Introduction: Exploration and Sacrifice: The Cultural Logic of Arctic Discovery

Summary

The Northwest Passage in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1818–74

Although this collective work can certainly be read as a self-contained book, it may also be considered as a sequel to our first volume, also edited by Frédéric Regard, The Quest for the Northwest Passage: Knowledge, Nation and Empire, 1576–1806, published in 2012 by Pickering & Chatto. That volume, dealing with early discovery missions and eighteenth-century innovations (overland expeditions, conducted mainly by men working for the Hudson's Bay Company), was more historical, insisting in particular on the role of the Northwest Passage in Britain's imperial project and colonial discourse. As its title indicates, this second volume deals solely with the nineteenth century. This was the period during which the Northwest Passage was finally discovered and – perhaps more importantly – the period during which the quest reached an unprecedented level of intensity in Britain. In Sir John Barrow's – the powerful Second Secretary to the Admiralty's – view of Britain's military, commercial and spiritual leadership in the world, the Arctic remained indeed the only geographical discovery worthy of the Earth's most powerful nation. But the Passage had also come to feature an inaccessible ideal, with Arctic landscapes and seascapes typifying sublime nature, in particular since Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818).