2 - Eskimaux, Officers and Gentlemen: Sir John Ross in the Icy Fields of Credibility (1818–46)

Summary

The tragi-comedy of John Ross's slow rise to splendour and sudden fall into disgrace was acted out on a specific socio-professional stage with at its centre a triangle of three actors: two men of action, John Ross and William Edward Parry, supervised by a powerful and influential armchair geographer, John Barrow, the famous Second Secretary to the Admiralty. The stage on which the three actors were repeatedly summoned from 1818 to 1846 was what Pierre Bourdieu calls a ‘field’: a structured social space with its own rules of acceptability and credibility, codes of corporeal and linguistic behaviour, schemes of domination and legitimate opinions. While keeping in mind the constraints inherent in that particular field – the field of government-sponsored Arctic explorers – one should also acknowledge the importance of the protagonists’ respective backgrounds. Still, although the three actors’ actions and reactions were determined by such contexts – social, geographical, ‘racial’ – the stage on which they interacted was also a space of precariousness, where each character's status came to be questioned and negotiated, his presence within the field made acceptable or unacceptable. These men's fortunes were articulated on the positions they managed – or failed – to secure in that specific social space. These were regulated by a complex dialectic between origins, individual achievements, financial backing, personal connections and institutional power relations, regulated also – and above all – by the more or less felicitous wielding of a crucial weapon – rhetoric – which will be the specific subject of this chapter.