Horror in the Arctic

Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted before and never would again. In ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, the man who had painted ‘Dignity and Impudence’ shows two polar bears, one howling above a human rib-cage, the other tearing at the sails of a ship crushed in the ice, all this in the bleak half light of what passes for a day in the Arctic. The picture is so terrifying that, hanging in the Great Hall of the Royal Holloway College, it is even now covered over when students take their exams.

Five years earlier, in his short story ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton had described a vision of the fate awaiting his demonic villain, a man who, like Cliff Richard, had arrested the processes of ageing.

‘The sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship…And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead…That man is yourself ; and terror is on you — terror ; and terror has swallowed your will. And I see swarming up the ice-rock, grey grisly things. The bears of the North have scented their prey…’

It is clear that something had scared the daylights out of the Victorians, this at the time of the implacable advance of their Empire and of the moment of their greatest self-confidence, of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

That something was the unknown fate of the experienced Arctic explorer Captain Sir John Franklin with two ships and 128 men in 1845. He was in search of that centuries old chimera, the North West Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but also, as Professor Lambert is insistent, of the earth’s magnetic field, a serious scientific enterprise.