Frozen | James Romm | The New York Review of Books

One day in 1652, a British man of science named Joseph Moxon stopped into an Amsterdam tavern, never dreaming that his harmless recreation would, indirectly, bring later explorers suffering and death. Moxon happened to meet a Dutch sea captain who claimed that his fishing boat had reached the North Pole and even gone beyond it. “I askt him if they did not meet with a great deal of Ice?” Moxon reported in a 1674 treatise. “He told me No, they saw no Ice. I askt him what Weather they had there? He told me fine warm weather, such as was at Amsterdam in the Summer time, and as hot.”

The old salt’s tale seemed to corroborate what Europeans had imagined since Greek antiquity: that temperatures got colder as one went north but suddenly, at earth’s northern extreme, turned warm again. The “open polar sea,” as it came to be called, beckoned to trading nations, especially England, that sought a quicker sea route to Asia than the weary journey around the Cape of Good Hope. A century after Moxon published his treatise, an influential amateur naturalist named Daines Barrington used the Dutch fisherman’s story to advance his argument that British ships had to find a way across, or through, northern Canada—the fabled Northwest Passage. Barrington’s writings helped persuade England to send its most famous ship, the HMS Resolution, and its most accomplished navigator, James Cook, on a voyage across the Pacific with the principal goal of finding the passage by heading east from the Alaskan coast.

Cook’s third voyage, the culmination of a storied career, nearly ended in disaster. In the summer of 1778, as they probed into deep Alaskan inlets, the Resolution and its sister ship, the Discovery, barely escaped from congealing Arctic ice. Cook gave up and returned to Hawaii (known to him as the Sandwich Islands), where King Kalaniʻōpuʻu had given him a warm reception a few months before. Edgy and short-tempered, Cook antagonized the Hawaiians and precipitated a clash in which he was killed.

A photograph by John Lapham Dunmore and George P. Critcherson taken during a voyage to Greenland led by the American painter and explorer William Bradford, reproduced in Bradford’s 1873 book The Arctic Regions (Courtesy the New York Public Library)

Samuel Gurney Cresswell: Melville Island from Banks Land, 1854

The search for the Northwest Passage loomed large on both floors of “Awe of the Arctic,” an exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman building. A room on the ground floor crowded with rare books, prints, and artifacts introduced the quest’s earliest known victims, the Dutch captain Willem Barents and his crew. Sailing eastward along the north coast of Russia in 1596, Barents’s ship was caught and crushed by pack ice; the crew was forced to winter on the deserted shore of Novaya Zemlya, an island north of the Russian mainland. A woodcut from a 1598 account of that horrific episode shows one crewman dying in the jaws of a polar bear, at which his shipmates desperately fire their guns. After enduring a winter of scurvy and near-starvation, most of Barents’s men made it home in the ship’s two longboats, but Barents himself died en route.

In two long hallways on the library’s third floor, where forty contemporary artists explored Arctic themes, a sculptural installation offered a modern take on the same disaster. In the 1870s the hut and effects of Barents’s crew, including moldering books with barely legible contents, were discovered on Novaya Zemlya and brought back to the Netherlands. To suggest the toll that Arctic exploration has taken not only on the lives of explorers but on the historical record of their travails, in 2016 the British artist Siân Bowen recreated versions of those half-decayed books, their writing effaced or washed out. The piece is called Descriptions True and Perfect.

“The immense size of the Arctic virtually ensures our inability to comprehend all that it embodies,” writes Elizabeth Cronin, curator of “The Awe of the Arctic,” in a beautifully produced catalog. “This gap creates plenty of room for a romanticized imaginary.” Those statements are equally true of the Antarctic, but Europeans were particularly intrigued by the Arctic’s human inhabitants. The size and ferocity of the prey sought by Inuit hunters, including the polar bear, lent these Arctic inhabitants a nearly Homeric aura; observers from Europe marveled at the idea that peoples they considered “primitive” survived quite well in the Arctic without metal or guns—much better, indeed, than those who had both. 

As with most first contacts that took place in this era, metal tools and firearms sometimes flowed unchecked from European explorers to the region’s native people. The Inuit way of life began disappearing the moment that British and Dutch explorers first encountered it: rifles took the place of spears and harpoons; the snowmobile pushed out the dogsled. Like the show itself, the catalog of “Awe of the Arctic” traces these ongoing transformations, first as recorded by painters and lithographers and then as explored by contemporary photographers and digital artists. In both cases the juxtapositions encourage us to make connections between the Arctic’s mythicized past, its troubled present, and its uncertain future.

The two-ship Northwest Passage expedition led by Sir John Franklin, launched from England in 1845, showed just how maladapted Europeans were to Arctic survival. The ships, the Erebus and Terror, left the Greenland coast in July and headed for the Canadian Arctic, then disappeared. Clues to their fates emerged only slowly, as search expeditions—over forty in total—looked for the missing crews, who had abandoned their icebound ships. A lithograph reproduced in the catalog, made in 1855 from illustrations by Walter William May, records an initial, grim phase of the investigation. That year a search party led by the Scottish physician and explorer John Rae made contact with Inuit hunters who had acquired metal objects of English manufacture. May drew the items with forensic precision: cutlery, a pocketwatch, a heraldic medal, and a silver button from Franklin’s wardrobe, inscribed with his name. These emblems of British civilization had done their owners little good: Inuit testimony revealed that all 129 men had slowly perished of starvation and scurvy.

The catalog volume includes the doomed voyage’s last communication: a letter by the surgeon of the Erebus, Stephen Samuel Stanley, dated July 12, 1845, which was dispatched to England with the supply ship that turned back when the Erebus and Terror departed western Greenland. The document is laden with tragic irony. Stanley speaks cheerfully of Captain Franklin’s good health and of the ship’s lucky escape from a collapsing iceberg. “I am not yet frozen to death,” he jests, “and therefore in the land of the living, and very jolly.”

James Hamilton’s 1856 engravings of a voyage made to northern Canada in search of Franklin’s ships, on display in the library, are echoed in the catalog’s frontispiece by a stark, somber pigment print of Canada’s Radstock Bay, made in 2008 by the photographer Sebastian Copeland. As Copeland undoubtedly knew, men from Franklin’s vessels set up a hunting camp at Radstock Bay during their first winter on the ice, hoping to augment their food supply with game. The photograph shows a rocky and desolate landscape, utterly devoid of life—muskets were useless here.

The catalog includes moving portrayals of the Inuit and other Arctic peoples, alongside work by native artists. The Inughuit of Greenland, the northernmost humans on the globe, feature in several nineteenth-century illustrations, including a beautiful watercolor credited to John Sacheuse, a Greenland native from a more southern tribe, who’d stowed away on an English ship in 1816 and landed in Scotland. There he studied painting under the tutelage of the prominent portraitist Alexander Nasmyth. The explorer Sir John Ross took Sacheuse along as an interpreter on his 1818 expedition to look for the Northwest Passage, and when the ships stopped en route in Greenland, Sacheuse witnessed the first contact between Europeans and the remote Inughuit.

Tiina Itkonen: Ilannguaq 2, 2019 (Courtesy the artist, Persons Projects, and the New York Public Library)

At the Pole with Cook and Peary: A Pictorial Record of the Most Important and Sensational Geographical Discovery of Recent Times, a volume published in Portland, Maine, by L. H. Nelson Company, 1909 (Courtesy the New York Public Library)

Sarah Anne Johnson: Arctic Wonderland, 2011 (Courtesy the artist, Yossi Milo Gallery, and the New York Public Library)

Evgenia Arbugaeva, Untitled 77, from Dikson, 2019–2020 (Courtesy the artist and the New York Public Library)

Mette Tronvoll, Svalbard #20, 2014 (Courtesy the artist and the New York Public Library)

He depicted a scene of excited exchange: the Inughuit hold mirrors and knives and hand their visitors narwhal tusks. (A similar first-contact scene, from Ross’s second Arctic expedition, is captured in moodier tones by the artist William Say, set against an unfriendly black and red sky.) The Finnish artist Tiina Itkonen, who has spent much of her career working with the Inughuit, offers a contemporary take on this tiny nation, many of whom still preserve their language and lifestyle. Her large-format photographic portrait of a hunter named Ilannguaq shows him dressed in traditional animal-skin clothing, in the act of pushing his head upward into his anorak. The hood forms an eerie black void where a face would be, suggesting the anonymity of the Inughuit in the modern era. In the 1950s the construction of the Thule air base forced many of them to move from their homes; now the sea ice on which they hunt is melting.

As Arctic exploration entered the twentieth century, the story of Europe’s search for the Northwest Passage gave way to that of a quest dominated by individuals rather than ships and their crews: the race for the pole. A heroic photograph of the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen evokes the voyage of the Fram, the ship he designed to be trapped in ice and carried north by currents and wind. When he put it to the test beginning in 1893, it performed beautifully, drifting along with the ice pack to within about four hundred miles of the pole, from which point he and a companion departed on skis. Forced to turn back by lack of food, Nansen never attained his objective, but the Fram proved to be his most lasting achievement; two decades after the ship was built, Roald Amundsen used it in his successful 1910–1912 assault on the South Pole.

It was two Americans, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, who each claimed to have reached the pole first—Cook in 1908 and Peary in 1909. The competition remains unresolved, and, as “Awe of the Arctic” reminds us, Peary’s African American assistant, Matthew Henson, may well have reached the pole first when Peary sent him ahead as a scout. The catalog features a pictorial reimagining or “recital” of Henson’s life by the artist Terry Adkins, a multimedia work that includes Nutjuitok (Polar Star), a series of photographs. In one of these images, Qikiqtaaluk (the name of an Arctic region through which Henson and Peary passed), Adkins uses his own body as a stand-in for Henson’s. He is shown bare-chested, wearing fur mittens in which he holds crystals presumably collected during his polar journey. An early British map of North America is projected onto his chest, complete with prominent images of Inuit hunters and a polar bear, as if his skin were absorbing the Arctic’s wildness and vastness through every pore.