Arctic Consciousness In The 19th Century And Its Reemergence In The 21st

An excerpt from, “White Horizon: The Arctic in The Nineteenth-Century British Imagination” by Jen Hill, State University of New York Press, 2008, pg. 1-2:

In the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, the narrator names two of the great “knights” of British exploration, Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Franklin. Readers can still place Drake, but most modern editions describe Franklin in a brief footnote as a nineteenth-century explorer who commanded an ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage. Joseph Conrad’s contemporaries needed no such note: for them, the reference to Franklin and ships the Erebus and Terror evoked both nineteenth-century geography at the height of its promise and, more importantly, the eclipse of that promise, and the recognition of the limits of British exploration that was the legacy of Franklin’s spectacular failure. While the invocation of a doomed polar explorer at the outset of Conrad’s great critique of imperialism serves to foreshadow Marlow’s own horrific voyage up the Congo, the reference maps Arctic geography onto the national imagination, enfolding a literally white space into the heart of darkness. Thus, when Marlow speaks of white spaces on the map, a meditation on Arctic exploration and the limits of the European imperial project lingers behind Conrad’s image.

In 1844, Sir John Franklin was awarded command of the Arctic exploration ships Erebus and Terror and given an Admiralty mandate to find the Northwest Passage. The expedition’s departure was a kind of mass spectacle, with newspaper articles detailing its preparations and the public thronging to see the ships before they embarked in the spring of 1845. Franklin and his 130 men departed and, after calling in at Greenland on their way to the frozen seas, were never heard from again, despite numerous and concerted efforts to find them. The mystery of what happened to these British seamen and the effort to discover and interpret the expedition’s traces captured Britain’s—and much of the world’s—attention for years.

An excerpt from, “Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt” by Paul Watson, The Guardian, September 12, 2016:

The Arctic Research Foundation was set up by Jim Balsillie, a Canadian tech tycoon and philanthropist, who co-founded Research in Motion, creator of the Blackberry.

Balsillie, who also played a key role in planning the expedition, proposed a theory to explain why it seems both Terror and Erebus sank far south of where they were first abandoned.

“This discovery changes history,” he told the Guardian. “Given the location of the find [in Terror Bay] and the state of the wreck, it’s almost certain that HMS Terror was operationally closed down by the remaining crew who then re-boarded HMS Erebus and sailed south where they met their ultimate tragic fate.”

The 21st-century search for Franklin’s expedition was launched by Canadian former prime minister Stephen Harper as part of a broader plan to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic and promote development of its resources – including vast reserves of oil and natural gas, which will be easier to exploit as the Arctic warms and sea ice disappears.

. . .The latest discovery was made two years and a day after Canadian marine archeologists found the wreck of Erebus in the same area of eastern Queen Maud gulf where Inuit oral history had long said a large wooden ship sank.

The same stories described startled Inuit stumbling upon a large dead man in a dark room on the vessel, with a big smile. Experts have suggested that may have been a rictus smile, or evidence that the man had suffered from scurvy.

An excerpt from, “The race to conquer the Arctic – the world’s final frontier” by Kristina Spohr, The New Statesman, March 12, 2018:

Over the past decade, the Arctic Council has risen in political importance because the Arctic Ocean has been thawing at a record rate. The expanse of ice in September 2017 was 25 per cent smaller than in the end-of-summer averages between 1981 and 2010. Yet this geophysical calamity is also an economic opportunity for developed countries, opening up new prospects for fishing and shipping. As a result, more countries have sought entry to the Arctic Council. The eight founding states, which form the council’s permanent members, have conceded observer status to several European and east Asian states. For instance, Britain – a permanent observer to the council since 1998 – has designated itself “the Arctic’s nearest neighbour”, though it is not clear if there is substance behind the rhetoric. Not to be outdone, China, a permanent observer since 2013, calls itself a “near-Arctic” nation, even though its northernmost point is about 900 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

For now, the co-operative mood in the Arctic Council still holds. On 30 November 2017, the five nations with Arctic coastlines – Canada, Greenland (Denmark), Norway, Russia and the US – as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Iceland and the EU, completed negotiations in Washington, DC. They agreed to ban for 16 years unregulated fishing in newly ice-free international waters of the high Arctic – equivalent to the size of the Mediterranean – or at least until scientists are able to analyse the ecology of the quickly thawing ocean and put into place a plan for sustainable fishing.

This deal still has to be signed and ratified – no easy task given Trump’s denial of climate change – but the successful negotiations are seen as a major step in conservation efforts and an example of what diplomats call “Arctic exceptionalism”, meaning a willingness in Moscow and Washington to set aside some of their geopolitical differences for the sake of common interests. 

Agreeing about water is one thing but terrain is something different. There is an enormous amount at stake. In 2008, the US Geological Survey estimated that the Arctic holds 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil, and 30 per cent of its natural gas. That is worth about £12trn in today’s prices, roughly equivalent to the entire US economy. In other words, the prospect of an unfrozen Arctic Ocean opens up the remarkable riches of the North Pole.

Competition is already fierce. Russia, Canada, Norway and Greenland have all set their sights on the Lomonosov Ridge – an underwater mountain chain that stretches for 1,240 miles almost directly across the centre of the Arctic Ocean and through the North Pole. It is under and around this formation that nearly a quarter of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources lies.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) came into force in 1994 – regulating the 200-nautical-mile national economic zones offshore within which a nation has exclusive rights to fish the waters and tap the minerals under the sea bed. Beyond this limit, the states with Arctic coastlines are not permitted to fish or drill. Yet a nation can lobby for a zone of up to 350 nautical miles from the shore, or even more – if it can prove the existence of an underwater formation that is an extension of its dry land mass. Such claims are decided by the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, established under Unclos.

Nearly 170 countries have acceded to or ratified the treaty. The US signed Unclos under President Bill Clinton but the treaty has never been ratified by the US Senate. Republican senators in particular contend that the agreement subjugates US military and business interest to UN control, which they detest. Among all the Arctic countries, America is the odd one out.