The Poetry of The "New Georgia Gazette" or "Winter Chronicle" 1819-1820Introduced by I.S. MacLaren Henry James Pye Readers of Canadian exploration literature customarily think of Henry Kelsey's verse journal as the single, unremarkable poetic contribution to a genre dominated by narrative,3 and standard reference sources confirm this custom.4 Strictly speaking, they are correct to do so. However, during the early nineteenth century at least two British naval expeditions of exploration for a Northwest Passage yielded many poems by explorers, if not all concerning exploration. They appeared in shipboard newspapers and, later, in facsimile editions,5 the first poetry in English written both in and about the Canadian Arctic, more than a century before the Mackenzie River poems of F.R. Scott and Al Purdy's poems from Baffin Island.6 These newspapers, like the narra tives of exploration, exploited recognizable cultural values, conventions, and literary forms to identify northern latitudes; thereby, the poetry made the north a recognizable portion of the globe to the British public during the half-century leading up to the discovery in 1859 of the fate of Sir John Franklin's lost voyage of 1845. To a notable extent, the poetry printed during the winter of 1819-1820 in "The New Georgia Gazette" or "Winter Chronicle," the shipboard newspaper of the first of four voyages to the Arctic under the command of Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855), was doing the work that Charles Dickens would image in 1857 as "making a garden of the desert wide."7 The Royal Navy, the British Government, and the Church of England are all celebrated formally in one or another of the poems, as, in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon and despite economic recession, a spirit of manifest destiny was being heard across Britain. Parry's voyage in HMS Hecla and Griper, with Lieutenant Matthew Liddon commanding the latter, formed part of a two-pronged assault on the passage in 1819, the other prong being the first of two overland journeys by boat and canoe from Hudson Bay to the arctic coastline under Commander John Franklin (1786-1847). The ambitious assault was the plan of Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty from 1804 to 1806, and from 1807 to 1845. Barrow even hoped that a rendezvous might be made by Parry and Franklin once the two reached the continental coastline. (The post-Napoleonic world was England's oyster in the view of many of its institutional representatives if not of the Romantic poets.) The results of the assault were mixed: Franklin's expedition lost nine of its twenty men to starvation and cannibalism while nine hundred kilometres of coastline east of the mouth of the Coppermine River was charted, much of it along the shores of the frustrating dead end of Bathurst Inlet;8 Parry's ships made the remarkable discovery of a western exit from Baffin Bay, thereby encountering the arctic archipelago, scene of so much activity and disaster in subsequent decades, and reaching past 110°W Long., a feat which earned his officers and men not only parliament's advertised £50009 reward but also, as it turned out, the distinction of being the only expedition to manage that degree of western penetration from the Atlantic during the entire nineteenth century. Following his remarkable summer's explorations, Parry found an excellent refuge from ocean ice, which he named Winter Harbour, on the south side of Melville Island, at 74º 47' 15" N. Lat., 110° 48' 00" W. Long. (approximately 650 kms. west of the modern settlement of Resolute Bay, N.W.T.). After his sailors spent several days cutting a canal 4080 yards (3.69 kms) through the ice, he anchored his ships near the shore and one another on 26 September (Fig. 1), secured as well as such wooden vessels could be in preparation for winter. Then he effected several precautions and commenced several régimes of his own devising in an effort to preserve his ships and his crews' physical and mental health through ten months of freeze-up, including ninety-two days when the sun, "that cheering orb, 'of this great world, both eye and soul',10 would not rise above the horizon. These included dismantling the masts, roofing over the ships' decks "with a cloth, composed of wadding-tilt, with which waggons are usually covered" (pp. 10 1-02), and, by placing them in the boats on shore, ensuring that all ropes and sails remained frozen and, therefore, unable to rot. The weather being too cold to permit the fermentation of beer (one solution to scurvy employed by Captains Cook and Vancouver forty and thirty-five years earlier on the Pacific northwest coast), Parry issued daily rations of lime-juice mixed with sugar, which "with a proper quantity of water, was drunk by each man in the presence of an officer appointed to attend to his duty" (p. 105). As well, morning and evening inspections of men's skin and gums were conducted. Schedules and routines were followed religiously, especially during the sun's absence, which "made all activities more difficult and was psychologically very trying."11 As for the preservation of morale, "amusement" had to be furnished and curiosity satisfied entirely by the sailors themselves, for this expedition, unlike Parry's next, met with no Inuit as long as it was in the archipelago. At least officially, amusement was created in two ways:
While Lieutenant Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856), also one of the expedition's artists and son of the famous portrait painter, served as stage manager of the Theatre Royal, the editorship of the manuscript newspaper was entrusted to the astronomer, Captain Edward Sabine (1788-1883). During the voyage, this was known alternatively as the "Winter Chronicle" and the "New Georgia Gazette"; only after the voyage, upon his return to England, did Parry realize that New Georgia, his designation for all the islands that he had "discovered in the Polar Sea," had already been used to name a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean (today, part of the Solomon Islands). He announced the change of name with an imperial flourish in his book (p. 99), although, having died during Parry's voyage, George III was not alive to receive the compliment. It is upon a manuscript copy of the "New Georgia Gazette" that the subsequent presentation of poems will be based; variations occurring in the versions published in The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle will be specified in notes.13 In order to avoid as much as possible any confusion between the manuscript and the publication, the former will henceforth be referred to by its alternative name, the "Winter Chronicle." The manuscript version is taken here as the authoritative one based on recent research, which indicates that what explorers wrote while exploring tended often to alter as it evolved, under their or another's hand, into published form. As the emphasis in the following presentation will be placed on the circumstances under which poems were created, it is logical that the version chosen for presentation be the one surviving that most nearly approximates original composition.14 Ten of the nineteen officers on the ninety-four-man expedition accounted for all of the one hundred and thirty contributions to the twenty-one numbers of the "Winter Chronicle," which appeared weekly on Mondays beginning on 1 November 1819 and concluding, rather prematurely since the ships did not leave their winter mooring until 1 Augnst, on 20 March 1820.15 Of these ten, seven — Parry, Sabine, Beechey, purser William Harvey Hooper, and mid shipmen Joseph Nias, James Clark Ross (1800-1862), who would go on to gain fame in his own right as an explorer of the Arctic and Antarctic, and John Bushman — served aboard the Hecla, and three — Liddon, Lieutenant Henry Parkyns Hoppner, the other artist of the expedition, and clerk Cyrus Wakeham — sailed on the Griper (p. ii). All but three numbers (5, 11, and 12) contained at least one item in verse, which usually appeared near the end of the number, and which treated subjects that, as Parry stated of the paper's entire contents, were "generally applicable to our own situation" (p. 127). Only Hooper, Beechey, Ross, Parry, and Wakeham wrote in verse. These poets range from Hooper, who can be credited (blamed?) for most of the occasional doggerel verse in song and ballad meters and stanzas, to Wakeham, who was far and away the most prolific contributor, and, with the exception of a few, author of the best poems and songs for the Theatre Royal. It is all the more regrettable, then, that almost nothing is known about him.16 All the poems, it is no surprise, retain an emphatic institutional awareness: their authors were naval officers cum poets, not poets on an adventure. Following are eight of the two dozen poems from the manuscript. The selection criteria are novelty of subject, formalistic interest, and evidence of an awareness of poetic tradition, although all three do not always appear in the same work. A brief commentary follows each transcribed poem.
This address, which appeared in the newspaper's second number, Monday 8 November 1819, amounts to a proclamation. Structured in three parts, like most of Wakeham's verse, it begins by surveying history on two counts: recent naval and national history, including the defeat of the tyrant (Napoleon) who held Europe hostage (11. 1-8); and then the history of arctic exploration from a British perspective (9-16), the names of Baffin, Davis, Frobisher, Hudson, and others obviously implicit. The second part traces the expedition's comparative success, which Wakeham attributes to no more than "happier fortune" (1.17), a necessary choice, since he cannot argue that God shines more favourably on his century of Britons than on a preceding one. Thereafter, the second part, by explaining the need for "cheer" amidst a prolonged arctic night, brings the poem at its midpoint to its occasional and titular purpose, the opening of the theatre (11. 17-34). The last third of the poem, commencing at the turn effected by the co-ordinate conjunction, "But" (1. 35), looks forward to the "reviving spring" (1. 36) and further exploits with a degree of success equal to the previous season's. Parry's ships being beset at 110°W Long., Wakeham was writing roughly at the mid-point of the passage, the west coast of Greenland lying at 55°W. Long., and Bering Strait at 168°W Long. His mistake here, an understandable one, is to continue reasoning from such balanced logic, for it implies, as every officer without exception fondly thought, that the return of the sun would, as it tends to do farther south, herald a change of seasons; on the contrary, as Wakeham and his fellows would learn to their chagrin, February and March can be the coldest arctic months, spring and summer occur almost simultaneously, and the ocean begins to offer leads of water only in July, if at all.19 But at the time of composition, such realizations lay ahead of Wakeham and his audience; nor did the occasion of his address call for anything other than a rallying of the esprit de corps in the face of the declining sun. Hibernation was not Parry's plan for the dark days; if Seasonal Affective Disorder had yet to acquire its fashionable late twentieth-century name, the officers knew intrinsically that it existed and needed to be combatted. And so the refulgence of the Tahitian sun, as well as the great achievements of their forbear, Captain Cook, are alluded to instead. Wakeham's not inconsiderable skill, by capitalizing on the sibilance of "Southern Surges," enchants his audience, calling up before them a seaman's fondest sounds and images: "Delighted listening to the swelling breeze" (1. 50). Hardly an arctic allusion, the line effectively transports the listener around "Columbias bending shore," and, almost before he realizes it ("swift impels us" [l. 51]), to England and poem's end. He has been diverted from Winter Harbour, amused, and not a little indulged by the pleasures of hope. Reflections occasioned by seeing the Sun set for a period
of
Written by William Edward Parry for the newspaper's sixth number, on Monday 6 December 1819, this was his only contribution in verse.21 Perhaps as much as a month in gestation, this poem appears influenced by several sources. One certain source for Parry, regarded as one of the more devout of the officers who commanded expeditions of arctic exploration,22 was the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer. As well (see note 10) it appears that he was familiar with Paradise Lost.23 This conventional poem of consolation, in couplets of iambic pentameter, turns on each of its five stanzas. Resonating with the familiar images of the sun as God's blessing on Man, it begins with the ominous observation of the departing orb, conveying powerfully the symbolic significance for a Christian of this natural phenomenon. Both irremediable desolation and forsakenness are adumbrated by the personification of lines five and six, certainly a powerful effort at registering the sense of deprivation that such latitudes can impart to one whose sense of nature and God derived from England and English landscape and climate. How could the heavens declare the "glory" of God if they were dark? the poem asks. Meanwhile, Parry soon determined that Melville Island itself failed to offer him and his men the consolation that British poets like Cowper and Campbell had counselled could be derived in times of despair from the observation of nature:
The sense of forsakenness would have been compounded but also refuted by the biblical readings appointed for the fourth day of the month, the day in November when the sun set.24 Evening Prayer for the fourth day designated Psalm 22, better known as one of the Good Friday Psalms. It offers Christ's cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me" (22:1). Also proceeding through five parts, it works towards a faithful expression that "All the ends of the world shall remember, and be turned unto the Lord" (22:2 7). But the sense of forsakenness also resounds with the despair expressed, and, gradually, the inspiration gained by the blind poet in his invocation "Hail Holy Light," which begins Paradise Lost, Bk. III. The questions voiced in lines nine through twelve of Parry's poem seem in particular to follow form the blind poet's despair:
Obviously, however, the certainty of the blind poet's predicament differs from the situation of the explorer, so that the latter appropriately shapes his despair in questions rather than statements. Still, the assurance in the third stanza of Spring and Summer's return to "dissipate the shades of night" has too easily solved the questions, since the same was conventionally and frequently supplied to the climate and meteorology of Britain by its poets. As if in an effort to search deeper, Parry begins again in the fourth stanza. For the conceit (Milton's "God is Light" is one likely source) upon which the first three stanzas were predicated, he substitutes the conceit of the declining sun as an "[e]mblem of man" (1. 23). The proclamation " 'Thy race is run!' " now seems to invoke the despair of Milton's Samson Agonistes: "My race of glory run" (1. 597). In stanza five, this conceit is rather flatly contradicted than deftly worked out: "Yet not for ever. . ." (1. 27). This would seem a problematical resolution for the audience at whom the poem was directed, given their aims of secular exploration. With only "th'immortal part of Man" ending in glory and dispelling "the dreary winter of the tomb" (11. 29,34), the consolation seems an excessively bleak figure for the situation in which Parry's men found themselves. Although it is clear from such contemporary publications as Edward Bickersteth's A Scripture Help that such consolation, derived from contemplating the transcendental, was fervidly counselled and adopted by early nineteenth-century Anglicans — indeed, several hundred kilometres to the south, on the mainland, Franklin's naturalist-surgeon John Richardson would read such a publication to Midshipman Robert Hood to console him as he lay dying on the tundra in October 182125 — it still seems a less than apt figure for Parry to choose given his responsibility for keeping his men's bodies and souls healthy through the dark months. But this judgement doubtless pays too little credit to the power that constant darkness exerts on the mind, however devout the person; it may be that Parry's only effort of devotion in verse bears the marks of the environment in which and against which he wrote. At any rate, what need not be surmised is that Parry remained as dutiful to his God as to the Admiralty; his "Shall rise triumphant midst the shades of night" (1. 32) is faithful to the doctrine as expressed, for example, in Surge, Illuminare, one of the alternative canticles for the Church of England's service of Evening Prayer, or in Psalm 139:1-11, which was designated as one of the "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea."26Thus have the night thoughts been transcended, if not profoundly investigated.27 Reflections on the Morning of Christmas Day, 1819,
* Aurora Borealis Composed by Cyrus Wakeham for the ninth number of the "Winter Chronicle" on Monday 27 December 1819, this hymn in blank verse celebrates a day when, according to Parry's narrative, "the weather was raw and cold, with a considerable snow-drift" (p. 128). Like an eighteenth-century topographical poem, it begins in contemplation of the poet's surroundings, dimly visible though they are. The lack of glory on Christmas Day, a lack that throws into profound doubt the symbolism of the Sun/Son conceit on which English-language Christians have long depended, initiates the series of wonders, and the Aurora Borealis' "paly light" continues it. But the opening negation ("no Glory darts"), and the caesura followed by the spondees in line two creates an elegiac tone, which is reinforced by the vague allusion in line three ("Save where the Moon's young Crescent") to Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard" ("Save where the beetle . . . ").29 The turn out of the elegiac occurs at the end of the second verse paragraph and the poem's second part, and it occurs, interestingly, not by Wakeham's coming to terms with his setting, but by his seeking the sun in "Brittannia," where it does shine. However unsatisfactory this shift is to readers interested in a poetic accommodation to environment, it permits Wakeham to move from topographical description and empiricism to spiritual inspiration and invocation, the aim of his hymn. The point is to "prolong the wondrous strain" amidst sundry other wonders "of His Pow'r," such as the continual night, and the aurora borealis. The consolation persists regardless of one's terrestrial surroundings (11. 28-32). Thereby, and not unlike Parry's poem, does "the Hymn of grateful Joy" provide consolation for the sailor immured in a "world of painful toil." The poem has neglected to come to terms with the birth of Christ in a realm where the Sun/Son symbol cannot obtain, and one regrets in particular that Wakeham, who might have had the ability, did not tackle the interesting conceit used by Milton in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" about the sun's hiding at the birth of Christ.30 But Wakeham may still be saluted for working his, one imagines, psychologically difficult way from darkness and elegy to glory and hymn of transcendent triumph on the Christian's great day of celebration.
* Our ships were the first that have succeeded in crossing Baffin's Bay in the Lat. of 72° + Telegraphic Signal made by the Hecla, after breaking thro' the first barrier of ice. ** The evening was beautifully clear, when we sailed over the spot, assigned to Croker's Mountains. + + The Meridian of 110° West, which entitled us to the 1st Reward of £5,000. Composed by Wakeham for the tenth number of the "Winter Chronicle," on Monday 3 January 1820, these seven octets of cross-rhymed anapestic sexameters cannot fail to bring to mind such traditional tunes as "Sweet Betsy from Clyde," (and, perhaps for the modern reader, such traditional themes as the "Northwest Passage," as composed and sung by the late Stan Rogers). The important optimism leant to the theme by the rising swell of the anapests is realized well in these "Thoughts." The poem may be regarded as the middle one of a triplet, with Wakeham's opening and closing addresses for the Theatre Royal (the first and last poems offered here) flanking it. All are secularly inspiring, although they all, as usual, pay tribute to God, and all survey the past, describe the present state of the expedition, and look hopefully towards future success. Wakeham draws a not inept correspondence between the expedition's attainment of the longitudinal meridian (1. 14) and the passing of the winter solstice, "the gloomy Meridian" (1. 29). One lurking danger may be vaguely intimated in line 30 — "And e're long shall gay Spring bid the herbage revive." The first case of scurvy (James Scallon, gunner aboard the Hecla) had been reported on the first day of the new year (p. 132). Parry immediately "began . . . to raise a small quantity of mustard and cress in [his] cabin, in small shallow boxes filled with mould, and placed along the stove-pipe," but it was "necessarily colourless, from the privation of light," and probably did the spirits of his "scorbutic patients" more good than it did their bodies.
Wakeham wrote this poem of consolation for the thirteenth number of the "Winter Chronicle," which appeared on Monday 24 January. A home sick poem the outset of which owes not a little to Thomson's "Winter" (1726),33 it begins conventionally with a catalogue of absences (the repetition of "No," for example), followed only by questions. At the conventional brink of despair, where neither nature nor art can fill the void, the poet turns inward (11. 21-2) and retrieves the consolation of spiritual nourishment. Whereas Thomson's swain falls victim to Winter ("Lays him along the snows a stiffened corse" [1. 97]), this winter wanderer learns from his wealth of "Contentment or Repose" to improve himself. Here, a theme is presented that gains prominence in Upper Canada somewhat later — that of the North as maker and tester of virtue in a man.34 Those who achieve the middle way (characterized as the golden rule of charity towards others [l. 29]) despite being surrounded by environmental extremes are the better for their test. The lesson learned, the poet turns in the last third of his consolation to celebrate the achievement for the transcendence it guarantees him over his foes' (time and weather's) "transient gloom" (1. 39). Here, at his most didactic, Wakeham gives his fellow officers a spiritual pep-talk, which balances the heavily secular nature of most other items in the "Winter Chronicle." Lines suggested by the brilliant Aurora Jany 15th 1820
The only one written by James Clark Ross, age 19 or 20, this poem appeared in the fourteenth number of the "Winter Chronicle," on Monday, 31 January. Parry (pp. 134-36), Alexander Fisher, and the anonymous author of letters to his brother concur that the display of the northern lights on 15 January was the only very brilliant one of the entire winter.36 Interestingly, it fell to a man of science to attempt a poetic description of the display. Ross, who, in 1831, on his third voyage of discovery in the Arctic, would locate for the first time the North Magnetic Pole, conducts his reader through eight pedestrian couplets of observation before turning inward to describe the effect on his soul of the event. Not surprisingly for a man of science still in the age of Paley, rather than of Darwin, Ross experiences no difficulty in ascribing the meteorological wonder to God's "inscrutable" plan. That the poem's thought expires as unexpectedly as the aurora, seems gratuitous; certainly, the verses give the lie to the inductive view that the more one beholds the more one understands of "th'o'erwhelming maze of Nature's laws" (1. 19), but such problems lay beyond this poet's skill to set out. Moreover, it needs to be noted, this particular blind alley in the maze of Nature's laws had baffled men of science for centuries before Ross, and for another five decades after.37 Finally, the poem takes on for the modern reader an eerieness not intended by its author. Time would tell that the aurora was only one of the most inscrutable works of God to escape man, in particular Englishmen, in the Arctic; the other was the maze of the North west Passage itself. Lines on the re-appearance of the Sun, Feby 3d 1820.
As if intentionally a companion poem to Parry's, this set of "Reflections" was composed by Wakeham. It appeared four days after the reappearance of the sun, on Monday 7 February; however, had the poet been as inspired by the advent of the reappearance as his fellow seamen were, he would have begun writing it long before the actual occurrence of the event, for every day from 25 January onwards, sailors braved the cold and climbed the ships' masts in hopes of a sighting. It will be quickly apparent that the chief reasons for including this poem are the novelty of its subject matter and the fact that it has a companion. Wakeham, although he demonstrates again his competent handling of meter in the iambic pentameter couplet, does not prove himself a match for the occasion; his figures are merely descriptive and his theme well worn. Moreover, he blindly invokes seasonal change as simultaneous with the sun's reappearance. But the shedding of a flood of sun "o'er the Northern world" (1. 2) does not herald birds' "[r]eturn from milder climes" (1. 27); nor is it the case that "[a]ll Nature feels the life-inspiring ray" (1. 29): herbs do not revive and the ice does not melt. The day on which the poem appeared in the "Winter Chronicle" had a maximum temperature of only — 20°F (p. 150). A charitable reading of this poem would credit it at least with figuring forth the exhilarated optimism felt by one left so long in the dark. Although the bear is awkwardly included in the general renovation (1. 22), one senses that the poet is experiencing, if he is not in fact harnessing in words, the sensation of rejuvenation after hibernation that only that animal knows.39 Farewell Address,
* Tarred Hemp. Apart from the editor's thanks to the paper's contributors, this address in verse by Wakeham marks the last item in the paper's last number, which appeared on Monday 20 March. Obviously, the poem is meant to serve several purposes, including the formal closing of the theatre, a review of the expedition's geographical progress to date, and a prayer for its future success. It regales the officers with compliments for their good-spirited undertaking of female rôles in the theatrical productions41 before raising the tone markedly by means of an epic simile (11. 27-42). In it, Wakeham renders clearer than in any other verse the idea of struggle against the environment, for he likens the conquered soldier to the icebound sailor. The comparison seems an appropriate one only in so far as the conquered soldier seems to have no choice but to await a change in Victory's tide; that is, he cannot alter matters on his own, only take advantage of a change once it occurs. Perhaps this martial simile is suggestive of the men's increasing impatience to set sail again. The early closing of the theatre and newspaper attests to the inexperienced arctic explorers' fervent hope (if not actual belief) that spring would occur at about the time of the sun's return; certainly, they had no expectation that another five months (almost as long again as they had already spent in Winter Harbour) would have to pass before their ships once again moved through water. In appropriate order, the poem then proceeds to acknowledge Providence and national pride as the mainstays of future success, which cannot be commanded, only deserved. In the case of Providence (11. 43-66), Wakeham's verse does nothing so much as contextualize in terms of his specific voyage (esp. 11. 55-60) one of the Collects of Thanksgiving from the "Forms of Prayer to be used at Sea," in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer. In the edition of 1818, perhaps the one used by Parry's men, it reads in part as follows: "Even when we gave all for lost, our ship, our goods, our lives, then didst thou mercifully look upon us, and wonder fully command a deliverance; for which we, now being in safety, do give all praise and glory to thy holy Name... ." Moving on to a prayer for success in the next season (11. 61-66), Wakeham deftly prepares the way for the patriotic theme with which he concludes the address. In the final verse paragraph (11. 67-80), a considerable weight is thrust on the expectation, for all "Brittannia's hopes are centered in [their] deeds" (1. 73). No doubt, following the remarkable success of their first year's explorations, and given, up until the time of the poem's presentation at least, that the first-ever overwintering of a ship of the Royal Navy had occurred safely, every officer felt comfortable with the burden of that expectation. It may seem inappropriate for Wakeham to close (1. 80) by paraphrasing a tragedy, but the point of his doing so is to allude not to the genre of Addison's verse drama, Cato, but to the British patriotism symbolized by that play throughout the eighteenth century, and by the character of Cato, symbol of undeserved banishment, chaste stoicism, and "the undoubted advocacy of a sane and ordered existence." Wakeham paraphrases the end of a speech by Portius, son of Cato, whose job, not unlike Wakeham's ("Sons of my Country!"), is to inspire the Roman Senate to overthrow the tyrant Caesar, and welcome Cato back:
The justice of the cause in which the ships' men were patriotically engaged, banished to the Arctic and struggling against the tyranny of nature rather than man, occasions Wakeham's paraphrase. Also, however, he may have known that in 1713, Addison's drama, with the famous actor Booth as Cato, was performed "with unprecedented success" by "Their Majesties' Servants" at London's Theatre Royal.42 It is doubtful that every member of Wakeham's audience would have known and appreciated this additional allusion in an address closing the arctic Theatre Royal, but those of his Majesty's servants who did catch it would have been swelled all the more by the weight of British history that the coincidence of the allusion carried. What they certainly could not have known was that their inspired optimism issued from their attainment of the high point of geographical exploration during the entire nineteenth-century British naval campaign in the Arctic. Although explorers for the "Passage" left a legacy almost entirely in prose narrative, these verses from on high, distinctive and not undistinguished, are similarly exceptional.43 Notes [back]Henry James Pye, The Progress of Refinement: A Poem in Three Parts (London, 1783).[back] Henry Kelsey, The Kelsey Papers, ed. and introd. by Arthur G. Doughty and Chester Martin (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada and the Public Record Office of Ireland, 1929). Two important recent essays that treat Kelsey's verse are D.M.R. Bentley, " 'Set Forth as Plainly May Appear': The Verse Journal of Henry Kelsey," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 21.4 (Oct. 1990), pp. 9-30; and Germaine Warkentin," 'The Boy Henry Kelsey': Generic Disjunction in Henry Kelsey's Verse Journal," in Literary Genres/Genres littéraires, ed. by IS. MacLaren and C. Potvin (Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 1991), pp. 99-114.[back] For example, Germaine Warkentin, "Exploration in English," in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, gen. ed. William Toye (Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 242-49. Warkentin emphasizes exploration by fur traders to the exclusion — save for Franklin — of British naval explorers. See also, Richard C. Davis, "Exploration and Travel Literature in English," The Canadian Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1985), I, 605; 2d. ed., 4 vols. (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988), II, 735-36. Davis goes so far as to state that "the accounts of primary geographical exploration in Canada" are "innocent of literary ambition" (p. 735).[back] Lieutenant Edward Sabine, ed., The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (London: John Murray, 1821); and Captain Sherard Osborn and George F. MacDougall, eds., Facsimile of the Illustrated Arctic News, Published on Board H.M.S. Resolute: CaptN Horatio T. Austin, C.B. In Search of the Expedition under Sir John Franklin (London: Ackermann & Co., 1852). Without mentioning that it included poetry, Victor G. Hopwood cites the former as "certainly the first literary magazine in the Canadian Arctic, but there is little to glean from its combination of youthful facetiousness and pious reflections" ("Explorers by Land to 1867" in Literary History of Canada [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965], p. 36; 2d ed., 3 vols. [Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976], I, 45.)[back] FR. Scott, "Letters from the Mackenzie River, 1956," in Signature (Vancouver: Klanak, 1964); Al Purdy, North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967). One other poem deserves mention if the terms of qualification are generously stretched. Eighteenth-century English knowledge of the Arctic west of Europe was slight; thus, all of it, including the island of Greenland, was often considered indiscriminately. From this standpoint, a translation titled "A Greenland Ode" might be included for consideration. The first Inuit literary work published in English, "A Green land Ode" was edited in 1745 by Samuel Johnson, who insisted on both a phonetic Inuktitut presentation and an interlinear English translation (Gentleman's Magazine, XV [1745], 376-77).[back] Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Under the Management of Charles Dickens. His Production of "The Frozen Deep", ed. by Robert Louis Brannan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), "Prologue," 1. 17. Brannan attributes the Prologue to Dickens (p. 98).[back] Of note regarding Franklin's expedition in the present context is a poem written about it at its conclusion by one of the surviving officers, Midshipman George Back. Comprising fifteen cross-rhymed, annotated stanzas, "Recollections of our unfortunate voyage" exists in two versions in the file, "Miscellaneous notes written during the first Arctic Land Expedition, 1819-1822," holograph, MS 395/71/1, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. A transcription of the annotated version forms one of the appendices in C. Stuart Houston's edition, "Arctic Artist: The Journal, Paintings, and Poetry of Midshipman George Back, 1819-1822," presently under consideration for publication.[back] The division of the award (20% of it went to Parry) is given by A.G.E. Jones, "Rear Admiral Sir William Edward Parry: A Different View," Musk-Ox, 21 (1978), p. 5.[back] Lieutenant William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Performed in the Years 1819-20, in His Majesty's Ships Hecla and Griper... (London: John Murray, 1821), p. 113. (Subsequent references to Parry's Journal will depend on this edition and appear following quotations in the text.) The quotation forming the appositive is from Adam and Eve's Hymn, Paradise Lost, Bk. 5, 171 (John Milton: Compkte Poems and Major Prose, ed., with notes and introduction, by Merritt Y. Hughes [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957]. All parenthetical citations and quotations of Milton's works depend on this edition.)[back] C.S. Mackinnon, "The Wintering-Over of Royal Navy Ships in the Canadian Arctic, 1819-1876," The Beaver: Magazine of the North (winter 1984/85), pp. 12-21; qtd., p. 14. Mackinnon's essay provides an overview of the life on board a ship wintering over in the Arctic.[back] Not everyone shared Parry's sanguine hopes for a salutary result from the newspaper. Alexander Fisher, assistant surgeon aboard Parry's ship, Helca, wrote in his unauthorized account that he had no doubt that the plays would realize their aim, but precedence suggested that the newspaper ran the risk of cultivating only ill will: "I have seen one or two instances, and have heard of many more, where newspapers on board ship, instead of affording general amusement, and promoting friendship and a good understanding amongst officers, tended in a short time to destroy both . . . at length the paper, instead of being the source of amusement and instruction, becomes the vehicle of sarcasms and bitter reflections. And should the conductor, or conductors of the paper have discretion enough to refuse admitting in their columns productions of this nature, yet they cannot repress the sentiments or opinions of the parties concerned, who, to make the matter worse, generally know one another; for, to be an anonymous writer on board of ship is but a thin veil to prevent a person from being known, for peoples' [sic] talents and turn of mind are soon discovered, when situated as people necessarily are, confined together at sea" (Journal of a Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions, in His Majesty's Ships Hecla and Griper, in the Years 1819 & 1820 [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820], p. 152.) Fisher did not contribute to the paper.[back] "New Georgia Gazette," 1 vol., 32.3 x 17.3 cm, MS 438/12; EN, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; qtd. by kind permission of the Archivist. This item is cited in Manuscripts in the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, England, ed. by Clive Holland, Garland Reference Library of Social Science, vol. 123 (New York and London: Garland, 1982), pp. 459-60, 743. Written in an unknown hand, perhaps Sabine's or a clerk's, it is both a fair copy of the shipboard newspaper and a draft manuscript of The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, containing a number of pencilled changes as well as notes of explanation, in ink (signed "WEP" [William Edward Parry]), required by the landlubber but obviously unnecessary for the paper's original readership. Although, Sabine states in The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle that "no alteration has been attempted in the respective papers, in preparing them for the press" (p. lv]), this is not the case; from changes of upper to lower and from lower to upper case letters, to the changes of words and the exclusion of whole items, extensive alterations were made, if not by Sabine then by the publisher, John Murray, before the paper appeared in book form.[back] On the matter of discrepancies between explorers' field notes/log books and publications, see, for example, MacLaren, "Samuel Hearne's Accounts of the Massacre at Bloody Fall, 17 July 1771," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 22.1 (Jan. 1991), 25-51; and "Exploration/Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Author," International Jou nal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d'études canadiennes, no. 5 (Spring/ Printemps 1992), pp. 39-68.[back] A "General Index to the New Georgia Gazette or Winter Chronicle" is included at the beginning of the manuscript copy. Authorship of individual items is not, except by pen name, disclosed in The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle. A single copy of that publication does, however, contain the names of authors, pencilled in by an unknown hand (see S.M. Silverman, "The Authorship of the Newspaper on Parry's First Arctic Expedition, 1819-20," Arctic: The Journal of the Arctic Institute of North America, 30.1 [March 1985], pp. 65-7), but these attributions do not correlate exactly with those given in the "General Index," on which subsequent discussion will rely.[back] Almost nothing is known of this officer, who sailed to the Arctic first with Captain Buchan, on HMS Dorothea in 1818, but whose name does not appear again among those of arctic explorers after Parry's voyage of 1819-1820. In the published account of the voyage of 1818, Wakeham's name appears only once, when he is identified in a list of officers as Clerk aboard the Dorothea (Capt. F.W. Beechey, A Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, Performed in His Majesty's Ships Dorothea and Trent, under the Command of Captain David Buchan, R.N.; 1818 [London: Richard Bentley, 1843], p. 28). Neither the standard sources in naval biography nor the Navy List include entries for him, perhaps because there was uncertainty as to whether or not ships' clerks ranked as officers. Records of Officers' Services (ADM 196, Public Record Office, London) include entries on clerks beginning only in 1845; as Clerk, a man had no commission and did not necessarily even require a warrant. Wakeham's name, where it appears at all, occurs in the muster for the Griper (ADM 36-39, Public Record Office, London), which records that he had several six- month advances on his pay. This information is too slight to justify the inference that indebtedness drove him out of the Navy, but the possibility cannot be ruled out. (I acknowledge with thanks the assistance received, in confirming and explaining the absence of information about Wakeham, from Ann M. Shirley, former Polar Research and Displays Officer, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; from Clive Holland, former Archivist, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; and from Angela Ryan, research agent for the Public Records Office, London.)[back] The image of winter as a tomb is sufficiently common to preclude the identification of it with a particular source. One that might be mentioned, however, is William Cowper's The Task, Bk. V, "The Winter Morning Walk." This book's extended simile, in which the ice palace of the Empress of Russia is compared to mortality, describes the traveller's, if not the explorer's, fate:
(William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. by H.S.
Milford, 4th ed., with corrections and editions by Norma Russell [London: Oxford
University Press, 1971].)[back] See Parry's Journal for 30 May 1820: "The sea still presented the same unbroken and continuous surface of solid and impenetrable ice, and this ice could not be less than from six to seven feet in thickness, as we knew it to be about the ships. When to this circumstance was added the consideration, that scarcely the slightest symptoms of thawing had yet appeared, and that in three weeks from this period the sun would again begin to decline to the southward, it must be confessed, that the most sanguine and enthusiastic among us had some reason to be staggered in the expectations they had formed of the complete accomplishment of our enterprise" (p. 179).[back] In The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (pp. 35-6) this poem bears a slightly different title: "Reflections on seeing the Sun set for a Period of three Months. November, 1819." Discrepancies in the published version of the body of the poem are as follows (manuscript version in italics):
See Ann Parry, Parry of the Arctic: The Life Story ofAdmiral Sir Edward Parry 1790-1855 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963). Parry, the father of thirteen children later in his life, also wrote Thoughts on the Parental Character of God (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1841).[back] It is quite likely that at least one copy of the poem was on board. An anonymous collection of fifteen letters to a "Brother Thomas" quotes Satan's apostrophe of hate to the sun (Bk. IV:32-37) in order to contrast Milton's description of Satan's arrival, "[a]fter a voyage still more extraordinary than ours, . . . on the verge of the solar system" (Letters written during the Voyage of Discovery in the Western Arctic Sea by an Officer of the Expedition [London, 1821], p. 66).[back] Unable to locate an edition published in 1819, perhaps the latest one available to Parry before he set sail in June of that year, I have consulted The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, according to The Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; together with The Psalter, or Psalms of David, pointed as they are to be sung or said in Churches (Edinburgh, 1818). For Morning and Evening Prayer, its Lectionary appointed Ecclesiasticus (the book of the Apocrypha that is known also as Sirach) 20 and 21, Luke 20, and Colossians 4 as the Lessons. None of these chapters dwells on God in terms of glory and light. (I acknowledge with appreciation the assistance provided by William H. Loos, Curator, Rore Book Room, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, in making available to me a copy of this particular edition.)[back] See Arctic Ordeal: The Journal of John Richardson, Surgeon-Naturalist with Franklin 1820-1822, ed. by C.Stuart Houston (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984), p. 148.[back] In part, Surge, Illuminare reads as follows:
In part (verses 10-11), Psalm 139 reads as follows: It seems appropriate to recall Edward Young's poem because it appears that Parry alludes to it, although it is difficult to know for certain. The single quotation marks around " 'numbered with the dead' "(1. 28) indicate an indebtedness, and it may be to "Night 1" (1742) of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Mortality. Young contemp lates the rich life of eternity enjoyed by the deceased in contrast to his own and concludes that the former thrive:
(In English Poetry of the Mid and Late Eighteenth
Century:An HistoricalAnthology, ad. by Ricardo Quintana and Alvin Whitley [New York:
Knopf, 1963].)[back]
This occurs in the seventh stanza of Milton's poem: In The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (pp. 58-60), this poem bears the identical title. Its presentation is somewhat different in that all even-numbered lines are indented. Other discrepancies in the published version of the body of the poem are as follows (manuscript version in italics):
The thoughts of home Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth In many a vain attempt. How sinks his soul, What black despair, what horror fills his heart, . . . (In English Poems: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1800), ed.
by W.C. Bronson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908], 11. 64-7.) [back] [back] This poem appeared under the same title in The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (pp. 82-3). Discrepancies in the published version of the body of the poem are as follows (manuscript version in italics):
[back] See Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 223, 226-31; and Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcon tinental Nation (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 129, 135, 138-39.[back] The date is not included in the title of the version printed in The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle (pp. 90-1). Discrepancies in the published version of the body of the poem are as follows (manuscript version in italics):
Although he offered no poetic response to the reappearance of the sun, Parry did not let the occasion pass uncelebrated by his pen. In the same (fifteenth) number as Wakeham's poem appeared, he acknowledged it in prose with a droll item titled "Fashionable Arrival in North Georgia," which has ite way with the genre of society notes: "On Thursday last, about noon, after an absence of three months, arrived at his seat, Snow-Hill, in the Isle of White, the Earl of Sol, Viscount Caloric, well known as one of those distinguished luminaries which seem born to enlighten and adorn the world. His lordship has been on his travels in the south, during the winter, accompanied by a numerous retinue of faithful adherents, who could not bear the thought of being separated for so long a period from their illustrious benefactor. Many of these are such fine bucks in their appearance, and have such fawning manners, that into whatever country they go, they are generally made game of; and yet, in spite of this, they are always deer to those who know them. It is said that his lordship's protracted absence has been severely felt in this neighbourhood, and that it has even produced a considerable degree of coolness between him and his tenants in this country; but as it is well known that his lordship possesses the peculiar quality of imparting his own warmth of heart and melting disposition, to all who are fortunate enough to be placed within the sphere of his genial influence, little doubt can be entertained of a speedy reconciliation. His lordship is already on his
way to the metropolis, but intends travelling by easy journeys, not exceeding twenty miles
a day. His noble sister, Lady Luna, has set out to meet him" (The North Georgia
Gazette and Winter Chronicle, p. 88). As the son of a fashionable doctor in the
Regency Bath of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Parry knew of
what he spoke.[back]
[back] Joseph Addison, "Cato: A Tragedy" (1713), in Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century as they were acted at the Theatres-Royal by Their Majesties' Servants, ed. by Dougald MacMillan and Howard Mumford Jones (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1931), pp. 517-47.[back] Together, these poems offer some early and intermittently memorable examples of themes that would recur and do recur in the response to the Arctic by non-native Canadians. In particular, the ideas of the north as a venue for the testing and for the replenishment of one's spiritual mettle are paramount. As well, the idea of the north less as a place than as an obstacle to elsewhere (the South Pacific, or England itself after a voyage round the world) arises here, following a tradition among seekers of the Northwest Passage. That view helps to account for the slighter adaptation to place in these poems than one finds in the poetry written at about the same time in the British North American colonies by poets such as Cary, Goldsmith, and Howe. Finally, though less consciously, there emerges the incipient idea of the north as a male preserve; the exploration of a Northwest Passage by large numbers of nineteenth-century seafaring Englishmen is the basis of that tradition.
Fig. 1. H.M. Ships Hecla & Griper in Winter Harbour. Drawn & Engraved by W[illiam] Westall A.R.A . from a Sketch made on the Spot by Lieut. [Frederick William] Beechey; in William Edward Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-WestPassage, opp. p. 122. Reproduction courtesy of D.B. Weldon Special Collections Library, University of Western Ontario.[back] |
