Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages

Uncovering a wealth of neglected archival information, this book examines both visual and textual material from the mid-nineteenth century Franklin Search Expeditions to the Arctic, painstakingly tracing their influence on popular imagination. Its surprising findings present a compelling challenge to the still-dominant 'man-versus-nature' trope.

In the mid-nineteenth century, thirty-six expeditions set out for the Northwest Passage in search of Sir John Franklin''s missing expedition. The array of visual and textual material produced on these voyages was to have a profound impact on the idea of the Arctic in the Victorian imaginary. Eavan O''Dochartaigh closely examines neglected archival sources to show how pictures created in the Arctic fed into a metropolitan view transmitted through engravings, lithographs, and panoramas. Although the metropolitan Arctic revolved around a fulcrum of heroism, terror and the sublime, the visual culture of the ship reveals a more complicated narrative that included cross-dressing, theatricals, dressmaking, and dances with local communities. O''Dochartaigh''s investigation into the nature of the on-board visual culture of the nineteenth-century Arctic presents a compelling challenge to the ''man-versus-nature'' trope that still reverberates in polar imaginaries today. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.