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brutal polar seas—plus natural skeptics like Mary Shelley—stood outside the Arctic climate
change consensus of the late 1810s.
Barrow spends little time in his remarkable essay exploring what has caused the “revolu-
tion” in the Earth's climate since 1815. He borrows Benjamin Franklin's theory of electric-
al atmosphere to suggest the aurora borealis may be responsible for melting the ice, but he
soon throws up his hands. It is “enough,” he concludes, “to consider it as the result of one of
those prospective contrivances, which are appointed to correct the anomalies, and adjust the
tions. For example, Barrow offers no evidence for his assumption that the prior four centuries
of cooler temperatures—the Little Ice Age—constituted a climatic anomaly, nor for asserting
that the current trend toward diminished sea ice, based on a slim few years' sample, might
represent a permanent benign change. In place of reason, as Mary Shelley well saw, Barrow
offered only gauzy romance—a grand illusion papered over with shreds of truth.
BERNARD O'REILLY: THE FORGOTTEN MAN
The accounts of Scoresby and Kotzebue of open Arctic waters in 1816-17, gift-wrapped by
John Barrow as a glorious prize to be claimed for the nation, was sufficient to launch a flurry
of polar discovery teams in the years that followed. Naval officers John Ross, David Buchan,
William Edward Parry, and John Franklin had all embarked upon highly publicized expedi-
tions by the decade's end. Their extreme experiences en route and fluctuating reputations on
their return set the terms of heroism, ignominy, suffering, and inconclusive defeat that were
to drive the British Arctic narrative for the next half century. But in all the hoo-ha, one vital
account of the highly unusual state of the Arctic in the aftermath of Tambora has been almost
entirely forgotten (thanks to John Barrow). This polar journal, from the summer of 1817, is
especially important since it provides eyewitness testimony of open waters in the aftermath
of Tambora's eruption to the
west
of Greenland, in Baffin Bay, whence the iconic expeditions
of Ross, Parry, and Franklin would later begin their quests for the northwest passage.
It is too often a crutch for historians to describe a little-documented figure from the past as
“obscure.” Obscure to whom? But there can be few other words to describe Bernard O'Reilly,
a young Irish naturalist of unknown lineage who bobs up into public view in the 1810s.
Traces of O'Reilly's stillborn scientific career may be found in the archives of the Dublin Royal
Society. But his major bid for fame takes the form of a topic, a single volume published in
London in 1818, boldly titled
Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the North-West Passage to the
Pacific Ocean
. From the opening page, O'Reilly announces his ambition for the topic to redress
the scandalous “want of scientific information on the northern climates.”
15
As we have seen with William Scoresby's 1817 summer voyage—plying the waters east of
Greenland on a fruitless search for whales spooked by lack of ice—Bernard O'Reilly, hitching
a ride on a British whaler, had chosen a strange, historic year to explore the Arctic. He found
the western waters off Greenland—Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and Lancaster Sound—equally
void of ice. The polar ice cap was clearly visible to the north beyond 78°, but in the direction
of the putative passage to the Pacific, with “all the broken field ice having drifted down to the
southward … the sea remain[ed] as clear as the Atlantic, blue, and agitated by a considerable
swell from the north-west!”
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