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Arctic Circles: Circuits of Sociability, Intimacy, and Imperial Knowledge in Britain and North America, 1818–1828

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Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter examines how explorers’ wives and families managed both information and trauma during the British search for the Northwest Passage in the 1820s. In their relatives’ absence, women circulated gifts, specimens, and correspondence within elite social and scientific networks in metropolitan London, and shored up explorers’ reputations as respectable and creditable observers unchanged by their harrowing experiences on the margins of North America. As a result, explorers and family members were both entangled in the fraught intimacies of the field, relationships that developed from explorers’ reliance on Indigenous authorities, mixed-race families, and vernacular agents, as well as the close bonds formed among men suffering trauma.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quoted in Frances J. Woodward, Portrait of Jane: A Life of Lady Franklin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951), 156–158.

  2. 2.

    Woodward, Portrait of Jane, 158.

  3. 3.

    Cornhusk doll: Object ID AAA3777, National Maritime Museum Greenwich (hereafter NMM).

  4. 4.

    Ann Parry, Parry of the Arctic: The Life Story of Admiral Sir Edward Parry, 1790–1855 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 128; Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 96–97.

  5. 5.

    Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012), 187.

  6. 6.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2001), 829–865; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 2002; Lynn Zastoupil, ‘Intimacy and Colonial Knowledge’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 2 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2002.0053; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

  7. 7.

    Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Antoinette Burton, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1, 14; David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds. Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26; Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth Century History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, eds. Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277472; Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, eds. Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), http://press.anu.edu.au?p=97101

  8. 8.

    Ann Savours, The Search for the North West Passage (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 39–55; Michael Bravo, ‘Geographies of Exploration and Improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic Whaling, 1782–1822,’ Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006), 512–538. For appraisals of Barrow as a ‘gatekeeper’ and promoter of exploration, see Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2001), 31–32; I.S. MacLaren, ‘John Barrow’s Darling Project (1816–1846)’, in Arctic Exploration in the Nineteenth Century: Discovering the Northwest Passage, ed. Frederic Regard (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 19–36.

  9. 9.

    John Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

  10. 10.

    June Helm and Beryl C. Gillespie, ‘Dogrib Oral Tradition as History: War and Peace in the 1820s’, Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 1 (Spring 1981), 8–27; Shepard Krech III, ‘Disease, Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social Organization’, American Ethnologist 5, no. 4 (November 1978), 710–732; Ernest S. Burch, Jr., Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Iñupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

  11. 11.

    Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers, 115–224; Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–72.

  12. 12.

    Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Sonja Luehrmann, Alutiiq Villages Under Russian and US Rule (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008).

  13. 13.

    Joseph Rene Bellot, Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph Rene Bellot. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855), 263; John Richardson, ‘Dr. Richardson’s Narrative’, in John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819–20–21–22. 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1824), 348.

  14. 14.

    Franklin, Narrative, 1824, 359; John Richardson to Mary Richardson, April 1822, SPRI MS 1503/4/3.

  15. 15.

    John Franklin to George Back, Fort Enterprise, 21 November 1820: MS 395/70/2 BL, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge (hereafter SPRI).

  16. 16.

    Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas: 1680–1840 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 126.

  17. 17.

    John Richardson to Mary Richardson, April 1822: MS 1503/4/3, SPRI.

  18. 18.

    John Franklin to George Back, Fort Enterprise, 15 October 1821: MS 395/70/5, SPRI.

  19. 19.

    John Franklin to John Richardson, 24 October 1822: D3311/53/4, Derbyshire Record Office, Matlock (hereafter DRO).

  20. 20.

    Inscription on a memorial to John Franklin and Henry Hepburn Richardson, eldest and second sons of Dr. John Richardson, c. April 1838: MS 1503/19/21, SPRI.

  21. 21.

    John Hepburn to John Richardson, 20 December 1830: MS 1503/8/11, SPRI.

  22. 22.

    James A. Secord, ‘How Scientific Conversation Became Shop Talk’, in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 23–25; Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, ‘Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 8, no. 2 (Autumn 2003), 208–230; Gillian Russell, ‘An “Entertainment of Oddities”: Fashionable Sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–70. See also Anne Secord, ‘Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge’, Isis 93, no. 1 (March 2002), 28–57.

  23. 23.

    G. Russell, ‘Entertainment of Oddities’, 57.

  24. 24.

    James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 178–180.

  25. 25.

    Carl Thompson, ‘Earthquakes and Petticoats: Maria Graham, Geology, and Early Nineteenth Century “Polite” Science’, Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 3 (September 2012), 329–346; Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2008), 1–30, 249–275; Evelleen Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals’, in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 119–142.

  26. 26.

    Mary Orr, ‘Pursuing Proper Protocol: Sarah Bowdich’s Purview of the Sciences of Exploration’, Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (Winter 2007), 277–285.

  27. 27.

    H. Traill, Life of Sir John Franklin, RN (London: John Murray, 1896), 56.

  28. 28.

    Charlotte Grimston to Harriett Estcourt, 26 March 1818: MS 1145, SPRI.

  29. 29.

    John Franklin to John Richardson, 55 Devonshire Street, 24 April 1824: D3311/53/22, DRO.

  30. 30.

    William Edward Parry to his parents, 2 December 1820: MS 438/26/53, SPRI; Willingham Franklin Rawnsley, The Life, Diaries, and Correspondence of Jane, Lady Franklin, 1792–1875 (London: E. Macdonald Ltd., 1923), 62; A Brave Man and His Belongings: Being Some Passages in the Life of Sir John Franklin, R.N., First Discoverer of the Northwest Passage (London: S. Taylor, 1874), 31; John Franklin to Sarah Kay, Lake Winnipeg, 3 June 1825: D3311/50/12, DRO.

  31. 31.

    Mary Russell Mitford, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, as Related in a Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends, vol. 2, ed. Alfred Guy L’Estrange (London: Richard Bentley, 1870), 68.

  32. 32.

    William Edward Parry to Caleb and Sarah Parry, 2 December 1820: MS 438/26/53, SPRI.

  33. 33.

    For a discussion of Eleanor Porden’s Arctic poetry, see Jen Hill, White Horizon: The Arctic in the Nineteenth Century British Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), 53–87.

  34. 34.

    John Franklin to John Richardson, 24 October 1822: D3311/53/4, DRO.

  35. 35.

    In Edith Mary Gell, John Franklin’s Bride: Eleanor Anne Porden (London: John Murray, 1930), 66–71.

  36. 36.

    Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 77–82, 86.

  37. 37.

    Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 82.

  38. 38.

    Quoted in Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 101.

  39. 39.

    The poem addressed to Franklin is in D3311/24/7, DRO. The poem addressed to Richardson is in MS1503/5/3, SPRI. As I discuss in the conclusion, the poem was memorised by many members of Franklin’s family, and was alternatively called ‘From Miss Greenstockings to her faithless admirer’. The original version is published in Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 97–98.

  40. 40.

    Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 145–149, 172, 279.

  41. 41.

    Correspondence on Eleanor Porden’s Wedding Dress, D3311/12, DRO.

  42. 42.

    Innes M. Keighren, Charles W.J. Withers, and Bill Bell, Travels Into Print: Exploration, Writing and Publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 73.

  43. 43.

    Margaret Hunt, ‘Women and the Fiscal Imperial State’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47; Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 142–150; Margarette Lincoln, Naval Wives and Mistresses (London: National Maritime Museum, 2011), 50–57.

  44. 44.

    William Edward Parry to Caleb and Sarah Parry, H.M. Ship Alexander, 25 July 1818, Davis’s Straits, Lat. 75, 30’ North: MS 438/26/22, SPRI. For practices of circulating and reading letters aloud, see Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009); Nichola Deane, ‘Reading Romantic Letters: Charlotte Smith and the Huntingdon’, The Huntingdon Library Quarterly 66, no. 3/4 (2003), 393–410.

  45. 45.

    W.E. Parry to his parents, H.M. Ship Fury, Island of Igloolik, North East Coast of America, 10 November 1822–3 July 1823: MS 438/26/63, SPRI.

  46. 46.

    John Richardson to Mary Richardson, Bas de la Riviere, Winnipeg, 29 May 1825: MS 1503/6/3, SPRI.

  47. 47.

    E.N. Kendall to Mrs. Kendall, Columbia New York, 15 March 1825; E.N. Kendall to Mrs. M.C. Kendall, Fort Alexander, Bas de la Riviere, the Borders of Lake Winnipeg, 18 June 1825; E.N. Kendall to Mrs. Kendall, Fort Franklin, Great Bear Lake, 18 January 1827: SSC/88/2, Royal Geographical Society, London (hereafter RGS).

  48. 48.

    E.N. Kendall to Mrs. Kendall, Fort Franklin, Great Bear Lake, 18 January 1827: SSC/88/2, RGS. Richardson to his mother, 6 September 1825, in John McIlraith, Life of Sir John Richardson (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1868), 144.

  49. 49.

    For paper-based information systems in the colonial world, and especially their usage by Indigenous peoples, see Tony Ballantyne, ‘Paper, Pen and Print: The Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge Order’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 2 (2011), 232–260.

  50. 50.

    Cavell, Tracing, 33.

  51. 51.

    John Franklin’s instructions to his Officers, 4 March 1825: John Franklin’s Letter Book, 26 November 1823–12 May 1825, MS 248/281/1 BJ, SPRI.

  52. 52.

    William Edward Parry to his parents, 5 September 1820, SPRI MS 438/26/49.

  53. 53.

    See Fort Chipewyan Correspondence Books, 1822–26: B.38/1/2-4, Hudson Bay Company Archives, Winnipeg (hereafter HBCA); Robert MacVicar, Journals, Great Slave Lake, 1820–21 and 1822–23: B181/a/3-4, HBCA; Post Journal, Great Slave Lake, 1825–27: B.181/a/6-7, HBCA.

  54. 54.

    See William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions, With a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co, 1820), 521–525.

  55. 55.

    W.E. Parry to his parents 25 July [1818]: MS 438/26/22, SPRI.

  56. 56.

    John Richardson to Mary Richardson, Fort Enterprise, 29 March 1821: MS 1503/4/1, SPRI.

  57. 57.

    Edward Kendall to Mrs. Kendall, Fort Chipewyan, 25 July 1825: SSC/88/2, RGS.

  58. 58.

    Gell, John Franklin’s Bride, 71–72.

  59. 59.

    Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 61.

  60. 60.

    John Franklin Letter Book, John Franklin to James Keith, 9 March 1824: MS 248/281/1 BJ, SPRI.

  61. 61.

    E.N. Kendall to Mrs. M.C. Kendall, Fort Alexander, Bas de la Riviere, 18 June 1825: SSC/88/2, RGS.

  62. 62.

    See, for example, ‘Extracts from Miss Kay afterwards the wife of Lieut. Kendall—to Captain Franklin’ 25 May 1826: MS 248/432/2, SPRI.

  63. 63.

    Partial letter from Mary Anne Kay to John Franklin [17 February 1826]: D3311/30/3, DRO; ‘Extracts …’, 25 May 1826: MS 248/432/2, SPRI.

  64. 64.

    John Franklin to Mary Ann Kay, William Porden Kay, and Emily Kay, Fort Franklin, 6 February 1826: FRN1/10, NMM.

  65. 65.

    Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000), 180–208; Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), xix–xxi; Lamb, Preserving the Self, 114–131.

  66. 66.

    Dorinda Outram, ‘On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and Enlightenment Exploration’, in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 281–294.

  67. 67.

    Gillian Beer, ‘Travelling the Other Way’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 323.

  68. 68.

    John Franklin to Sarah Kay, Lake Winnipeg, 3 June 1825: D3311/50/12, DRO; John Richardson to his sister Margaret Carruthers, in McIlraith, Life of Sir John Richardson, 133.

  69. 69.

    On correspondence as travel writing, and its epistemological importance, see Keighren, Withers, and Bell, Travels Into Print, 11–13.

  70. 70.

    John Richardson to Mary Richardson, Fort William, 12 May 1825, MS 1503/6/2, SPRI; John Franklin to Sarah, Kay, Fort Chipewyan, 23 July 1825, D3311/50/14, DRO.

  71. 71.

    Edward Kendall to Mrs. Kendall, Fort Chipewyan, 25 July 1825: SSC/88/2, RGS.

  72. 72.

    John Richardson to Mary Richardson, Fort William, 12 May 1825: MS 1503/6/2, SPRI; John Richardson to Mary Richardson, Fort Chipewyan, 20 July 1825: MS 1503/6/4, SPRI.

  73. 73.

    John to Mary Richardson, Fort Franklin, 6 February 1826: MS 1503/6/8, SPRI.

  74. 74.

    John Franklin to Sarah Kay, Fort Franklin, 12 June 1826: D3311/50/18, DRO.

  75. 75.

    John Franklin to Mary Anne Kay, Fort Franklin, Great Bear Lake, 8 November 1825: FRN/1/9, NMM; George Back to John Back, Great Bear Lake, 19 February 1827: SGB/1/4 RGS.

  76. 76.

    The most significant repositories are in SPRI, DRO, NMM, and the RGS, though there are considerable collections elsewhere in the United Kingdom and Australia.

  77. 77.

    Object ID AAA3777, NMM.

  78. 78.

    ‘Miss Greenstockings to her faithless admirer’: SJF/7/5, RGS. This version of the poem, in John Franklin’s handwriting and in which several stanzas are transposed (as though it was written from memory), is identified as having been sent with Franklin’s last letter from the Erebus.

  79. 79.

    The transposed stanzas in the RGS poem are replicated in the Traill version. H.D. Traill, Life of Sir John Franklin, RN (London: John Murray, 1896), 111–112.

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  1. University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Annaliese Jacobs

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  1. School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Penelope Edmonds

  2. School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Amanda Nettelbeck

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Jacobs, A. (2018). Arctic Circles: Circuits of Sociability, Intimacy, and Imperial Knowledge in Britain and North America, 1818–1828. In: Edmonds, P., Nettelbeck, A. (eds) Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76231-9_10

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