DESCRIPTION OF A VIEW OF THE NORTH COAST OF SPITZBERGEN

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen, Painted from Drawings Taken by Lieut. Beechey, who Accompanied the Polar Expedition in 1818; which is Now Exhibiting in the Large Rotunda of Henry Aston Barkers Panorama, Leicester Square (London, 1819). Reproduced with permission of the British Library, shelfmark 10349.t.15.(60.).

Henry Aston Barkers Panorama of the North Coast of Spitzbergen was exhibited between approximately April 1819 and September 1820. This was the first time an Arctic scene was on display in the Leicester Square Rotunda, and it was probably the first Arctic exhibition shown in any panorama. The Arctic would become an increasingly popular subject in the decades to follow, appearing twice more in the Leicester Square Rotunda and in venues such as the Minerva Hall and the Linwood Gallery by mid-century. Robert Burford, a succeeding proprietor of the Leicester Square Panorama, exhibited two further Arctic panoramas: the View of Boothia, Discovered by Captain Ross (1834) and the Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850).1 Some of the content of the 1818 panorama of Spitzbergen as well as some of the writing in its programme were in fact reworked and represented in the Marshalls Peristrephic Panorama of the Polar Regions and its accompanying programme.2 Barkers programme, however, was not entirely original itself. Some of the text of the notes has either been paraphrased or reproduced from the scientific work Arctic Zoology by Thomas Pennant (London, 1785). The narrative portion of the programme contains testimony from Lieutenant Frederick William Beechey, one of the officers on the voyage, as noted in his much later published expedition narrative, A Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole (1843).3 The visual content of the panorama also originated with Beechey, as the title of the programme suggests, being based on his drawings taken during the expedition. The voyage represented in the panorama is one branch of a dual expedition that departed in 1818. Captain David Buchan led the Dorothea and Trent toward the North Pole with Lieutenant John Franklin as second in command.

Copyright

155

156

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Captain John Ross led the second branch on a search for the Northwest Passage, but his expedition did little to further this pursuit, as he was deceived by atmospheric effects into believing that passages were blocked which were later discovered to be navigable. Barkers choice of subject for representation was significant; John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, was famously disappointed and critical of Ross on his return.4 Barker therefore carefully avoided provoking the Admiralty and capitalized on what was seen to be the less controversial branch of the expedition, even though Buchan also accomplished little, hardly surpassing the well-travelled waters of the areas used by an international array of whalers. Barkers intervention into the press attention to this expedition was particularly significant because the voyage narrative offered in the programme was the only account of Buchans attempt to reach the North Pole that was publicly available until Beechey published his account decades later. The 1818 panorama might be said to have set a sort of precedent in this area, as the Leicester Square Rotunda would again act as an Admiralty-approved medium of distributing expedition results in 1850, when no narrative was published for James Clark Rosss failed 18489 voyage in search of the missing Franklin expedition. The style of the narrative portion of the programme is akin to that of other popular writing about the Arctic, and Barker may have taken some inspiration from Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818) or Samuel Taylor Coleridges poem The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798). The programmes descriptions of the awe-inspiring power of the Arctic sea are reminiscent of Victor Frankensteins account of pursuing the creature to the North Pole: Immense and rugged mountains of ice often barred my passage, and I often heard the thunder of the ground sea, which threatened my destruction.5 The Ancient Mariner also uses the arctic landscape to develop a sense of desperation and despair: The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around: / It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, / Like noises in a swound!6 Barkers programme especially captures this atmosphere toward the end of the narrative when describing the incident of the ships near destruction during the storm that forced the expedition to turn back to England. Where previously the mind is filled with admiration of the grandeur and magnificence of the Arctic landscape, when the storm rages at the height of its intensity, the Arctic becomes a scene of horror far beyond the power of language fully to describe. Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century, numerous writers would depict the Arctic in this contradictory manner: immensely beautiful and awe-inspiring, but prone to sudden transformation into a deadly environ-

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

157

ment. Barkers panorama programme is no exception. Like Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, its position as an early and widespread depiction of the Arctic suggests that it may have been one of the forms of print culture that helped establish this convention. LG Notes
1. 2. 3. See Burford, Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions, Volume 3, pp. 2139. See Messrs Marshall, Peristrephic Panorama of the Polar Regions, Volume 4, pp. 131. F. W. Beechey, A Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole, Performed in His Majestys Ships, Dorothea and Trent, Under the Command of Captain David Buchan, R.N., 1818 (London: Bentley, 1843), p. 2. Whilst Buchan did not publish an account of his branch of the expedition, John Ross did, and in 1819, Barrow, under the cover of an anonymous review, scathingly criticized Ross, commencing a decades-long dispute between the two men; J. Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 18181860 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 534. M. Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 176. [W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge], Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: J. & A. Arch, 1798), p. 9.

4.

5. 6.

Copyright

Copyright

Copyright

160

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Copyright

162

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

163

Copyright

164

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

165

Copyright

166

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

167

Copyright

168

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

169

Copyright

170

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

171

Copyright

Editorial Notes

315

Chetwode Eustace, for example, writes: they contrived, either by bribery or stratagem, to purloin the body; A Classical Tour through Italy, 3 vols (1813; London: Printed for J. Mawman, 1815), vol. 1, p. 170. According to modern scholarship, the merchants smuggled the body out in order to save it from desecration; see S. Carboni (ed.), Venice and the Islamic World, 8281797, exhibition catalogue, trans. D. Duisinberre (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 14. p. 152, l. 24: Palladio: Andrea Palladio (150880), author of I quattro libri dellarchitettura (1570), was responsible for a great number of buildings in Venice. p. 153, l. 2: Pius VII.: Pius VII (17421823) was ordained in 1800. p. 153, l. 13: plague: When the plague swept northern Italy, it killed about 300,000 people. There are several reports on outbreaks of the plague in the Mediterranean at the time of the panoramas exhibition. The Times also printed a report issued by the Select Committee, which had been appointed to establish the nature of the disease and how it could be prevented: Your Committee would also observe, down to the year 1800 regulations were adopted which must have had the effect of preventing goods infected with the plague from being shipped directly into Britain; they see no reason to question the validity of the principles on which such regulations appear to have been adopted; The Plague, The Times, 11 August 1819, p. 2. p. 153, l. 22: Nicolas Pisano: Nicola Pisano (c. 122078/84) dominated the style of late-thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sculpture. p. 154, ll. 56: Bartolomeo Coleone de Bergamo: Bartolomeo Colleoni (140074), the leader of a mercenary army hired for protection, was made general-in-chief of the Republic of Venice in 1454. The statue, erected after his death, is by Andrea del Verrocchio. p. 154, l. 14: Pianta Leone: It. lion planter. The term describes the planting of the lion flag. p. 154, ll. 1819: pantomimes of the present day: In the Commedia dellArte, there is no fixed play-script. The actors improvise around their stock characters, whose temperaments and behaviours are determined through masks.

Copyright

Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen

p. 162, l. 10: Capt. Buchan: Captain David Buchan (1780c. 1838) was selected to lead the branch of the 1818 expedition searching for the North Pole due to his years of service in Newfoundland. After the 1818 expedition, he returned to service in Newfoundland and was promoted to the rank of captain in 1823. Buchan was lost in the ship Upton Castle in 1838; J. Barrow, Voyages of Discovery and Research within the Arctic Regions, from the Year 1818 to the Present Time (London: John Murray, 1846), p. 57. p. 162, l. 22: Wm. Barentz: Willem Barentsz (c. 155097) was a Dutch explorer who made three voyages in search of a Northeast Passage in 1594, 1595 and 1596. His experiences are often evoked in writing about Arctic exploration in the early nineteenth century. p. 163, ll. 89: that immense barrier of ice: This was the lower limit of the permanently frozen pack ice. Those frustrated by the conditions in this area included Barentz, though it was a common destination for whalers and was in fact visited by John Barrow during a whaling expedition. p. 163, l. 20: floes: These are large portions of pack ice, or drifting sea ice that has come loose from the shore, which have been driven together to reach formidable sizes from tens of metres to several miles. The floes described here presumably refer to large portions of pack ice continually produced by four glaciers that met in the area.

316

Panoramas, 17871900: Volume 1

p. 165, l. 32: helm placed a-weather: This is a nautical term for turning the ship into the wind in order to gain speed. In preparation for this expedition, the bow and other parts of these ships had been strengthened in anticipation of just such a disaster, hence Buchans decision to use the strength of the storm to drive the ships into the ice. p. 166, ll. 1722: Smeerenberg South Gat: These were ports used by whalers on the northwest corner of Spitzbergen, slightly southwest of the islands grouped around Cloven Cliff. p. 167, l. 8: dip of the needle: This was the angle of inclination of a compass needle toward one of the poles, a phenomenon that had implications for navigational science. Some of the debates the 1818 expedition sought to settle included questions of how many magnetic poles there were, whether they were stationary or mobile, and how compasses would be affected in their presence; T. Levere, Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration, 18181918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 47. p. 167, l. 22: lost Greenland: also Old or Ancient Greenland. This was a region to the east in Greenland whose supposedly verdant landscape gave the island its name. A Danish colony was supposedly settled there in the seventeenth century and lost due to the impossibility of ships approaching through waters clogged with pack ice. p. 168, l. 6: Capt. Buchan: see above, p. 315. p. 168, l. 6: Lieut. Franklin: Commander Sir John Franklin (17861847), following his service as second in command on the 1818 voyage in search of the North Pole, led three additional Arctic expeditions. Other officers served on more expeditions, but Franklin is the single most famous Arctic explorer for having nearly starved to death on his 1819 overland expedition and for having disappeared with his entire expedition in 1845. Franklin mapped over 1,000 miles of Arctic coastline, but his indirect contribution to the search for the Northwest Passage is arguably more significant: his disappearance led to its discovery as well as the mapping of many more unknown areas of the Arctic. p. 168, l. 9: Mr Fischer: George Fischer, FRS (17941837), mentored by Humphrey Davy and Joseph Banks, left working for an insurance company to study science at Cambridge. His studies were interrupted when he was selected for service on the 1818 expedition, during which he carried out astronomical observations, gravity pendulum experiments and measurements to determine the degree of effect of shipboard iron on chronometers. Fischer also served on William Parrys 1821 expedition. p. 168, ll. 1641 and p. 169, ll. 12: Larus Glacuous a crimson lid: Much of the material on sea birds is cribbed from T. Pennant, Arctic Zoology, 2 vols (London: Henry Hughes, 1785), vol. 2. All but the first sentence of the text of No. 18 is reproduced directly from Pennant. Other sources must have been consulted as well. Nos. 5 and 14 are lifted directly from Pennant, though the work is not referenced, but the material for No. 11, for example, is gathered from an unnamed source. In each of these notes, the genus of birds named is still in use but the combinations with species appear to be obsolete. The genus larus, which refers to gulls, is a term still in use, as are the terms alca for penguin-like northern birds such as the puffin and colymbus for a genus of diving birds. Some of these combinations of genus and species are listed in the Pennant text, while others are not. p. 169, l. 1018: Sterna Hirundo molested by them: see above. p. 169, l. 22: Ice Blink: This refers to the phenomenon, compared by Arctic explorer William Scoresby to a grand phantasmogoria, wherein objects beyond the horizon are seen, inverted in the air above their real location on the sea. In his 1832 publication Letters on Natural Magic, Sir David Brewster explained the illusion on the basis of different densities of air, causing the atmosphere to act like a convex lens, refracting and reflecting light: If in serene weather the surface of the sea is much colder than the air of the atmosphere, as it

Copyright

Editorial Notes

317

frequently is, and as it was to a very great degree during the phenomena described by Mr. Scoresby, the air next the sea will gradually become colder and colder, by giving out its heat to the water; and the air immediately above will give out its heat to the cooler air immediately below it, so that the air from the surface of the sea to a considerable height upwards will gradually diminish in density, and therefore must produce the very phenomena we have described; D. Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (New York: 1832 ed.), p. 142. p. 169, l. 30: Scoresby on Polar Ice: This is probably a reference to the chapter on Greenland or Polar Ice in William Scoresby (17891857), The Arctic Regions and the Northern Whale Fishery (London, c. 1820). This publication may have been issued in one or more periodical articles or as a tract earlier than 1820 and therefore available at the time of writing the programme. Scoresby was a respected Arctic scientist, mentored by Sir Joseph Banks and educated at the University of Edinburgh, but he never realized his hopes of leading an Admiralty-sponsored voyage to the Arctic even though his findings were influential in the planning of the 1818 expedition. p. 169, l. 40: Grey Hook: This is the easternmost point of the peninsular land and archipelagos at the northwest corner of Spitzbergen. p. 169, l. 44: Red Hill: This is on the north coast of Spitzbergen to the east of Cloven Cliff, mentioned in C. J. Phipps, A Voyage Towards the North Pole, Undertaken by his Majestys Command, 1773 (London: J. Nourse, 1774). See below. p. 169, l. 45 and p. 170, l. 1: Hon. Capt. Phipps: Captain Constantine John Phipps (174492), later Lord Mulgrave, carried out a voyage in search of the North Pole via Spitzbergen in 1773. See also above. p. 170, ll. 513: Fulmar Petral Penn. Arc. Zoo. vol. 2, p. 516: see above, p. 316. p. 170, l. 7: Cook: Commander James Cook (172879), one of the most important navigators and hydrographers of the eighteenth century. He made three Pacific voyages in 1768, 1772 and 1776, during which he crossed the Antarctic Circle three times and unsuccessfully attempted to locate a Northeast Passage, hence his significance to Arctic explorers of the following decades. p. 170, l. 28: voyage of Barentz: On sea-bears and the crew of Vitus Berings expedition to find the Northeast Passage, see G. F. Mueller, Voyages from Asia to America, for Completing the Discoveries of the Northwest Coast of America, 2nd edn (London, 1764), p. 102. See also p. 315 above. p. 170, l. 35: South Gat: see above, p. 316. p. 170, l. 43: Colymbus Trolli Penn. Arc. Zoo. vol. 2, p. 516: see above, p. 316. p. 171, l. 26: Cloven Cliff: This was a landmark island at the northwest corner of Spitzbergen, located near the mouth of Red Bay and adjacent to the islands called the Norways as well as Vogel Sang. It was named by Barentz during a 1594 voyage. Portions of Barentzs narrative are reproduced in M. Conway, How Spitzbergen Was Discovered, Geographical Journal, 21 (1903), pp. 14250.

Copyright

Description of a View of the Ruins of the City of Pompeii, and Surrounding Country
p. 178, l. 2: Donaldson: Thomas Leverton Donaldson (17951885) studied under Sir John Soane at the Royal Academy, and left England in 1819 in order to travel through Europe and sketch and measure ancient buildings. Antonio Canova (17571822) admired his work, and Donaldson was elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in