THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 80

phase. A baffling and tragic irony, then, that these same cold decades witnessed the most con-
certed British assault on the Arctic.
So confident was Barrow in the first polar missions of 1818 that he directed Captains Ross
and Buchan to rendezvous in the Pacific after completing their pleasure cruise across the Arc-
tic Circle. But Buchan's mission to the east of Greenland quickly came to grief on the massive
ice pack north of Spitsbergen. Not equipped with sleds for an overland bid at the pole (as
William Scoresby had advised), Buchan had no alternative but to turn back with nothing to
show for his efforts. In this case, the arch spinmeister Barrow chose silence as the best pub-
lic relations policy. A written account of the failed Buchan expedition didn't appear until the
1840s.
Barrow reserved a more aggressive reception for John Ross, who returned early from his
expedition to Baffin Bay to declare that he had encountered a range of mountains to the west
of Lancaster Sound, terminating any northwest route across the Arctic. Barrow was crushed.
But when rumors reached him that other officers in the expedition—notably Edward Parry,
who commanded Ross's companion ship—by no means concurred with their leader's view,
and that the “mountains” were likely the figment of a frostbitten captain's imagination, he
launched into print with a withering assault on Ross's competence and courage.
The clouds of 1818 contained a silver lining for Secretary Barrow. The embarrassing Ross
expedition had turned up a likely hero in the form of Lieutenant Parry, whom Barrow im-
mediately entrusted with a follow-up expedition for the summer of 1819. Sir Joseph Banks
himself entertained the dashing young officer in his study, pulling out a newly drawn map
that showed the vast Greenland seas empty of ice (Scoresby's reports had quickly become of-
ficial geography). Positive results were immediate. Parry's ships sailed blithely through Ross's
mountain range named, ever so briefly, “Croker's Mountains,” after Barrow's immediate su-
perior at the Admiralty (the same baleful Croker who published a scathing review of Franken-
stein in the Quarterly Review later that year). Passing through Lancaster Sound, Parry en-
countered encouragingly open waters, and his two ships reached as far as Melville Island at
110°W by summer's end, the farthest point west ever reached.
With a generous Admiralty reward already earned for their extravagant longitude and
dreams of completing the northwest passage the following year, Parry made the critical de-
cision to spend the sunless winter months on the Arctic ice. A superb officer and “man-man-
ager,” Parry kept spirits high through the long months of darkness with a lively schedule of
games and theatricals. He even founded a polar newspaper, with dubiously witty contribu-
tions from the officers copied out in journal format, one for each ship. Parry never made it
any farther toward his Pacific destination, but the homosocial romance of his winter quar-
ters—his happy, orderly Little-Britain-on-Ice—delighted the public and made him an instant
celebrity. Parry of the Arctic embodied a new leadership ideal for postwar Britain: virile, lib-
eral, and humane—just the sort of “new man” Jane Austen's heroines fall for in her novels
published that same decade.
Most important, Parry's success had secured a generous stock of credit for Barrow's long-
term polar enterprise—a deep public goodwill that, despite repeated disappointments, would
not be fully exhausted until after Barrow himself had died of old age. Long before then,
however, both Barrow's influence on the narrative of Arctic exploration—and that of his hero-
designate Parry—had been eclipsed by the iconic figure of John Franklin, “The Man Who Ate
His Boots.”