by Renee Fossett
History Department, University of Manitoba
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C. Stuart Houston (ed.) with a commentary by I. S. MacLaren, Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin, 1819-1822. Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press. 392 pp. illus., 1995. ISBN: 0-7735-1181-4.
Arctic Artist is a welcome addition to the published primary literature of arctic exploration, ethnographic observation, and geographical description. Here in one volume are the journal of a young and enthusiastic British Navy officer, George Back, nicely edited and usefully amplified by C. Stuart Houston’s editorial comment and introduction, a Commentary by Ian S. Maclaren on the diarist as artist and poet and on the role of exploration art in the cultural history of the period, a selection of exquisite paintings of early nineteenth century arctic peoples and landscapes, plus appendixes which reproduce relevant letters and journals from a number of archives.
British exploration of the North American arctic began in 1576 with Martin Frobisher’s first voyage to Baffin Island.
It was motivated largely by the desire to obtain geographical and ethnographical information of commercial and strategic value to British government and business concerns, and to a lesser extent by the dream of a North West Passage from Europe to Asia. Exploration continued sporadically during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, depending on climatic conditions in the arctic, and economic conditions at home. After 1817, with a too-big inventory of both ships and officers on half pay following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Admiralty intensified its arctic operations. George Back (1796-1878) was a member of three of those voyages.
“Winter view of Fort Franklin”, watercolour by George Back painted during his second overland journey with Franklin in 1825-27.
Source: Library and Archives Canada
In 1818, the first expedition in the new assault on the Arctic Ocean sent out four vessels: the Isabella, under John Ross, and the Alexander, commanded by Edward Parry, attempted to reach the Arctic Ocean through Baffin Bay, while the Dorothea, under David Buchan, and the Trent, under the command of John Franklin, took the east Greenland route. The failure of all four to reach an open polar sea convinced the Admiralty to plan more southerly routes for future expeditions.
In 1819, Edward Parry and Matthew Liddon, in the Hecla and the Griper, respectively, headed into Hudson Bay. At the same time, an expedition was sent to York Factory under orders to proceed west and north by land, down the Mackenzie River, and then east along the arctic coast, to join forces with Parry and Liddon. John Franklin had command of the party. His officers were Dr John Richardson, surgeon and naturalist, and two midshipmen, Robert Hood and George Back. The maritime and overland arms of the expedition failed to meet. Parry and Liddon sailed home to a triumphant welcome a year later, having wintered success-fully at Melville Peninsula. Three years passed before Franklin’s men arrived back at York Factory, and they were then a mere remnant. Ten men and one officer, Robert Hood, out of an original complement of twenty Europeans and Canadians, had died of starvation, or gruesome misadventure. Rumours of mismanagement, murder and cannibalism were hushed up by the Admiralty and the British press.
George Back was twenty-two years old when he sailed for the arctic with Franklin, but in spite of his youth, he was a man of considerable experience. In 1808, at the age of thirteen, he was captured by the French while on active duty at sea. After five years as a prisoner of war, he returned to England, received new sailing orders, and took up duties at the naval base in Halifax. He was not yet eighteen years of age. In 1818 he volunteered to serve under Franklin on the Trent. Because of Back’s ability to draw and paint, Franklin requested him as a member of the 1819 overland expedition. He was with Franklin again, as a lieutenant, on the second overland journey in 1825-27. In 1833-35, he commanded his own expedition across the barren grounds via the Great Fish River, later renamed the Back River, and undertook his final arctic exploration, 1836-37, as captain of the Terror with instructions to sail around Melville Peninsula and complete the survey of the Canadian north coast.
During the long journey of 1819-22, and in spite of incredible hardships, George Back produced a series of delightful sketches, watercolours, and studies for later rendering. Thirty-seven of them are beautifully reproduced in Arctic Artist.
Midshipman Back also kept a diary, as did Franklin, Richardson, and Hood. Back’s is the only one which covers the entire period of the expedition. And of the four, it is unarguably the most human and sympathetic in its representation of individuals coping with harsh circumstances, and suffering dreadful deprivations.
Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea ... 1819-20-21-22 was ready for submission to a publisher when the expedition members arrived back in England, and it appeared in 1823. It included excerpts from the journals of all three of his officers, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not. The Richardson and Hood journals, edited by C. Stuart Houston, have already appeared in print; Back’s journal, also edited by Houston, is the fourth, and last, of the journals kept by the officers of the expedition.
George Back left three major documents describing his experiences with Franklin in 1819-1822: the Extracts, &c from his journal ..., with entries for the first nine months, June 16, 1819 to March 19, 1820; the Journal of the Proceedings of the Northern Land Expedition ..., for the period from June 16, 1819 to August 31, 1822; and the Rough Notes, written “on the spot,” between June 13, 1821 and July 14, 1822. Much of the Journal is Back’s fair copy of his Rough Notes.
The three documents differ from one another in minor ways. As editor, Houston has intelligently integrated the three versions by the simple expedient of using the Journal as the basic text, and incorporating different or additional material from the Rough Notes in square brackets. In comparing Back’s documents with those of Richardson and Hood, Houston unearthed few discrepancies, none of them significant. Houston also compared Back’s documents with Franklin’s published Narrative, and used bold face to identify words, phrases, and sentences from the Back material which was omitted by Franklin. Here there is at least one surprise of major significance to historians and anthropologists. According to Back, Chipewyan elders who remembered Samuel Hearne’s sojourn among them in 1772, denied that Hearne had been present at the Bloody Fall massacre of the Inuit, which he described in such great detail in his memoirs, published in 1795, three years after his death. As I pointed out in my master’s thesis (1989), Hearne’s description of another massacre of the Inuit, at Knapp’s Bay (now Arviat) in 1755, was also wrong in most of its details. While the massacre certainly took place, Hearne (or perhaps his posthumous editor) was wrong about the date, the number of people killed, the reasons the Chipewyan gave for the attack, and the responses of the Inuit. Back’s tantalizing comment (page 141) will add fuel to the academic debate over the accuracy of Hearne’s reporting, and, one hopes, encourage historians and anthropologists to question even the most revered of their written sources more closely.
The editorial ideal of producing text which is both faithful to the original and easy to read and understand has been well met in Arctic Artist. Houston’s bold face additions and bracketed insertions have clarified the original text without affecting the immediacy and emotional impact of Back’s writing style. Houston solved the problems of eccentric capitalization, archaic spellings and word usages, misspellings, and illegible handwriting cleanly, leaving the original text unchanged, and at the same time easy to read.
Because Back did not prepare his diaries for publication, many references to people, ships, places, wildlife, etc. were left incomplete. Houston has identified these fully and clearly in footnotes, as well as providing explanations of the naval jargon of the 1820s, and of current events obscurely referred to by Back. The footnotes also contain sometimes tentative, sometimes definitive identifications of physical ailments suffered by expedition members and aboriginal people, a task Houston, a medical professional, is well-qualified to do.
The footnotes also include the sources of Houston’s information, and here the final editing has gone astray. Unfortunately, the citations are radically abbreviated, and somebody involved in the publication, possibly Houston, possibly McGill-Queen’s in-house editors, forgot that readers might actually want to know what these sources are. The footnotes, which so competently clarify the text, do not tell the reader where to find the key to the abbreviations, a failure which tends to annoy and frustrate the reader. For example, a footnote on page 7, the first page of Chapter 2, contains a parenthetical reference to “Houston, TTABC.” But Arctic Artist does not have a bibliography or a list of abbreviations, and there is, therefore, no logical place for the interested reader to search for the full citation. In my reading of the book, it was only after a long, frustrating search, that I found the complete reference, on page 362, in the endnotes to the Introduction, with the necessary decoding information — “(hereafter TTABC)” — which allowed me to identify the source referred to in the page 7 footnote as Robert Hood’s expedition diary. This problem haunts the reader throughout. To understand the reference in footnote 3, page 9, I needed to read all the endnotes from the beginning before it was clear that “CRCB” meant Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book.
One final comment on the technical organization of the book, an area where the journal editor probably had little or no influence: a strong flavour of male-adventurer point of view pervades the Index. There is, for example, no entry for women, although Back had interesting things to say about their social roles. Other subjects which might usefully have been indexed, such as disease, health, and medicine (both European and aboriginal), were not listed. There are also a daunting number of undifferentiated page references under some headings; ninety, for instance, under the entry for Franklin, John.
Houston’s expertise as a medical professional, accomplished ornithologist, and amateur historian of northern exploration has allowed him to provide contexts which a less inter-disciplinary editor could easily have missed. His Introduction and footnoted comments suggest explanations for a number of the puzzling mysteries of the expedition.
In some disciplines, however, Dr Houston is not entirely comfortable. References to aboriginal peoples in the Introduction perpetuate some inaccurate generalizations. Contrary to Houston’s statement (xvi), the fact that “Inuit and Indian were superbly adapted to their environment” was not “overlooked by most Europeans of that era.” Voyageurs and fur trade employees were well aware of aboriginal expertise in survival skills, and with the superiority of native clothing and travel gear, as a reading of Hudson’s Bay Company journals shows. If Franklin missed the point, it was due to personal arrogance and refusal to take advice from those he regarded as social inferiors, whether from aboriginal societies or from the British lower ranks. Other Europeans shared his attitude, especially those who made brief forays into the arctic, but not “most,” “and certainly not the voyageurs and fur traders who over the course of many years’ service learned aboriginal languages and survival skills, and in many instances, married aboriginal women.
Another, more serious, inaccuracy is Houston’s description of arctic and subarctic hunting communities as “nomadic” (xvi). No definition of “nomadic” fits the well-integrated, carefully planned demographic shifts of these hunting-gathering societies. Neither Indian nor Inuit were nomads.
In spite of the occasional instances where Houston’s understanding of aboriginal societies is somewhat unsophisticated, the editing has been well done, and the final work is a useful addition to the genre of published primary documents. Arctic scholars from all disciplines owe Dr. Houston a debt of gratitude.
The penultimate section of Arctic Artist, Ian Maclaren’s analysis of Back’s expedition watercolours and writing, manages to avoid the most dangerous traps of literary criticism by grounding his comments in a thorough understanding of the artistic conventions of early nineteenth century Europe, and their historical development. His Commentary makes a valuable contribution to the disciplines of history and cultural studies through his use of an analytical method which combines the approaches of both. He makes the point that Back’s painting, prose, and verse styles conformed to contemporary aesthetic attitudes. The observation suggests that Back’s visual depictions, charming as they are, may be less reliable as objective representations of the landscape than we might assume. Maclaren suggests that Back obeyed, either consciously or unconsciously, most of the prevailing rules for producing pleasant pictures, reshaping the landscape somewhat in order to make it more acceptable to a European audience among whom the picturesque was popular. When a leading engraver of the time, Edward Finden, transferred Back’s depictions from paper to metal plate, he made more changes, tempering the harshness of the arctic scene still further to increase its appeal to a British audience which perceived untouched wilderness as frightening.
Maclaren’s analysis of both the content and the style of Back’s writing adds to our understanding of Back as a witty, fun-loving, sensual man, with a well-developed ability to sympathize with and understand his fellow man. The word “man” is used here advisedly. As one follows Maclaren through his analysis of the written work, it becomes more than mere suggestion that Back, like many other men of his time and occupation, had considerably more sensitivity for the feelings and attitudes of men than he had for women.
The final section of Arctic Artist consists of four appendixes. The first is George Back’s letter to his brother, written at Fort Chipewyan in 1820, with a detailed description of trail life in the subarctic. The second is Ian Maclaren’s analysis of Back’s rhymed narrative of the journey. Appendix 3, the longest, contains excerpts from all the Hudson’s Bay Company post journals which noted the arrivals and departures of members of the 1819-23 expedition. The journal entries, besides adding many details of the progress of the expedition’s members, are especially interesting for what they reveal about the relations of the fur trade companies with each other and with the explorers. Appendix 4 is Back’s Obituary (1878), and here his life and career after 1837 are summarized. In the 1830s and 40s he was honoured with memberships and the gold and silver medals of the British and French Geographical Societies, and the Natural History Association of Montreal. In 1839 he was knighted; in 1847 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society; and in 1867 he was awarded the rank of full Admiral.
Back’s accounts of the two expeditions he commanded in the 1830s were published in 1835, 1836, and 1837. This most recent publication not only completes the cycle of narratives of the four officers of the first Franklin overland expedition; it also completes the cycle of Back’s reports of his own explorations. Houston, Maclaren and McGill-Queen’s have made a worthwhile contribution to the history of the arctic and of explorers and exploration by making these documents available to the wide readership to whom the works would normally be inaccessible.
Page revised: 26 September 2012
