Geoscience Reference
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Figure 6.1. Portrait of Sir John Barrow from about 1810, early in his forty-year tenure as a highly influ-
ential Second Secretary to the Admiralty. (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Barrow, the most powerful bureaucrat at the Admiralty in the post-Napoleonic period,
used the pages of the widely read Quarterly Review to advance his policy agenda for Britain's
navy. Mary Shelley was staying at the Hampstead cottage of her friend the radical journalist
Leigh Hunt when, among tea tables cluttered with the latest topics and newspapers, she took
up the February 1817 issue of the Quarterly Review to read a breathless review of the latest in-
stallment of Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , which featured scenes from their recent
Genevan summer. Sitting right next to the review of Byron was matter of even more relevance
to the summer of 1816 and to her writing of Frankenstein : a review by John Barrow chronic-
ling the heroic history of Britain's quest for a northwest passage to Asia across the polar seas.
In the Quarterly article, Barrow floated his latest trial balloon from the backrooms of the
Admiralty: that a select band of naval officers, legions of whom had languished in port since
the defeat of Napoleon, should now be put to sea to renew the glorious search for a navigable
passage to China across the uncharted top of the world. Despite centuries of failure in this
quest, Barrow assured his readers that such an expedition would now be “of no difficult exe-
cution.” Sailing westward across the north of Canada to the Pacific could amount to no more
than “the business of three months out and home.” 4
Then came the jaw-dropping coincidence with which this history truly begins. Only
months after Mary Shelley read Barrow's article in February 1817 calling for renewed explor-
ation of a northwest passage, reports began reaching the Admiralty of a remarkable diminu-
tion of Arctic sea ice. The authority of these reports rested with the veteran whaler William
Scoresby, who in 1815 had published the first scientific treatise on polar ice. The 1817 sum-
mer whaling season of the east coast of Greenland had been a ruinous disappointment. A
frustrated Scoresby identified the cause in his journal: No ice!—
The fishery of the present season has been the most singular, partial, unsuccessful of any
occasion witnessed of many years…. The ostensible reason of the scarcity of whales & their
pecular [ sic ] habits, is the singular state of the ice which lies at a distance from the land
greater than was ever known by any fisherman now prosecuting the business…. So thin is
the ice dispersed through the country, that it is creditably asserted that a brig from the Elbe
has penetrated without hindrance to the West land [the east coast of Greenland] and coasted
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