William Edward Parry (1790–1855) belongs to ‘the pleiad’ of the great polar explorers in the Arctic, as Alina and Czesław Centkiewicz observe in their history of the exploration of the Far North. Between 1819 and 1825, this bright star of northern exploration headed three major expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage which set standards in terms of their meticulous preparation and resourceful crew management, but also as far as the results were concerned. Thanks to Parry, the certainty was obtained that there was no easy sea route to be found from Europe to Asia via the northwest even though the first expedition under his command (1819–20, HMS Hecla, a bomb, and HMS Griper, a gun-brig) managed to attain the 110th meridian west, allowing Parry to collect the prize money of £5,000 offered by Parliament to anybody reaching this point upon his return. The second voyage (1821–3, HMS Hecla and the bomb HMS Fury) did not reach further west but it did serve to charter an important area of that part of the Arctic from Southampton Island to Baffin Island.

In the early decades of the seventeenth century, looking towards the west and across the Atlantic Ocean, the British attempted to set up permanent colonies in North America that could be used as stopovers on the way to ‘Cathay’, as Marco Polo had called China. For European merchants and nations, locating a direct waterway to the fabulous wealth of Asia would have been a tremendous commercial advantage, as finding this shortcut would also have implied avoiding the dangers of travelling across the Ottoman Empire. The sailors and explorers of Europe's most powerful maritime power, England, therefore made a point of proving to the rest of the world that their reputation was well deserved and that they could locate the Passage. Robert Bylot and William Baffin were among those explorers commissioned by the Northwest Company of London to find the elusive passage to the South Seas. The two men united their fates on board the Discovery in 1615 and 1616. In 1615 Bylot was appointed master of the ship, and Baffin served as his ‘mate and assotiate’, then as his pilot in 1616. The chronicles Baffin wrote of these two expeditions up Hudson Strait and then Davis Strait were published in various, sometimes differing accounts and greeted with mixed, very often sceptical reactions, until Daines Barrington, an eighteenth-century lawyer and antiquarian, wrote across the map he wished to include in The Possibility of Approaching the North Pole: ‘Baffin's Bay according to the relation of W.’

‘Many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea.’ With this epigraph from the first lines of the Odyssey, Owen Vidal, a student from Trinity College, Oxford, wished to place his poem dedicated to Sir John Franklin's quest for the Northwest Passage under the glorious aegis of Homer. This now forgotten poetic tribute won in 1860 the £50 prize offered by the University of Oxford for ‘the best English poem on the Life, the Character and the Death of the heroic seaman, Sir John Franklin, with special reference to the time, place, and discovery of his death’. Among the other contributors who competed for this coveted literary prize – which the Guardian had advertised on 8 February 1860 – was Algernon Charles Swinburne, a rebellious young poet who had just been rusticated from Balliol College, officially for having neglected his academic work, in fact for having publicly expressed strong Republican, agnostic and antiNapoleonic feelings. The poet had certainly seized the opportunity offered by this competition to try and make up for his poor academic achievements and launch his poetic career. But he was most doubtful of his success, as he explained in a letter to his mother:

When the account of his first Arctic expedition by land, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, was published in 1823, John Franklin became a national hero, henceforth known as ‘the man who ate his boots’. For the public, he had passed the sublime test of the Arctic. Yet much should have been controversial about the expedition. Franklin had lost eleven of his men, including Robert Hood, the young officer shot by an Iroquois voyageur, and his account was a harrowing tale of suffering, hunger and cold. But read as a mystical ordeal befitting the quest for the Northwest Passage – the holy grail of Arctic exploration – this first Narrative won both official and popular praise, and Sir John Barrow, the powerful Second Secretary to the Admiralty, lavished approval on Franklin. By contrast, the tale of Franklin's second expedition by land, Narrative of a Second Expedition To the Shores Of the Polar Sea, received comparatively little attention when it appeared in 1828, probably because there were no dramatic, sensational deaths to arouse interest; hence it was a single edition, whereas the tale of the first journey had been reprinted six times in England, published in America and translated into French and German. This second narrative, though equally praised by Barrow, tended to pale in comparison to the 1823 account, just as it was to be eclipsed by the disaster of the 1845 voyage.

In 1849, James Clark Ross having found no trace of Franklin's expedition, the Admiralty decided to send another fleet of six ships under the command of Henry Austin along the usual Atlantic route, as well as a new search expedition via the Pacific Ocean. This voyage from west to east was undertaken by the Enterprise under the command of Richard Collinson, seconded by Robert Le Mesurier McClure aboard the Investigator. This chapter examines four different accounts of the voyage of the Investigator and of its detention in the ice between January 1850 and April 1853. Strictly speaking, only three of the reports were actually written by ‘Investigators’ – as the crew liked to call themselves – since, unlike most other captains of his time, McClure did not publish his own narrative but asked a fellow officer, Sherard Osborn, to tell the tale.

A skillful naval officer, Osborn had not served on the Investigator but had participated in two expeditions searching for Franklin, first under Austin in 1850, and under Sir Edward Belcher between 1852 and 1854. McClure trusted his journals and the ship's logs to Osborn, who presented the narrative as having been simply ‘edited’, which explains why the book is still catalogued in some libraries under the authorship of McClure.

As the subtitle to The Strange and Dangerous Voyage (1633) states, the book's author, Welshman Thomas James (c. 1593–1635), sailed from Bristol on 2 May 1631 on an ‘intended Discouery of the Northwest Passage into the South Sea’. His voyage involved the intentional sinking of his vessel at Charlton Island, James Bay, so that ice would not destroy it during the winter that he and his crew spent miserably on the island. James represented his era accurately in not conceiving of such a passage as mythic. Merchants sponsored his expedition; profit was their goal. Sailing along the west coast of Hudson Bay in 1612 and 1613, Thomas Button had closed by one-half the distance between North America's Atlantic coast and the point on the Pacific coast that Sir Francis Drake reported having touched more than thirty years earlier.

But, as one would expect in a narrative of exploration prior to the Royal Society's edict in the second half of the seventeenth century that they should be expunged, strange and dangerous events, not just businessmen's considerations about shipping, found their way into James's book with sufficient regularity to lend the expedition a lustre as much of wonder and spiritual inquiry as of geographical exploration.

The tragi-comedy of John Ross's slow rise to splendour and sudden fall into disgrace was acted out on a specific socio-professional stage with at its centre a triangle of three actors: two men of action, John Ross and William Edward Parry, supervised by a powerful and influential armchair geographer, John Barrow, the famous Second Secretary to the Admiralty. The stage on which the three actors were repeatedly summoned from 1818 to 1846 was what Pierre Bourdieu calls a ‘field’: a structured social space with its own rules of acceptability and credibility, codes of corporeal and linguistic behaviour, schemes of domination and legitimate opinions. While keeping in mind the constraints inherent in that particular field – the field of government-sponsored Arctic explorers – one should also acknowledge the importance of the protagonists’ respective backgrounds. Still, although the three actors’ actions and reactions were determined by such contexts – social, geographical, ‘racial’ – the stage on which they interacted was also a space of precariousness, where each character's status came to be questioned and negotiated, his presence within the field made acceptable or unacceptable. These men's fortunes were articulated on the positions they managed – or failed – to secure in that specific social space. These were regulated by a complex dialectic between origins, individual achievements, financial backing, personal connections and institutional power relations, regulated also – and above all – by the more or less felicitous wielding of a crucial weapon – rhetoric – which will be the specific subject of this chapter.

The history of the early search for the Northwest Passage has been surprisingly overlooked. Most of the time the bibliography that examines the long and doomed quest focuses on nineteenth-century official expeditions, climaxing with the Franklin tragedy in June 1847. It is true that the death of the Trafalgar hero turned Arctic explorer underscored the absurdity of the quest while also marking the culmination of a paradigm in the British imagination. The Arctic was where a specifically British ethos was born, the model of a heroic, sublime masculinity, in a world becoming more and more complex as the British Empire was reaching its zenith. But Franklin's last expedition and the search expeditions launched as late as the 1870s were only the visible tip of a gigantic iceberg that had been floating into Victorian culture from a venerable past. The massive underwater portion of the mountain needs now to be examined.

The findings might well entail a revision of the cultural landscape that we inhabit. Indeed the discovery in 1497 of Newfoundland by John Cabot seems to have been supplanted in the cultural unconscious of Britain by the story of the two colonies of Roanoke (1584–7) and Virginia (1607), so that the Powhatan, romanticized as they are, are generally thought to provide the very first scene of the encounter between English travellers and American Indians.

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, Native American reports of copper mines near a northern river prompted the Hudson's Bay Company to send missions of exploration into the remote northwestern interior of Canada. As they all failed, interest in the ore declined, until in 1767 Moses Norton, the son of the Hudson's Bay Company's first governor, now at its head, chose Samuel Hearne – an inexperienced twenty-four-year-old stranger who had only joined the HBC in 1766 – to undertake a series of overland expeditions. A young and fit man, Hearne had an excellent reputation for snowshoeing. No fewer than three attempts were however necessary to find the mouth of the Coppermine River and the exact location of the copper ore. A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771 & 1772, published posthumously in 1795, is Hearne's account of his ventures.

For his third expedition, Hearne imposed his choice of Matonabbee as his guide. A leading Indian, Matonabbee enjoyed great prestige among the Chipewyans and the Athabascan Crees and he was fully devoted to Hearne. Thanks to Matonabbee's help, and accompanied by a small party of Indians, Hearne reached the Coppermine River on 14 July 1771. The Indians then took him thirty miles south to one of the copper mines, where Hearne was terribly disappointed as he could not specify in what quantities copper was present.

Although John Barrow (1764–1849) published many articles about the exploration of the North American Arctic, he is best remembered today by scholars and enthusiasts of the Northwest Passage for two volumes, published twenty-eight years apart, that bookend the British Navy's search for a northwest passage in his lifetime. A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions (1818) provided mariners of his age with a well-researched compendium of all prior efforts to discover northeast, northwest, or polar passages; Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions (1846) offered its readers an account of the campaign that Barrow waged to discover a northwest passage after the defeat of Napoleon, when the British Admiralty's supply of able officers and seamen quickly became a surplus that needed putting to use. Before this opportunity fell into his lap, Barrow had already decided that a passage must exist, and his Chronological History implicitly argued that it was Britain's destiny to discover it. By uniting national honour, the virtue of scientific curiosity and the magnanimity of British diplomacy, Barrow forged a triumphal rhetorical bastion for the promotion of his darling project, an impregnable fortress that only a full-blown catastrophe such as the disappearance of an entire expedition could effectively show to be imperfect and dangerous. Thereby, hubris displaced faith in the forty years’ effort to discover the secret of the Arctic.

Shortly after the purchase from France of the lands situated west of the Mississippi River (1803), President Jefferson chose Captain Meriwether Lewis as the leader of a ‘Corps of Discovery’ to explore the new and as yet uncharted northwest territories, describe the landscape, study the plants and animal life, establish diplomatic relations with the Indian tribes and – most importantly – find a direct waterway to the Pacific Ocean to facilitate expansion, trade and commerce. The prevailing belief among the promoters of the expedition within the Jefferson administration was that the Missouri and Oregan (or Columbia) rivers did necessarily ‘interconnect’ somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, providing an easy and continuous water route across the mountains to the western sea and the Orient.

Lewis was an experienced Army officer who had selected as his co-captain another Army officer, William Clark. From 14 May 1804 to 23 September 1806, from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back, the Corps of Discovery travelled nearly 8,000 miles. From a purely rational perspective and considering the net results of the enterprise as originally planned and prepared, the voyage was a failure: the message brought back to Jefferson by his special envoy into the wilderness was that there was no easy route from the headwaters of the Missouri to the Pacific basin. The famous interconnection simply did not exist except in the realm of illusion and mythic construction.