Geographies of the Romantic North

Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830

A. Byrne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137311320
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

This book examines British scientific and antiquarian travels in the "North, " circa 1790–1830. British perceptions, representations and imaginings of the North are considered part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of British self-fashioning as a Northern nation, and key in unifying the expanding North Atlantic empire.

Part I

“Most Valuable and Interesting to the Science of Our Country”: Northern Exploratory Travels

Introduction: “Ask Where’s the North?”

Ask where’s the North? at York ’tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,

At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where;

No creature owns it in the first degree,

But thinks his neighbour further gone than he.¹

Introduction

This book examines British scientific and antiquarian perceptions and representations of northern regions in c. 1790–1830, building on recent studies of Romanticism and the sciences to consider their complementary roles in experiences of the north.² Particular attention is paid to climate theory and intersections of apparent opposites, such as the sciences and antiquarianism, and native and newcomer ways of knowing, to establish the bases upon which contemporary British “men of science” interacted with the north. Romantic–scientific travel accounts form a significant but heretofore largely ignored component of Romanticism in their consolidation of humanities and sciences. Traveling men of science indulged in antiquarianism and ethnology alongside cartography, meteorology, astronomy, mineralogy, and geology, providing a baseline of antiquarian and historical perspectives placed within scientific frameworks and providing the foundation for interactions with northern indigenous peoples.

In historiographical terms, this book attempts to transcend many of the assumptions of postcolonialism. Much important work was achieved within that framework, providing essential, necessary reexaminations of colonial discourses.³ However, it implies that all scientific travelers were solely interested in imperial expansion.⁴ It is hoped that this work will contribute to the revision of scientific travels by emphasizing their multifaceted approaches toward the regions in which they traveled, and by dismantling essentialized and generalized portraits of Western and other cultures. While scientific travelers did of course provide information fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of empire, considering all scientific travel accounts as imperial discourses is simplistic. Edward Daniel Clarke’s travels, for example, were undertaken independently, without state sponsorship. He traveled as part of a small company, without a retinue of experts (indeed, he was the expert). A dedicated astronomical and meteorological observer, Peter Fidler, provided surveys of previously unmapped regions of present-day Canada, but also filled his journals with accounts of First Nations cultures and linguistics. The multifacted nature of these texts is acknowledged here, contributing to understandings of the impacts of imperial expansion and scientific advancement on human cultures. These impacts are evident in the challenges faced by northern communities today: climate change; debates on whaling and seal hunting; the myriad of problems associated with mining, forestry, hydroelectric, and other natural resources projects; issues relating to cultural identity rooted in the legacy of imperialism; and the need for truth and reconciliation following the violence of residential schooling and forced relocation and settlement. It remains to be seen whether the central governments with control over circumpolar regions—some of the world’s most “developed” countries—possess the will to find solutions to the imperially rooted problems that continue to affect the daily lives of northern indigenous peoples.

This book also advocates a rethinking of traditional attitudes toward Romanticism. Accepted notions of “what Romanticism was” have been challenged recently, but much remains to be done to erase decades of perpetuation of too-readily accepted presumptions. Distilled definitions of Romanticism as a reaction to the Enlightenment oversimplify a complex movement expressed across aesthetic, literary, scientific, cultural, imperial, philosophical, and other lines and which developed in tandem with the later Enlightenment. Penny Fielding also argues that “terms such as ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Enlightenment’ are very closely involved with each other in the period . . . the former can rarely replace the latter.”⁵ Romanticism formed a natural progression from eighteenth-century advances in scientific, geographical, and ethnological knowledge, preserving elements of the Enlightenment, particularly scientific progress, and adding to it a desire to experience the world and life more comprehensively—a new concern for the spiritual, the sensory, the subjective. The travelers studied here were simultaneously scientific, religious, Romantic, and interested in “the people” and landscapes. Together with, in Nicolaas Rupke’s words, a “more sympathetic investigation of those past ages which the Enlightenment had treated as unenlightened or barbaric and had left in obscurity,”⁶ scientific, antiquarian, literary, and artistic concerns were married in the search for a comprehensive understanding of life in all its forms. The Romantic emphasis on “unity in nature” characterized by Alexander von Humboldt’s approach to scientific research was reflected in such works as Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (3 vols, 1830–3).⁷ Conversely, the sciences were fundamental to Coleridge’s worldview as he “worked constantly toward a system reducing ‘all knowledges into harmony,’ ” his appreciation for the sciences stemming from his belief that they “revealed and constituted relations in nature.”⁸ Noah Heringman has uncovered a “pervasive connection between scientific and literary culture” resulting in “a body of poetry obsessed with mountains, but also a geology steeped in aesthetics.”⁹ An interest in the sciences did not preclude a Romantic aesthetic or worldview, nor vice versa; if anything, they were mutually beneficial. Indeed, Romanticism appears as the culmination of the Enlightenment’s achievements—these scientific and antiquarian travelers reached a heightened, comprehensive awareness of humanity, nature, and the structures of life, encountering the earth not only in terms of scientific understanding, but also as a living thing in itself that influenced human cultures.

Romanticism was not, as formerly portrayed, a spur for travel or exploration, but one of its products, fueled simultaneously by eighteenth-century exploratory travel, scientific advances, and antiquarianism.¹⁰ In other words, a “three-fold relationship between exploration, science and literature” permeated British culture in the period and thus Romanticism “arose partly as a response in writing (travel writing, scientific writing, literary writing) to encounters with foreign people and places.”¹¹ Enlightenment imperial expansion necessitated the gathering of cartographic, linguistic, topographical, botanical, agricultural, mineralogical, zoological, ethnographic, and other forms of knowledge and its placement in centralized databases. Increasing appetites for such knowledge led to more widespread travels, the establishment of learned societies, and the diversification and specialization of scholarship. As the already-sizeable market for travel literature widened further with increasing literacy and the opening of more public libraries and reading rooms, it became more common for exploratory and scientific travelers to publish their experiences and observations. Romantic poets drew inspiration from exploratory narratives. Northern and Arctic discourses were, then, not simply outcomes of Romanticism, but active forces in its creation; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a regularly quoted example. Samuel Hearne’s story of a Tlicho (“Dogrib”) tribeswoman who spent seven months in the wilderness with no human contact inspired Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798).¹² Coleridge was influenced by accounts of the Cree and Dene of Hudson Bay and drew upon Arctic travelogues to construct an imagined Antarctic in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).¹³ Jonathan Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America (1778) was published in 60 editions in six languages and influenced the work of von Schiller, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, and James Fenimore Cooper.¹⁴ The north was a hot topic in Britain, with reports of the achievements and failures of such high-profile exploratory travelers as Mackenzie and Franklin contributing to constructions of the north in the British Romantic mind.

Geographical and temporal boundaries: the Romantic north

Texts studied here are published and unpublished British travelogues of northern/sub-Arctic regions in c. 1790–1830 by antiquaries and “men of science.” The common contemporary term, “men of science” is used here to avoid anachronistic use of the word “scientists.” This inclusive term reflects the heterogeneity of the group; it emphasizes “the person rather than the activity undertaken . . . the qualities of mind and character supposedly needed for and formed by the practice of science.”¹⁵ The phrase was used contemporaneously to describe the activities of those recognized as having made a contribution to the sciences: for example, William Jackson Hooker referred to the governor of Iceland as a gentleman and a “man of science” for his research on Danish history and his recognition by Danish and Norwegian learned societies, and Humphry Davy was described as such in the first line of his brother’s biographical edition of his writings.¹⁶ However, it does, obviously, exclude women; see the “Note on Gender” section. It also conveniently covers the polymathism characteristic of the period. The variety of these polymaths’ interests is evident in their attention to geology, meteorology, astronomy, cartography and geography, antiquities, linguistics, popular culture, and ethnography. The loss of such rounded, open-minded, and complete perceptions of human and earth history in favor of narrower specialization and professionalization in the later nineteenth century remains problematic today.¹⁷ The dissection of the formerly natural relationship between the humanities and sciences leads many modern northern humanities scholars and social scientists to complain that scientists perceive of the Arctic as a space devoid of people, due in part to a lack of awareness arising from a need for increased interaction between disciplines.

The area covered in this book lies generally within the sub-Arctic, the southernmost extent of which is usually placed somewhere between 50ºN and 70ºN, depending on local climates. The focus rests here on the broad, North Atlantic region stretching from Scandinavia across to present-day Canada, territories that were the objects of British imperial desire and scientific enquiry, and that exerted considerable influence over contemporary British imperial identity formation. Here, sub-Arctic travels receive more attention than the more famous “heroic” Arctic ventures from 1818 onward. The sub-Arctic was infinitely more important in real knowledge terms than the North Pole, which has been described as “an economically and scientifically . . . useless target.”¹⁸ While to observers “there did not seem to be much time at the Arctic: no visible effects of chronology, no lost civilisations, no history and no myth,”¹⁹ the sub-Arctic was filled with tantalizing glimpses of living history.

“The north” has been a fluid and socioculturally contingent but important geographical, historical, and ethnological construct since classical antiquity. It was not a matter of latitudinal lines; rather, the point of reference was a set of cultural, scholarly, and imaginative constructions applied to the Nordic and Celtic fringes of Europe, the northern reaches of the British Isles, and British North America. The north was less a geographically defined region than a set of representative sociocultural, climatic,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   “Most Valuable and Interesting to the Science of Our Country”: Northern Exploratory Travels
• Part II   “A Living Pompeii”: Antiquarianism, Identity, and the North
• Part III   Geographies of the North
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index