Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century by Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund (review)

Reviewed by: Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century by Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund Hester Blum (bio) Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century, by Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund; pp. x + 230. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, $40.00, $38.00 ebook. Explorations in the Icy North: How Travel Narratives Shaped Arctic Science in the Nineteenth Century is interested in how the scientific outcomes of Arctic exploration were variably communicated within the narrative accounts of the voyages of British, Danish, and American expeditions in the nineteenth century. In Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund's telling, the accuracy and authority of the scientific information transmitted by these expeditionary narratives hinged on the credibility of their authors. Kaalund analyzes how polar expeditionary accounts presented their scientific findings, whether incidental or commissioned, and describes the criteria with which readers gauged the authority of such accounts; expeditionary integrity, Kaalund nicely argues, was contingent in part on the tables, charts, illustrations, and appendices often included in published voyage narratives. The trustworthiness of white explorers was also shaped by their class standing and to some extent by the degree to which they did (or more usually, did not) heed Inuit Indigenous knowledge. [End Page 531] In her engagement with Inuit knowledge and with the texts and histories of Danish settlement in Greenland (in addition to the more familiar British, Norwegian, and American expeditions to the Canadian Arctic), Kaalund brings a welcome new perspective to a topic that is usually approached through monolingual sources. One notable aspect of the book is that its own narrative arc takes readers from early nineteenth-century British Northwest Passage attempts—a common starting point for expeditionary histories—to the First International Polar Year (IPY, 1882–83), not generally the telos of such scholarship. The IPY was a year-long period of intensive collaborative international Arctic research (subsequent IPYs included Antarctica), and Kaalund argues that the twelve-nation initiative marked a shift in attitudes toward polar exploration: from nationalist and imperial projects to more globalized scientific attention to the North. "Nineteenth-century Arctic science was inherently transnational in nature," Kaalund writes astutely; "explorers from different nations read and commented upon each other's narratives, and expeditions often included participants from other countries, including Indigenous peoples encountered or employed when there" (131). In the seventy or so years of Arctic exploration included in this book's timeline, scores of expeditions by Europeans and Americans voyaged north, although scientific research was not necessarily the primary driver of such ventures. Kaalund's interest in the IPY delimits a potentially compelling, more compressed time frame for study of nineteenth-century Arctic voyaging, which usually extends to the early twentieth-century attempts to reach the North Pole by Americans Matthew Henson and Robert Peary, or Norwegian Roald Amundsen's completion of the Northwest Passage. Yet this book's promise of focused inquiry into how narrative writing practices shaped nineteenth-century Arctic science—an ambitious promise, to be sure—winds up more unresolved than fulfilled. Kaalund's claims are striking, such as when she writes that the textual and visual representations of scientific practices in the Arctic were "negotiated as their own genre" (62). The volume misses an opportunity, however, to provide a particularly informed account of how such a genre operated and how it could be differentiated from other forms of expeditionary or travel writing. In fact, Kaalund states at the book's outset that her definitions of terms such as "explorer," "narrative of exploration," and "travel literature" are broad and overlapping if not interchangeable (6). This is unfortunate. The figures of the explorer and the traveler did not signify the same thing historically, even if both figures were often animated by colonialist energies, and there are important differences between the genres of travel literature, expeditionary writing, or personal narratives. Precision with such terms would benefit a study that is interested in the various forms of authority that can be conveyed by a text. This attention would also help to illuminate the reception differences between the narrative of the widely traveled Greenlandic Inuk Suersaq (writing under the name...

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