Space is the Place ...

The history of jazz -- indeed, the history of music -- has never seen anyone quite like Le Sony'r Ra, better known as Sun Ra, and his variously-subtitled Arkestra. Although his earthy incarnation was born to humble circumstances as Herman Poole Blount in Alabama in 1914, Ra always insisted that he was actually from the planet Saturn. As he wrote in his essay "Fallen Angel," 

I'm not a human.  I never called anybody mother.  The woman who's supposed to be my mother I call other momma. I never call nobody mother. I never call nobody father.  I never felt that way. You have to realize this planet is not only inhabited by humans, it's inhabited by aliens too. They got the books say they fell from heaven with Satan. So, in mixed up among humans you have angels. The danger spot is the United States. You have more angels in the country than anywhere else. You see, it was planned.

However that may be, his otherworldly qualities were evident from his first recording, 1948's "I am an Instrument," backed with "I am Strange." He one near-hit single was about his favorite planet, "Journey to Saturn" in 1973; by that time, he and the Arkestra had taken up communal residence in a big house in Philadelphia; the band lived upstairs and had their record label and pressing plant in the basement. Fresh stock was delivered to local record shops by means of a Radio-Flyer hand-pulled wagon. In 1974, he produced a feature-length film, Space is the Place, which opens with a pair of animal horns floating through space, as the Arkestra chants "It's after the end of the world ... don't you know that yet?" The film has since become a touchstone of a larger artistic and critical movement known as Afrofuturism, located (as Ra says) on "the other side of time."

I saw the Arkestra perform only once, at the Blue Grotto in New Haven, CT in 1986. When the curtain rose, Ra was already on stage; the Arkestra came in as a sort of procession, their enormous twisty horns sticking up like something out of Dr. Seuss, all of them festooned with jingling bells. The opening tunes were a sort of 'greatest hits' of the band, including "If I Told You I Am from Outer Space,"  "Discipline 27-II," and "We Travel the Spaceways." In the middle of their two sets, the Arkestra left the stage, and Ra played a couple of old jazz classics -- "Yeah, Man!" and "Beautiful Love" -- as instrumentals on his Hammond organ. 

Since Ra's death in 1993 -- or, some say, his return to Saturn -- the Arkestra has continued to perform around the world. Oh, and there's one more very local connection: Deval Patrick is the son of Pat Patrick, for four decades a pivotal member of the Arkestra.

Note: No response required this week, though comments are welcome!

Pale Blue Dot

To anyone who was around in the 1980's, Carl Sagan was an almost ubiquitous presence; somehow, he managed to combine being incredibly nerdy with being incredibly cool. Parodied by SNL and Johnny Carson, he took it all in stride, even titling his final book Billions and Billions -- a catchphrase from Carson's parody that Dr. Sagan himself didn't actually utter.

Over his career, who wrote seventeen books and countless scientific papers, but it was his television series, Cosmos, that cemented his place in the pop-cultural science universe. Airing over thirteen weeks from September to December of 1980, it became the highest-rated show in the history of public television. For its time, the show's production values were remarkable, giving Sagan the seeming ability to walk through a giant solar system (actually, the planets were quite small models), and featuring appropriately "spacey" music from Vangelis.

One might say that his timing was also perfect; just a decade after the Moon landing and at a time before the space shuttle program experienced its first failures, it was a time of increasing optimism about space and space travel; the kids who had drunk their Tang and eaten their Space Food Sticks in the 1960's were now young adults, primed for a curious, celebratory, and slightly speculative journey into the outer reaches of the universe.

There was a tie-in book, which of course became a best-seller; Sagan followed it with others. In one curious twist, his fictional narrative, Contact -- originally a screenplay, which Sagan decided to turn into a novel when he wasn't able to get it made into a movie -- did get made into a movie a few years later, starring Jodie Foster (Sagan, alas, didn't live to see it.) Pale Blue Dot is, to my mind, the best of the later books; it's the most philosophical, and connects best with our overall theme of exploration. Sagan was closely involved in the two Voyager space probes, and lamented that Nasa decided to set aside plans for further exploration of space after the Apollo program ended. At the same time, he knew -- and emphasizes in the book -- the practical truth that there's no home away from home for us earthlings -- at least "not yet."

NB: Be sure to check out the "Planetary Update" I've just added!

The First Men in the Moon

H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon surprises from its title onward: the peculiar preposition "in" hints of what's to come. Appearing originally in serial form in the Strand magazine (also home to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle), it may be the first modern science fiction novel -- but it's far from the earliest account of a voyage to the moon. 

The Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote one of the earliest accounts in his The True History; its centerpiece is a great war between the Sunites and the Lunites, the latter of whom ride atop enormous three-headed vultures and throw spears that look like giant stalks of asparagus. Terry Gilliam's Adventures of Baron Munchausen reprises this, with Robin Williams as the King of the Moon! 

The centuries since are strewn with tales of trips to the moon, from Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) to Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865); even Poe weighed in (so to speak) with a tale of his own, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall." What all these tales had in common, though, was that the method of reaching the moon was fantastical -- riding in a balloon, being drawn by vast team of trained geese, or shot out of a cannon -- which were, in point of fact, unrelated to the actual challenge of reaching their destinations. Verne's cannon, with the astronauts strapped into a giant artillery shell, proved enormously popular, despite its two disadvantages: 1) The initial firing of the cannon would have killed everyone inside the shell; and 2) Because of inertial decay, it's impossible for any object to escape the earth's gravity without some additional form of propulsion.

And, though Wells's moon in many ways his moon is just as fantastical as his predecessors, came up with a fictional -- but scientifically plausible -- method of reaching this goal. His "Mr. Cavor" is a scientist, working to develop a kind of material that will block the force of gravity. Cavor reasons, sensibly enough, that we have materials that block light, block x-rays, and block radio waves -- why not a material that could block gravity? (all this before the long post-Einsteinian debate over a unified theory of force that could include gravity).

The rest follows, scientifically consistent with its premise; Wells also realize that the passengers in a sphere coated with this material -- which its inventor dubs "Cavorite" -- would lead to weightlessness, and offers the first description of it in fiction:

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed, not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt – as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.

What happens once Cavor and his partner, Mr. Bedford, actually arrive on the moon quickly accelerates from the plausible to the purely fantastical, a pattern that later science fiction often follows, taking (for instance) the rational and scientific crew of the starship Enterprise from one fantastical world to another.

The 1964 film version is remarkably faithful to the original, though -- being a Hollywood film -- it has to add a love interest. Lionel Jeffries is brilliant as Cavor, as is Edward Judd at Mr. Bedford. The selenites -- "moon creatures" -- are brilliantly rendered by Ray Harryhausen. The frame story of a more modern moon landing is brilliantly used, and lead to an ending far more poignant than that imagined by Wells.

Backgrounds on Space Exploration

It's not that long ago -- well within living memory, as I can attest from my own childhood -- that space truly was seen as "the final frontier," with all the problematic baggage that the word implies. Westerns were sure-fire TV ratings gold; the future of space dramas was a lot less certain. When Gene Roddenberry first pitched Star Trek to the networks, his tagline was that it was basically a "Wagon Train to the Stars." Kids like myself grew up building models of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space capsules, ate Space Food Sticks and washed down our breakfast with Tang; to grow up to be an astronaut was way cooler than being president. On July 20, 1969, I stayed up with my parents, glued to the fuzzy video of Neil Armstrong stepping out onto on the surface of the Moon.

But what would we do in space? Why, if we really did "come in peace," was the whole concept of the "space race" built around besting the Soviets? Would we build space stations? Moon colonies? How about Mars? And, even then, there was a vague awareness that, although our appetite for space exploration was vast, the funding and public support it depended on was far from infinite. It was not entirely a surprise, then, when after the first few Moon landings, public support began to dwindle; the Apollo 13 astronauts famously didn't even merit a live TV feed, at least until their mission turned potentially tragic. The Space Shuttle program, though less ambitious in exploratory scope, continued to capture the American imagination, despite (or perhaps in part because of) the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Yet with costs rising and mission goals elusive, its days were numbered, and the last shuttle, Atlantis, landed at the Kennedy Space Center in 2011.

NASA has certainly achieved some remarkable benchmarks since then -- their New Horizons probe made it all the way to Pluto, and took dramatic images of that no-longer-quite-a-planet and its moon (one might even say it wasn't entirely an unmanned probe, as it contained 30 grams of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930). But with budgets in question, the future of human space travel -- one might not deem it properly "exploration" -- is now largely in the hands of private concerns such as SpaceX.

The Library of Ice

With Nancy Campbell's The Library of Ice, we finally move into a contemporary moment, and the kind of complex connections which characterize our existence today. Campbell, an artist/poet and expert in rare manuscripts, opens her story in "real time" -- as she tells a colleague that she's decided she needs a break: "I'm going to the Arctic," she tells him. 

But this is no mere escape -- it's more of a pilgrimage, a quest, a hejira -- only not of a religious kind, and not with any particular grail in mind. When told that she can have her artistic residency in Upernavik either in the summer or the endless night of winter, Campbell immediately chooses winter -- for the challenge, yes, but also for the beauty and strangeness of it all.

Some of which is unexpected -- the museum seems to be half-empty, and there's no sign of the director who encouraged Nancy to spend a winter there -- when she asks the locals, they just smile and change the subject. What is it she's supposed to do here? The people who came before have left curious traces: a jar of apple spread, a book of Andersen's fairy tales, and a packet of herbal tea. Campbell finds herself at once explorer and searcher, finder and loser -- with ice as her one recurring companion and theme.

As my friend P.J. Capelotti remarked in his review of this book, "No detail is lost or forgotten.  It is, one could argue, the first great literature of the Anthropocene.  If you don’t believe this, go to page 33, where a sentence concludes: “if humans are lucky, there may be more decades ahead.”  Decades.  If we are lucky.  Thus chastened, we embark on a journey around the Radcliffe Camera to the Bodleian to uncover Robert Boyle’s History of Cold.  One imagines John Thaw’s Inspector Morse drinking at The White Horse across the street—a crazy thought until, sure enough, Morse code makes an appearance later in the book.  One searches for the many prophecies in this book just as when listening to the music in Morse, where the composer of the soundtrack, Barrington Pheloung, would telegraph the name of the murderer in code in each episode."

In the shadow of the failed Glasgow climate conference, we perhaps should tremble -- but Campbell, I think, would want us still to stand in wonder. We can tremble later.

A Woman in the Polar Night

In his introduction to A Woman in the Polar Night, Lawrence Millman notes that is author, Christiane Ritter, had no interest in any of the "Arctic Grails" that drove most northern explorers -- the northwest passage, the pole, or the discovery and naming of some unknown spot. And yet, he notes, she could appreciate the Arctic in ways that those "great explorers," with their "Grail-oriented blinders," could not. Hers was an exploration, not of lands to be named or passages to be navigated, but of the inner nature of life and consciousness in a world in which everything that she -- along with most people of her class and background -- took for granted as much as the air they breathed. It's an exercise in long subtraction: the subtraction, at first, of creature-comforts and little things, then of greater ones, such as predictable food, predictable weather, or the ability to just go get another something when something important breaks or is lost, and at last the subtraction of human company itself.

It's notable that her journey begins in relative luxury, aboard a German cruise-ship with its deck-chairs, its "illuminated coffee lounge," and snug, comfortable beds -- just the sort of cruise ship that presently navigates these regions, though now they are even larger and more luxurious. It's a perfect contrast to the life that awaits her in the little hut with its felt roof, ancient broken stove, and puttied-shut windows. Her sojourn begins in endless day, continues through seemingly endless night, and becomes for her an almost cosmic sort of rebirth, a witnessing of life's great circuit that forever changes her perspective on civilization. Indeed, as Millman notes, not long after her return home, after her family estate catches fire and burns to the ground, Christiane is not perturbed or mournful, but secretly grateful. For the fire had done what ice did: reduced her life to its essentials. 

An African in Greenland

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

It's one of the greatest tales of exploration, adventure, and friendship ever written, and yet its author, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, was never a member of an "expedition" as such. In some ways, he's closer to Charles Francis Hall, who hitched a ride to the Arctic on a whaler -- and yet, unlike Hall, his dream was of self-exploration rather than the divinely-sanctioned rescue of others. And most unlike Hall, he worked his way north, arriving not as some sort of elevated figure, but as a common man in search of the company of ordinary people, along with the sights of a place he had been dreaming of visiting since he was a boy. An African in Greenland is his story.

Kpomassie begins with an arresting account of his own childhood in Togo, where he lived in a community that still observed many of the traditional customs of its indigenous people; his account of being attacked by a python, which has to be addressed by a purification ceremony performed by a priestess of the Python cult, is harrowing. In a curious way, though, the depth of his own roots in his native culture were part of how and why he was able to relate to the Inuit people of Greenland. Both peoples had an ancient shamanistic tradition, and though both had encountered the western world of beliefs, still had to abide by what one Inuit shaman called "numerous and irksome taboos." Colonialism had touched but not yet despoiled Kopmassie's native land, but in Greenland, the Danes had been at work since the eighteenth century, and Greenlanders lived in a more throughly hybridized culture. Still, the situational awareness is similar: let's call it living on the edge.

What's most refreshing about Kpomassie's narrative, though, is that he writes as a person with complete confidence in his own perspective and culture; for him, Europeans are just another group of people in another place, whose customs are as curious and strange as his own might seem to them. He climbs, as it were, up the tree of these intertwined cultural and colonial histories, finding at the top the coconuts of understanding. He is both self-secure and unassuming, and the spirit of his curiosity is a welcome calling-card in every place in which he lands.

"The Terror"

The intersections of history and modern cultural obsessions are many and fascinating. Most significantly, although Dan Simmons' original novel centered around the "Tuunbaq" (more properly known in Inuktitut as Torngat), the producers of the AMC series, David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, have moved the monster to the margins for a time -- giving other, more human horrors (scurvy, lead poisoning, and cannibalism) time to work their magic. Time is also space, and as the men depart the cocoon of the ships and spread out on the land, the story darkens even as sun floods the scene.

Although I didn't work with the producers directly, they made use of my research, and one scene in Episode 1 -- where Franklin and Crozier attend a "tableau vivant" depicting James Clark Ross's Antarctic voyage (on which Crozier served as his second) -- a depiction drawn from similar shows described in my book Arctic Spectacles. Later episodes take pages -- quite literally -- from the mysterious "Peglar Papers" found on one of the bodies of Franklin's men, and about which I've written extensively; two of the episodes even take their title from phrases in these papers. Two years ago, star Jared Harris (in person) and co-producer Kajganich (virtually) visited RIC, and talked about the show with students in my Arctic Encounters and Victorian Lit courses. Despite the somber nature of the subject matter, the discussion was a lively and jovial one, as you can see!

There are many entry points to the story -- you can check out my reviews, written in collaboration with Stephen Smith, which appeared on the Canadian Geographic website. The FX company responsible for the show's amazing visuals, UPP, has a reel showing how the magic worked.  The show-runners have done several interviews, some with cast members, which you can see here and here and (with even more of the cast) here. It's important to know that this show was many years in the making -- Kajganich told us that he had originally scripted it as a feature film -- and, as so often happens, it was only by indirections that this story found its direction out.

On the Proper Use of Stars

To the long annals of flights of fancy inspired in whole or part by the last, fatal expedition of Sir John Franklin -- a list whose authors include Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Sten Nadolny -- must now be added another name, that of Dominique Fortier. It might be questioned whether, given the continued recourse to the pen over a century and a half by these and numerous other writers, another tale is called for, or even possible -- but considering On The Proper Use of Stars, I can only say this: no matter how crowded the firmament, there shines here a new and startlingly brilliant light, yet one which takes its place in a familar constellation as though it had always been there.

Ms. Fortier's novel -- originally published as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008 -- succeeds by refracting the light of its sources into a series of stellar vignettes, each of which captures a glimpse of one of the many figures who were caught up in the launch of, and search for, the Franklin expedition of 1845. Some glimmer darkly -- Crozier is almost a black hole of stellar suspiration -- while others, such as Lady Jane Franklin, take on the full refulgence of an Arctic sky. Sir John himself is cast deep in the shadows of his own expedition, reduced to a few doubtful-seeming journal entries, but we hardly miss him. His crew, on the other hand, is crammed with a variety of colorful characters, some based on its actual officers, some entirely fictional, such as the delightful "Adam Tuesday," who claims to have read every book in the ships' well-stocked libraries. In-between these leaves are folded, specimen-like, the fragments and documents of daily life: a dinner menu, a page from a manual of magnetism, a snippet of Eleanor Porden's poetry, a scribbled note attached to a button, a recipe.

The central portion of the narrative alternates between Crozier, whose dark matter grows in gravity and depth as the expedition progresses, and the lives of Lady Jane and her niece, Sophia Cracroft. Crozier's ineffectual courtship of Miss Cracroft is the connecting thread; in Fortier's version, their relationship seems far less futile than either of them feared, although (alas) neither will ever be the wiser. Crozier eventually must leave his reveries, and his ships behind, while Sophia comes to the realization -- with the help of Lady Franklin -- that perhaps, after all, the companionship of a conventional-minded man is far inferior to the company of a smart and free-spirited woman.

The social history of tea forms another delicate and finely nuanced strand, figuring both in Crozier's rivalry with Fitzjames and Lady Franklin's carefully choreographed social ensembles. And in the end, it's Lady Franklin who shines the brightest; never, in any of the other novels drawn from these histories, has she been so particularly, vividly alive as she is in Fortier's capable hands. She is here, she is there, she is everywhere -- equipped with little dogs named Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, her color-coded maps, her calling cards, and her formidable recipe for Christmas pudding (given at novel's end should anyone wish to embark upon a two-month's journey from first stir to fiery arrival) -- she proves herself again and again a far more intrepid and tireless explorer than her seeming-heroic husband. One must see her, in this light, as the very first to make a fiction out of Franklin, and although here we witness only the first few opening brush-strokes, the reader can little doubt that, in the end, it is her portrait at which after-comers must ever ponder and pry, however various and disparate their ultimate visions.

Arctic Forensics II: Franklin

In his anthemic "Northwest Passage," the late Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers evokes the sad yet compelling aura of the Franklin expedition perfectly: 

Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie

The sea route to the Orient for which so many died

Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones

And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones ...

Cairns are another matter, but of weathered, broken bones there is no shortage on King William Island. And, over the past two decades, they -- along with their better-preserved comrades in their graves on Beechey Island -- have received increasingly careful and detailed study. What can this work tell us? What enigmas remain. Here, as Sherlock Holmes might have said, is a brief statement of the facts so far known in the case.

The Beechey Island bodies were the first to receive detailed study -- when they were exhumed in 1984 and 1985 by forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie, each received a detailed autopsy, complete with x-rays, pathological exams, and bone and tissue samples. The best introduction to their story is the old NOVA episode "Buried in Ice" -- you can watch it in its entirely here. You can also see the detailed autopsy of John Torrington, or read the article in People Magazine naming him "One of the Most Intriguing People of 1984." 

The big takeaway from these bodies turned out to be their elevated levels of lead, which led Beattie to the hypothesis that lead poisoning -- likely from the lead solder in the tinned food provided to the expedition -- was the main cause of the expedition's failure. This "big" hypothesis, though, has been complicated by later studies that took up its challenge; the first, in 2014, showed that the impact of the lead levels observed was likely less dramatic than earlier assumed. Then, in 2015, a study of English sailors interred at English Harbor in Antigua at nearly the same time as Franklin's men also had elevated lead levels that were quite similar, despite their not having had tinned food or served in the Arctic. Finally, in 2016, a study using an advanced form of x-ray analysis demonstrated the more recent bone growth in Franklin's men -- men who died some years after those at Beechey -- showed no increase in lead intake. Taken together, these studies show that exposure to lead, while possibly severe in some individuals, wasn't too much worse than that of the average bloke in the mid-19th century Royal Navy.

The most recent breakthroughs have come from new work by land archaeologists, prominent among them Dr. Douglas Stenton. Stenton and his associates have revisited a great many known or alleged Franklin sites and re-studied the remains, using DNA analysis in addition to other archaeological tools. Finally, just this year, Stenton's team -- which has been actively soliciting DNA samples from living descendants of Franklin's men -- made a positive match. That same skull you see at the top of this post -- previously thought via facial reconstruction to be that of James Reid -- turns out to belong to John Gregory, the engineer employed to operate the steam engine aboard HMS Erebus!

With any luck, this will just be the first of many such identifications.

Arctic Forensics I: Hall, et. al.

Hall exhumed

The narratives penned by explorers, and the scholars who study them, are by no means the only stories that we can tell about these histories. When physical evidence exists -- whether on the ground or under the sea -- archaeology and forensics can tell a story of their own. It's often a more fragmentary story -- that's its nature -- but it's also a story anchored in material evidence, and can provide either corroboration or refutation of the written narratives of the time, as well as of Inuit oral traditions. And, as scientific methods advance, and additional artifacts analyzed, this kind of forensic evidence can end up shaping the narrative in powerful ways, perhaps altering our understanding of events entirely.

This week, we'll look at several cases where this kind of research has done so. First, of course, in the case of Charles Francis Hall, the fact that his hair and fingernails, examined after his exhumation at the behest of Chauncey Loomis, we obtained confirmation that he had been exposed to potentially toxic levels of arsenic in the weeks before his death. Loomis handled this evidence with care; he knew that arsenic was part of various medical preparations, and simply knowing that it was present didn't make poisoning a certainty. And, while suspicion at the time had turned to the German scientific staff, particularly to Emil Bessels, he had no specific evidence linking the possibility to them. The envelope that I discovered, and the subsequent finding of love letters from Bessels to Vinnie Ream, offered a motive for murder, but even then the case remains less than 100% certain.

A second body, interestingly, connected with Hall has recently invited fresh scrutiny. Hall, having finally reached his desired goal of King William Island, was frustrated that deep snow prevented his seeing the several bodies the Inuit indicated were to be found there. He took one, though -- nearly an entire skeleton -- and brought it back with him. Eventually, with the assistance of the British consul, this skeleton was sent back to England, where it was examined by Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the day. Huxley's identification, though, was based only on very general estimates of the age and height of the individual, as well as a gold tooth filling; he pronounced it to be that of Henry Thomas Dundas Le Vesconte. Le Vesconte's own family, though, had their doubts, and the skeleton was interred under the floor of the old Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich under a plaque simply indicating that he was a member of Franklin's crew.

Fast forward to 2009: the memorial in which the bones were interred was to be moved and renovated, offering an opportunity to give them a fresh examination. The assumption remained that they were Le Vesconte's, but all the same, DNA samples as well as samples of the tooth enamel were taken. Teeth tell a marvelous story; depending on the local mineral content of the water, teeth record their point of origin as they take on specific isotopes of strontium and calcium; even the legendary "Ice Man" Otzi was able to be traced to his home village in Italy. The teeth of Hall's skeleton suddenly told quite a different story; the person whose bones these were almost certainly grew up in the north of England or in Scotland, along the granitic strata of the northeast coast -- whereas Le Vesconte had grown up near the chalky cliffs of Devon, quite a different environment altogether.

1845 photo of Goodsir (left) with reconstructed face

So the bones were not his -- then whose? There were a number of Scots on Franklin's expedition, including three of the four surgeons and assistant surgeons. Since there were photographs or portraits available, these men seemed likely and useful subjects. The next step was a facial reconstruction, where the skull is built up with clay or other materials to the likely average depth for various parts of the head; the resulting 'sculpture' often can help identify the individual. And, in this case, it did: the head was almost a perfect match for Harry Goodsir, the expedition's naturalist and assistant surgeon aboard HMS "Erebus." Even the gold filling turned out to corroborate his identity -- using gold to fill teeth was a relatively new procedure in 1845, and one of its pioneers, Robert Nasmyth, was a close friend of Harry; Harry's brother John even worked as Nasmyth's assistant for a time!

All this is still slightly short of certainty, though. DNA would be the ideal method of making the identification nearly 100% -- but where to get Harry's DNA? There are many ideas out there, including a rather challenging one -- extracting a hair from a locket made from strands from Harry's head -- but that locket also contains hair from 10 other individuals! The quest goes on -- perhaps some of the skeleton's foot bones, which Hall inadvertently left behind, may offer a clue. Still, forensic science has certainly clarified the matter, and I for one am pretty sure these bones are Harry's!

Weird and Tragic Shores

Charles Francis Hall may well be the most singular explorer in the entire history of the western fascination with the Arctic regions. Unlike the vast majority of such men, he never served in the Navy or merchant marine of any nation, nor did he have any family or local connections with whaling, fishing, sail-making or any other nautical trade. Although he published a sort of newspaper in Cincinnati, it would be a bit of a stretch to call him a “journalist,” and while for a time he had a business making engraved seals for business use, he himself was not a particularly accomplished engraver. Never apparently much of a family man, he more or less abandoned his wife and children when he first set off for the Arctic, and they were almost never the subject of his letters and journals. Indeed, if it were not for the singular leap he made out of the ordinary life of commerce and middle-class life, he might very well have never made much of a mark in any of his endeavors. Hall’s destiny was to do one thing, to do it with faith and fury and a determination which bordered on the monomaniacal – and yet, in so doing, he revealed a deeply humane and conflicted character, at once absolutely unique and yet absolutely a man of his time.

One of the most notable aspects of Hall's career was his close reliance on his Inuit guides, "Joe" Ebierbing and "Hannah" Tookoolito. Throughout his career, they were Hall’s most faithful and trusted companions, accompanying him on numerous sledging expeditions, providing food and shelter, and translating and interpreting at hundreds of interviews with Inuit who had stories to tell about the Franklin expedition. No only were they tireless and constant in their support for Hall’s often very demanding Arctic plans, but, between expeditions, they accompanied him throughout the United States, as well as permitting Hall to arrange for their exhibition in New York and Boston to raise funds for further missions, as well as appearing alongside him on his east coast lecture tour (see here for details of his Providence engagement).

Hall in a German graphic novel

And yet, astonishingly, they remained constant despite the death of two of their children while working for Hall, even though in each case the deaths were at least partly due to Hall’s demands – in the first case, for exhibitions and lectures, and in the second, for a difficult sledge-journey to King William Island (their second child, indeed, was named “King William” by Hall). Hall could be an imperious master, especially when his ‘sacred cause’ of finding Franklin’s men was at stake; Ebierbing, in his only surviving letter, recalled that during the attempt to reach King William, “Mr. Hall tease me all time. Make me go their [sic].” Yet not once, during the entire time of their association, did “Hannah” or “Joe” waver in their service to this man who, without their assistance, would likely have never earned the sobriquet he so dearly coveted – “Charles Hall, Arctic Explorer.”

When Chauncey Loomis arrived at "Thank God Harbor" to exhume Hall and conduct tests for arsenic, he -- like Owen Beattie -- felt that establishing the cause of death would be sufficient service to science and history to justify disturbing his bones. As this photo shows, the body was in considerably poorer shape than those uncovered at Beechey Island, although traces of his beard can be seen. Loomis felt the evidence was less than conclusive, but for my part I am personally convinced that Hall was poisoned with arsenic, most likely by Bessels.

Hall's death had many reverberations. One of the documents I found among the Hall papers at the Smithsonian was a printed copy of a petition circulated in Congress by Hall's widow, Mercy Ann Hall. In tones that evoke those of Lady Franklin, Mrs. Hall allowed that her late husband, "in his devotion to duty, was unsparing of his family and himself," asked only for "tender consideration" and some small "pecuniary assistance" (i.e, money) -- the amount was not specified. She was eventually granted a pension of $40 a month (about $750 in today's currency).

Hannah's Grave

"Joe" and "Hannah" returned to Groton where, as Joe wrote with some pride, their daughter Panik "go to school every day." Alas, there were not many more days remaining; her health had never been good, and she died at the age of nine. Hannah herself followed her adopted daughter to the grave on New Year's eve of 1876; Joe returned to the Arctic, serving as a guide for the Schwatka expedition in search of Franklin records from 1878 to 1880, and died some years later under uncertain circumstances. You can visit the graves of Hannah, little "Butterfly," and Panik at the Starr Burying Ground in Groton. A memorial stone for two other Inuit, Cudlargo and Ooseekong, stands nearby; see this article by Kenn Harper for more details.

We'll have many judgments to make about Hall, but love him or hate him, it's hard not to admire his persistence. And, in a field of endeavor crowded with fateful, haunting endings, his may well have been strangest of all. Weird and Tragic shores, indeed.

The Man Who Ate His Boots

It might be said of Sir John Franklin, as of the unlucky Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, that "nothing became his life like the leaving of it." Had Franklin succeeded in finding a navigable Northwest Passage, he would have gone down in history merely as a notable navigator; instead, by vanishing, he has ascended to the firmament of Arctic mythology, as much a fixture of that sky as the Aurora Borealis. His death, and the mystery surrounding it, has inspired dozens of poems and novels, attracting writers from Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad and Margaret Atwood; any number of poignant ballads (among them Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage,' which has become almost a second Canadian national anthem), and (to date) four plays, six documentary films, a German opera, and an Australian musical.

The search to rescue, and then to discern the fate of, Sir John Franklin and his men was the very first mass-media disaster. For more than a decade, it dominated the popular press on both sides of the Atlantic; writers such as Dickens, Collins, Swinburne, Thoreau, Eliot, Verne, and Conrad were enthralled by its dark mysteries; clairvoyants from Scotland to India had visions of Franklin's ships, and more than thirty vessels were dispatched, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in today's money, to seek him out. Stage plays, moving panoramas, and lantern shows depicted the wild loneliness of the "Frozen Zone"; lecturers equipped with maps, charts, and Esquimaux artifacts opined on his likely location, and his wife/widow Lady Jane Franklin became a dominating figure of the day, lauded by The Times of London as "Our English Penelope." Alas, for her, there would be no returning Odysseus! But loss and death draw down to deeper springs of human feeling, perhaps, than happy returns and loving embraces. And when, finally, the specter of the "last dread alternative" -- cannibalism -- was cast over the affair, it drove its tincture of admiration and revulsion deep down into the British psyche.

Even after the recovery of the expedition's final "Victory Point Record" by Francis Leopold McClintock in 1859, there was continued interest in discovering anything further about his final fate. The American eccentric and erstwhile newspaper publisher Charles Francis Hall led two search expeditions in the 1860's; in the 1870's, the U.S. Army dispatched Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka on a new seach for paper records or artifacts that might help clarify the last days of the Franklin exedition. Individual searchers returned to the area periodically from the 1880's through to the 1980's, among them the great explorer Knud Rasmussen, who in the 1902's heard stories of Franklin's ships from the grandsons of the men who had seen them perish, stories almost exactly the same as those collected by Hall more than half a century earlier. Forensic expeditions -- Owen Beattie in the mid-1980's, and Anne Keenleyside in the early 1990's -- collected the bones, and analyzed the bodies, of known Franklin remains, finding evidence of lead poisoning, scurvy, and tuberculosis. Most significantly, historians such as David C. Woodman and Dorothy Harlan Eber have collected and gathered Inuit testimony, comparing numerous accounts with the hope that a common narrative thread could be found. Woodman has traveled to the Arctic numerous times, searching for the ships in the places the Inuit described.

But it wasn't until 2014 when the first of Franklin's ships -- HMS "Erebus" -- was finally found. It was located by Parks Canada's underwater archaeologists only a few kilometers from where Woodman had searched, right where the Inuit had said it would be. Dives on "Erebus" have netted several remarkable objects, including the ship's bell, several china plates, brass buttons, and the hilt of a naval sword. Many of those, such as myself, who had followed the search for years, thought that finding one ship was already beating the odds -- and then, in 2016, the second ship "Terror" was found, again thanks to Inuit accounts (though in this case that of a contemporary witness, Sammy Kogvik). Although suspended for the past two seasons, new dives are planned for the summer of 2022, and many more to come -- who knows what secrets these wrecks may disclose? Meanwhile, land-based archaeologists have not been idle; earlier this year Doug Stenton announced that he'd been able to use DNA to identify one of the better-known skulls as that of John Gregory, who'd been hired to operate the steam engine installed in Erebus.

Interest in the Franklin story has continued to grow, both thanks to the discovery of the ships and the the new AMC TV series "The Terror," starring Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin, Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, and Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames. Based on Dan Simmons's horror novel The Terror, it nevertheless stays largely true to the history of the original expedition, and was meticulously researched and shot. To the historical hazards of scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism, the story adds a mythological Inuit beast, the fearsome "Tunbaq" -- if you don't mind the blood and gore, it's a wonderful re-telling of the Franklin story. You can download individual episodes from iTunes, or get the entire series as a DVD.  Michael Palin's new book on HMS Erebus will doubtless spur still more interest, as many who only know him through the Pythons or his BBC travel shows will get his dramatic take on the ship's history, and his account of re-tracing its routes around the world from Tasmania to the Arctic. Part of this involved visiting Franklin sites in the Canadian territory of Nunavut aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov, a voyage on which I was lucky enough to accompany him.

It's been more than 170 years since he went missing, and Sir John Franklin remains a source of seemingly endless fascination -- but why? Is it just the mysterious nature of his disappearance? Or does he symbolize something deeper, something we feel we've lost in these modern times? Have a look at "The Man Who Ate His Boots," and leave your thoughts and comments here.

Exploration and Sacrifice

 

Skull of a member of Franklin's Arctic Expedition in 1845

The French writer Georges Bataille spent the last years of his life on his great but little-known work The Accursed Share.  In this book, Bataille argued that sacrifice or “expenditure” was the one absolute necessity of all human civilizations.  Whatever energy cannot be used in growth, Bataille argued, “must be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”  In his view, war, human sacrifice among the Maya, or the Northwest Coast potlatch – were all forms of sacrifice essential to their respective societies. This idea sounds strange to us today, who have come to believe that, whatever its occasional caprices, capitalism – which demands that all profit be plowed back into maintenance and growth – is the best way for a society, and indeed for the world, to thrive.  And yet, for most of our history, even the wealthiest and most successful civilizations have given sacrifice a sacred status.  We still do so today – for war only – but our awareness of this is muddied by our mixed feelings about the terrors of modern warfare, along with the belief, cultivated by some leaders today, that a modern and “professional” army can wage war successfully without undue sacrifice -- but of course, it can't.

Though we mark the soldier's sacrifice twice annually on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, we're unaccustomed to thinking about exploration as a form of sacrifice. And yet, in a profound sense, it is. We're reminded of that sacrifice at times such as the loss of the space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003), but even when space exploration is accomplished, as it is more often today, with unmanned missions such as the NASA's JUNO, there is a monetary sacrifice involved -- in JUNO's case, roughly 1.1 billion dollars, not counting the use of existing infrastructure (NASA's command post, various radiotelescopes, and the sixty or so employees involved in the project). If we define sacrifice as 'expenditure without hope of recompense,' then we have to consider NASA's budget (much shrunken over the past decades, but still running $20 billion a year), and indeed the entire US military budget, currently running near $700 billion. It may be a worthy expenditure, of course -- but money that is put into military hardware returns no funds on the investment. As President Eisenhower once put it, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

But are there not some things worth the sacrifice? Certainly there are, and when the direction of that sacrifice is a peaceful one, there's every reason to celebrate it. In our science-fictional universes, such as the Star Trek franchise, we imagine a world in which explorers will "boldly go where no one has gone before" -- but in our present-day world, manned exploration -- whether of outer space, the deep oceans, or the frozen zone -- is often hampered by the unwillingness of governments to take the risk. But this could, and perhaps should, change. After all, it's a tradition that, as President Reagan noted in his Challenger speech, stretches back to the days of explorers in their wooden ships:

On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and an historian later said, "He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it." Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete. The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

See additional links here.

Into the Wild

It's been a site of pilgrimage over the twenty-four years since Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild first told the story of Chris McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp -- the abandoned Fairbanks City bus, #142, in the middle of a in a clearing a couple hundred feet off the legendary Stampede Trail in Alaska, a track first blazed by a miner to his claim back in the 1930s. It even appeared on Google Earth, where it was marked "Stampede Trail Magic Bus," a name which invokes another, more mobile bus, a.k.a. "Furthur," aboard which Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy, and others of the Merry Pranksters embarked upon trips of another kind in the 1960's.

The Fairbanks bus had been towed (along with another now gone) to the site as temporary shelter for workers years before, and had been fitted with box-spring beds and a stove; when the work was done, the bus was -- like so many things in Alaska -- abandoned. Unfortunately, its popularity was also its downfall; Alaska state troopers in Fairbanks say that more than 75 percent of their yearly rescues have been in its vicinity, and in recent years several people have drowned attempting to cross the Teklanika River, which cuts across the route to the bus, including a woman who had just visited the bus with her newly wed husband. Finally, on June 18th 2020, the bus was airlifted off the the site by an Alaska National Guard helicopter to an undisclosed location; rumor is that it may eventually be on display at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks.

When McCandless's body was found there by moose hunters in September of 1992, his family had not known his whereabouts or even heard from him, for more than two years. A young man full of promise, an A-student with a degree from a top college, no student loans, and a $25,000 start up savings from his parents, he seemed like a young man who had it made. And yet, before he departed on his curious quest, he'd given all that money to charity, burned the cash in his wallet and (soon after) abandoned his car. Changing his name to Alexander Supertramp, he traveled by hitch-hiking, crashing on couches, and working -- apparently hard and well -- at a series of farm jobs. He made friends everywhere he went, and yet at the end, he didn't want anyone to go with him. Krakauer, a journalist for Outside Magazine, was hired to do a story, which he did (it appeared in 1993), but he was still unsatisfied. Tracking down more of McCandless's friends -- some of whom contacted him after seeing the article in the magazine, helped fill out the picture, while Alex's few leavings -- postcards to friends, notes scribbled in the margins of books, and such -- offered the bare outlines of a journey.

Into the Wild, the resulting book, was a huge bestseller, and in 2007 was adapted as a film by Sean Penn.  And yet, despite the book's immense popularity, readers have remained divided: for some, McCandless is a true hero, a voyager of the spirit whose restless trek symbolizes everything great about the human desire to explore the world -- while for others, including quite a few Alaskans, he's just one of the apparently endless stream of inexperienced, foolish, and just plain stupid people who head out into the wilderness without the knowledge, skills, or materials essential to surviving. The debate is not an entirely new one; as Krakauer observes, a similar argument has long raged over Arctic expeditions such as that of Sir John Franklin, which -- though sanctioned by the British Empire and provided with what was though the best equipment -- canned food, two enormous ships, flour, buscuit, and rum -- proved unable to survive in the harsh Arctic climate, even though, a few miles from the stranded ice-bound vessels, Inuit families were enjoying a rich meal of seal meat and muktuk, and bouncing healthy babies on their knees in their snug igloos.

So, as we begin our journey with Chris/Alex, what do we think? Try not to be polarized by the debate which pits McCandless as hero vs. idiot -- but give a read to this thoughtful essay by my friend, the Alaskan Journalist David James. Would you, if you could have, gone to visit the bus? What was it that drew so many to the place? And what now, that the bus is taken away -- what should be done with it? Don't hesitate to speak your mind -- Chris certainly didn't.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a documentary about Chris that includes interviews with his family members; you can also watch an older documentary from 2007 that retraces Chris's route.

Arthur Gordon Pym

We all know Edgar Allen Poe for his brilliant, terrifying, and macabre tales, but his one novel-length work, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, is far less familiar. And yet, I would claim it as quite possibly his finest work, a tale whose conceit -- that Poe is merely shaping and refining a narrative given to him by Mr. Pym -- and whose deft evocation of the genre of travel and exploration narratives, were so effective that the London office of Wiley and Putnam was prepared to publish it as "an American contribution to geographical science" -- until they learned that Pym was, in fact, a fiction.

The effect was very carefully obtained. Poe had devoured any number of nautical narratives, and always had some navigational manuals, along with the Encyclopedia Brittanica, close at hand. The giving of facetious specifics, such as the name of the ship "Grampus," and the illustrated plates of the strange hieroglyphics, all added to the sense of realism. Most significantly, Poe drew from the hollow-earth theory of John Cleves Symmes, along with the exhortations of Jeremiah Reynolds, both of whom argued that an expedition should be dispatched to investigate the "hole" in the earth at its Southern pole. 

In Britain, the seeming marks of authenticity caused some to mistake it for an actual travel narrative; among those duped was the publisher George P. Putnam, who planned a join publication with his friend David Appleton, declaring that "this man has reached a higher latitude than any European navigator. Let us reprint this for the benefit of Mr. Bull." Putnam later ruefully noted that "the grave particularity of the title and of the narrative misled many of the critics as well as ourselves, and whole columns of these new ‘discoveries,’ including the hieroglyphics found on the rocks, were copied by many of the English country papers as sober historical truth”

Nor everyone, of course, was taken in by the initial ruse; the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine castigated the book, declaring that:

A more impudent attempt at humbugging the public has never been exercised; the voyages of Gulliver were politically satirical, and the adventures of Munchausen, the acknowledged caricature of a celebrated traveller. Sinbad the Sailor, Peter Wilkins, and More's Utopia, are confessedly works of the imagination; but Arthur Gordon Pym puts forth a series of travels outraging possibility, coolly requires his insulted readers to believe his ipse dixit.

Together with this novel, we'll be seeing Peter Delpeut's film Forbidden Quest, which assembles an enormous amount of "found footage" of polar expeditions to lend reality to an equally facetious tale, this time lent an "air" of reality by an elderly Irish ship's carpenter. Like Poe, Delpeut draws from the "hollow earth" theory, using it to explain the presence of Eskimos at the South Pole, as well as his narrator's otherwise miraculous return to civilization.

In the end, both narratives are best enjoyed when the ruse is realized -- for it's only then that we can, unlike other creatures, take pleasure from traveling along the edge of our own deception. But what did you think? Did this feel to you like a real narrative? Or at some point, was the spell, perhaps abruptly, broken? Or perhaps the real magic lies in-between our ideas about fact and fiction ...

Poe's Holes in the Earth

Poe was not much of a seafaring man -- indeed, he made only two journeys by sea, and that was to (and back from) the boarding school his stepfather sent him to in England. And yet, by steeping himself in the lore of the sea, and filling up his head with nautical terminology, he managed to provide all the necessary atmosphere for many stirring sea-tales. First -- and some may say, foremost -- among these was his "A Descent into the Maelstrom." Poe drew here from a number of maritime legends, among them the original malstrøm, an infamous whirlpool off the coast of Norway -- but also on the idea of "Symmes's Hole" -- a crackpot theory of the time originated by John Cleves Symmes. Symmes believed that the earth was hollow, with inhabitants within (which he humbly named Symzonia!), and could be reached via eiher of two holes near the poles of the earth. It sounds quite as crazy as it was, but since neither pole had been reached or explored, it held sway among some serious minds -- indeed, the very first voyage of exploration launched by the U.S. Government -- the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 -- was initially sent to find one (their remit was later changed to more broadly explore the southern ocean). Poe had a direct connection with this scheme, as his friend Jeremiah Reynolds was one of the strongest advocates for the undertaking. Indeed, legend has it that Poe's very last word -- uttered at the end of a night of delirium -- was "Reynolds!"

Poe was not finished with the theme -- he drew from it again in his "MS Found in a Bottle," and, as we will soon see, a more extended version of the idea of a chasm in the southern ocean was the centerpiece -- or perhaps, one should say, the endpiece -- of Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. And, remarkably enough, the idea of a hollow earth with a hole at either end lives on, even though these regions have since been explored thoroughly. There is evidently something captivating about it.

Welcome!

In this senior seminar we’ll explore the literature of exploration itself, from the nineteenth century to the present. What has driven human beings to explore? What’s the relationship between exploration and risk? Where do we draw the line between exploration and exploitation? These and other questions will guide us through our readings – historical, poetical, historical-poetical, tragical-historical, poetical-comical, and many other literary avatars of the urge to look around our corners, to be “the first that ever burst / into that silent sea.” Students will each choose a specific moment or mode of exploration, follow and represent it throughout our discussions, and weave it in to a final seminar paper. Our books will include McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place; Krakauer, Into the Wild; Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores;  Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night ; Kpomassie, An African in Greenland; Fortier, On The Proper Use of Stars; Campbell, The Library of Ice; and Sagan, Pale Blue Dot.