opposite effect: despite the unperturbed appearance of the centered and peripheral human elements, the fog is so dense as to render the background figures nearly a part of the landscape, and the foreground is punctuated by what appears to be a large vertebrae, giving the scene an almost macabre feel. Clearly, the sublime is at work here. And yet, in spite of its uncanny restriction of visual scope, the image is not only sublime, either; a sense of awe or threat, for example, is notably absent. In the end, it seems we must class it as a true-to-nature recording of an experience, as the scene has little interest in terms of economics or geography.