The Heroic Age of the Tin Can: Technology and Ideology in British Arctic Exploration, 1818–1835

On 11 August 1831, the men of the Victory , under Captain John Ross, were hard at work in a desolate bay in Arctic Canada. Rather strangely, given the location, they were busy stocking up on provisions, helping themselves to a vast array of supplies left behind when an earlier naval expedition had had to abandon one of its ships, the Fury . Suddenly, and briefly, one of the most hostile environments in the world became a place of spectacular bounty. The incongruity between the supplies and the setting was not lost on Ross, who later wrote: I need not say that it was an occurrence not less novel than interesting, to find in the abandoned region of solitude and ice, and rocks, a ready market where we could supply all our wants, and collected in one spot, all the materials for which we should have searched the warehouses of Wapping and Rotherhithe. Ross’s tone here is interesting. Even as he acknowledges the surprising transformation that has taken place in the Arctic, that relaxed, circumlocutory understatement (‘I need not say’: ‘not less novel than interesting’) makes it seem as if it is entirely in the order of things that British explorers should effect such transformations. British efficiency has quite naturally turned a mishap – the loss of the Fury – to advantage; at the same time it has turned a waste zone, an ‘abandoned region of solitude and ice and rock’, into a veritable trading emporium akin to ‘the warehouses of Wapping and Rotherhithe’. Slightly ahead of its time – Ross’s narrative of the expedition was published in 1835 – Ross’s prose ripples with a self-belief that today seems stereotypically ‘Victorian’. Surveying the stores of the Fury , one item especially holds Ross’s attention. With surprise and satisfaction, he comments that: Where the preserved meats and vegetables had been deposited, we found everything entire. The canisters had all been piled up in two heaps; but though quite exposed to all the chances of the climate, for four years, they had not suffered in the slightest degree. There had been no water to rust them, and the security of the joinings had prevented the bears from smelling their contents. Had they known what was within, not much of this provision would have come to our share, and they would have had more reason than we to be thankful for Mr Donkin’s patent.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.