THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 82

Figure 6.7. The grisly discovery of skeletal remains of Franklin's crew on King William Island, by the
McClintock search expedition in 1859, is illustrated here in a German volume from 1861. Accounts of
the British polar voyages were translated and published all across Europe, including Norway, where they
inspired the young Roald Amundsen. (Hermann Wagner, Die Franklin-Expedition und ihr Ausgang [Leipzig,
1861],218; Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)
With Franklin's death, the objectives of polar exploration underwent a sea change, from a
scientific inquiry into the northwest passage and its commercial prospects for the British em-
pire to a morbid quest for Franklin's salvation, or his remains. On one of Parry's unsuccessful
return trips to the Arctic in the 1820s, he had difficulty explaining to the Inuit inhabitants he
met of the purpose of his voyage. The tribespeople decided among themselves that he could
only be in search of his ancestors' bones. Nothing else made sense. 29 Franklin wasn't yet dead,
but their judgment proved unerringly prophetic. When Robert McClure, during one mission
for Franklin's recovery, actually mapped the course of the northwest passage, putting an end
to the centuries of speculation and desire, his achievement received muted treatment in the
press. It is a statue of Franklin, not McClure, that stands in central London, with its famous
inscription by Tennyson:
Not here! The white north hath thy bones, and thou,
Heroic sailor soul,
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Towards no earthly pole.
Only according to the gothic metrics of Victorian Arctic romance could Franklin, who only
ever failed, outdo the brilliant and resourceful Parry by virtue solely of his body count, a vic-
tory certified by his own martyrdom. Barrow's optimistic 1818 proclamation of a new golden
age of global warming, and an open polar sea, had long been forgotten. The polar seas had
opened briefly in the Tambora period—just enough for Parry's 1819 expedition to raise the
nation's hopes for completion of the fabled northwest passage to the Pacific. But post-1819,
with North Atlantic ocean circulation returned to normal, the polar ice abruptly closed over
once more, like a grave.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein stands for so much in Western culture—hubris, horror, and
schlock—that it's easy to forget the novel also contains the first significant statement of polar
skepticism in the nineteenth century. Like most educated Europeans of her day, Shelley was
addicted to travel literature. She had been reading anthologies of old voyages for pleasure
and was preparing her own Alpine travel journal for publication when she came across Bar-