Lost ships: Performance and the disappearance of the Franklin expedition

This thesis is an investigation of performances that emerged in response to the disappearance of the Franklin expedition, which went missing in the Canadian Arctic in 1845. I am concerned with two questions arising from the relationship between performance, loss, and remains: How do performances emerge as the remains of what has been loss? How can past performances be known through their remains when critical aspects of performance are lost as time passes? Franklin's 1845 expedition is unique in the annals of polar history because it ended in almost total disappearance: no journals or ship's logs from the expedition were ever retrieved, and the lone legible paper that was found provides little indication of what disaster befell the expedition. Most histories of the Franklin expedition use material and narrative fragments in order to reconstruct what happened to the men; however, reconstructions often fail to address the experiences of the men who abandoned the ships or the way that those left behind at home understood the expedition's absence. This project examines how those impacted by the expedition's disappearance expressed their experiences of loss through performance. By considering four sites of performance, one can trace how performance first facilitated the search for the missing men and then allowed the loss of the expedition to be melancholically engaged with and mourned. Performance initially held open the hope that the search could succeed, first in the shipboard pantomime, 'Zero, or Harlequin Light,' which imaginatively transformed the Arctic into a familiar domestic space and then in the work of American explorer Charles Francis Hall who "acted Inuit" in order to demonstrate that survivors might still live. The second pair of examples consider how performances responded to the impossibility of knowing what actually happened to the expedition, first by examining how the experiences of the expedition's final survivors were preserved in the gestural performances of Inuit who came into contact with them, then by considering how the melodrama 'The Frozen Deep' overwrote the incomprehensible disappearance of the expedition by producing a coherent narrative, allowing the British public to mourn the loss of Franklin and his men.

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