“A tribute of respect to the dead”: Narrative Containment and Focal Substitution in Leopold McClintock’s “The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ ”

Abstract

In 1859, Captain Leopold McClintock was lauded as a hero upon his return to England from a two-year Arctic expedition that was declared by the Athenaeum as “one of the most important voyages ever made in the Arctic Seas” (24 December 1859, 845). McClintock and his crew of 24 had pushed Lady Franklin’s converted luxury schooner Fox into the Eastern pack ice during the winter of 1858-59, prosecuting a final search for the remains of Sir John Franklin’s missing crews and eventually discovering a single piece of paper outlining the lost expedition’s intentions to march en masse to the Arctic mainland. McClintock’s vastly popular published narrative of the expedition was accorded, as a Chambers’s Journal editorialist put it, “great value as a simple and satisfactory narrative” of heroism and sacrifice (CJ: January-June 1860, 39), but the present essay argues that it was actually neither transparent nor straightforward. McClintock’s “simple tale” is in fact the product of a series of complex narrative negotiations that rejuvenate Arctic exploration generally – and Franklin specifically – as a suitable subject for nationalist pride (Murchison xxxvii). Examining both the written and the visual texts of Voyage, this paper analyzes how McClintock uses a dual strategy of narrative containment and focal substitution to rewrite the story of Franklin’s expedition as a monument to British fortitude and duty, and to discourage any imaginative reconstruction of Arctic disaster by offering himself and his crews as visual and narrative stand-ins for members of the lost expedition.