THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 84

It was to be many decades before Mary Shelley's Arctic warnings were heeded—decades
of frostbite, starvation, lost ships, and lost men. At an early point, public fascination with the
polar quest became untethered from any worldly measure of success. Instead, the enterprise
took on the characteristics of a neo-Arthurian cult, to which Britain's finest knights would
naturally be sacrificed in search of the elusive grail. Barrow's mythology of the northwest
passage took hold of the public imagination in ways beyond his wildest dreams. Thousands of
newspaper column inches chronicled the British polar expeditions between 1818 and 1860,
not to mention a veritable blizzard of stories, plays, panoramas, songs, political speeches,
paintings, prints, and photographs. The Arctic explorers themselves—Parry, Ross, Franklin,
andtheirsufering bands ofbrothers—enjoyed massive celebrity: thenarratives oftheirbleak,
often nightmarish journeys were devoured by millions worldwide. The bitter, gothic romance
of polar exploration, first to the Arctic then to Antarctica, evolved into a defining cultural
symbol of the Victorian period in Britain.
Given the dozens of history topics devoted to the signiicance of British polar exploration,
how poignant then to learn that none of it might have occurred at all—or, at least, that the
polar history of the nineteenth century would have taken a vastly different course—were it
not for the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815, which wrought temporary but radical
environmental changes on the Arctic Circle. Tambora's volcanic dust might have vanished
from the atmosphere a few years after 1815, but the Edenic prospect it opened—of an un-
frozen north of “perpetual splendour”—persisted a full century in restless British fancies. Only
the definitive failure of Robert Scott in the Antarctic in 1912—coupled with the triumphant
expeditions of Roald Amundsen who claimed the Northwest Passage and both poles for Nor-
way—at last drove a stake through the dead heart of John Barrow and his fever dreams of
British polar dominion. The subsequent trauma of World War I—which put an end to Victori-
an fantasies of many kinds—ensured that this time there would be no full-fledged revival, no
new Franklin (or Frankenstein) to sacrifice himself gloriously on the ice.