“I dreamed a dream and I thought it true”: The Ghosts and Dreams of Polar Exploration
This is a version of the presentation I recently gave at Terror Camp 2021, a conference for all things related to The Terror (2018) and the Franklin Expedition. The conference was marvellous, and a delight to participate in; my thanks to the organisers and speakers is endless.
Supernatural elements — accounts of hauntings, clairvoyant or prophetic dreams, and presentations of explorers as dead-and-alive ghosts — form a surprisingly large aspect of Victorian ideas about polar exploration. Through newspaper reports, expedition journals, and literature and songs in popular media, the Arctic had gained an otherworldly quality long before Franklin and his men vanished entirely into it; and when they did, this fervour for the Gothic, dreamlike and ghostly only heightened. Here, I will discuss the importance of landscape in polar conceptions of the supernatural, and how this created a dreamlike otherworld in accounts and literature. Then, I will discuss those books and poems in more detail, and the presentation of the Arctic in Gothic literature. Clairvoyancy and dreaming in relation to exploration and particularly regarding rescue expeditions will be my next topic, as well as the presentation of dreams in sea shanties and folk songs. Finally, I will address the usefulness of ghosts and dreams to Britain’s imperial and colonial ambitions in the Arctic.
The Arctic, in Victorian literature and public consciousness, takes on a ghostly, supernatural quality unlike any other region. Its landscape is so vast and seemingly empty, and wholly unlike any other part of the Western world, that it appeared strange and otherworldly to the white men who explored it. In their accounts and journals, these explorers described places entirely without movement or signs of life; what Parry in his journals called a ‘death-like stillness of the most dreary desolation.’ In a place entirely without familiar stimuli, a form of sensory deprivation developed, and nearly all nineteenth-century explorers to the poles reported experiencing mirages and illusions, from John Ross’ famous Croker Mountains — an imagined mountain range blocking his route to the Northwest Passage and sending him home early, to his great shame — to shifting shapes in the ice, inexplicable sounds which echoed and resounded in odd ways, far-off objects appearing huge. On Shackleton’s long march across South Georgia, all three men reported feeling the presence of a fourth man who walked alongside them across the empty landscape. These strange phenomena made human perception unreliable, untrustworthy, as in a dream; explorers seemed alone but felt the eyes on the back of their neck, the step just behind theirs, the presence of previous explorers or long-dead friends. The idea of an unseen presence was strong in the Arctic; the region was inhabited, but very sparsely, and it was therefore possible to feel entirely alone and then stumble suddenly upon another person. More troubling was the possibility of finding strange ruins and perfectly preserved detritus from those explorers who had gone before, and in many cases not survived. The things they had left remained just as they were, as though the men might return at any minute, and were so preserved as to become ageless: an article in the Leader from 1851 reports finding footprints, likely from the Franklin expedition, though they can learn little from them, for ‘we are assured by Arctic travellers that similar marks endure with distinctness during successive seasons.’ Franklin could have stood there five minutes ago, or five years ago — though long dead, his presence remained unaltered.
Despite this sense of presence, however, the contrasting absence was far stronger. The Arctic presents a problem of vanishing: returning accounts frequently feature tales of thick fog separating members of a party from one another, or the party from the lost explorers whom they seek. Franklin himself wrote of an earlier expedition that ‘the atmosphere was so thick…as to confine our view to a few yards.’ Vanishing entirely or nearly without trace was not wholly uncommon, from the disappearance of Franklin and all his men to early explorers like Henry Hudson who, in 1611, was set afloat on the Atlantic in a small rowboat by a crew of mutineers and never seen again. Hudson, so Washington Irving has it in Rip Van Winkle, published in 1819, returns from his uncanny vanishing to the banks of the Hudson river to keep ‘a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-Moon; being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river and the great city called by his name.’ The explorer who never returns home to tell of what they have seen has unfinished business; their bones, unfound, lie unburied. They are the perfect ghost, and the Arctic is the perfect spectral, uncanny setting: Romanticism has a strong literary tradition of winter melancholy and mystery, of ghost stories and dreams. The Arctic as a Gothic wilderness plays into this tradition of ghosts, dreams, and mysterious occurrences, and forms a perfect setting for Gothic horror — securing the place of ghosts in the Arctic.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the heyday of Gothic horror, tales and poems set in the Arctic proliferated and became part of popular culture. Some of these narratives tell of strange characters who appear out of the Arctic landscape and thence disappear once more: Victor Frankenstein and his monster still roam the ice, so far as the narrator knows; the ghostly lover of The Captain of the Polestar manifests from a swirl of snow and is whipped away by the wind. Others, like The Frozen Deep and The Shadow of a Shade, are based specifically on the lost Franklin expedition and respond in various ways to the increasing prevalence of dreams and ghosts in popular ideas of the expedition: The Frozen Deep, heavily influenced by Dickens and through him Lady Franklin, doubts clairvoyance and any unpleasant or horrific aspects of events, but The Shadow of a Shade features a sailor murdered before he can aid in Franklin’s rescue and who then haunts his murderer through a painting on the wall. But the Arctic region is present in them all as a place of strange, unaccountable happenings that might be dreams, and might be ghosts, and might even be real: the uncrematable Sam McGee, the ‘ghost-faces’ aboard The Dread Voyage, the repeating, haunted Ancient Mariner. These stories, and others like them, create a cultural idea about the Arctic in the nineteenth century associated with unreality and haunted landscapes, and the idea of ‘strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold; / The Arctic trails have their secret tales / That would make your blood run cold.’ (The Cremation of Sam McGee (1907), Robert W. Service)
The idea of unreality in the Arctic makes it not only haunted, but a place of dreaming. Edvard Grieg said of the Arctic: ‘that is where the reality became a dream, and the dream became reality!’ Explorers categorised their experiences as dreamlike, and it is perhaps for this reason that dreaming became a linking connection between Arctic explorers and their loved ones at home. The long periods of dead time between news of expeditions and explorers — ships could be away for years on end without being seen or heard of — created a need to find some way of contacting explorers, much as those whose loved ones had died might attempt to contact them through seances. The Franklin expedition, being so famous, attracted a large number of clairvoyants to assist in its rescue, and Lady Franklin seriously entertained several of them. Most interesting was the Prince Albert expedition of 1850, under Charles Codrington Forsyth and William Parker Snow. Snow had himself had prophetic visions of the ships’ location in his dreams, and added to this was the testimony of Weesy or Louisa Coppin of Ireland, a three-year-old girl who had died some six months previously. Weesy manifested as a ball of blue light and wrote the supposed location of the ships on the family wall, though how seriously Lady Franklin took this has been doubted. What is important, however, is not whether Weesy was right, nor even how much the authorities believed her, but that the expedition was important enough to generate testimonies from unconnected people. The clairvoyant is an agent of hope; vanishing expeditions generate loss without closure, and into this void steps the dreamer. It is a way of comprehending loss which played into Victorian ideals of female fidelity, pushed to an incredible psychic connection. But ordinary Victorians dreamed of Franklin, not just his own family: the loss of Franklin was a national loss, and ownership of it was exerted through dreams.
Dream clairvoyance was not new, particularly to sailors. All sailors left home for long periods of time with no news of home and no guarantee for their own safety; it is, perhaps, natural that ways of communing with their loved ones over long distances and being perceived in turn should arise from this. Shanties and folk songs like Lowlands, Willie Drowned in Ero and The Young Man’s Dream refer to this kind of clairvoyance to connect with friends and lovers far away, though usually gaining bad news of an untimely death. The dream figures who appear to their loved ones in Lowlands and Willie Drowned in Ero both, by their appearance, foretell or make known their premature demise to the dreamer. The plight of the Franklin expedition made it into several ballads, such as Lady Franklin’s Appeal to the North, and one of the most popular songs about Franklin: Lady Franklin’s Lament, a broadside ballad from 1850. It is about a sailor who dreams about the Franklin Expedition, and about Lady Jane herself. Lady Jane cries: ‘And now my burden it gives me pain / For my long-lost Franklin I would plough the main / Ten thousand pounds I would freely give / To say on earth that my Franklin does live.’ She is the perfect example of female fidelity, waiting forever and at any cost for her husband to return, and yet there is a suggestion of hopelessness — the insistence on Franklin living ‘on earth’ allows the possibility of his living in some unearthly way, perhaps as a ghost. Clairvoyance in conjunction with Lady Franklin was clearly sufficiently well-known in Britain to become pop culture and dreaming of the expedition was an established phenomenon; Lady Franklin experienced loss without closure, familiar to all those who had lost family and friends at sea.
But the Franklin expedition was more than the loss of men — it had gained the character of a national traumatic event. Victorian society was fascinated by the expedition and its fate; it had been well-lauded at its outset, and then discussion of its disappearance and rescue had been public and prolific. Whether they had paid into Lady Franklin’s subscriptions or simply followed the story in the news, people had a sense of ownership over the expedition and a strange parasocial relationship with its men — they were invested in their survival and recovery. The London Journal reported in 1854 that ‘the names of the officers and crews of the Erebus and Terror, contrary to the notice given by the Admiralty, are still retained in the “Navy List,” and will remain there until the return of the searching ships.’ The Admiralty had attempted to remove the men from the lists of active service, effectively declaring them dead, but had faced such strong backlash from the public — spearheaded of course by Lady Franklin — that the names were retained. Ghostlike, the men of Erebus and Terror were called alive even though they were, very likely, dead; but keeping them alive in this way maintained the expectation that they would be found. Likewise, the many clairvoyants who dreamed of the expedition were producing real hope for their recovery — as well as exerting control over both the expedition, and the Arctic. The Franklin expedition was important to British society in more ways than one: it was a matter of national and naval pride that they survive to demonstrate the naval supremacy of which Britain had been so proud for centuries; it was key to the economy that any new trade routes be under British control; and Britain’s imperial ambitions had not yet reached their peak. Britain felt that it owned the Arctic, or at the very least that it should do, and dreaming of the landscape was just another way that people at home in Britain could feel that sense of ownership. The Gothic literature which shaped so many ordinary people’s conceptions of the Arctic twisted the space into a malicious wilderness, inhospitable to human life and filled with abandoned ruins, rather than simply an unfamiliar place in which the native Inuit lived ordinary, if different, lives. The creation of this land so wild and savage, populated by the supernatural and strange, othered the Inuit and made them by turns laughably credulous and frighteningly powerful, with their ghosts and shamans and dreams. Othering the native peoples in media and accounts has been common throughout Britain’s interactions with other cultures and places; if they live in this strange, not-quite-real place, then they too are strange and not-quite-real, and the average Victorian need feel no compunction about invading and colonising their lands. Populating the space with ghosts, too, is one of the more perfect forms of colonisation: British subjects have taken occupancy, but not in such a way that the natives might beat them out in an embarrassing display of strength. Death of the explorer was not an obstacle to victory: it is, perhaps, a peculiarity of British polar exploration that the Brits are far prouder of those that died, like John Franklin and Robert Falcon Scott, than of those that brought all their men home again, like Ernest Shackleton. The ideal expedition is one that transcends the earthly coil: having endured extreme suffering with virtue, the brave souls perish and thus become unevictable. Scott’s memorial at the Scott Polar Research Institute reads quaesivit arcana poli, videt dei — he sought the secret of the pole, but saw God; the Franklin memorial in Westminster Abbey written by Alfred Lord Tennyson reads ‘Not here: the white north has thy bones; and thou / Heroic sailor soul, / Art passing on thine happier voyage now, / Toward no earthly pole.’ In this way, too, Franklin forms part of modern Canadian mythology: Margaret Atwood wrote of him that ‘Because Franklin was never really “found,” he continues to live on as a haunting presence.’ Canada, specifically the white, European part of it, needed a kind of creation myth; one which justified their occupation of Inuit territory. The Franklin expedition, in its way, provided that: a safely dead and absent hero, but one who could lay claim to some part of the Arctic north where his bones, hidden, lie. It’s why Stan Rogers’ Northwest Passage is the unofficial national anthem of Canada, and why he seeks to find the ghostly ‘hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort sea.’ It’s why Parks Canada owns the wrecks of Erebus and Terror, and not the British government. Franklin’s ghostly absent presence marks ownership. Ghosts can’t be moved, and dreamers can’t be evicted, and those that claim Franklin claim the Arctic.
The association of the Arctic with the haunted and dreamlike is primarily a product of its strange landscape: its distance from Europe, its vast unfamiliarity, its tendency to swallow up expeditions whole. This understanding of the place was cemented in Victorian popular culture by Gothic literature and ballads, giving ordinary Victorians the opportunity to imagine the Arctic through dreaming and telling ghost stories. Crucially, however, the idea of British explorers living on in dreams or as ghosts and continuing to occupy the Arctic allowed Victorian society to exert control over the space in an otherworldly empire, and drag victory through the teeth of death.
