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In one tantalizing passage from O'Reilly's account, he records the experience of a veteran
captain that summer who, having ventured farther northwest than any whaler before him,
observed in amazement from the masthead an unprecedented invitation to “proceed as far
north as he pleased” across Melville Bay, on a “heavy open sea” with “no obstruction.” 16 His-
tory turns on small moments, with no band playing. Just then, the captain remembered his
sacred whaler's oath to pursue no object but whales and so turned his ship about.
Even so, O'Reilly was able to confirm Scoresby's account: that “owing to some convulsions
of nature, the sea was more open and more free from compact ice than in any former voyage
they ever made … that, for the first time for 400 years, vessels penetrated to the west coast
of Greenland, and that they apprehended no obstacle to their even reaching the pole.” 17 Bern-
ard O'Reilly's topic should have made him famous. But the new ield of Arctic literature had
quickly gotten crowded, and he found himself elbowed sharply from the scene by the power-
ful igure of John Barrow, who himself published a topic on the Arctic in 1818.
Barrow's achievements as an Admiralty bureaucrat over the previous twelve months had
been impressive to say the least. In that time, he had turned a topic review and a few whalers'
reports into two fully manned expeditions to the Arctic Ocean and a spectacular publicity
coup for the Royal Navy. Swapping on his naturalist's hat, he had also publicly announced a
new benign era of global warming. As the Arctic expeditions, under the command of Captains
Ross and Buchan, made their preparations in Portsmouth at the beginning of 1818, Barrow
had only loose ends to tie up.
Bernard O'Reilly was one such loose end. In a Quarterly Review article of April 1818, Bar-
row eviscerates O'Reilly's Greenland as among “the most barefaced attempts at imposition
which has occurred to us in the whole course of our literary labours,” a topic full of “non-
sense,” “falsehood,” and “glaring folly,” and motivated throughout by a “mischievous tend-
ency.” 18 At first blush, Barrow's vituperation of O'Reilly seems perplexing. After all, had not
O'Reilly done great service to the naval cause in publishing his eyewitness account of an open
polar sea in precisely that region to which Captain Ross was now preparing to sail in search
of a northwest passage?
Fatefully for him, however, O'Reilly openly rejected the notion of a northwest passage
to be found anywhere but along the Canadian north coast (where no expedition had been
sent) and flatly rejected Barrow's theory of polar warming and an open Arctic sea. Worse still,
O'Reilly dared to mock Barrow himself for believing in such chimeras. He called the new Ad-
miralty expeditions a “utopian paper-built plan,” destined to “futility”:
Sailing to the north pole has been long a very favourite subject for closet lucubration; and
as long as a man, in such circumstances, chooses to amuse himself harmlessly, or entertain
his friends with his effusions through the medium of a magazine, such pursuits are altogeth-
er allowable; but where such visionary schemes are in contemplation as would mislead the
public mind, in the same manner as the writer misleads himself, not pausing over facts, and
maturely weighing their consequences, the prudent will be careful how they admit his opin-
ions, however plausibly dressed up. 19
O'Reilly (like Mary Shelley, as we shall see) reveals himself a polar skeptic, a Barrow critic,
and hence an enemy of the Royal Navy. And because the impudent Irishman brought to his
skepticism the authority of eyewitness, Barrow—who had never been to the Arctic—calls
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