THE SENSATIONAL LANDSCAPE:
THE HISTORY OF SENSATIONALIST IMAGES OF THE ARCTIC, 1818-1910.
by
Laura Stevenson-Waldie
B.A., The University ofVictoria, 1993

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
m

HISTORY

©Laura Stevenson-Waldie, 2001
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
March2001
All rights reserved. This work may not be
reproduced in whole or in part. by photocopy or
other means, without permission of the author.

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Preface

This thesis is a study of the public perception of the Arctic through explorers'
journals and the modern press in America and Britain. The underlying question of this
thesis is what exactly was the role of the press in forming public opinions about Arctic
exploration in general? Did newspaper editors in America and Britain simply report what
they found interesting based upon their own knowledge of Arctic explorers' journals, or
did these editors create that public interest in order to profit from increased sales? From a
historical perspective, these reasons relate to the growth of an intellectual and social
current that had been gaining strength in the Western world throughout the nineteenth
century: the creation of the mythic hero. In essence, the mythical status of Arctic explorers
developed in Britain, but was matured and honed in the American press, particularly in the
competitive news industry in New York. Here, the creation of the heroic Arctic explorer
resulted largely from the vicious competitiveness of the contemporary press.
Although the content of published Arctic exploration journals m the early
nineteenth century did not change dramatically, the accuracy of those journals did.
Exploration journals up until 1850 tended to focus heavily on the conventions of the
sublime and picturesque to describe these new lands. However, these views were
inaccurate, for these conventions forced the explorer to view the Arctic very much as they
viewed the Swiss Alps or the English countryside. These images demonstrated very little
factual accuracy. In fact, British exploration journals of the Arctic in the early half of the
nineteenth century were enhanced by the skills of hired ghost writers and book editors,
such as John Murray, who wanted to sell as many copies of the journal as possible. To do
this, the journal had to made as exciting as possible to sell many copies.
11

The creation of the modem press and the replacement of the sublime and
picturesque with sensationalism helped to change these older conventions. With
sensationalism, the new image of the Arctic was still at a variance from what we now think
of as reality. One reason was for this was the desire the explorers and of American and
British newspaper editors, such as James Gordon Bennett in New York, to make the
Arctic as exciting as possible. Another reason was that these explorers went to the Arctic
with preconceived notions of what the region was like, thanks to the early expedition
journals which highlighted the sublime and picturesque qualities of the region. The
explorers had become sensitive to the information that confirmed their preconceptions and
often ignored contradictory evidence. These errors of perception continued right into the
1860s by journalists and newspaper editors who had little experience with the areas they
wrote o£
Tragically, during the nineteenth century it was not the accuracy of the reporting
of these explorers such as Sir John Franklin, John Rae, Robert Peary, and Frederick Cook
that was of the utmost importance to the press or public, nor was it their scientific
achievements, nor even their attainments. What counted was the tragedy, failure, hardship
and controversy. If Franklin had lived to tell about his 1845 expedition, if Dr. John Rae
had never discovered bodies on King William Island, or if Cook and Peary had agreed that
they could share the attainment of the North Pole, there would be much less interest in
them today. By being shrouded in mystery in the press and writing about the tragedy of
death, suffering and cannibalism, these explorers were elevated to mythic status in the
press, a status which is difficult to shake even a century later. If an embellished story sold
thousands of copies, the editors had no problem with deepening that embellishment.
ill

To the vast majority of newspapers in New York and

o

o~ this kind of ennoblement of

Arctic explorers-- and its subsequent sensationalised stories--was far more important than
any scientific knowledge that would come from the expedition or the conquest of the
Arctic.

lV

Acknowledgement
For Jack, Jean, and Maureen.

v

Table of Contents

Preface

ll

Acknowledgement

v

Notes on Sources

Vll

Introduction

1

Chapter One: Images of Our Country's Reasoning

9

Chapter Two: Master Manipulators

23

Chapter Three: The Search For Franklin and the Modem Press

37

Chapter Four: The Fate ofFranklin

50

Chapter Five: James Gordon Bennett Jr: Redefining the Arctic

63

Chapter Six: Newspaper War at the North Pole

74

Conclusion

84

Bibliography

88

VI

Notes on Sources

In general, nineteenth century American and British newspapers gave very little press time
to the exploration of Asia, Australia, the US and Canada, and certain regions of South
America, but focused more on the two extremes--the cold polar regions and the steamy
jungles of Africa and Brazil. Perhaps this is because all those regions, with the exception
of the polar regions and the African continent, had pretty much been thoroughly explored
and, for the most part, settled.
The time frame ofthis thesis is from 1835 to 1910, which is considered the height
of Arctic exploration. The first date corresponds with the beginning of the modem press in
America and how it played a role in the shaping of the Arctic in the imagination of the
readers. It was also the period when explorers' journals were at their most popular with
the reading public and they were critiqued in the local newspapers of the time The latter
refers to the period where the last conquerable obstacle in the Arctic was attained--the
North Pole. It is also the time where the press began to intervene and, at times, force itself
upon the creation of the Arctic explorer myth.
Though this thesis talks about images, not all forms of imagery have been given
equal weight. It is, rather, a study of imagery though words--the explorers' journals and
the words of the press in America and Britain with reference to Arctic exploration. J.C.H.
King and Henrietta Lidchi's book Imaging the Arctic was used for this study, though as its
focus is photography and film, it was not used in the development of the thesis' analytical
framework, but only as substantiating evidence where necessary.
Several newspapers have been used in the development and structure of the thesis.
In Britain, a broad range of newspapers that covered all facets of society were used. The
London Illustrated News was a popular paper who catered more to the working class with
Vll

its utilisation of cartoons, drawings, lack of business and financial news, and bigger font.
The London Times, which was more expensive than most papers, catered more to the

upper class society with its society pages and weekly financial news. These two papers
combined had 85% ofBritain's national readership from 1835 to 1910.
In America, there were several newspapers. In New York alone, there was the
Herald, the Sun, the World, and the Times. The former two were more adhered to the

middle classes, the World catered to the working class and the Times was the financial
paper until the creation of the Wall Street Journal. Together, these papers covered nearly
100% of the readership of New York and of all newspapers in circulation in the United
States, New York out-sold more newspapers than Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta
combined.

Only New York and London newspapers were chosen because on an

international level, they were the direct sources for news from most smaller cities on both
continents. They also boasted that largest numbers of reporters covering news and they
clearly established the patterns for writing about exploration as well as being leaders in the
sensationalising of the press. In some instances, newspapers changed their names--for
example, the Herald in 1870 became the New York Herald to distinguish itself from the
new Los Angeles Herald. These changes are reflected in the footnotes and are not
explained in the text of the thesis.

V1ll

Introduction
More than a century and a half has passed since the news reached Britain that the
1845 Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage had failed. For years, the
British and American press speculated as to what caused the disaster, while other reports
chronicled the numerous British and American expeditions that searched the Canadian
Arctic for clues and answers. Few other events in the history of British world exploration
received more press time than the fate of and search for Franklin. Not even Robert Falcon
Scott's failed South Pole expedition of 1913 received as much attention as Franklin's did.
In fact Franklin, throughout his long Arctic career, had been a much loved subject of the
British and American press. His overland and sea expeditions through the Canadian North
were followed and reported on, his published accounts were critiqued, and his public
lectures were all highly promoted in the British press. But Franklin did not solicit this
attention completely on his own; but he had both the blessings and the representation of
Sir John Barrow, the Second Secretary of the British Admiralty. This thesis is an
examination of the interaction between the British and American popular press and Arctic
explorers, like Franklin, in creating a popular and universal image of the Arctic through
reporting techniques and verbal imagery. Investigating how both the press and the
explorer used each other to promote their own ends helps to explain the public's growing
interest in Arctic exploration well into the twentieth century. In fact, it was Franklin's use
of the media that was a precedent setting situation. As will be shown, Frederick Cook and
Robert Peary also used the modem American media to wage their own person war against
one another to prove who had obtained the North Pole first.
A study of newspaper headlines and personal letters of Franklin to his promoters
reveals what the common public in Britain knew about Franklin and of the lands he was
exploring more clearly than a study of the expedition accounts alone. This thesis will also

1

look at some commonly held theories about the news media's need for sensationalism and
how the development of that sensationalist reporting style illuminated the broader issues of
control of the press over the knowledge of and images of Arctic exploration held by the
reading public. Though images of unknown lands and the creation of the heroic myth are
often associated with nationalism and imperialism, this is not the focus of this thesis. This

will be a study on how the increasing sensationalist reporting styles of the British and
American newspaper media were influenced by eighteenth century conventions which
created widely held images of the Arctic and served to increase readership on both sides of
the Atlantic.
In the end, the attainment of the Northwest Passage or the North Pole did not
signifY anything important globally. It resulted in no imperial gain, no scientific
understanding, no commercial goal was achieved, and it lacked all essential benefit to
mankind. Despite this, the discovery of the Northwest Passage and the North Pole were
considered by many two of the most significant triumphs of their time. Why then are such
a discoveries considered so significant when all they achieve, at terrible costs, are personal
prestige and recognition? Perhaps it is because these regions had for centuries been
considered an elusive goal. By the time the Northwest Passage was discovered,
geographical exploration of all continents led by British explorers had become an
important part of the European identity. Equally important was that the British and
American newspapers were sparring with each other to be the first to bring the readers
new and updated information each day on the search efforts to find Franklin.
From a journalistic view, these reasons conjure up a chicken-and-egg theory as to
the press's role in forming public opinions about Arctic exploration in general. Did the
media in America and Britain simply report what was interesting to the people or did the
media create that public interest? From a historical perspective, these reasons relate to the
growth of an intellectual and social current that had been gaining strength in the Western
2

world throughout the nineteenth century: the creation of the mythic hero.
Chapter one focuses on the creation of the Arctic myth in western society from
ancient times to the early exploration attempts of the British navy. The nineteenth century
was a time of great exploration, both by sea and overland. In society, the welfare of the
people seemed to come a distant second to the need to explore new lands. The explorers
who achieved these remarkable feats of exploration became more than just popular heroes.
They were people to be revered and admired, and subjects for promoters and press to
exploit. Explorers were perhaps the most celebrated icons of their time in Britain, for they
confirmed the ideals of heroism, romance, and adventure. They were pictured in the press
as journeying into the humid, steamy jungles of Africa or the cold, white, wastelands of
the high Arctic.
Chapter Two looks at the creation of the Arctic narrative, using Franklin's two
overland expeditions as examples. By the early nineteenth century, Arctic explorers were
being promoted through several different means. They were highly desired and very wellpaid public speakers at concert halls. They, and their images of the new lands they
explored, became the subjects of painters, sculptors, storywriters, early photographers,
and budding new journalists. Franklin was no stranger to the world of public relations. In
1822, he topped the billing for all public lectures that year in London by drawing in nearly
75,000 to listen to his accounts of harrowing overland expedition across the Arctic Sea 1•
Because of Franklin's successes, and subsequent failures, Arctic exploration topped the
lists of all public lectures in London throughout the nineteenth century and reached its
peak in 1860 with nearly nine million seats sold that year to hear Francis McClintock
lecture for four nights a week for five months on his discovery of the fate of Franklin2 •

1

2

P. Bailey, Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure. (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, I 986), 98.
Ibid., 112.

3

People from as far away as South America and South Africa came to hear McClintock
speak. There was perhaps no better example of the public promotion of the explorer-myth
than the McClintock lectures. Such events were one of the key public relations tools of the
era and they represented explorers, like Franklin, in supremely heroic terms. 3 Equally as
important, explorers were well promoted in print. They and their heroic adventures were
featured in their written exploration accounts, juvenile fiction, and biographies. Here
Franklin was assisted by Sir John Barrow and John Murray to create a highly readable and
entertaining narrative. Narratives, as will be seen, were the preferred choice of readers as
the British popular press still had not developed as strong a hold in Britain as it had in
America, because of Britain's extremely high tax levies on books.
The popular press such as illustrated dailies such as the London Illustrated News
and The Daily Mirror became more accessible and affordable by the 1850s. It was the
popular press that reached the widest audience throughout the later half of the nineteenth
and into the twentieth centuries. The interest in Franklin by the press was not unique.
From 1820-1920, explorers and journalists cultivated close ties with each other. During
this period, newspapers were influential in establishing images of and interest in
unexplored lands. Not only did members of the press sponsor expeditions (the search for
Franklin most notably), they also encouraged exploration by paying large sums for
exclusive accounts from the explorers. Also, the sensational style of press coverage helped
make the search for the Northwest Passage a significant cultural factor in the development
of mass-market journalism.4 Chapter three examines the birth of the modem press in
America and Britain and how it was used to promote the heroic image of the Arctic

3

J. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion,1860-1960.
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) Ill.
4
JH Weiner, Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1859-1914. Westport, Conn:
Greenwood Press, 1988) 280.

4

explorer in society.
Those involved in the business of exploration knew that it often bore little
resemblance to the truth in the accounts that were given to the public, but the depiction of
exploration was rarely changed once formats were discovered that not only were mutually
beneficial to the explorers and the media, but popular with the hero-seeking British and
American public. The British popular press created the sensationalising of the hero-myth
in order to sell more papers. Historians and geographers have agreed that what 1s

perceived to exist is often as important as what actually exists or happens. 5
To those who study the history of journalism, the term "sensationalism" is often a
negative one. James Gordon Bennett was the father of sensationalism and no other
journalist in the history of American newspapers was as successful as he in using the
sensational to sell newspapers. Sensationalism is just as prevalent in today' s mass media as
it was in Bennett's day and in fact the term sensational has not altered much over the
century. Sensationalism, then as now, is a journalistic marketing ploy used to inspire,
entice, and emotionally captivate as wide a readership as possible that, for whatever
reason, is mainly concerned with being entertained rather than informed. Even today, these
basic methods of attracting an audience are widely accepted goals adopted by journalists
concerned with intellectual idealism, as well as those who emphasise "trash" or "reality
TV". However, it must be noted that the most important defining aspect of sensationalism
is the treatment of news, which includes literary style and content as well as layout
including pictures, artwork, type-set, and photography. Just the mere look of an article
adds to the overall message of the piece. If British and American newspapers engaged in
sensationalism to sell the Franklin mystique, clearly they were not passive disseminators of

5

J. W. Watson, "The Role of Illusion in North American Geography: A Note on the Geography of the
North American Settlement." Canadian Geographer, 13 (1) 1969, 15.

5

geographical fact. They played an active role in translating the Franklin saga into popular
perception, even to the extent of embarking on the Franklin hero-myth creation. Chapter
Four looks at what happened after Franklin's fate was determined, and as will be seen, the
extreme lengths that editors went to report the sensational went beyond the boundaries of
decency.
If British and American newspapers engaged in such blatant sensationalism, clearly
they were not casual disseminators of scientific knowledge. On the contrary, the press
played a very active role in depicting these events even to the extent of creating and
maintaining a framework of heroic myth creation that the readers could grasp onto and
make flourish over the decades. Chapter Five looks more closely at James Gordon Bennett
Jr., tl}.e New York Herald editor who was as fascinated in the lure of the Arctic as his
readers were. With his tastes for the sensational, he helped to create a sense of national
hero. The British press did not invent the exploitation of heroism. They have been found
all through history from Greek and Roman tragedies to modem novels. But what is the
definition ofhero and how is it important to this study?
The Oxford English Dictionary states that the definition of hero is 1. "A
mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength" and
2. "A man admired and emulated by his society for his achievements and qualities." 6•
There have been many studies of what constitutes a hero over the last several decades,
including Joseph Campbell in 1949. In this classic book, The Hero With a Thousand

Faces, Joseph Campbell examines myths and folk tales from all over the world that draw
together common parallels in order to determine generalities about the life-cycles of the
mythic hero. Campbell describes the hero as a single minded individual who has drive,

6

Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. 514.

6

miraculous courage, unbounded intelligence and physical attributes that appear superhuman. Though Franklin is perceived as a hero because he was admired by the British
people for having the courage to venture out into a land that most Britons would never
dream of going to, he does not fit well into Campbell's model. Few explorers, in fact, ever
reach this mythical, almost messianic status. Franklin may have possessed miraculous
courage, but he did not possess unbounded intelligence or super-human attributes.
Franklin was not as well read or as gifted with his writing abilities as were his Arctic
contemporaries, and at age 59 in 1844, he had quite a time in convincing the British
Admiralty that he was fit and well enough to command the 1845 Expedition. In fact, the
mere possibility that he was not physically up to the challenge may have contributed to the
demise of the expedition. The fact that very few heroes of the Arctic actually reach
Campbell's final stage of mythic status is unimportant to this study. However, men like
Franklin, Cook, and Peary still personified the public's perceived greatness of their
profession and can still be used as symbols for those interested in justifying their
popularity in their respective countries. These Arctic heroes served well to perform the
desired function of their most important mediator--the press--this being able to sell large
qualities of newspapers.
Chapter Six looks at the seedier side of heroism, with Robert Peary, the selfprofessed hero, as the example. His intense self-promotion not only set a lifelong feud
between himself and rivals Frederick Cook, but also set the stage for one of the most
intense media wars in history. It also allowed the media unprecedented opportunity to
foster the creation and perpetuation of the explorer myth in the minds of its readers. So in
a sense, the media had a direct bearing on the development and course of the explorer
myth both in Britain and America.
Because of the number of newspapers in America and Britain, only a few have
been thoroughly looked at. The London Times and the London Illustrated News cross the
7

broadest spectrum of readership in Britain. The Times was aimed more at the middle and
upper classes, while the Illustrated News catered more to the working classes because of
its strong emphasis on pictures and drawings. In New York, the Chicago Tribune, and the

New York Times were more business oriented, where as the New York Herald was
maintained on a basis of sensationalism, hence the hero-making qualities are inherent.
These newspapers not only boasted the widest readerships and highest sales numbers, they
were also a direct and indirect source of international news for papers from other regions
of the world. They also had the largest number of reporters working abroad and they
established the patterns for writing about Arctic exploration, and were leaders in the
sensationalising ofthe press.

8

Chapter One
"Images of Our Country's Reasoning ... Creating the Arctic Myth."
On April 2, 1956, Life magazine featured an Ahiarmiut family on its cover. For
most readers of the magazine, this was the first glimpse of these people who lived in the
Keewatin District of the Northwest Territories. Life had chosen the Ahiarmiut family as
representatives of the Canadian Inuit who maintained the most primitive lifestyle of all
Inuit tribes. 7 This family trio at once evokes a timeless image, that of the Madonna and
Child, with Joseph or one of the angels or saints looking on. It is reminiscent of such
Italian Renaissance paintings as the "Madonna di Loreto" by Raphael, or Tommaso's
"Madonna and Child with Angel". 8 Their ennoblement could present an attractive ideal, of
an age lost and found in modem times, even though the article itself makes romanticised
and ill-informed remarks about the Inuit way of life. 9 But where did these images come
from. Life Magazine did not create these images completely on their own; rather they had
been passed down from generations before. The idea of romanticising and falsifying the
Arctic is nearly as old as history itself.
In the late eighteenth century, before the popularity of the modem press
blossomed, the most powerful means of describing unexplored lands came from books.
Both non-fiction books, such as travel accounts and ships' logs, and fiction which included
novels and epic poems, played a role in creating a vision of a mythical landscape for many
readers. These books, however, had been read by relatively few people in society, but
what these books reported gained acceptance far beyond the reading public.
Though most Canadians have never ventured into the Arctic, the north, as both a

7

Alan Rudolph Marcus, "Reflecting on Contested Images" in J.C.R King and Henrietta Lidchi, Imaging
the Arctic. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 190.
8
Ibid
9
Ibid, 190-191.

9

place and an idea, is well imbedded in the national psyche. 10 References to the exploration
of the Arctic reach as far back into Western culture as classical Greece. In 457 BC, the
Greek philosopher and historian Herodotus trekked through the north country of Greece
in search of the famed Mount Olympus. He wrote about a country wild with blowing snow
and humans dressed in furs. He believed he had found the end of the Earth.
Today, classical historians believe Herodotus travelled to Lvov in the Ukraine
where he witnessed Northern Europeans struggling to survive a mini ice-age that would
last another 25 years in that region 11 • Herodotus published this and other travel accounts
and influenced a new generation of explorers.
Pytheas of Masillia had been so greatly influenced by Herodotus' account that he
set out in a boat to see how far north he could go. He likely became the first southern
European to cross the Arctic circle and give a description of the Aurora Borealis, during a
voyage in which he circumnavigated Britain before searching for a mythical land he called
Ultima Thule 12 • Future Greek philosophers discounted Pytheas's account, but recently
these claims have been re-evaluated, although there is a debate brewing as to the location
of Ultima Thule. It may have been Iceland, Greenland, or perhaps the Orkney or Shetland
Islands.
The importance of Pytheas's claim lies not in the actual descriptions, but in the
scepticism his accounts raised with readers. Scholars of the day questioned his account
because the Arctic had been perceived as an inhospitable place to explore, let alone live in.
This belief influenced European perceptions ofthe Arctic well into the nineteenth century.
Over the centuries, the Middle and Far East had been explored by Europeans,

10

Pamela Stern, "The llistory of Canadian Photography: Issues of Territorial and Cultural Sovereignty" in
JCH King and Henrietta Lidchi, Imaging the Arctic. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998) 117.
11
Stanley Martins, Ancient Greek Mythology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 37.
12
K. Witaker, "The Problem with Pytheas." Mythology, vol21, #10 June 1990, 167.

10

North and South America fell under Spanish, Portuguese and British controL the Pacific
and Atlantic oceans were claimed and mapped by European sea powers, but the Arctic
remained an unknown and feared place.
Finally in 1440, the French Humanist Francois Rabelais became the first to bring
the Arctic into the consciousness of all Europeans with his widely translated novel
Gargantua and Pantegruel. This noveL in four parts, is a fictitious record of a voyage to
complete the Northwest Passage that includes descriptions of living in the frozen north
with a fur-clad race.
Albert Lefranc, a travel historian working in France in the early twentieth century
theorised that Rabelais' main inspiration came from the travel of Jacques Cartier and John
Cabot. Cabot stirred the imagination in England with his tales of thick Newfoundland fog,
cold snow, and seas teeming with fish. Since Cartier and Cabot never moved beyond the
sub Arctic, Rabelais assumed the high Arctic was also a snowy, foggy place teeming with
fish. As his account gained popularity with readers, the French court of Francois I
declared Rabelais' adventure novel in 1583 to be a true and accurate description of the
Arctic 13 •
From 1550 to 1780 travel accounts opened the unknown world to the literate
British public. Many of these accounts gave detailed ethnographic or geographical
descriptions, but most became simply tales of adventure, with some romance, and always
spiced with facts ofrather suspicious accuracy. Few ofthe Arctic descriptions were more
fanciful, and popular, than that of Pierre de la Martiniere, a French surgeon who served on
the Danish science expedition of 1653 that sailed to the Barents Sea and Novaya Zemlya
Martiniere's book owed more to fancy and sensationalism than to fact, both in the
narrative of new fauna and native inhabitants, and the accompanying map had no

13

Christopher Hibbert, The Reign of Francois I (New York: St. Martin's Press, I 982), I 88.

11

resemblance to the maps of the time or of those since. Despite the inaccuracies, no one in
Europe knew better, and the account became a popular one.
As with most nationalities, the British were more impressed by the achievements of
their own explorers. This desire to follow their own explorers led to a wide scale passion
in England throughout most of the eighteenth century to find a route through the
Northwest Passage. By 1750, the assault on the Arctic was led primarily by the British
Navy. This coincided with Parliament's promise in 1745 to pay anyone 20,000 pounds for
discovering a passage through Hudson's Strait. Yet, the failures of such veteran explorers
as Thomas Knight, Samuel Hearne, and several expeditions led by Arctic whalers, who
were considered the heartiest and fittest of all Europeans in the Arctic, made the Arctic
more fascinating to the people back home in Britain. The real belief that the Arctic might
never be conquered arose during this period. Like the hunt for Eldorado down the
Orinoco River in Brazil, or the search for the lost kingdom of Solomon in the African
interior, the fact that so little was known about the Arctic, even after years of exploration,
only added to the power it held in the imagination of the British. It seemed to the British
public that nature was manifested not only at its harshest but its most inscrutable in the
Arctic.
References to the Arctic in eighteenth century literature encouraged these images,
using unknown areas as sources of mystery, vastness and danger. Most writers were
ignorant of the Arctic and used other writers' descriptions as influences for their own
novels. Mountain vistas and wide-open pastoral landscapes played a large part in the
British mentality of self and beauty. This fascination with alpine areas included the same
stereotypes as the "icy grandeur" of the Arctic. What they shared was "an asymmetry that
violated all classical canons of regularity" 14 This feature became known as the sublime.

14

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca: New York, 1959) 126.

12

Simply put the sublime refers to something that is outstanding in spiritual,
intellectual and moral worth. Something that is sublime, is deemed to not have any earthly
comparison. Therefore landscapes such as mountains, oceans, and great rivers which were
awe-inspiring for their sheer size, were believed to be God-like in appearance. These
landscapes were to be respected as insurmountable objects, and feared for their power to
crush humanity.
Although little was known about Arctic geography in the early nineteenth century,
the British public had definite ideas about the region. John Watson argues that the
geography of any region results as much from how we think we should see it as from
what is actually seen. 15 Exploration uses this very process of identifying the unknown,
combining expectation and illusion with empirical reality. The British perceptions of
regions that were non-British developed out of the conceptions at the start of the
nineteenth century were not perceived to be distorted, but were considered the truths of
their time. It has been suggested that the visual world can be represented by a widely held
single concept or mode of perception. 16 For British explorers from 1750 to 1850, the two
most important schemata for observing the Arctic through words and pictures became the
sublime and the picturesque. 17
French audiences were already familiar with the concepts of the sublime and
picturesque in rhetoric and poetry with Nicholas Boileau-Desperaux's 1674 translation of
a treatise by Greek philosopher, Longinus in 128 AD. The British, however, were finally
introduced to these concepts when in 1758 Edmund Burke published A philosophical

15

J.W. Watson, "The Role of Illusion in in North American Geography: A Note on the Geography of the
North American Settlement" Canadian Geographer, 13 (1969), 10.
16
E.H. Gombricb, "The Evidence of Images". Interpretation, Practice and Theory (Baltimore: Rainbow
Press, 1969) 97.
17
I.S.MacLaren, "The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859" in: Coates, K and Morrison, W.R
Interpreting Canada's North. Toronto: Copp, Clark, Pitman, 1989) 19.

13

enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Burke made the sublime

and picturesque coherent and unified theories that became the chief aesthetics of the time.
A philosophical enquiry became a textbook for all those who wanted to view nature in its

purest and unspoiled form. These concepts became so widely accepted that William
Wordsworth proclaimed them to be "the images of our country's reasoning" 18 •
Burke's sublime also referred to the surprising, the geography of vastness-vast
open space that defies definition or imagination, the awe-inspiring phenomena that "lifts
the soul, to exalt it to ecstasy: so that, participating, as it were, in the splendours of the

Sublimity, said Burke, was present in the natural world when a landscape reflected
nature at its extreme and most wild, beyond human control and inspiring fear and
submission in the observer. Some examples of this would be open spaces such as an
ocean, a prairie, mountain peaks or abysses, snow storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The
sublime geography, logically and emotionally, could not be conquered, but if an explorer
failed and barely lived to tell about it, he was hailed as a national hero. If the sublime killed
the explorer, he was raised to deity status. Burke described the sublime as the emotion of
terror, especially when in confrontation with the unknown whether it be landscapes or
human emotions. The sublime evokes terror, fear and a sense that what the viewer is
observing, on some level, was not real, but imagined.
Although Burke's thesis served as a general philosophical approach to viewing
landscapes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sublime could be applied
easily to both nature and to other aspects of life that were considered frightful and

18

Douglas Wilson, The Romantic Dream: Wordsworth and the poetics of the Unconsciousness. (Lincoln:
University ofNebraska Press, 1993) 218.
19
S.H.Monk, The Sublime: a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII Century England. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1960) 250.

14

impossible. Both the world's highest mountain and the horrors of war and murder were
sublime, for they evoked fear in the reader or viewer. According to Burke's theories of
power, terror, and grandeur, the Arctic was viewed as the most sublime and terrible part
ofunexplored world.
As eighteenth century English gentlemen travelled throughout Europe conducting

their Grand Tours of the continent's major cultural centres, many of them found difficulty
in classifying all of nature into Burke's categories of the sublime and beautiful. The result
was the development of the picturesque.
Popularised in the 1790s by William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, the picturesque was
a convention that was aimed to give an observer the opposite feeling to the sublime.
Instead of feeling fear or Divine power, the picturesque was a feeling of pastoral beauty.
the perfect picturesque landscape was something that described as a picture. In other
words, the viewer looked at the landscape as if looking at a painting. A good landscape
required a strong prominent foreground, the sides of the landscape to be framed, the view
should follow the rule-of-thirds where background, middle ground and foreground each
take a third of the view, and displays of like colours was important for continuity of
landscape. From this ideal vision of the landscape, it was believed that the viewer would
feel peace rather than fear within the landscape. Gilpin felt variation from irregular
landscapes to course surface texture lay at the heart of defining the picturesque. Yet,
despite this emphasis, the picturesque became conventional, and often times very
oversimplified at least in part because Gilpin so completely defined the aspects of the
picturesque such as the correct shape hills should take, right down to the number of cattle
required in a painting to make a pasture picturesque.
According to I.S.MacLaren, the typical picturesque view of the Arctic became a
prospect or a viewing station usually set on a moderate rise, looking out over a
foreground, a lower middle ground through which a river meandered, and an enclosed
15

background of bluish hills or mountains while at the sides, trees would frame the scene and
encourage a single perspective20 • The British, who discovered the picturesque abroad,
therefore were achieving three purposes: they were looking for reminders of Britain by
stamping foreign tracts of land as being British in appearance. They also conducted their
travels/explorations in an orderly manner something that was necessary to get the most
out ofthese landscape perceptions. But, most importantly, travellers were nourishing their
own aesthetic identity as being British. These travellers wanted to see the gentle hill-anddale topography of their home counties or "the more rugged but still composed lacustrine
beauty ofthe English Lake District" 21 •
Due to the absence of Gilpin's strictly defined conventions, the picturesque simply
could not exist, and created dangers to those who explored unknown lands like the Arctic.
Special adaptations were needed to survive the terrain, although, the need to find the
picturesque outweighed the need for survival. A prime example of this need to find the
picturesque occurred on John Franklin's overland expedition to the Arctic Sea in 18191822. In October 1822, a camp was erected on a hill that had been partly chosen for
aesthetic reasons. Franklin's surgeon, John Richardson, commented in a letter back to
England that "we could not have selected a more convenient or beautiful spot. The
surrounding country is finely varied by hill and dale and interspersed with numerous lakes
connected by small streams" 22 • Yet that prized location, which was so picturesque by
British standards, became a death trap in itself The site lacked the necessary food, water,
proper wind shelter, and fuel that could have been found further down the hill near the
lake. When a Scottish born officer, who had not been schooled in the British aesthetics of

20

MacLaren, "Aesthetic Map ... ", 19-20.
Ibid.
22
J. Macllraith, Life ofSir John Richardson. (oxford University Press, 1959) 62.
21

16

i
,,

the sublime and picturesque, suggested to Franklin that the camp be moved closer to the
necessities of life, Franklin bellowed back saying he was there to civilise the landscape23 •
After their arduous journey the following year, Franklin and his party returned back to fort
Enterprise and they did not have the strength to make their way down to the lake to fish or
hunt. Had it not been for the assistance of the Dene in bringing food to Franklin's party,
Franklin and his men would have been killed by their own aesthetics.
Thus the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque became thoroughly engrained
on the consciousness of all British travellers as the criteria for viewing scenery in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time where books on exotic travelling and
exploration were outsold only by books on theology. Through the use of these
conventions in exploration literature, novels, and art and architecture, the British public
developed stereotypes of the Arctic that were often wrong, but still believed to be true.
These aesthetics were not restricted to the Arctic. Simon Fraser described his
journey down the Fraser River as a sublime experience. He spoke of "towering mountains,
too tall to ever climb" and "rapids ... situated in the most unpicturesque manner" 24 • Clearly
Fraser was expecting a different landscape. Maybe he was expecting to find a calm river
that would remind him of his native Scotland. Samuel Taylor Coleridge described in vivid
detail the sublime vistas of Antarctica in his epic The rime of the ancient mariner, which
became a definitive model for writing novels about distant places. British readers were
also introduced to the exotic and picturesque visions of India and the sublime landscapes
of Egypt and South Africa by the 1750s.
Those who organised expeditions in the 1760s in Britain may have read many of
the popular travel accounts of the day, for many of the developments in exploration

23
24

J.Franklin. Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1988) 115-21 .
Simon Fraser, A Journey to the Interior. (London: John Murray, 1810), 56.

17

encouraged these ways of viewing unexplored lands. In 1776, the British Parliament
decreed that as a condition for discovering the Northwest Passage, searches should be
restricted to north of the fifty-second parallel. This meant that the search moved from the
relatively safe confines of Hudson's Bay to the vast, uncharted (therefore sublime) waters
of the Pacific. The most noted voyage of the time to be restricted to this region was
James Cook's 1776-1780 voyage. The posthumous publication of Cook's accounts
brought polar exploration to new heights and publicised him the first modem explorer in
search of the Northwest Passage. But as J. Beaglehole points out, Cook's popularity
stemmed partly from the fact that he died during the voyage and therefore couldn't
describe, in his own words, his Arctic experience25 • Some in Britain even went so far as to
sugge.st that the sublime experience of the Arctic affected Cook's judgement so much that
a mental error led to his murder in Hawaii.
Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Cook's final voyage,
believed Cook's death may have been caused by confusion from being too long in the
Arctic. He said Cook isolated himself in a sublime environment with nothing but ice in
sight for hundreds of miles, and speculated that this may have caused Cook to go insane
because he felt insignificant in comparison to the sheer vastness of the Arctic. He came to
this conclusion when in 1780, a midshipman with Cook, George Gilbert, claimed his
captain looked unwell and began to have serious arguments with his officers about the
directions the ships should pass through the Arctic. Gilbert went on to tell Sandwich that
Cook seemed unwell from that point on, and that he engaged in erratic behaviour,
including arguing with and assaulting the natives upon his return to Hawaii from the
Arctic. Gilbert even suggested that Cook was so "terrified of the Arctic ... of its sublime

25

J.Beaglehole. The Life of Captain James Cook, (London: University of London Press, 1974) x-xxi.

18

and terrifying state of existence that he acted out of fear of the unknown and the terrible 26 •
Recently, this theory of melancholia dementia caused by over exposure to the Arctic cold
and isolation has been rejected by naval medical historian Sir James Watt. He concluded
that Cook likely contacted a rare form of malaria on his second Pacific voyage that led to
meningitis which would surely have killed him from progressive insanity within months of
his return to England.

Other travels added to the notion of the sublime because of their failure to
elaborate on the mysteries of the unknown. For example Samuel Hearne's voyage to the
mouth of the Coppermine River in 1771 and Alexander Mackenzie's journey down the
Mackenzie River in 1789 added few points of discovery in a vast unexplored region.
Though their travel accounts had been read by the literate few in society, the two
explorers were still received with a hesitant scepticism at public lectures in London and
Royal Geographical Society meetings for their lack of contribution to the sublime and
picturesque. The Royal Geographical Society Paper reported on the lecture,
The explorers spoke of a land of friendly savages who appeared
in no way to be aggressive toward them. This strange land with its
strange savages must INDEED be sublime, for even these brave
explorer's cannot speak of such terrible realities for fear of frightening
all who read their words. 27

However, as will be pointed out in Chapter Two, Hearne and Mackenzie were the
first explorers of the far north who tried to explain just how unexciting the Arctic really
was, that the sublime did not necessarily mean it was a frightening place. It was for these
reasons that both explorers were met with such scepticism.

26
27

Ibid., 118.
The Royal Geographical Society Paper, January 21, 1791, 1.

19

By the early nineteenth century the Arctic was beginning to be an exotic backdrop
for adventure stories that were closer to fiction than reality. During this time, explorers
continued to wander the globe, searching for unmapped places to romanticise, but most of
the great mysteries, such as the discovery of the Northwest Passage, remained WISolved.
As Europe became entrenched in the Napoleonic wars, exploration more or less lost its

importance, and again the blank spaces on the map became unchallenged. But by 1818 the
wars were over and Britain became more irresistibly drawn to discover the unknown
reaches of the Empire. It was at this time that the popularity of one novel pushed the
ideals of the sublime and picturesque again to the forefront and gave rise to a new Arctic
myth.
It has been heralded as one of the greatest coincidences of Arctic exploration that

1818 marked not only a return of Britain's search for the Northwest Passage, but also of
the appearance of a fantasy novel that used the Arctic as effectively as any ever written.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a prophetic novel for the time. The changes that the
main character, Walton, experienced came to be the same experiences that the Victorians
would undergo in the coming decades. Initially, Walton's dream was of a tropical ring of
land surrounding the North Pole, and his belief in the sublime power of Mother Nature
was heightened by his meeting with Frankenstein. Shelley wrote of this encounter: "The
starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have
the power of elevating his soul from earth" 28 Walton learned of the vastness of the sublime
through Frankenstein's tale, and by the end of the novel, Walton was finally able to realise
the terror of his own experience in the Arctic: "I am surrounded by mountains of ice,
which admit of no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my ships." 29 Walton

28

29

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) 50.

Ibid.

20

explained that the polar world was hostile, untameable, and unforgiving.
Despite the immense popularity of Frankenstein, it still remains the only novel of
significance pertaining to the Arctic published in the first half of the nineteenth century.
This is partly because there existed no need for creating stories; since the era focused on
exploration, there were plenty of expedition accounts to entertain the imagination.
The driving force behind Britain's exploration of the Arctic was Sir John Barrow,
Second Secretary to the British Admiralty from 1799 to 1845. Called the "Father of Arctic
Exploration", Barrow viewed water-based exploration as a means of occupying the
nineteenth century British Navy, which had become idled after the end of the Napoleonic
wars. There was also the possibility of commercial profit in exploration, not to mention a
chance for Barrow to be elevated to the illustrious position of First Lord of the Admiralty,
a life long dream, but more compelling reasons were for national pride and for scientific
advancements. For these reasons, Barrow pressured the Royal Society to get Parliament
to amend the 1776 Act, offering prize money for the completion of the Northwest
Passage. He convinced the Admiralty that British national honour was at stake in the
Arctic. He claimed it would be mortifYing to the whole nation if Russia, Germany,
Norway, or anyone else for that fact with a weaker navy, were to complete the Northwest
Passage before Britain. Parliament agreed, amended the Act of 1776, and gave Barrow
permission to assemble an expedition to search for the Northwest Passage.
Barrow's first two sea-based expeditions to the Arctic were in 1818. Sir John Ross
commanded the Isabella and the Alexander in search of the Passage, which David Buchan
attempted to reach the pole in the Trent and Dorothea. Both expeditions failed miserably.
Ross barely penetrated Lancaster Sound and refused to go any farther, while Buchan made
it as far as the west side of Spitsbergen. Despite their failures, both explorers were
featured at sold out lectures at the Royal Society meetings (again arranged by Barrow) to

21

"discuss their sublime journeys into the harsh unknown" 30 • The audiences could not get
enough of these officers and many wealthy landowners gave donations to the Navy to
send out new expeditions. Barrow could not have been more pleased.
From 1818 to 1845, Barrow approved and planned a series of overland and
maritime expeditions that added many pieces to the puzzle of the Arctic. The new
emphasis was on the discovery and safe completion of the Northwest Passage. Everything
else from mapping the continental coastline, the collection of biological specimens, and
taking magnetic observations was secondary. It was the Northwest Passage that occupied
the Admiralty's imagination and that of the explorers, the publishers, the artists, and the
public at large. These explorers, who attempted to complete the passage while enduring
dreadful ordeals and demonstrating the stiff-upper-lip mentality of British courage, even in
such complete failure, were to become national heroes: William Edward Parry, Sir John
Franklin, Dr. John Rae, and Sir Robert M'Clure. These men would be the inspiration to
those who followed in the late nineteenth century: Horace Greely, Charles Hall, Robert
Peary and Frederick Cook.
By the mid nineteenth century, it was only a matter of time before both Britain and
the United States were drawn irresistibly toward to opening up of the Arctic and as that
time drew nearer, the modem press had a large role to play in the shaping of the new
Arctic perceptions and of its explorers.

30

John Barrow, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions. (London: David and Charles
Reprints, 1971) 100.

22

Chapter Two: Master Manipulators: John Murray, John Franklin, and the Birth of British
Sensational Exploration Literature.

Before the heyday of the modern press, the best way an explorer could reach his
audience was through the publication of his travel journals. In fact, publishing one's
account of an expedition not only became popular, it became expected and those who
profited were the explorer, the publisher, and John Barrow. Although most who travelled
to the Arctic published their accounts, this chapter will look primarily at Franklin's journals
and published narratives from both his overland expeditions and how, with the help of
publisher John Murray and his ghost writers, Franklin manipulated the presentation of the
facts to draw in more readers, therefore, increasing sales and profits.
One of the most popular early nineteenth century travel accounts to describe the
Arctic landscape came not from Franklin, but from William Parry. Written in 1821, Parry's

Journal of a voyage for the discovery of a North-West Passage devoted many pages to
the mw1dane details of ship life and ofwaiting out the long Arctic winters. But the concept
of wintering in the Arctic was a new one, and it thrilled the British public. Though the
book seems unromantic today, it was considered a very romantic saga in 1821 London.
Even Parry's understatement and logic in describing what must have been unusual for him
emphasised the strangeness and vastness of the Arctic landscape. When he explained the
dreariness he and his crews endured, he evoked sublimness:
Not an object was to be seen which an eye could rest with pleasure
unless when directed to the spot where the ships lay, and where our
little colony was planted. The sound ofvoices ... served now and then to
break the silence far different from that peaceable composure which
characterizes the landscape of a cultivated country; it was the deathlike
stillness of the most dreary desolation and the total absence of animated

23

existence.31

The long winters were only one aspect of this extraordinary world. At times, the Arctic
was home to many strange phenomena not seen anywhere else on the globe; mock suns,
the Northern Lights, and mirages created by refracting light all added to the mystery and
allure of the Arctic. Above all, there was the sheer power of the pack ice that could crush
the strongest ships. Even the steam engine, the newest invention of the Industrial Age, was
no match for the power of the Arctic pack ice. The knowledge the public received of the
Arctic was, therefore, a culmination of fact and fiction dominated by the power of the
sublime.
Throughout this era of polar exploration, few explorers made such an impact on
the public as did Sir John Franklin, a Royal Naval officer who served with Nelson at
Trafalgar and who got his first taste of the Arctic while serving with David Buchan in
1818. After this brief apprenticeship in the Arctic, Franklin went on to command two
overland expeditions (1818-1821 and 1825-27) and his ill-fated 1845 expedition by sea.
On his first overland expedition, eleven men succwnbed to starvation, scurvy, or murder.
But Franklin lived to tell about his ordeals and was heralded in Britain as "the man who
ate his boots" to survive. He emerged as a romantic hero figure and as a result Oxford
University bestowed him with an honorary degree in 1822, and he was knighted the year
after.
But it certainly was not Franklin's ability as a writer that gained him prominence.
His prose is plodding, difficult to decipher at times, and what can be deciphered is quite
formal. Even as he attempts to describe the Arctic landscape in terms of the literary
conventions of the time, the picturesque, the result is not very convincing:

William Parry, Journal of a voyage for the discovery of a North-west Passage from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. (London: John Murray, 1821) 125.
31

24

Steel River presents much beautiful scenery; it winds through a narrow, but
well-wooded, valley, which at every turn. discloses to us an agreeable variety
of prospect, rendering more picturesque by the effect of the season of the
foliage, now ready to drop from the trees and the light yellow fading of the
poplars formed a fine contrast to the dark evergreen of the spruce, whilst
the willows, of an intermediate hue, served to shade the two principal
masses of colour into each other. 32
But instead, the public delighted in Franklin's account of suffering, murder, and
cannibalism, all of which fitted the prevailing taste for gothic and heroic tales.
Simultaneously, his books included an unintentional use of the sublime: the very lands that
reduced his men to such desperate and life-threatening conditions were powerful, vast,
brooding, and terrible images to the reading public back home.
But why was Franklin the most popular Arctic explorer of the first half of the
nineteenth century? There were previous tales of death and suffering, but none of them
reached the popularity or the notoriety as did Franklin's. There are many answers to this
question. Perhaps it was because the nineteenth century British public could see a
nobleness to his character that our society no longer can ascn'be to our public figures.
Perhaps it simply was because that his entire career was on average so disastrous that the
very idea he could come back two out of three times from such a terrible place captured
the public's imagination. For whatever reason, Franklin laid the groundwork for both his
and future Arctic explorers' roles as tragic heroes both in Britain and in America. But to
do this, Franklin needed help with his public image, and this is where the Admiralty and
London's most powerful publishing house came in to help.
Franklin's two overland narratives have been mined almost to exhaustion by
historians for their ethnographic, historic, and geographic content, but the idea that the

32

John Franklin, Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea in the Years 1818, 1819, 1820 and 1821
(Edmonton: Hurtig Press, 1971) 34-35.

25

narrative, particularly the second narrative, was written by a number of different people,
is still not well known.
While modem readers question the authority of historical study by pointing to the
unavoidable colonising effect of the culture that writes the narratives, nineteenth century
readers in Britain viewed the journals very differently. Franklin published his accounts of
his experiences soon after he returned to England. On the conclusion of each voyage, he
was summoned by Sir John Barrow to the Admiralty offices where he met with Barrow
and John Murray, London's foremost publisher of adventure novels and exploration/travel
journals. Together, the three would sit down with to discuss Franklin's notes and how to
make them into the most important travel account of the year. From the public's point of
view the written word was the truth and Franklin's narratives seem to have been accepted
as unbiased assessments of his experiences in the Arctic. Never viewed as fictitious,
Franklin's journals became as credible as fact. Franklin's idea of interpreting the Arctic
landscape in picturesque or sublime terms was virtually non-existent in his personal
journal. The idea of landscape perception, therefore, had to be added to the published
account to draw the reader's interest. The perception, or lack of it, of landscape which
appears in the final 1822 version was not a condition of Franklin's own visual
conditioning, but was a conscious effort by Murray to fulfil the expectations of the reader.
The second published narrative of 1828 shows a much darker and condemning view ofthe
natives than what appeared in Franklin's own personal narrative. This is uncharacteristic of
Franklin, as he had never been known to speak ill of the natives even among his officers.
Franklin had even promised the Copper natives that no harm would come to them by his
men in appreciation for them having saved his party's lives in 1822 when they were
starving on the tundra. There must have been a reason why the two published journals
differed so much in content, language, and intended target. It was because there was such
overwhelming success with the first journal, and because the events of 1825-1827 seemed
26

so boring and uneventful in comparison that Franklin may have felt compelled to write his
personal journal as if he were going to publish it. Franklin's first published narrative sold
over 75,000 copies both in Britain and in the United States, and that was incentive enough
for Murray and Barrow to significantly change the look and style of the second narrative.
What then is the difference between a narrative and a journal? To help understand
the answer to this, an understanding of Arthur Ponsonby's relation between "diary" and
"autobiography" is essential. The autobiography is distinct from the diary in that it is
composed with publication in mind whereas the diary is a private venture33 • Publication
can only be considered if there is sufficient reason to assume someone will want to read
the account. Ponsonby also states that "letters" are different from diaries because letters
have a distinct recipient and the diary does noe 4• Therefore, can Franklin's journal be
considered a diary? The answer is no, because in the British Navy, there was no such thing
as a diary. Officers were expected to keep journals of their day to day ship activities,
scientific experiments and so on, and these journals would be surrendered to the Admiralty
once the expedition arrived back in London.
Franklin's overland expeditions' journals had a specific recipient in mind: the
Admiralty, and therefore they were considered "letters" more than diaries. All officers on
any ship anywhere in the British Navy, even today, are required to keep daily records of
activities conducted aboard ship such as navigational data, magnetic calculations, and
biological observations. Under no circumstances were these logs to contain personal
commentaries, such as discussing family back home, looking forward to port, or especially
questioning the orders of senior officers. These issues were to be kept in personal diaries
which the Admiralty never saw (or knew existed). As a result of this constraint, the

33

34

Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1956) 52-4.
/bid, 60.

27

alterations in Franklin's narrative from the journals can be attributed to the demands of the
readers in Britain. The audience's role in shaping the narratives is indisputable.
Although in reality the expedition of 1825-27 set out to finish what was not
completed in the 1819-1822 expedition, the public's reception to both expeditions was
anything but similar. The first narrative ran to four editions in Britain in eighteen months.
No other travel narrative had ever been published so soon after the expedition's
completion. Most writers had to wait ten years for the second printing to be considered.
By 1824, there was a French edition of Franklin's book, a German translation, and an
American version, and by the end of the decade, the narrative was being published as a
companion edition to the second narrative. Yet it was quite a different story in 1828 when
the second narrative was released. At first, the book did not sell many copies, and Murray
was, to put it mildly, annoyed. Franklin also probably felt as though he should go into
hiding for a year until the disappointment died down. There was no second edition until
well into the next decade. The popularity of the two narratives can be traced back to
content and the public's growing appetite for the new British buzzword: sensationalism.
On the first expedition, Franklin lost nearly half of his party because of
unpreparedness, starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy. Midshipman Robert Hood, the
party's artist, was murdered by a deranged voyageur, after which surgeon Dr. John
Richardson retaliated by shooting the scout after he found him consuming Hood's body.
Finally, there was the rescue of Franklin's party by the "savage and wild" natives of the
north who brought the party fish because Franklin's men had refused to leave their
"picturesque heaven" for a less "cultured" location. The expedition, by Admiralty
standards, was bold, considering that military discipline was expected of the Canadian
voyageurs. The Admiralty was not sure how the Copper Indians would react, and that the
party had to rely on supplies from poorly-stocked trading posts at the height of the rivalry
between the Northwest and Hudson's Bay companies. There was everything a person
28

wanted in a popular narrative, and Franklin was rewarded by seeing his first narrative sell
an unprecedented amount of copies.
To make sure the second expedition was a better success, the Admiralty took
painstaking measures to plan the trip well. Although the merger of the two fur companies
was now complete, Barrow did not want to take any chances and sent Franklin out with
his own provisions. This time native interpreters were added to make the contact smooth,
and Barrow spent two years hand picking those who would go with Franklin. Once
picked, these men were thoroughly trained in Arctic survival by Franklin and Richardson.
As a consequence, Franklin experienced his most successful expedition to the Arctic. No
lives were lost and no incidences of scurvy or starvation were reported. Franklin did not
take uncalculated risks; he made sure his men retraced their steps, and they were cautious
in their calculations of pack ice movements and shifting. And if these events did not meet
with the British ideal of heroism, the results proved that the coastline was too shallow to
allow ships of any size to sail easily while fully loaded with goods.
To the British public, the second expedition was boring in detail. It had nothing of
the human interest of the first expedition and since Franklin was by then addicted to public
adoration, he probably knew before Murray that the narrative would have to be made
more interesting. The first expedition had told a gripping tale. Franklin met disaster at Fort
Enterprise in 1821. He had to remain in Rupert's land to recuperate, but by then
newspapers in Britain had printed the sordid details of murder, cannibalism, loyalty, and
determination. Franklin's arrival was announced in the Times and about 2000 well wishers
came to greet the biggest national hero since Nelson35 • Franklin was wined and dined by
royalty, the Prime Minister, the clergy, university presidents, and important people in
society. He admitted to his future wife, Jane Griffin, that he finally found the recognition

35

Times, October 9, 1882, 3.

29

in life that was never given to him in childhood: "I am having the time of my life!" 36
Despite the accolades, months went by before the public saw the published narrative.
John Murray was very eager to publish Franklin's first narrative, so much so that
he was there at the end of this expedition to greet Franklin on his return to England.
Though there was no commitment made there, Franklin said he would contact Murray if
Barrow permitted the meeting37 • John Barrow not only approved but he summoned
Murray to Admiralty Headquarters where he told Murray that Franklin's narrative was a
masterpiece waiting to happen38 • Murray obviously agreed, as the first edition sold for ten
guineas a copy, which was equal to one month's salary that Franklin would earn as
Governor ofVan Diemen's Land in the next decade.
, A closer look at sales figures from the first narrative shows that the books became
more popular than Murray had originally projected. Franklin got five hundred guineas plus
a fifteen- percent share on profit sales for a total of about eight hundred guineas. The first
edition of A Journey to the Polar Sea was published as a single volume in four parts which
appeared in June of 1823. The second edition came out in September of 1823 and again
Franklin collected his share ofthe profits. The second edition found its way into grammar
schools where boys fantasized that they would grow up to be like Franklin. More homes
now had a copy of this first narrative and the Times began to see the value in plugging
explorers by urging its readers to believe that supporting Franklin was supporting the
Empire's taming of the wilderness39 • Since price setting laws didn't apply to the book trade
until 1845, book sellers and collectors boosted the price of the second edition to urge
people to grab their copy before the edition sold out.

36

Franklin to Jane Griffin, December 10, 1822. SPRI MS 2290.
Franklin to John Richardson, October 30, I 822, SPRI MS 288/5.
38
Barrow to Murray, November 4, 1822. John Murray Archives, London JMM 1138/2.
39
Times, September 23, 1823, 4.
37

30

A second edition to the first narrative was ready for release only four months after
the first edition but oddly enough, Franklin did not know this was to happen. Murray
probably already intended then to release the second edition on the heels of the first.
Negotiations between Franklin and Murray did not state that a second edition was
planned, but Franklin was plotting behind the scenes with Richardson for a possible
second edition by July of 1823. Here, they spoke of changing Richardson's account of
shooting the voyageur who had murdered and cannibalised Hood40 • This was discussed in
order to take away any glimmer of guilt from Richardson and in the end from Franklin as
well, who could have been accused of not keeping his officers under control. Perhaps
Murray thought the same thing when he decided a second edition should come out
quickly. He probably wanted to stop any grumbling from the public concerning
improprieties. Murray then ordered the type to be reset for the second edition to meet the
demands of the market that he so poorly underestimated. Franklin became a best selling
author.
In 1824 Murray published the third and fourth editions. Although Murray had to
take on the expense of the new editions, they were cheaper, so more people could buy the
narrative. Franklin had suggested that the fourth edition contain more of Robert Hood's
art work, but Barrow refused, arguing that owners of the previous editions would feel

cheated that they did not have the same art work.
Though it is not all together clear how much money Franklin finally made from the
first narrative, he was receiving substantial rewards for his efforts. Murray presented the
same offer of five hundred guineas to William Edward Parry in 1819 for the publishing
rights to his Arctic narrative. But Parry did profit more than Franklin on his second
edition. Parry got another five hundred guineas, where Franklin is reported only to have

40

Mcllraith, Life of Sir John Richardson, 114.

31

received 170 guineas. But Franklin came out on top for he had two more editions plus
foreign editions. All estimates put Franklin's earnings at nearly 1500 guineas, an amount
equal to three year's salary as Governor. Franklin, without a doubt, was hoping he could
repeat the success in his next expedition's narrative.
However, the less than sensational outcome of the second expedition and the far
less enthusiastic response by the Admiralty and the Murray publishing house, forced
Franklin to change his strategy. He began to think more consciously about creating an
account of the journey that would be interesting. In a sense, he had to make something out
of nothing. In 1823 all he had to do was satisfy the public's eagerness to read about the
highly published controversial events. In 1828 he was required to take the mechanical,
formal tone off what had happened. Since Franklin broke publishing records with the 1823
edition, it became a tough act to follow, and, unfortunately, what he had accomplished
with the second expedition would not sell anywhere near the numbers of the first edition.
The idea of adding details to a carefully composed narrative was not a new idea in
Franklin's day. In fact, many explorers had been guilty of playing with reality. Alexander
Mackenzie's account of his voyage down the Mackenzie river was actually not his own.
The narrative had been written by a very clever, and very invisible, ghost writer/editor,
William Combe. Mackenzie had no interest in publishing until a friend introduced him to
Combe, a professional writer by trade and avid reader of travel literature. Finally, in 1801,
Mackenzie's narrative, Voyages From Montreal, was published ten years after the initial
voyage. Mackenzie's notes were sketchy at best so when he and Combe discussed writing
the narrative in 1799, Mackenzie could not quite remember the full details of the events.
Cut from the same cloth was Samuel Hearne's Journey to the Northern Ocean, a book
which was not published until twenty years after the voyage. David Thompson spent five
years writing a narrative of his journey down the river that now bears his name, but
unfortunately, he died before its completion. This is just a small collection of explorers
32

who understood the possibilities of manipulation in writing, even if they were truly more
interested in geographical knowledge and learning.
But Franklin's journey in 1819-1822 was different. He had failed yet he lived to tell
about it, and Murray was eager for Franklin to get the first narrative out before time
elapsed, not because he worried about Franklin's memory, but about a decline in public
interest. To Murray, public interest was money in his pocket and he did not want to lose
out. The Admiralty offices as well, looking for an excuse to prove they were still valuable,
urged Franklin to start writing immediately. Thus, instead of waiting for what seemed to
be the customary ten or twenty years, Franklin and Richardson started to work on the
human interest story of the disaster.
At the close ofthe 1825-1827 expedition, Franklin had to weigh more carefully the
concerns of the audience and rhetoric because the events themselves had little appeal. Still,
Franklin was relatively quick in getting out the second narrative as compared to Hearne
and Thompson, for he was aware that his telling of the events, rather than the events
themselves, offered the only hope for public acceptance. He seems to have used his time in
1828-1829 to write his narrative as a conscious writer rather than relying on his journal of
facts, figures, charts, and diagrams for the Admiralty.
But a literary writer Franklin was not, and the thought made him uncomfortable. In
1828, he again begged for Richardson's assistance in writing the second narrative. He and
Franklin had spent long hours in 1822-1823 going over diction, spelling, and grammar.
Richardson accepted, but had to pull out when he was transferred for a brief period to the
Great Lakes as a relief surgeon and he would be away for Franklin's deadline. In a letter to
his sister Franklin wrote

The prospect of becoming an author is by no means
gratifying to me, indeed nothing but a sense of duty
33

would prompt me to undertake the task. My objection
partly arises from a consciousness of my inability to equal
the stile [sic] and language of most ofthe Modem travellers.
I am afraid I cant [sic] do this without Richardson's help. 41

This clearly shows that Franklin was very insecure about his difficulties in writing.
He equated good writing with sensibility of style and proper language and it seems he
would rather have been known as a travel writer. So Murray, knowing there was a
problem that needed to be rectified, sent in help, a ghost writer named Thomas Briddle to
help Franklin flesh out an interesting, and sellable, second narrative.
Briddle was a Cambridge educated literary critic whose scholarly interests lay
mainly with fantasy writing for boys. Murray hired him in 1823 to head the children's
literature division of the publishing house42 • Briddle also had a knack for teaching
individuals with learning disabilities, and though he was not specifically assigned to
Franklin, he consulted the explorer on a weekly basis on content, style, and language.
Though there is no existing correspondence between Briddle and Fninklin, Franklin seems
to have benefited from Briddle's influence as the second narrative, thought not as exciting
as the first, is well written.
When Franklin wrote his journal from 1825-1827, his language is much different
than in the first, almost as ifhe were anticipating that the public, not the Admiralty, would
read it upon his return. For example, in several places through the journal, he says "The
Reader will observe", "The reader will be interested", "The reader is invited to
contemplate". As the Admiralty did not read the journals for the pure pleasure of doing so,
Franklin had his intended audience in mind. And when his journal indulges in an anecdote

41

Franklin to Elizabeth Sellwood, October 10, 1828, SPRI MS 210.
Employee Lists Book, John Murray Archives, JMM 2551122, 56. Reports show Briddle was hired six
months after Murray published Franklin's first edition of the first narrative.

42

34

complete with "I said-they said" dialogue, about a Yankee steamship passenger's
inquisitive mind, Franklin again had the British people, not the Admiralty in mind.
Franklin took all the mundane, Admiralty required information such as
topographical charts, explanations of the wildlife and botanical specimens, and sea depth
explorations and turned them, thanks in part to Thomas Briddle, into picturesque
landscapes designed for a Burkian audience. In other passages, he described the scientific
tools the expedition used as devices to measure sublime reality and picturesque beauty. In
order for Franklin to become an author and not just a geographer in a wild, strange place,
he himself must change mentally, or as it were, keep up with the times. Unable to rely only
on actual events, he must become a picturesque hunter for the public back home who need
him to keep the myth of the Arctic alive. And keeping in tune with an author, for the

second narrative to be on par with the first he must create a protagonist. He was no longer
able to depend on the hostile land that served as the protagonist in the first narrative. So
Franklin created a new protagonist: the natives. They were portrayed as saviours in the
first narrative, and as heathen, blood-thirsty savages in the second. As the created
landscapes catered to the typical travel literature audience, the created images of the
natives stirred feelings ofharrowingly bold adventure in others, particularly young boys.
Exploration literature is as fictional as the popular mystery novels of the day, such
as Frankenstein. Both manipulate material to entice the audience into believing what they
read is true, and for what means? For Franklin it was fame and recognition, for Murray, it
meant a big house in the High Street. A close examination of the journals and the
narratives shows two very different works, particularly in regards to the second
expedition. We can only speculate what the narrative's popularity from the third and final
expedition would have looked like had he survived, but it likely would have been quite a
narrative for the time.

35

By the time the second expedition's narrative was going to its second printing, a
new medium was beginning to take shape both in Britain and the United States. It was the
beginning of the popular press, which now meant that a growing number of people could
follow their heroes in the broadsheet pages rather than the expanded, and often expensive
for most, pages of a travel narrative. The world was also about to enter its most intense
concentration ever on Arctic exploration and the popular press was there to chronicle it.

36

Chapter Three: The Search for Franklin and the Popular Press.
The English language popular press was actually born in the United States and
made its way to Britain several decades later. The reason for this is that America had all
the prerequisites for the creation of a mass reading public: high literacy rates, leisure time,
and disposable income to purchase newspapers. 43 The second most important reason is the
equipment discovered and used in America to produce and distribute large quantities of
newspapers. Before the 1830s, the printing press had changed very little since its creation
in the 1450s. But thanks to the recent developments of the Industrial Revolution,
American press investor Fredrich Koenig patented the world's first steam driven press in
1811 that enabled printers to print both side ofthe paper simultaneously, enabling them to
print twice as many papers in the same amount of time. In 1814, the New York Times was
the first to use Koenig's invention which could print 1200 sheets an hour. 44 By 1825,
improvements allowed the printers to print 3000 sheets and hour and by 1880 that number
was increased to 10,000 per hour. 45
The effect of technological developments on the efficiency of newspaper
production was not confined to printing. Distribution and news gathering techniques also
improved dramatically throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1840s
railways in Britain ensured that papers could be printed overnight in London and delivered
by late afternoon to cities such as Bristol and Birmingham46 • By the 1870s, that time was
cut down to a guarantee of a nine o'clock delivery in those same regions. In the 1840s, the
New York Herald established a regular system of paper carriers so that subscribers in

Albany and Philadelphia could read their papers at breakfast47 • But the most important

43

Richard Atlick. The English Common Reader. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) 28.
Edward Howe, Newspaper Publishing in the Nineteenth Century. (London: Howe Press, 1943) 23.
45
Ibid
46
Ibid., 36.
47
A.M. Lee. The Daily Newspaper in America. (New York: Octagon Press, 1973) 67.
44

37

step in the rapid transmission of news was the invention of the telegraph. On May 21,
1844, when Samuel Morse was sending his first telegraphic message, he also sent along
the results of a vote in the American House of Representatives to the Baltimore Gazette,
although he sent the wrong results48 • In 1845, the first telegraph sent to a British
newspaper was sent from Portsmouth to the London Chronicle. Newspapers all over
America and Britain were quick to use the new wire service to disseminate information as
quickly as possible. As newspapers began to reach a growing readership as the nineteenth
century progressed, so too grew a new way of reporting about the world. It was called
sensationalism. This new trend started in America in the 1830s and would make its way to
Britain just in time to cover the tragedy ofthe 1845 Franklin expedition.
, In 1833, American journalist and businessman, Benjamin Day first published his
four page newspaper the New York Sun. Up until Day's arrival on the newspaper scene,
American dailies primarily served as political platforms for individuals while attracting a
smaller few into the world of business and international trade. The rest of the spaces were
filled with mundane clippings lifted from other papers, few of which would meet the
standards of the day for integrity or popular human interest. Day revolutionised news by
first lowering the cost of his paper to one cent per copy (the lowest in America at the
time) and added to the standard newspaper distribution by means of trains and boys on
bikes, Day hired seasonal labourers to sell his papers in Times Square by yelling out the
paper's daily headlines to entice passers-by. Day had by then realised that the key to
popular journalism lay in appealing to the emotions of the masses rather than to their
intellects. Thus, he filled his papers with interesting but trivial local news, feature stories
usually about animals or children to attract more female readers, and humorous stories
that were meaningful in the texture of human life. Day was an avid reader of Gilpin,

48

Ibid., 90.

38

Uvedale Price and of many explorers like Buchan and Parry, and was enthralled with
Burke's theory that the sublime evoked terror and fear. To sell more papers, Day applied
this ideology of terror and fear to his reporting style by covering murder, suicides, and
duels while deliberately neglecting to cover political and economic news as the years went
on49 • Perhaps one of Day's earliest examples of the terror ofthe sublime in reporting came
in 1835 when the Sun ran a series of articles and drawings describing the apparent lunar
discoveries of British astronomer John Herschel, including reports of strange amphibious,
man-bat creatures that inhabited the moon:
... alas Man's hope of flying and travelling to the Moon will be dashed
with the latest discovery... a source says these horrifying creatures
look like the average man, but possess strange and wonderful wings
and long fangs that can penetrate the flesh of any Earthly being ...
no one will be able to look at the Moon again and think it a peaceful
50
pace
I ....
The Sun's circulation rocketed that third week of September, and even after the series had
been unveiled as a hoax story, the paper retained that increase of readership. The results of
the innovation of sublime reporting brought the paper's circulation from just over 1000
readers in 1833 to just under 15,000 in just two years. 51 However, as time went on, Day
would have competition as others realised the power of sensationalism on the imaginations
of readers as well as the high earning potential of a wide readership.
By 1840, there were four new newspapers in New York that catered to the
growing need for news that terrified, but only one would actually out-do the Sun. This
was the New York Herald, started by James Gordon Bennett in 1836. He was far more
sensational than Day, and as time would tell, he had a huge passion for the Arctic regions.
When Bennett started out, his style was very similar to Day's, but he soon

49

Francis O'Brien. The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 (New York: D.Appleton and Co, 1918) 75.
The Sun, New York. September 19, 1835, 1.
Sl 1bid.,78.

50

39

expanded his region of reporting to other more remote parts of the world. Bennett too,
was an avid reader of all the major books and theories of the sublime of the day; Kant,
Burke, Gilpin, all influenced his editorial style. He read as many explorers journals as he
could whether they were from Africa, the Arctic, or the Amazon and based on these
books, he developed an editorial style that heightened the terror of the sublime in all his
writings. He also appealed to the business people in New York by developing the city's
most comprehensive business section52 • He devoted space to New York's high society,
religious leaders, sports figures, none of whom had been prominently featured in any daily
anywhere before. He also was the creator of the headline and the sub-headline. And
Bennett did not hold back when it came to reporting the terrifying sublime news of the
day. Typical headlines and second headline read: "PAYNE'S BRUTALITY:--Battering a
Fellow Workman to Death to Please His Wife", "HER LIFE BLOOD FLOWING: A
Woman Afllicted With Melancholia Opens Her Veins in a Bathroom", "BABY TODD
MURDERED BY MOTHER: A Penniless Young Mother Throws Her Baby From the
Tenth Story Window" or "IN FLAMES: Massacre of Europeans by the Alexandrians". 53
By 1827, the Herald had out-shone the Sun with its reports of crime, seduction, and
scandal. "I have seen depravity to the core," wrote Bennett in his paper, "I proclaim each
morning the deep guilt that enshrouds our society." 54 Bennett was the first newspaper
editor in America to coin the phrase "sensationalism" using it to refer to the terror of the
sublime in reporting as Day had. He had studied the cold, calculated British press and
wanted to be more sensational like Day. Bennett was calculating that "society was more
willing to sit down and read six pages worth of testimony from a murder or divorce trial

52

The Wall Street Journal used Bennett's paper as their model to reach business people world wide.
The Herald, June 10, 1837. February 23, 1838. May 6 1838. September 5 1838. All front page stories.
54
Ibid., August 19, 1837.

53

40

then they were to read the work of genius by one of the world's foremost writers". 55 And
he was right. The divorce trials of several New York City socialites were eagerly
anticipated with headlines like: "MRS. FERGUSON THREATENS TO HANG
HERSELF! She Demands Fifty Per-cent of the Estate and Will Commit Suicide if
Demands Not Met." and "COLONEL SHANTON'S MISTRESS TELLS ALL. How the
Esteemed Officer Attacked His Wife in Boston. "56 Again, Bennett's sales increased and he
knew he had a winning writing style. Such reports were terrifying to most people; it was
terrible and tragic to think society was this corrupt and cruel.
By 1840, Herald-style sensationalism was found in newspapers all over America,
but on the other side of the Atlantic, this new form of sensationalising the sublime was
frowned upon as being immoral and a false means of reporting news. British papers still
overflowed with dullness and images of the sublime and picturesque particularly in its
reporting of exploration. One reason why this was the case was the existence in Britain of
taxes on knowledge, that meant the newspapers could not be distributed to everyone. This
meant that, according to the Stamp Act of 1819, a periodical which contained news was
subject to a heavy tax. So this meant that papers in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s cost
three shillings. Thus, only the privileged few could afford to buy newspaper
subscriptions. 57 Those able to purchase the papers were businessmen, politicians, or the
gentry wanting to keep up with their peers. But, by 1842, this was all to change as the tax
on newspapers and periodicals was lowered to allow all British papers to cost no more
than three pence a paper. Though their circulations were smaller than in America, British
newspapers like the London Times and Daily Mirror had circulations of 28,000 in 1845,

55
56

57

Ibid.
Ibid., July 1838.

Newspapers in Britain at this time could not be purchased on a day-to-day basis. A minimum of
a one year's subscription was required.

41

while the powerhouse papers became the London Illustrated News, The News of the

World, and Lloyd's Weekly with over 100,000 in circulation a year. For the first time since
the reign of Queen Anne, the British press was free of fiscal constraints, and this allowed
for more freedom of the press which opened the door for sensationalism to take root in
order to appeal to all and increase sales.
Despite the use of the terror of the sublime in America and Britain, the press still
had not truly discovered exploration as a topic for suitable sensationalist reporting and
would not until about 1847. Still the dominant views of these uncharted lands were the
sublime and the picturesque, it would have to take the death of these two ideologies
before the sensationalism of exploration could firmly take hold, and that opportunity came
with the much anticipated launch of the 1845 Franklin expedition.
Franklin set sail from London for the Northwest Passage on May 18, 1845 under
much hype and media spectacle. Again, John Barrow had a hand in orchestrating this
media coverage, for he had personally gone to visit the editors of the London Illustrated

News and the London Times to inform them of the impeding voyage. The London
Illustrated News on May 11 1845 stated,
Franklin prepares to accomplish what no one else has been able to
thus far ... the sailing of the North-West Passage. At last the sublime
terrain of the Arctic will be conquered by the Gallant and Fearless
Franklin. 58

Franklin's expedition was the largest and most well equipped expedition ever mounted by
the Admiralty, and Barrow was so optimistic that Franklin would come back that no
contingency plan was implemented in case he did not. Franklin's party consisted of 129

58

London l/Iustrated News, May 11, 1845, 2.

42

men and two ships that were the first to be outfitted with a metal plated hull and steam
powered screws to cut through the Arctic pack ice. Even the latest in canned food
technology was taken and only the top officers currently serving in the British Navy were
chosen for this mission. Joseph Conrad would later describe these Arctic explorers the
"most dominating figures among all seamen explorers of the first half of the nineteenth
century. "59 Arctic experts, the people, and more importantly, the press were equally
optimistic about the outcome of the voyage that the London Illustrated News reported on
its front page: "The evident design of Providence in placing difficulties before man is, to
sharpen his faculties for their mastery... and an expedition is at present on foot which will
probably complete the outline ofthe American continent toward the Pole." 60 •
Not only was there a considerable material investment in the Franklin expedition,
there was also the emotional investment. The expedition was merely about national pride,
but it represented the explorer's heroic capacity to tame nature. The crews were viewed in
the British press as heroic idols willing to give their lives for their discoveries and "whose
aims were certainly as pure as the air of those high latitudes where not a few had
previously laid down their lives for the advancement ofgeography." 61
Franklin's final voyage, however, took place during one of the coldest winters on
written record and this, together with the things that the expedition was not prepared for,
resulted in a disaster that had not been seen before or since in the history of Arctic
exploration. The realisation that Franklin may have failed came very slowly to the British
over the next several years. It was not until November of 1847 that Sir James Clark Ross
casually walked into Admiralty House in London and enquired about when he may see
Franklin back in London. Until then, Franklin was little more than a thought in people's

59

Joseph Conrad. Last Essays (London: J.M.Dent and Sons, 1926) 82.
London Illustrated News, May 20, 1845, 1.
61
London Times, May 20, 1845, I.

60

43

minds. Only in the spring of the following year did serious questions begin to be asked
about Franklin's whereabouts (again raised by Ross). Now, it began to sink into the public
that Franklin, his men, and his two ships may have disappeared in the frozen lands of the
Canadian Arctic. Newspapers in Britain and America displayed headlines that evoked fear
that Franklin had lost his 20 year battle to conquer the Arctic. Headlines claimed
"FRANKLIN FEARED DEAD: The Sublime Takes another Hero. "62 Bennett, who was
becoming increasingly fascinated with the Arctic as he followed the Franklin saga, delved
deeper into the fears society held about this unknown place: "ARCTIC HORRORS. THE
TERRIFYING TRUTH?: The Suspected Deaths of 129 British Explorers. They Were the
Best in Britain, but Even They Could Not Cheat Death." 63 Bennett recorded increased
sales ,that year as he chronicled the Franklin story and his stories were to get more
sensational and frightening as time went on and as new information about the expedition
came to light.
That same year, Franklin's friends and colleagues mounted three search efforts to
find him: one by sea from Lancaster Sound led by Ross, a westerly approach by sea at the
Bering Strait by Sir Thomas Moore, and overland down the Mackenzie River led by Sir
John Richardson. Dr. John Rae also searched the Mackenzie area separately from
Richardson. Despite the fears of what these officers might find, the public appeared calm,
optimistic, and upbeat. As the Times reported: "We do not feel any unnecessary anxiety as
to the fate of these two ships ... We place great hope in the materiel as well as the

personnel of the expedition, for ships better adapted to the service, better equipped in all
respects, or better officered and manned, never left the shores ofEngland." 64
Still the searchers for Franklin could not break away from their previously held

62

London Times, April 18, 1847, l.
The Herald, May 16, 1847, I.
64
Ibid. , March 16, 1848, I. Emphasis the Times.

63

44

visions of the north and continued to view the region much as they had in decades past.
Richardson reported to the London Illustrated News before he left England in search of his
friend: "Here only, of all the countries I have seen, can I understand the deep blue shades
of the Italian masters ... The depth of shade which marks out low snowy waves of the lake
when the sun is low would surprise a painter. "65
Although Richard clearly could not tear himself away from viewing the world,
particularly the Arctic, with a picturesque eye, most British newspapers of the time were
moving away from this point of view and focusing more on the heroic qualities of the
explorers in terrible and sublime locations:
The return of Sir James Clark Ross from his voyage in search of Sir
John Franklin recalls our attention from the ordinary topics of discussion
to those distant and desolate regions of eternal ice from which man and
his interests seem for ever banished. That where there is danger men should
be found to brave and conquer it, is not a matter of surprise. There will
always be forthcoming adventurous spirits... ready to grapple with peril
for peril's sake ... To men of such stern, unyielding stuff, the human race
has been greatly indebted. 66
It was not only description that the British papers avoided, but lively portrayals in

general. They were much like Franklin's journals: long, tedious, and lacking excitement.
For example, on October 1, 1850, the London Times ran 78 columns on the dispatches of
Ross, Richardson, Moore, Rae, and ran 94 columns devoted just to French explorer
Joseph-Rene Bellot, who volunteered his time and resources to search for Franklin, but
who himself was tragically killed in the pack ice later that year. Oddly enough, many of
these newspaper columns were not written by journalists but by the searchers themselves

65
66

London Dlustrated News, March 19, 1848,2.
London Weekiy Times, November 25, 1849, I.

45

and submitted when and where they could. The majority of these articles fell into six
defining categories, none of which made for enticing or interesting reading. They were the
official searchers' accounts that were often not edited at the paper but printed word for
word; pre-expedition sailing records released by the Admiralty to the editors of the
London papers; letters received from expedition members; reports of lectures that were
taking place in London that focused on the Arctic landscape and possible theories into
where Franklin might be; letters to the editor, and editorials. In these respects, British
newspapers, particularly the Times, the London Illustrated News, and the Morning Herald
gave much more coverage to the Franklin search than they had to all previous Northwest
Passage expeditions combined.

Similarly, all newspapers American newspapers also picked up on the Franklin
saga after the first American Franklin search party, sponsored by Henry Grinnell, left New
York in 1850. It is with this introduction of Franklin into the American press that a
distinct difference in reporting styles between both sides of the Atlantic can be seen.
Stories about Franklin in American newspapers in the 1850s tended to be written
more sensationally than those in British newspapers. For example, when the Grinnell
sponsored ship Advance returned to New York in 1851, the New York Herald printed an
article that discussed how the crews interacted with the Inuit, the relics they brought
home, and the methods used of measuring height and distance when trapped in the pack
ice. Though these stories tended to explain how the weather was terribly cold, that the
Inuit were untrusting of their southern guests, and that the possibility of finding Franklin
alive was very bleak, they were far more reader friendly articles than those that were
popping up in the mainstream British press:
The majority of the crews, as if relieved from a heavy responsibility, and
it seemed by common consent, a sympathetic, upheaving, sickening consent
46

rushed almost to man for the bulwarks of the vessel, and then there gave
full flow to their 'pent-up' feelings without a murmur or reproach from
anyone .. .It is certain that in this waste, Franklin is dead. 67
For seven more years, expeditions by the dozen sailed all through the Canadian
Arctic in search of Franklin and returned with only pieces of Navy Broadcloth, buttons,
and spoiled tin cans. These desolate rays of fading hope captivated the press and in turn
the public. Franklin was lionised and hero worshipped as a man who clearly, it had to be
assumed, had become a martyr for his country and for the advancement of science. His
gift, as Campbell suggests the hero gives back, was the vast exploration of an area that
was once regarded as desolate and unforgiving. Even popular writers of the day began to
lament Franklin as a hero in the name of God, country, and science. Herman Melville's

Moby Dick was set in the polar regions and David Thoreau Walden is filled with
references to the Franklin search, arguing that all exploration other than the exploration of
one's soul, was futile and wasteful of life:
Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin
the only man who is truly lost, that his wife should be so earnest
to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he is himself? Be
rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and the Frobisher
of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. 68
In Britain, the popular author who did more for maintaining the public's fascination
with the Arctic and Franklin was Charles Dickens, who helped to keep the frenzied
interest in Franklin alive well after Franklin was confirmed dead. Dickens did not write
about the Arctic, but his magazine Household Words served as a forum to discuss Arctic
exploration in general and of the mystique surrounding Franklin. Household Words,
though a magazine, was printed and designed like a London daily. It had a readership of

67

68

New York Daily Times October 3, 1851,2.
David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Penquin Classics, 1969) 119.

47

125,000 in 1855 and was the only popular forum for sensationalist writings in Britain that
probed the lives ofbeggars, prostitutes, cannibals in Africa, and salacious politicians. And
Dickens did his best to maintain the Arctic sublime that was beginning to diminish in the
press on both sides ofthe Atlantic.
Think of Christmas in the tremendous wastes of snow and ice, that
lie in the remotest regions of the earth! Yet it has been kept in those
awful solitudes, cheerfully, by Englishmen. Where crashing mountains
of ice, heaped up together, have made a chaos round their ship, which
in a moment might have stiffened upon the bodies of men lying asleep,
closely housed by huge fires, and plasters have turned to ice upon the
wounds of others accidentally hurt; where the ships have been
indistinguishable from the environing ice, and have resembled themselves
far less than the surrounding masses have resembled monstrous piles of
architecture which could not possible be there or anywhere ... 69 •
Dickens' image of the Arctic sublime only continued as long as the Admiralty was
willing to maintain a search for Franklin and as prize money for finding a safe route
through the Northwest Passage continued to go unclaimed. However, that was to change
when in 1853, Robert McClure proclaimed that he was the first to safely navigate through
the Passage. Not only was Franklin missing and presumed dead, but one of exploration's
most alluring goals had been reached. McClure's completion of the Northwest Passage
inspired probably the last classic images of the Arctic sublime in the London Illustrated
News:

The ice was floating in broken detached masses, with frosted summits,
beautifully brilliant beneath a bright sun and azure sky, assuming the most
extraordinary and grotesque appearances-from ships under full sail to
whole squadrons of gun-boats, spires of churches ... towers, domes, and

69

Charles Dickens. Household Words. December 20, 1851 . 10.

48

pinnacles, which lent a strange charm to these lonely regions 70 •

Three months later the Admiralty announced that if nothing concrete was heard
from any other the search parties about the fate of Franklin and his crews by March 31,
the Admiralty would officially declare all members of the expedition lost. Despite Lady
Jane Franklin's relentless pursuit of knowledge of her husband's fate, the Admiralty had
lost interest in continuing with the search. Now that the Northwest Passage had been
completed, the Admiralty began to lose interest in the Arctic altogether. Any hopes for
another Admiralty-funded search expedition was quickly discarded as war in the Crimea
broke out March 27, 1853.
But as fate would have it, as soon as the Admiralty turned their backs on the
Arctic, the first definite evidence of the fate of Franklin surfaced. In the fall of that year,
Dr. John Rae, perhaps the most successful Arctic explorer of all time, reported to the
Admiralty what had happened to Franklin, thus ending the period of the Arctic sublime
and opening the way for British sensationalist reporting to take root in the Arctic and
planting the seeds for the Admiralty's return to the Arctic in the next few decades.

70

London Illustrated News, October 22, 1853,2.

49

Chapter Four: The Fate of Franklin: The Death ofthe Sublime and the Rise of
Sensationalism in the Modern Press, 1855-1870.
The years between 1855 and 1870 are significant to the study of how the popular
press in America and Britain changed its ways of viewing the world and how the newly
defined roles of heroes fit into that new world image. The American public's way of
perceiving unexplored lands through the conventions of the sublime and picturesque were
no longer consistent with the horrible realities exposed by the discovery of the fate of
Franklin. The sublime was replaced with a new vision based on man's continuing struggle
against nature, and the British public was now beginning to adopt this view as well. The
stories that were being brought back from the Arctic in the early stages of the search for
Franklin demonstrated the completion of the transition from the terror of the sublime to
the sensational in the presentation of the Arctic. This transition was subtle because it did
not involve a major adjustment of the cognitive element in the physical image of the north;
rather it influenced the affective element, that is, the interpretation ofthat physical change.
In other words, the Arctic did not change, but how explorers envisioned the Arctic
changed because they had abandoned the convention of the sublime to view nature.
Although the wording of many explorers' accounts of the Arctic in the 1860s was not
significantly different than the accounts written in the 1820s, the underlying image was
different; whereas the Arctic was mysterious, frightening and sublime before, it was now a
region of excitement, tension, and wonderment--a place to be understood for its own sake.
In fact, the face of exploration was changing all around the world. Explorers were
not so much interested in conquering the sublime landscape but were becoming genuinely
interested in the scientific and cultural benefits of exploration. Many adventurers were
interested in new lands for their own sake, particularly in the far north. Travellers to these
areas came away with fresh interpretations and exciting images, and together with changes
50

in the American and British press, set the stage for the subsequent sensationalising of
exploration into the later half of the ninetieth century. But sensationalism was about to
take off with an accusation that turned the reading public in Britain and America upsidedown with disbelief
Since 1848, when the first concerns arose about the fate of Franklin, the public in
America and Britain were fascinated with the newspaper details of the various search
parties. On October 23 1854, the London Times published a report that Rae had sent to
the Admiralty back in July of that same year. The British public finally had an answer to
what happened to Franklin, but it was not a pleasant truth that Rae was bringing forth.
Rae began by stating that while he was on Boothia Peninsula, he encountered a group of
Inuit who, he claimed, gave him sufficient evidence that several bodies of European men
were found on King William Island. Rae made his way to King William Island to search
and concluded that these were Franklin's men and that they had died here of scurvy and
starvation as they were likely trying to make their way to Back's Great Fish River in an
attempt to sail down to the nearest fur trading fort. This conclusion was bad enough for a
public who believed that Britain's best naval officers were incapable of failure, but what
Rae said next sent shockwaves through British society and reverberated strongly in
America:
Some of the bodies had been buried (probably those of the first victims
of the famine); some were in a tent or tents. others under the boat, which
had been turned over to for a shelter; and several lay scattered about in
different directions... From the mutilated state of many ofthe corpses and the
contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been
driven to the last resource--cannibalism--as a means of prolonging existence... 71 •

There was an immediate outcry in Britain of horror, disbelief and scepticism that

71

London Times. October 23, 1854, 1.

51

cannibalism really could have occurred on Franklin's expedition. Many newspaper editors
accused Rae of fabricating the story in order to collect the 10,000 pound reward for
discovering Franklin's fate, while other's discounted the cannibalism story and instead
believed that the Inuit had killed Franklin and his crews. 72 Rae was attacked in editorials,
especially when he said he believed the Inuit testimony. It didn't take long even for Charles
Dickens to break his silence. He put Rae on trial in Household Words by claiming to voice
the opinions of his nation: "It is in the highest degree improbable that such men as these
officers and crews of the two lost ships would, or could, in any extremity of hunger
alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means. '173 • Although Rae wrote to
Household Words to stand by his claims, Dickens continued to argue that the pride of

Britain would never consider stooping to the level Rae suggested could be possible in dire
circumstances. Even as Rae published his full account of what happened in the magazine
over two issues from December to January 1854-55, Dickens came back in his editorial
section to suggest caution to his readers that "there are no ample or satisfactory means of
discerning the truth." 74 To further his point on cannibalism, Dickens teamed up with
another well known English author of the time, Wilkie Collins, to write a play based on
what they thought would happen to a group of British naval officers if caught in the same
dilemma. The play was called the Frozen Deep, and it became one of the most popular
plays of its time by drawing in crowds of25,000 in its opening week in September 1855. 75
Despite Dickens' very public disapproval of Rae's claims, the British press tended
to take a more subdued approach. After a brief burst of negative press, the British
newspapers quickly turned their attentions back to the continuing Crimean War. The

72

London Times, October 26, 1854, 1.
Charles Dickens. Household Words. November 15, 1854a, 361.
74
Ibid., January 8, t 855a, 221.
15
London Times, September 14, 1855, 8.
73

52

Times reported "Our work amid the snow and ice is now limited to the certain
investigations which may throw light upon the matter in which our heroic FRANKLIN and
his crew came to their end. "76 The press felt the topic was just too controversial to
discuss, but their own admission as to what they were willing to report about Franklin
meant they too were publicly condemning Rae's report.
Rae's problems didn't stop with the press's treatment of him. His own peers refused
to acknowledge him let alone speak to him, and he was barred from attending the Royal
Geographical Society's annual general meeting in 1855 for fear that he would bring up the
Franklin debate. 77 Rae was ignored and became the earliest example of an explorer who
was not elevated to the status ofhero because he presented facts which the establishment,
the press, and the public refused to believed of its most esteemed British navy. Unlike
many other explorers of the Arctic--Parry, Franklin, Richardson, the Rosses, Back, and
McClure--Rae was never knighted nor was he ever considered one of Britain's national
heroes. 78
Rae tried to substantiate his claims with photographs. While he was in the Arctic in
1853, he met up with Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, an American physician, and tireless selfpromoter, in search of Franklin. Kane had a photographer, Amos Bonsall, accompany him
on the voyage. Kane was hoping to take some photographs to take back to Bennett at the
Herald for Bennett was beginning to wonder whether the new technology of

Daguerreotype photography could increase his readership. Bennett wanted to bring the
Arctic right to the people, and he felt photography would be even more effective than his
authors' sensational words. A published letter written by Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes, surgeon
of the expedition, on July 20 1853 confirmed that Bonsall did have some success with the

76

Ibid., November 8, 1854, I.
London lllustrated News. May 10, 1855, 3.
78
RL. Richards, Dr. John Rae. (Whitby: Whitby City Press, 1985) II.
77

53

photographic equipment while in Greenland79 •
A number of pictures have been taken, representing the
geographical and picturesque character of the country.
The difficulties apprehended in the working ofthe
chymicals (sic) have been overcome, and Mr. Bousalt (sic)
thinks he will be able to take pictures with a great deal of
decency, even in the highest latitudes we may reach. 80

The next year, as the party moved south to search for Franklin again, Bonsall took
pictures at King William Island of several bodies that had been strewn across the
landscape. These pictures were taken back to America, where Rae examined them before
heading back to Britain. He claimed that the King William Island skeletons showed visible
cut marks to suggest that the flesh of Franklin's men had been cut off with knives rather
than the teeth of Arctic animals. The Times claimed "Dr. Rae will stop at nothing to have
us believe the worst of Franklin and his crew. These pictures are unreliable and tell us
nothing about what happened to them. "81 However, Bennett, Bonsall, Kane, and others all
agreed that the pictures were unsatisfactory and they were never published in the media.
Again Rae was criticised for going to extremes to prove his point. The pictures may have
held something, but perhaps only a trained eye could see the alleged marks and Rae may
have relied on his memory of being in the Arctic and seeing the bodies rather than
remembering what he saw in the photos. For the next decade, several expeditions headed
by explorers such as Sir Edward Belcher, Captain Inglefield, and Sir Francis McClintock
brought back pictures but with no real substantiating evidence concerning the fate or

79

Douglas Wamsley and William Barr, "Early Photographers of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland" in
J.C.H. King and Henrietta Lidchi, Imaging the Arctic (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998) 38.
80
Ibid.
81
The Times, September 15 1855, 3.

54

Franklin, nor any unlocked any secrets of the Arctic in general. 82 It was discovered later
that this was because the Daguerreotype was an inappropriate form of photography to use
in the Arctic.
Although the British psyche concerning the Arctic had changed after Rae's report,
the press and public alike tried to disparage Rae's findings in any way possible. The
American press jumped all over the story and wrote some sensational headlines: "IS IT
TRUE? Official Utterances of the latest in the Franklin Search. Rae's Report Shakes
Britain, but the British Government Does Not Deny the Accusations.", "WERE THEY
CANNIBALS? Shocking Accusations Out of Britain", and "THE SHAME OF THE
BRITISH NAVY: How the Country's Best Seamen Lost Control." 83 This treatment of
Franklin in the American press gave the British further cause to be upset. But as no more
word was coming from the Arctic concerning the "truth" about Franklin, the first
suspicions that Rae may have been at least partially correct began to surface. It was the
beginning of a new way ofviewing the Arctic. For centuries the Arctic had been viewed as
a terrible sublime place of terror that contained its own devilish hints of beauty and
grandeur. Knowing that Franklin had disappeared was tragic. But now knowing that the
men had starved to death or had eaten each other was altogether different. The reality and
the proximity of the disaster to the British public had eliminated all hints of the sublime
when defining the Arctic. No longer was the Arctic sublime--it was real.
No, there are no more sunny continents-no more islands of the blesthidden under the far horizons, tempting the dreamer over the undiscovered
seas; nothing but those weird and tragic shores, those cliffs of everlasting
ice and mainlands of frozen snow, which have ever produced anything
to us but a late and sad discovery of the depths ofhuman heroism, patience,
and bravery, such as imagination could scarcely dream of. 84

82

Wamsley and Barr, "Early Photographers ... ", 45.
The Herald, various dates in August, September, and November 1855. All front page stories.
84
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, June 1855, 589.

83

55

Four years after Rae's report was published, Francis Leopold McClintock and
William Hobson, who searched for Franklin in a ship outfitted and sponsored by Lady
Franklin, found bodies, relics, and a note that confirmed Franklin's exact day of death, and
brought their findings back to Britain. They had confirmed that Franklin had been beset in
the ice for two years and that the crews had marched south to find Back's Fish River and
canoe south. Finally, the British press had the proof they needed. They came to gradually
accept the disaster and were able to instill pride in the British navy by stressing the
courage and the self-sacrifice of Franklin and his crew. The London Illustrated News
trumpeted the heroic end ofFranklin:
Who shall tell how they struggled, how they hoped against hope, how the
fainting few who reached Cape Herschel threw themselves on their knees
and thanked their God that, if it so pleased Him that Britain and home should
never be reached! He had granted them the glory of securing to their dear
country the honour they had sought for her-the discovery of the North-West
Passage! 85

The Arctic was no longer seen as sublime or picturesque, but Franklin was
elevated to mythic status and revered as a hero for his suffering:
... at last the mystery ofFRANKLIN'S fate is solved! We know where
he died, we know the very day ofhis death.... Alas! There can be no
longer those sad wailings from an imaginary Tintagel to persuade the
credulous that an ARTHUR still lives ... We must learn that there are
powers in nature too strong for man to overcome. The dauntless soul
dies out amid the ice and snow; the spirit is never quenched though
the body perishes... We now retire from the contest ofhorror, and if
with grief we may leave the name of FRANKLIN engraved on the
pillars which the energy of mankind had dared to erect as the landmark

85

London ll/ustrated News. October 15, 1859,2.

56

of its research in the dull and lifeless region that guards the axis of the world86 •
In addition to the destruction of the sublime and picturesque and the new ideas of
sensationalising fact to gain readership, there were other factors reported in the British
press that helped to promote new images of the Arctic. Among these new ways of
thinking was the photograph. As exploration continued throughout the Arctic, more and
more scientists became interested in the Arctic for its own sake. Ethnographers took
stunning pictures of the Inuit of the Northwest Territories and Greenland using the new
wet-plate technology which allowed photography to be more successful in cold climates.
Daguerreotypes were proven to be useless and what photographs did survive are
indistinct. Hudson's Bay Company traders took photographs of Inuit settlements where
Inuit children wore western-style clothes purchased at the forts--a sight definitely not seen
or even believed down in the southern climates87 • Another factor in the changing images of
the Arctic was the approach to diet and transportation in the Arctic.
Before the last Franklin expedition, the Arctic explorers who covered the most
territory were the British navy or expeditions which were not necessarily staffed with
British officers, but sponsored by the Admiralty. This, of course, changed in 1854 with the
navy's withdrawal from the Arctic to fight the Crimean War. It was at this time that more
international expeditions headed to the Arctic. Americans, French, Norwegian, and
German expeditions to name a few showed up in the Arctic, lured there by the Franklin
saga and out of their own national self-interests. American presence in the Arctic finally
led to the purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867, while the Danish began extensive
geographical and ethnographic research in Greenland. This move toward more of a
melting-pot image of the region also meant that new methods of travel and diet entered

86

London Times, SDeptember 23, 1859, 3.
Pamela Stern. "The History of Canadian Arctic Photography: Issues of Territorial ands Cultural
Sovereignty" in J.C.H King and Henrietta Lidchi, Imaging the Arctic, 47-50.

87

57

the Arctic. Though the British still preferred to haul their own sleds and dress in navy
broadcloth, the Norwegians adopted dog sledding and the Americans began wearing seal
skin clothing taught to them by Inuit women Most countries now understood the benefits
of a vitamin C rich diet to fight scurvy in the Arctic, and although every private expedition
sponsored by the British government was scurvy-free, naval expeditions reported
outbreaks in scurvy as late as 1911. 88 These developments had different effects on the
British and American press's representation of the Arctic. The newspapers in America
tended to focus on the exciting exploits of its explorers, while the British press reported
on the ability of its explorers to conquer the harsh climate of the Arctic. However, the
British were guilty of making their journeys more difficult than need be in the Arctic.
The influx of new countries into the world of Arctic exploration meant new and
fresh visions of the region. Those who held these visions were not political, military or
naval heroes, or even professional explorers. They were researchers that had specific
concerns and interests in the Arctic.
Of the developments in Arctic exploration in the late nineteenth century, none was
more significant than the exploration of the Arctic for its own sake. Traditionally, the
Arctic had been seen as an unfortunate reality or as an obstacle in the way of mass trading
opportunities in the Orient. For British naval explorers and their promoters, like Barrow
and John Murray, the Arctic was a key to fame, promotion and wealth. Even the ordinary
seamen jumped at the chance to earn double pay because many of them believed the
Admiralty's public relations line that death in the Arctic was more rare than in the tropics,
where most preferred to serve. This is not to say, however, that geographical exploration
was not a reality in the first half of the century. John Richardson walked out of the Arctic

88

K.J. Carpenter, The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C. (Cambridge:Cambridge university Press, 1986)
214.

58

twice with Franklin with a vast knowledge of plant and marine life that was referred to for
the next 50 years. But probably the most accomplished scientific researcher of the Arctic
for his day was John Rae. His publications looked at shifting ice patterns, native lifestyles,
bird life, and the examination of frozen mammoth remains. He made a total of five
expeditions to the Arctic and did not suffer hardship on any expedition.
These explorers helped to influence and new generation of explorers that, by 1855,
private citizens began dreaming of travelling to the Arctic. So American explorers were
not unlike their British counterparts, for they saw the possibility of fame, fortune, and
constant press coverage. There are two American examples of explorers out for self
promotion in years following Franklin: Elisha Kent Kane and Charles Francis Hall.
Kane was an American naval officer and physician who spent most of his leave
time travelling the world. He volunteered for the first American Franklin search out of a
romantic desire for heroic adventure. 89 He considered his experience exciting and it fuelled

his passion to return and explore the region for himself Immediately upon his return to
America, he proceeded to plan for his next voyage. During his second Franklin search
expedition of 1853-55, he was to sail to the northern point of Baffin Island to search for
Franklin and conduct his own scientific experiments on magnetism, meteorology, and
photography. Whether or not he seriously searched for Franklin does not matter now. He
likely made this his platform, for he knew that to get financed for another trip, he had to
prove he was doing honourable deeds while in the Arctic and his blurred and
indistinguishable Daguerreotypes were a piece to that puzzle. This ultimately was his goal-to get financial backing back in America and return again where he would achieve fame
and notoriety .
Charles Francis Hall also started his Arctic career with "noble" intentions. Hall, a

89

G.W. Comer. Doctor Kane of the Arctic Seas (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1972) 28.

59

journalist from Cincinnati felt that God had called upon him to solve the mystery of
Franklin. "It seemed to me as if I had been called, if I may so speak, to try and do the
work. "90 Hall lived and worked among the Inuit for a total of seven years over two
expeditions and he found the Arctic an alluring and vastly harsher than life back in Ohio.
He freely adopted the Inuit lifestyle and he believed that the Arctic had become an
essential part of his existence, a concept that the British clearly did not share. Hall
explained his commitment to the Arctic to the American Geographical and Statistical
Society in 1871:
Many who have written me, or who have appeared to me personally,
think that I am an adventurous spirit...Not so. It does not require that
heart which they suppose I have. The Arctic region is my home. I love
it dearly, its storms, glaciers, icebergs, and when I am there among
them, it seems as if I were in an earthly heaven or a heavenly earth. 91

Though Hall seems eccentric, he was genuine in his love for the Arctic. He also
had another connection that served him better than all previous explorers. As he was a
journalist and printer by trade, he had numerous contacts in the media on both sides ofthe
Atlantic. But his considerable influences were on the New York media. A second contact
he had would also help to serve the push for more media exposure for Arctic exploration,
particularly expeditions led by Americans.
Hall had a friendship with Henry Grinnell, the wealthy New York merchant who
Hall would later call "the father of American Arctic exploration" 92 Grinnell became
interested in Arctic exploration after hearing of Hall's adventures and, particularly, after
Hall encouraged him to attend a public hearing where Lady Franklin petitioned President

90

91
92

New York Times, April3, 1865, 3.
Ibid, March 15, 1871 , 4.
Ibid

60

Zachary Taylor for American aid to search for her husband. It was Grinnell, not Taylor,
who financed four American expeditions to the Arctic and his efforts even saw the
introduction of the American navy in the search efforts. But Grinnell also had another trick
to use.
Grinnell established a great connection to the American people by being able to
give them what they wanted particularly through the media. Grinnell encouraged the new
powerful New York press to drum up support for his search efforts by publishing updates,
urging the public to give its support to the humanitarian efforts to find Franklin, and to
foster pride in Americans travelling the world. The American people were now seeing the
Arctic with fresh eyes. Grinnell's accounts of the Arctic were different than had been seen
before. The stories were written on a personal note, informing the public about the
dangers, bravery, and heroism of the crews. But Grinnell also used these articles as a
propagandist platform, intertwining passionate arguments for the reasons why America
should be in the Arctic, and touting scientific, commercial, and religious reasons to
intensify the mass public appeal of the region. The public response to the newspaper
articles was powerful because of the immediacy and of the fact that something tragic may
happen by the time the next update found its way to the editors. This made the story and
appeal more. thrilling, but it also served a purpose for the editors. First, the more thrilling
the story could be, the more these explorers would captivate a public anxious for heroes.
So the Arctic became in the American newspapers, a backdrop for the heroic exploits of
American explorers who struggled against the harsh elements. Secondly, it allowed the
press to raise money to sponsor other expeditions, thus legitimising their sensationalist
reporting of the Arctic as a means of promoting national pride in an American presence in
the Arctic.
When Hall returned from his first expedition in 1862, the New York Herald

61

featured a page wide headline, "HALL"S SUCCESS IN THE ARCTIC" 93 and a picture of
the Arctic landscape that was larger than the picture provided for the Civil War battle at
Shiloh. Grinnell showed his belief in the American public's desire to read about explorers
and showed his commitment to have the press cover it by commenting that "Fondness for
adventure will lead men, so long as the world lasts, to seek new sources of excitement, to
create new heroes, and Arctic explorers will never be found wanting ... "94 • The New York
Times gave the first page to Hall's self-serving claims and the Chicago Tribune touted Hall

as "the greatest explorer since Columbus" 95 A new weekly in New York, Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper, made Hall's expedition the cover subject of its first edition.%.

Several weeks later, the Herald devoted four columns to Hall. The space allowed
is extraordinary considering the intensity of the American Civil War. There is also the
advancement of reporting in the 1860s that allowed more advances in news gathering,
transmission, reporting, and technology. Papers no longer had to rely on sensationalism
alone to attract readers, though this did not mean that sensationalism died completely in
every major daily. With these improvements, traditional sensationalist papers, such as the
weeklies, began to attract wider audiences that wanted better written stories in addition to
their sensationalist writings. By 1870, most of the sensationalist papers had included more
informative, better-written sections, and were considered some of the world's best
newspapers. In fact, the most successful editor in America to keep the sensationalist allure
of the Arctic alive in the imaginations of the American public was James Gordon Bennett
Jr.

93

New York Herald, August 24, 1862, 1.
Ibid, August 25, 1862, 1.
95
Chicago Tribune. August 25, 1862, I.
96
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Paper, August 1862, 2.
94

62

Chapter Five: James Gordon Bennett Jr. Redefining the Image of the Arctic.
James Gordon Bennett Jr.'s career was pretty much defined in childhood. He grew
up in New York watching his father James Gordon Sr. create sensationalist journalism.
focusing on murder trials, high society scandals, divorce cases, and anything else that was
not considered political or economic news. But Bennett Jr. also saw the move away from
sensationalist reporting in the dailies, as his father had learned to be, he was greatly
influenced by the heroic deeds of Franklin, Hall, and Kane.
Bennett was apprenticed to Henry Grinnell in the 1860s, since his father felt he
needed to learn more about journalism from a broader base. Bennett was witness to the
Hall and Kane coverage and soon found himself drawn to the Arctic as a subject he
wanted to promote. Bennett's own fascination with the Arctic convinced him that topics
such as the navigation of the Northwest Passage, and the attainment of the North Pole
could be of great interest to the American people. One of his earliest attempts at creating
Arctic news was to send reporters with the American relief mission to find Hall in 1873.
There was a reporter assigned to each of the search ships, and these reports became the
first published Arctic report ever written for immediate publication in an American
newspaper. The reporter to be first published was Martin Maher, who reported the
following from the ship Juniata:
There was a terrible sea running and the spray danced into the air to a
great height and could be seen overleaping the icebergs of on hundred
feet high, and the waves, lashed out in a fury by the hurricane, burst
against those mountains of ice, breaking off ponderous looking, solid
masses which fell into the sea with a rushing, deafening sound. The destruction
ofthe boat and all on board seemed imminent. 97

97

The New York Herald September 11, 1873,5.

63

Since the Arctic was now seen as a place of wonder and excitement, something
that everyone should have the chance to witness either in person or through a journalist,
Bennett Jr. believed the best way to report about the Arctic was to have a roving reporter
there at all times. He felt the Arctic was to be revered not feared.
In 1875, Bennett helped finance another voyage to the Arctic, this time Allen
Young's voyage in the Pandora. This journey was to navigate the Northwest Passage in
one season, not for commercial reasons, but to see if it could be done quickly. There was
also the minor goal of circling King William Island in search of any Franklin relics that
may have been missed in the previous decades. Bennett also wanted to collect any news
from the British Arctic Expedition under George Nares. Bennett believed that the selling
of newspapers featuring first hand accounts by explorers from the Arctic would boost his
popularity among readers and his peers. Janarius MacGhan was chosen as the reporter to
go on Bennett's "Arctic beat", and perhaps more than his predecessors. McGhan
emphasised not only the thrill of the expedition, but the feel of the Arctic and his vivid
descriptions were credited with fuelling the public's craving for more Arctic heroes:
For hundreds of miles in every direction, it is the same. The whole
north coast of America, from Bearing Strait to Hudson's Bay, with
the great Archipelago north of it, is nothing but stone, rock, and ice,
not only without a tree or shrub, or blade of grass, but without even
a handful of earth to hide its savage nakedness. The water is ice, the
land is rock, the sea a frozen corpse, the earth a bare, grinding
skeleton, that meets you everywhere, that seizes you by its honey clasp
and will not let you go, the skeleton of a dead world. 98
These reporters were reporting on everyday life in the Arctic for the explorers and
the public craved knowledge of what life was like beset in ice for a winter. Bennett

98

New York Herald, September 2, 1875, 2.

64

realised that the Arctic would become a place of awe, not fear, if it could be proven that
an everyday, untrained explorer, such as a reporter, could survive the Arctic landscape.
Reading a "daily diary" helped to cement in the readers' minds that the Arctic was not a
terrible, foreboding as their ancestors had believed to be true, but rather it was a place
that everyone could dream about seeing one day.
The Pandora had been plagued by heavy ice for weeks, and the ships turned
around to avoid being trapped further. Even this retreat was filled with danger and
excitement. McGhan's story was published in Britain by Bennett, who wanted as much
coverage ofhis Arctic exploits as possible.
We succeeded and we were driven back into Peel Strait. Ice was rapidly
closing the outlet, and the young ice was forming on the waves like oil,
and rising and falling without breaking. At last we found a "lead" closed
at the further end by a broadneck of ice. This we charged and got through,
and finally made our escape! 99

Within a year of McGhan's return to New York, his accounts were published in
both America and Britain as a compilation entitled Under the northern lights [sic]. It
became a best seller, selling 100,000 copies in its first year and led to McGhan being hired
as a foreign correspondent by the British daily. McGhan's Arctic assignment legitimised his
stature as a world reporter and it helped Bennett increase the readership of his newspaper.
In 1878, Bennett continued to use the Arctic to gain increased circulation. He hired
William Gilder to replace McGhan and sent him on another Arctic expedition he was
sponsoring. This expedition, led by Frederick Schwatka, was sent to look for records and
journals of the Franklin expedition.
Gilder by experience and training was a sensationalist writer. He received his

99

London Times, October 18, 1875, 5.

65

training at The World newspaper in New York in the 1860s. The World was the most
sensationalist newspaper in all ofNew York and remained so, even after the retreat from
sensationalism during the Civil War years. Gilder continued with this style of
sensationalism, and Bennett did not seem to discourage it. He felt he would do what was
necessary to gain readership and to enthral the public with tales of intrigue and heroism.
After being stranded near Daly Bay on the Northwest side of Hudson's Bay, the
party of five men spent the winter learning survival tips from the Inuit. In the Spring of
1879, the group travelled by dog sled to King William Island and found a skeleton that
McClintock had missed in 1859. This became the stuff of sensationalism for Gilder:
There was little doubt they were in a desperate condition, in fact,
as we subsequently learned for other witnesses, there were almost
unmistakable evidences of their being compelled to resort to
cannibalism until at the last they absolutely starved to death. 100

Gilder's claims echoed back to a time when Rae was shunned for stating the same
thing. However, Gilder did not meet with negative press in America for his claims.
Immediately after the expedition returned to New York in 1880, Gilder's accounts
appeared in the Herald, frequently taking up the entire front page and ran everyday from
September 20 to October 6. In fact the expedition coverage was given more time than the
election of President James Garfield a month later, or even his assassination the next year.
Bennett may not have been the first to realise that a story that takes several days or weeks
to flesh out is more exciting and sells more newspapers than a story that runs once, but at
least he understood it. By keeping the story fresh and in the minds of the readers
constantly, he was helping to foster a permanent image of explorers as heroes in the minds

100

New York Herald, September 25, 1880, 1.

66

ofthe readers.
Much of Gilder's account was wrapped up in sensationalist headlines to draw in the
reader. Headlines like "Eight Days Between Meals" were enough to draw anyone's
attention, but like a modem tabloid, the reader soon discovers that it was the dog team,
not the men, who went eight days between meals. 101 Yet other headlines were not
misleading, such as "One Hundred and One Degrees Below Freezing Point" which
referred to the fact that the winter of 1878-79 was one of the coldest ever recorded.
Gilder's account of emphasising the excitement and danger of the exploration
thrilled the New York reading public, helping him to become a celebrity, and he was
credited with boosting the sales of the Herald. But unlike most of his predecessors, and
despite his sensationalist leanings, he did more to enlighten the public about living in the
Arctic. He mentioned the perils explorers endured, but he also described the typical day to
day Arctic life to readers back home:
It is one ofthe great discomforts of Arctic travel that the exercise of walking
wets one's fur stockings with perspiration. At night they freeze, and it is
anything but agreeable to put bare feet into stockings filled with ice.
But it is astonishing how soon one gets accustomed to that sort of
thing and how little he minds it after a while. 102

In contrast to the Herald's constant sponsoring of expeditions to the Arctic, British
newspapers did not begin to sponsor their own expeditions until the 1890s. Press coverage
of the Arctic was hard to find in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, probably because of
Britain's withdrawal from the Arctic to fight the Crimean war and the disillusion that
followed the Franklin episode. What news coverage was being printed in British dailies

101
102

Ibid, September 21, 1880, I.
Ibid , September 21, 1880, 1.

67

concerning the Arctic came from men like Bennett who wanted to increase his readership
on both sides of the Atlantic. There was one notable exception to this lack of press and
that was the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-76.
In the mid 1860s, there was a small resurgence of those who wanted the British to
go back to the Arctic for the sake of science. These people were not affiliated with the
navy, but were members of geographical societies. Sherard Osborn read a paper in 1865

to the Royal Geographical Society in which he advocated a renewal of Arctic exploration.
He harkened back to Barrow's desire in the 1820s to give the navy a respectable raison
d'etre. But by this time, the navy was nearly broke after the efforts in the Crimean War. It
would take Osborn another decade before he could convince the British Admiralty to
~ another assault on the Arctic. In 1875, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli approved

the expedition saying that it had been sanctioned because of the "scientific advantages to
be derived from it, as well as the importance of encouraging that spirit of maritime
enterprise which has ever distinguished the English people." 103 Behind the government's
public statements about the expedition, there were three motives for it. The first was to
help the British whaling industry in exerting Britain's right to be in the Arctic, the second
was the navy needed to rekindle their Arctic supremacy, and third Britain needed to boost
its prestige in the Arctic with its people.
Unlike previous years when the British press seemed disinterested in the Arctic,
they could not say enough about the new expedition. Even the London Times, who
typically opposed Arctic exploration during the Crimean War, wrote favourably about the
expedition's high hopes for success. The London Illustrated News and the journal Navy
also reported high optimism. Thus, in 1876, when disastrous losses due to scurvy caused
the expedition to arrive home a year early, the press expressed enormous disappointment

103

London Times. AprilS, 1875. 3.

68

in something they had so highly played up. The British newspapers reported the failure as
a major disappointment and a waste of the government's time and money: "Verily the
expedition of 1875-6 has but little of which to boast," reported the London Times, "It
went out like a rocket and came back like the stick." 104 This would be the last expedition
to the Arctic, by the British, until the 1890s.
Where the British press condemned the failures of its country's expeditions, the
American press brought out the sensationalism of failed expeditions. When Horace
Greely's expedition to the North Pole failed in 1884, the American press jumped all over
it. On July 18, 1884, most of the major papers in America led their front pages with the
Greely rescue. The Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the New York Times
devoted three pages each to the rescue story. And the story was sensational:
The story told by Connell from his recollection of their starving
experiences is heartrending: how they burned the hair off their sealskin
boot and coats, cut them into strips, boiled them into a stew and ate
them voraciously till the stomach rebelled, and weakness and nausea ensued
for some. Nature gave no call for ten, twelve, fifteen days, and then
haemorrhage and consequent weakness ensued, prostrating the victim
for days. 105

During the next several weeks, the press kept a close eye on the expedition and prominent
coverage was given to those who passed away and their subsequent funerals.
Amid the strains of mournful music and followed by sorrowing relatives
and thousands of sympathizing friends the mortal remains of Sergt.
William H. Cross, one of the noblest and heroic victims of the Greely
Expedition, were yesterday borne to their final resting place in the
city ofhis nativity... The floral tributes were many and beautiful, the
largest and handsomest offering being a huge white pillow resting at

104
105

Ibid., August 20, 1876, I.
New York Times, July 19, 1884, I.

69

the foot of the casket of white flowers ... Among the floral offerings
was the floral design of a heart composed of white flowers, on which
a touchingly suggestive word "Papa" the tribute of Charlie, the only
child of the deceased. 106

The accounts of the Greely expedition included everything the readers were
searching for in a hero: adventure, sacrifice, illness, hardship, suicide, and insanity. Then
the New York Herald, thanks to Bennett, broke with an even more sensationalist story:
cannibalism.
For a number of days, Bennett had sent down reporters to prowl around the
shipyards where the rescue ships were docked and unloading. Persistence seemed to pay
off, for the result was a massive headline titled "THE HORRORS OF CAPE SABINE" in
August that told a different story to the one Connell reported about eating seal skin boots:
As a matter of fact, they were kept alive on human flesh... The bodies were
dug from their graves in the little hill. Most ofthe blankets contained nothing
but heaps of white bones, many of them picked clean.. .It is reported that the
only men who escaped the knife were the three or four who died of scurvy
The amputated limbs of men who afterward perished were eagerly
devoured as food. 107

The New York Herald followed up with even more graphic accounts that were not
based on fact, but gossip and innuendo. The response to the story was varied. Readership
went up, yet there were written complaints by some readers of the salacious tone of the
stories. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post downplayed
the sensationalism (though didn't totally abolish it) and did question the accuracy of the
story. The New York Times responded with "It has been discovered that there is a basis for

106
107

Ibid., August 21, 1884, I.
New York Herald, August 22, 1884, I.

70

the charges, but the circumstances of the case are by no means so horrible or as
sensational as the published story indicates." 108
But sensationalism can easily influence a newspaper. The normally conservative
daily the Chicago Tribune picked up the wave the Herald was riding and went on to
report, inaccurately, saying: "Yet ofPrivate Henry, who died only 16 days before the relief
party arrived, there was nothing left but skin and bones. The head had been thrown into
the sea to prevent identification." 109
But as extreme as the Herald could be, there was no more extreme reporting of
this story than that found in the World from New York. It comes under the headline
"EATING DEAD COMRADES", and the commentator is unidentified:
He would give years from him life to forget about it, but, he said,
that first taste, the sensation of having between his teeth the flesh
of one who used to be his friend, was with him always. walking or
sleeping, he seemed to feel his lips pressing that smooth, flabby
meat that must be choked down somehow ifhe would live. And then
in the inhuman, savage way of getting it! Each feeder upon such food
must cut offhis own shreds of flesh. No friend could be found to
perform the horrible office. Every man, if he would eat, must of
necessity be his own butcher. And these cannibalistic orgies, these
midnight feats, were secrets to be kept. Body after body was
stripped of its flesh, bur none of those ... dared speak of this. As he
thrusts into the open flame on the end of a pointed stick, no one of
his companions utters a word. And when the tearing the smoking
flesh with his teeth, he lies down and another of the would-be
sleepers rises up and goes down that path, knife in hand, it is
easy to guess his horrid purpose. 110

Predictably, the British press version of these charges were not a sensationalised,

108

New York Times, August 26, 1884, 1.
Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1884, 1.
110
The World, August 15, 1884, 1.

109

71

although it still made the front page of most of the dailies. The London Times was astute
enough to include information that the American papers chose to leave out:
Lieutenant Greely was just able to support himself of his hands and
knees. He was dressed in fur, with a red knitted hood, which added
to his haggard appearance. His long hair and beard, his wasted form
and deep, sunken eyes, and his feeble voice, which he strove to
control, but which revealed him overwhelming feelings, brought
moisture to the eyes of the strongest of the relief party. 111

The charges of cannibalism caused much discussion in both America and Britain,
some of it scathing, but all of it interesting. The readers on both sides of the Atlantic
seemed to be caught in the middle of the war between editors who either debunked or
praised each other for the handling of such stories. But one thing remained: the public
wanted more and it reconfirmed, through the press's direct involvement, the hero
worshipping of Arctic explorers. The Daily News in Britain said: "A doctor who handled
these bodies declares they bore no resemblance to of mutilation, and there was nothing to
suggest that the flesh had been eaten." 112 •
Eventually the furore died down. Bodies were exhumed, which showed that flesh
had been stripped from some of the bodies, but in general, the American public, like their
British counterparts of the 1850s, wanted to believe that those on the Greely expedition
knew nothing of cannibalism. In an editorial that echoes voices from the Franklin attitude

in Britain, the Chicago Tribune argued for an end to Arctic exploration:
Artd now let us, in the name of decency and humanity, have no
more investigations of Arctic voyages. Let us pay all honour to
the living and the dead, to the rescued and their rescuers, but

111
112

London Times, August 15, 1884. I.

The Daily News, August 20, 1884, 2.

72

may the country be spared the affliction of such investigations
as we have had in the case of more than one disastrous
Arctic expedition. 113

A week later the London Illustrated News captured this same sentiment as it
carried the banner for much of the British press by saying.
Why then should any more Arctic expeditions be sent out, either
From England or America? The only result is much suffering, terrible
loss oflife, and the amendments of maps and charts that are of no
general utility. Apollyons are too many and Greathearts too few
for us with regard for equanimity this waste of men, money and energy. 114

But the topic would not drop or even fude. Explorers themselves were not willing
to consider abandoning the Arctic. The lure was too strong, and even they had come to
view their predecessors as mythical heroes. Like all heroes, Arctic explorers were ready to
face death to attain their goals. Sir George Nares equated Arctic exploration as waging his
own battle: "I regret what has happened to Greely... but battling with northern ice is like
any other warfare, and some must fall." 115
But just as explorers wanted to continue with exploration so did certain
newspapers as the tum of the twentieth century approached. Focus began to tum away
from the Northwest Passage and Franklin and more towards the attainment of the North
Pole and although historians have generally viewed the Peary/Cook controversy as a
conflict between two explorers, it was also an equal struggle between two New York
newspapers to become one the country's most respected newspapers. The war of the
media over Arctic exploration had arrived in America.

113

Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1884,3.
London Illustrated News, August 19, I 885, I.
115
London Times, August 19, 1885, 1.
114

73

Chapter Six: "The Newspaper War at the North Pole: Redefining Sensationalism in the
Twentieth Century".
Without a doubt, the most popular American polar explorer is Robert Peary. His
name is as popular with American school children as Franklin's is with British school
children. Peary is also widely accepted by the American public as the first man to reach the
North Pole, and he apparently did so under much media coverage. He is remembered
today as a national hero, a great patriot who named his ship after President Theodore
Roosevelt, and who will always be remembered for his famous quote "Stars and Stripes
nailed to the North Pole." 116
But there is another side to Peary that is necessary to understand his rivalry with
explorer Frederick Cook and his relationship with the media. Peary was the most selfserving, arrogant, and mean-spirited of all Arctic explorers. He despised his rivals and
anyone who he felt was trying to share his status of national hero, whether they were dead
or living. He was condescending and insensitive to those who served with him on his
expedition, and he was completely servile to those who he felt could help in his quest for
personal glory. Those he played up to were the New York media.
These traits can be found as early as 1887 in a letter to his mother. This letter
shows a man obsessed with his own self-worth: "I must have fame, and cannot reconcile
myself to years of commonplace drudgery and a name late in life when I see an
opportunity to gain it now.. .I want my fame now!" 111 Yet, even as these traits are not well
respected by most, they did serve him well in his perseverance to be recognised and to
attain the goals he set for himself He was so charged with his insatiable appetite for fame

116
117

New York Times, September 7, 1909,2.
W. Herbert. The Noose of Laurels. (London: Stoddard and Houghton, 1989) 65. Emphasis is Peary's.

74

and fortune, that nothing would get in his way. His drive led him to cover more miles
across the Arctic than any other explorer, including Dr. John Rae.
Peary give no hint in his journals that he had a particular attachment for the Arctic.
He viewed it solely as a means to gain fame in a goal that hadn't been attained to date.
Peary planned an journey to reach the North Pole in 1898, but his plan failed despite
having played himself up in the media as the man to do the job. He had built himself up so
high that his failure was seen almost to be as disappointing as that of the Greely
expedition. The New York Times summed up the general feeling in its front page head line
"PEARY FAILED TO REACH THE POLE". To save face, the next day's edition had
Peary declaring
The gain to the scientific world by the results of my work in the Arctic
regions are of far more factual value than ifl had discovered the North
Pole. The discovery of the North Pole is more or less a spectacular
fact ... The departments of science which will be benefited by my sojourn
in the north are geology, meteorology, anthropology, and natural history.
The full result of my labors cannot fully be ascertained or even imagined
until the observations I have taken have been worked out by
scientists ... the work I have done, I am vain enough to think, is great. 118

For a man who, unlike Rae, never learned the Inuit language or did any
ethnographic studies to have claimed such successes was completely false and self-serving.
But he was making steady gains into planning his next big trip to the North Pole, but this
time, he would have competition from a man altogether different in personality to Peary,
and viewed as his biggest rival.
Frederick Cook was younger and far more courteous and honourable that Peary.
Cook was a physician in New York and, in 1891, was looking for an adventure. He

118

New York Times, September 20, 1902,2.

75

responded to a newspaper ad that was calling for volunteers to join an Arctic expedition.
That expedition was none other than Peary's Greenland expedition. Cook was chosen as
the physician and seemed to get along well with Peary. But that changed when the
expedition returned to New York. Cook had asked Peary if he could publish a paper on
the ethnographic studies he took of the Inuit in Greenland. Peary refused, saying the
information was of no importance to society. Cook disagreed and published his paper,
thus ending their friendship. For a while the two men went their separate ways. Cook
travelled to the Antarctic, and Peary continued with his Arctic journeys. Their paths
crossed again in 1905 when Cook claimed in the New York Times that he was the first
man to climb Mount McKinley, while Peary had returned from the Arctic that year. Peary
was dismayed when the younger Cook got the same amount of media coverage. Then to
Peary's further dismay, Cook's published journal of his McKinley journey became a best
seller, while Peary's book on his latest Arctic expedition was a flop, only selling 2300
copies its first year. But this battle was only the beginning.
In 1907, Cook sailed north to find the Pole and although he tried to keep the
expedition under wraps, word leaked out to Peary and the newspapers that Cook was on
his way. Despite Cook's abilities to succeed he was not viewed as being as experienced as
Peary and the rumours of his journey to the Pole were largely ignored by the mainstream
American press. But when a letter reached New York which had been written by Cook
and sent home with a member of the expedition, the contents stirred anger in Peary. "I
have hit upon a new route," wrote Cook in 1909, "to the north pole and will stay to try it.
By way of Buchanan Bay and Ellesmere and northward to Nansen Strait over the Polar
Sea seems to me a very good route ... and here are natives and dogs for the task."IJ9.

119

Ibid, September 2, 1909, 2. Though this letter had been written in the summer of 1908, it never
appeared in the press until a year later.

76

Peary was incensed. He felt that Cook was invading the land he alone was meant
to conquer. What more, was Cook used methods that Peary had never considered or failed
at. Thus, he saw Cook as a fool. Peary used the platform of the New York newspapers to
voice his outrage and demanded that geographical societies around the world refuse any
dealings with Cook because "Dr. Cook's action in going north...for the admitted purpose
of forestalling me is one of which no man possessing a sense of honour would be
guilty!" 120 Peary promptly organised his own assault on the North Pole, and while he was
somewhere in the Arctic on September 2, 1909, newspapers around the world trumpeted
his worst fear.
On September 1, 1909, James Gordon Bennett Jr. responded to a telegram sent to

him the day before. It was from Cook who offered to sell his harrowing story of reaching
the Pole for $3000. Bennett quickly snapped at the story, for he had seen nothing of this
magnitude since the Greely disaster, and he knew he would easily make up the payment in
increased sales. The next day, the New York Herald, the London Times and the Paris
Herald ran five pages of Cook's assertion that he reached the Pole and all featured the
headline "COOK ATTAINS THE NORTH POLE!". 121 He told of hardship, nearly
freezing and starving to death and almost missing his supply depot on his journey back.
The Herald sold every copy that day, about 500,000 copies and Bennett received
telegrams from all over the world to purchase the rights to print the story in their own
newspapers. Many of those papers paid both Bennett and Cook handsomely to print
Cook's account told in his own words. His story was published was September 3 in Tokyo
and those who could not contact Bennett ended up lifting the story from the Paris edition.
The American press presented Cook's claim sensationally with banner headlines,

120
121

Ibid., May 28, 1908, I.

New York Herald, September 2, 1909, I.

77

comments from other Arctic explorers, scientific analyses from leading geographers, and
eulogistic editorials espousing the heroic efforts of Cook. Coverage actually increased in
the following days as more information arrived and when more experts could be
interviewed for their reactions. But although the newspapers realised the immediacy and
selling power of Cook's story, not all readily accepted his claims, because there was still
the lingering belief that Peary was the more experienced and capable of the two.
From the outset, the New York Times was leery of Cook's claims and wrote an
editorial with the headline "HAS MAN REACHED THE POLE" 122 • Likewise the New
York Tribune (which incidentally was owned by Peary's friend Whitlaw Reid) did not view
Cook's claim to be factual:
Keen businessmen on their way to their offices, who paused to read
the announcement, usually smiled incredulously, and passed along
without comment. It is not denied that Dr. Cook may have reached
the Pole, and there is no patriotic American who does not wish most
fervently that the New York physician may have achieved the goal
of the ages, the goal for which so many heroes of all nations have
vainly struggled and died, but, to speak frankly, , the average
American has become so accustomed to the announcement of
wonderful discoveries in American newspapers, which subsequently
have failed to justify, that he pauses by instinct, and before accepting
the announcement literally, he naturally demands abundant proof 123

More condemnation from Arctic experts and high society rolled in. George
Melville of the Jeannette expedition said "Without backing, money, or equipment, I don't
see how Dr. Cook could have reached the Pole, let alone lived through the journey. I can't
conceive that Dr. Cook has done it 'on his nerve' so to speak." 124 Two days later after

Ibid., September 2, 1909, 5.
New York Tribune, September 3,1909, 4.
124
New York Herald, September 2, 1909, 2.
122
123

78

more reports were published Melville had this to offer: "This cannot be substantiated.. .It is
perfectly easy for a man to go to a certain point and say he has reached the Pole. I am
more convinced now that this claim is a fake." 125 Even the famed Harvard astronomer
Percival Lowell quipped that 'scientifically the discovery of the North Pole is of the same
significance as a new record in the 100 yard dash." 126
Despite the doubters, most newspaper articles in America were favourable to
Cook, and words of praise came from men such as Greely, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest
Shackleton, and Roald Amundsen. The belief in Cook's claims took a giant leap on
September 6 when Cook arrived in Denmark and was greeted by hundreds of well
wishers. He was immediately swept away on a tidal wave ofhero-worship and constantly
praised by friends and strangers. Few things, however, show the utter popularity of an
individual as the creation of the Cook toys and Cook hats. The Cook hat became the rage
of women's high fashion in Paris and London:
The Dr. Cook hat is suggestive of the polar region. It seems
as high as the cartoonist's picture of the Pole, although in reality
it is only two feet tall. It is made ofbrown fur, fuzzy and expensive.
It looks massive and solid enough to supply a good soup stock in
case of Arctic exigency. 127

Cook was also hounded by reporters wanting to get "the" story. It appeared to
Cook that "Fleet Street had moved to Copenhagen." 128 • In a press conference attended by
80 world journalists, he claimed to have proof that he had indeed attained the Pole and
that he was to deliver that proof soon to the scientific community. His apparent honesty

125
126

New York Times, September 5, 1909, l.

Ibid., September 3, 1909, l.
London Times, September 7, 1909, 3.
128
Ibid.
127

79

and integrity kept the reporters waiting for his next move. He had literally, overnight,
become the Western world's media star. But Cook's claim was to come under doubt again
when on September 7 another story rocked the journalism world and the American public
had to decide who the real hero was.
The New York Times printed a story on September 7 that read "STARS AND
STRIPES NAILED TO THE NORTH POLE." The claim came from Peary that he was
the one who truly reached the pole and it sparking an all-out media war that the public had
never before seen. Bennett, who knew what Peary was like, didn't show much interest in
his claims, passing them off as another fruitless and boring claim of reaching the Pole.
However, one editor who believed in Peary over Cook was William Reich, who took over
o~

of the New York Times in 1908. Peary's story, all 7500 words was published

that day, but new information was slow in getting transmitted and printed because of bad
weather conditions where Peary was stationed. The full story was not published until the
1Oth and 11th of September. The story reported how Peary had reached the Arctic a full
three weeks before Cook. Peary claimed that his journey back to Indian Harbour took
only three days and he would have got the story out sooner had the bad weather not
hampered his ability to send telegrams.
Because of Peary's popularity and more varied expenence in the Arctic, his
announcement received more attention than Cook's The New York Times gave Peary six
full pages while the Herald gave him four pages, while all newspapers published the same

photograph which Peary claimed to have been taken at the Pole. And although the British
newspapers did not give Peary (or Cook's) claims as much space as the American
newspapers, Peary still dominated over other subjects. For example, the Daily Telegraph
and London Times each devoted two pages to Peary's claim. The literary world also
jumped into the fray. Cassell's publishing house in New York asked adventure author
Frank Shaw if he would produce a 70,000 word children's book on polar exploration that
80

captured the Peary hero-myth. Shaw wrote the book in a week and it was on sale
November 1, 1909. But it wasn't just Peary's claim that received attention in the New
York press.
Peary continued to attack Cook every chance he could. Before Peary released his
own claim, he condemned Cook in the New York Times as a liar and a cheat. Peary said:
Do not trouble about Cook's story or attempt to explain any discrepancies
in his statements. This affair will settle itself. He has not been at the Pole on
April 21, 1908, or anytime after that. He has simply handed the public a gold
Brick. These statements are made advisedly, and I have proof of them.
When he makes a full statement of his journey to some geographical
society .. .I shall be in a position to furnish material that may prove interesting
reading for the public. 129

This is in stark contrast to the glowing comments Cook had about Peary: "I am proud that
a fellow American has reached the Pole ... He is a brave man and I am confident that if the
reports are true, his observations will confirm mine and set at rest all doubts." 130 The paper
war was on.
The New York Times hoped that its increased circulation could be made at the
expense of the Herald So Peary and the Times, which staked its entire reputation on the
experience of the older explorer, began an aggressive campaign to debunk Cook in the
hope that the acknowledgement of Peary's success and Cook's attempt at fraud would
increase the sales of the Times, while destroying those of their rival, the Herald. Bennett
could see the war looming over the horizon so he paid Cook $25,000 for the right to
publish four exclusive instalments then turn around and sell them to other papers both for
profit and more exposure to rival the Times.

129

130

New York Times, September 11, 1909, I.
New York Herald, September 12, 1909, I.

81

As the rest of the publishing world saw the Peary/Cook controversy as a nice bit of
scandal to sell more newspapers, the Times and Herald saw it as an all out war and used
mud-slinging, name calling, and other techniques to win the fight. The Times was very
vindictive and negative towards Cook while the Herald praised both men though
preferring to take Cook's word. But as time would tell, the press that reported on the
controversy outside of America showed Peary was losing support rather than gaining.
Arctic experts were starting to favour Cook's story so the Times had to change its strategy
to win over the readers support for Peary.
By September 21, the Peary/Cook war was primarily fought out in the pages ofthe

Times and Herald. Most other papers had abandoned the fight. The Times had found out
that Cook still had not handed in his "proof' to any of the geological societies and the

Times also made a bold remark that the pictures published in his September 2 story were
actually seven years old. The Explorer's Club, of which Cook was a member, also came
forward to state that they believed Cook's claim of climbing Mount McKinley was a hoax.
Although the hero-worshipping public initially ignored that statement, the topic didn't go
away and the Times exploited it. Cook of course denied the accusations, but the final blow
to Cook's reputation came when the Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired by the
National Geographic Society to check into the McKinley affair. A signed affidavit by
Barrille, who accompanied Cook to McKinley stated that they did not reach the summit,
only the highest western peak and that was where the photograph came from. The tide of
popularity shifted now to Peary and there was no going back.
Headlines such as "COOK"S CLAIM TO DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH POLE
REJECTED: OUTRAGED DENMARK CALLS HIM A DELIBERATE SWINDLER!"
appeared, and in that story the Times reported the Commission's findings: "The
Commission is therefore of the opinion that... there is no proof that Dr. Cook reached

82

either the summit ofMount McKinley or the North Pole." 131 •
To further destroy Cook's reputation, in January, before Hampton's Magazine was
to release Peary's account of his journey, the journal hinted at Cook's mental state and
suggested he was insane. Needless to say the Times jumped all over this and reported
"COOK ADMITS FAKE. MAKES PLEA OF INSANITY." 132 • If Cook's reputation was
ruined before, this headline made sure it permanently was and Cook became the laughing
stock of America. There was even a movement to obliterate him from the history books on
Arctic exploration.
The press had never done anything before, or since, so deliberately to change
someone's story to suit their own needs. They had played a roll in the hero-myth making
status of Peary and the war plunged the media in general into a state that was described by
Charles Reich. Media became "an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic,
controlling, and utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to human
values." 133

131

New York Times, December 22, 1909, 1.
Ibid, January 15, 1910, 1.
133
London Daily Times, January 17, 1910,6.
132

83

Chapter Seven: Conclusions

So it appeared that at least as the press was concerned Peary was the clear victor
in the attainment of the North Pole. What is certain is that Cook was never able to restore
his reputation, and more proof was to come later that he never reached the summit of
Mount McKinley either. In fact, Cook came to be as big a self-promoter as Peary, though
Peary clearly was more cunning and successful in his quest for fame. But one thing that
has been proven in this war of words; that the modem press has a very pervasive presence
in the shaping of hero-myths for the public.
The most striking aspect of linking the press to Arctic explorers is that the origins
lay solidly with one person: James Gordon Bennett Sr. in the 1830s. He proved that the
world could be intoxicated by the exciting reports about heroic struggles in the wilderness
to master nature. Had Bennett preferred a more staid version of journalism over the
sensational, he would not have played such a major role in helping to shape the public
image of the hero-myth or the modem images of the Arctic. Bennett helped society move
away from the sublime and picturesque to view the Arctic in real, if not sensationalised,
methods. The Cook/Peary war was an equal struggle for public recognition of the New

York Times and the New York Herald, and it was dictated by their commercial interests,
mainly their sponsorships of American expeditions to the region. The controversy showed
that the press was capable of reaching the loftiest of heights with regards to
sensationalism. And, although publishing reports of a questionable nature (whether
sanctioned by the press and/or the explorers themselves) and assailing rival press
competitors were practices considered acceptable in the past, they were now being
questioned by the public.
These events highlight the significant role of the press in Arctic exploration
throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Newspapers, their editors,
84

and reporters, were more influential in increasing the public's awareness of these regions
than has previously been realised. Not only did the press in America sponsor a number of
American expeditions to the Arctic to search for Franklin, the North Pole, or scientific
knowledge, the amount and style of the press coverage helped create a strong interest in
the public about exploration and explorers. From these articles came books, readers,
photographs, and later films and radio plays.
Another conclusion can be drawn about Arctic exploration in the nineteenth
century; the role of science was variable from country to country, depending upon their
reasons for being in the Arctic in the first place. Although there were explorers like Rae,
Richardson, and Hall who were genuinely interested in the scientific and ethnographic
knowledge they could come away with from the Arctic, there were still countless others
who were more interested in the adventure aspect. Although adventure validated the
expeditions, most people did not want to know about the scientific information. They
wanted to hear about the tales of hardship and misery. Nationalism also played a small
role in covering the expeditions' progresses. The American and British press tended to
focus on their own countrymen in the Arctic. Very rarely were foreign expeditions
covered, and those that were, certainly not were touted as heroic figures.
From the Cook/Peary controversy came some valid questions about sovereignty
over the Arctic. Who actually owns it, even to this day, is still an important question for
many northern nations, indigenous or not. Regardless of the intents of the earlier
photographers and explorers to the region or the purposes to which these images were
originally put, the existence today of historic photographs and journals permits Arctic
peoples to repossess their histories and to reassert sovereignty over their cultures 134•

134

Pamela Stern, "The History of Canadian Photography... ", 51.

85

The next conclusion is that there was no relationship between the success of an
expedition and the press coverage it received. Cook and Peary received the same amount
of press coverage in Britain that the search for Franklin did, and this is still far more
coverage than any political, social, or economic event at the same time. The men who
received the most in depth attention were still the failures, like Franklin and Greely,
because the press could exploit the real (or not) sensationalism surrounding cannibalism,
murder, and death.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, travel narratives tended to exaggerate
the sublime or the picturesque, thus giving an inaccurate vision of the Arctic. By resorting
to such cliches, there was little factual accuracy in the explorers' words. But the British
and American public did not know any better. As these aesthetics were replaced, and new
and improved technologies allowed newspapers to become more accessible, the
sensational views of the world began to take precedent. As mentioned before, one reason
this happened was the publishers' and explorers' desires to make their accounts as excitable
as possible, and therefore, as sellable to a mass audience as possible. Explorers travelled to
areas with preconceived notions of what the region was like before they arrived, thanks to
previous travel narratives. The explorers had already drawn their own conclusions about
the Arctic. They were then sensitive to data that confirmed those notions and insensitive to
contradictory findings. In some cases, the explorers invented their visions of the Arctic to
satisfy the public's desire for adventure and heroism. These errors on judgement were then
perpetuated by journalists who had little, or no, experience in the Arctic.
It is ironic then that the very first sensationalist reports written by reporters in the

1850s were actually hoping to find "the real" truth behind the myths of the Arctic. Unlike
the men who followed them, reporters like McGhan, and Gilder were talented enough
writers to make life in the Arctic seem truly wild and unforgiving to those who had no clue
about the region. They were examples of travel-writers though presenting a sensationalist

86

view of the world around them, still managed to give detailed and sensitive descriptions of
the Arctic that endured for decades.
Though in all of this the underlying goal for these journalists and editors was not
the accuracy of the reports, nor the scientific achievements made, nor the fascination of
the landscape, but the sheer controversies and tragedies that shaped the hero-myths of the
Arctic explorer. Had Franklin survived, he would not have been as revered as he is. Had
Cook and Peary both agreed who really got to the Pole first, the press would not waged
an all out press war to boost sales. Had Rae not decided to mention his cannibalism
theories in 1854, cannibalism would not have remained such a scandalous and often
reported about tragedy throughout the rest of the century. And certainly for the vast
majority of newspapers in both America and Britain, this kind of boosting then tearing
down the hero was far more important than scientific facts. What mattered were sales:
how many and how fast. But one thing is certain--the press had a huge role to play in the
perpetuation of the hero-myth of the Arctic explorers. It is interesting to speculate how
the press might operate today had there not been a need to sensationalise events then.

87

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Archival materials:
Scott Polar Research Institute: Cambridge
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Newspapers
London Times
London illustrated News
Pall Mall Gazette
Daily Mirror (London)
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Household Words
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
Toronto Globe and Mail
New York Herald
New York Sun
New York Times
The World (New York)
Chicago Tribune
Washington Post
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

92