Drawing, along with reading and keeping a personal diary, was one of the middle-class values central to work and pleasure that transferred to shipboard life and encouraged social cohesion on expeditions. While naval officers were expected to produce basic topographical drawings as part of their duties, individuals aboard ship, including non-officers, often created drawings for other reasons. Using original empirical research, this chapter analyses a number of sketches and watercolours by expedition members from all ranks, discusses the practicalities of sketching in the Arctic, and shows how layers of new, and often surprising, information begin to emerge when the visual material is interrogated. The contents of pictures reveal an unexpected array of responses to the Arctic environment and its people. The examination of scientific and personal documentary art from the Franklin searches points to a visual matrix of the Arctic that is far more complex than the peaked icebergs and threatened ships that dominated the public eye.

In the nineteenth century, visual culture became noted for spectacles such as panoramas, which sought to create an experience that offered more than simply viewing an engraving or a framed painting. The panorama placed the spectator at the centre of a circle, surrounded by a huge painting on a curved surface. This chapter focuses on the Arctic panorama Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850) that opened in London in 1850. The chapter explains how a radically transformed Arctic was presented to a metropolitan audience, which anticipated education, entertainment, and an aesthetic experience at Leicester Square, London. Summer and Winter Views was based on the drawings of a recently returned officer, William Henry Browne, and made claims of authenticity in a competitive market. By closely reading the sources available for the panorama, including sketches, contemporary reviews, and prints, it argues that this affordable and persuasive spectacle of ‘savage horrors’ transformed the Arctic into a supernatural space of well-executed, yet sensationalistic, Gothic icescapes, masculine endeavour, and exotic meteorological effects.

The concluding chapter draws out the broader implications of the research for our understanding of the present-day Arctic and offers new insights into the dominating ‘man-versus-nature’ trope that has become a standard mode of viewing the Arctic. Even expedition leaders and authors of narratives noted the trend in nineteenth-century media for magnifying the dangers of Arctic travel. The appropriation of the story of Franklin, and the search parties that followed, into popular culture has evolved from the first-hand records of expedition members who went to the Arctic. Yet these records were transformed into commodities before they reached the public eye, often concealing an Arctic that was local, intimate, and familiar. This local Arctic was fertile ground for the production of culture, with expedition members from all ranks partaking in representation. Moreover, the Arctic was exploited for humorous ends, with expedition members mining the incongruous nature of their situation. The narratives, prints, and panoramas that reached the metropolitan audience, however, displayed an icy, threatening world, a scene that still reverberates in the popular imagination today.

The introductory chapter provides geographical contexts and briefly outlines both the history of the search for the Northwest Passage and the Franklin expedition. It gives an overview of the searches that ensued for the missing expedition over twelve years and emphasises the centrality of visuality and the importance of skills like drawing to shipboard life, as well as highlighting the gaps in the literature that this book will fill, in particular the neglect of rich primary-source visual material (such as on-the-spot sketches and watercolours) as a key source of information and evidence. It notes, too, the sparseness of scholarly work addressing this period of Arctic exploration history and the absence of detailed visual analyses of documentary art from the Arctic. This chapter introduces the key debates in the study of exploration literature, Victorian visuality, and historical geography. These include the gendered space of polar exploration, the imperial gaze, and theories of space and place. It looks too at how visual evidence can be seen as layers of representation, with each response departing further from the original sketch.

Like the panoramas, sets of lithographs based on officers’ drawings created new versions of the Arctic imaginary. Such products were too expensive to appeal to the average consumer, but printsellers’ practice of displaying lithographs in their windows and holding exhibitions ensured that this particular version of the Arctic reached far more people than simply those who could afford to purchase them. This chapter observes how the Arctic and the search were represented in three folios of lithographs produced from officers’ sketches (Browne, 1850; Cresswell, 1854; May, 1855). With attention to text and picture, using sketches and written sources, I offer close readings of these materials. This chapter emphasises how the lithographs, from 1850 to 1855, increasingly imply that a battle is being waged against the capricious Arctic nature in an effort to find Franklin. Significantly, the ability of these apparently factual lithographs to continually evolve and multiply, both digitally and on paper, ensures that they continue to inform ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century Arctic, and perhaps the present-day Arctic, into the future.

During the search for Franklin, it was common for expeditions to intentionally winter over in the Arctic sea ice. Indeed, some ships remained in the Arctic for up to six years. The ships in winter quarters provided space and time for cultural production; a lively homosocial life inspired material for illustrations and articles that were compiled as handwritten ‘magazines’ intended to be read solely by the ship’s company. This chapter takes a closer look at the production of these fascinating and revealing illustrated on-board periodicals, which were a key part of the maritime culture during the Franklin search. The illustrations in the periodicals are, in the main, human-centred, turning inwards to observe the ship’s inhabitants in winter quarters, focusing on social interaction and incidents. The Arctic itself and expedition members’ incongruous domestic life was the source of a humour that was personal and particular to the expedition members’ situation. Intended both for amusement on board and as future objects of nostalgia, the periodicals satirise the British experience in the Arctic and effectively utilise the Arctic environment as a rich resource of humour.

This chapter is the first of three that shifts the focus of the book from the Arctic ship to the public metropolitan sphere. Between 1850 and 1853, an astonishing twelve travel narratives of exploration were published by members of expeditions involved in the search for Franklin. By 1860, twenty-four narratives had been published from the search, representing a sudden increase in books about the Arctic. Many of the publications were illustrated and ran to several editions, testifying to the popularity of texts about Arctic exploration. The chapter explores the text–picture interplay in narratives of travel and exploration that were published by members of search expeditions from 1850 to 1860. It explains how the representation of the Arctic was heavily dependent on factors such as the success and duration of the voyage, the way in which an author wished to portray himself, and the vibrant visual culture of the nineteenth century.