Arctic Exploration in Canadian Print Culture, 1890-1930

In the spring of 1933, Canadian poet E.J. Pratt conceived the idea of writing a verse epic on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, a story that had "long haunted his imagination."Pratt's sources of information about Franklin, and about the Arctic in general, were almost purely literary, and rather strangely assorted.One that had a particularly strong impact was James Macdonald Oxley's Hentyesque novel North Overlalznd with F[ranklin (190I), which Pratt had read in his youth.Another was a November I930 article by Jean Mitchell Smith in the Canadian Magazine, called "The Riddle of the Snows."Pratt's interest in Franklin endured throughout his life.One of the last books read to him while he lay dying in 1964 was Richard Lambert's 1949 biography Franklinz of the Arctic.'However, the epic poem was never written.The project was revived in 1944, as the last expedition's centenary approached, and again in I949 (presumably because Pratt was inspired by reading Lambert's book soon after its publication).But there was an insuperable obstacle in the way of this poet who wanted to write on what his friend Northrop Frye described as "a great Canadian theme"3: he had no direct personal experience of the Arctic, and despite strenuous efforts, it proved impossible for him to obtain any.Pratt felt that he could not do justice to his suibject without having visited the scenes where the Franklin tragedy took place, and travel to the Arctic was both expensive and difficult to arrange.In 1933 Pratt tried to book a passage on the Hudson's Bay Company supply ship Nascopie; in 1944 he hoped to journey north by government airplane; and in 1949 he applied for a travel grant from the Humanities Research SJanice Cavell works in the Historical Section, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, where she edits the series Documents on Canadian External Relaztionzs and does research on Arctic sovereignty issues.2 See David G. Pitt, E].] Pratt: The Master Years, 1927-1964 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987), 114-1 .3Northrop Frye, "Conclusion to A Literary History of Canadda," pt in his The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 197I), zz8.Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 44/2 flourished, along with more scholarly journals such as the Review of Historical Publications Rela~ting to Canada.Publishers, benefiting from improved copyright legislation, began to print more Canadian works, and to issue Canadian editions of new books by foreign authors, while also initiating ambitious projects like the Makers of Canada and Chronicles of Canada series.Arctic literature had formerly been the preserve of British and American publishers, but now re-tellings of Arctic history and discussions of the place of the far north in Canada's future development could be found in many Canadian publications.Despite all this, however, connections to British and American print culture remained numerous and complex.Canadian readers had, of course, long shown an interest in the saga of northern discovery, but in this they were far from unique.Such interest was strong throughout the English-speaking world, and indeed beyond it: in Poland during the I860s, schoolboy Josef Korzeniowski, later famous as Joseph Conrad, was enthralled by Leopold McClintock's The Voyage ofthe "Fo~x" in the Arctic Seas.He later remembered it as one of the books that had the most influence on his imagination.gTwo decades later a young Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, found his calling when he encountered Franklin's narratives of his I8I9-zz and I825-27 expeditions."I read them with a fervid fascination which has shaped the whole course of my life,"'o Amundsen wrote in his autobiography.In no country other than Britain itself was interest stronger than in the United States.It was, in fact, largely from American publications that most Canadian readers gained their information about the far north in the years before I900.Americans were always eager for news of the British expeditions; during the 1850s, they sponsored their own searches for Franklin, and enthusiastically hailed the exploits of Elisha Kent Kane, the first American Arctic hero.American expeditions led by Charles F. Hall in

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