From Antarctica to the North Pole

- an 1820 drawing of a narwhal

A few posts ago, I mentioned a movie about Antarctica .... today an audio book I requested from the library has finally come - Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett - the story of which is located in the North Pole :)

Here's just the first part of a 1998 review of the book in the New York Times (you can read the whole thing here) ....

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On one level -- the tip-of-the-iceberg level -- ''The Voyage of the Narwhal'' is a gripping adventure story. A motley crew of men sets off for the Arctic in 1855 looking for traces of Sir John Franklin's expedition of a decade before, mysteriously lost while searching for a northwest passage through the frozen, largely uncharted jigsaw of islands between the Canadan mainland and the North Pole. Three hundred men, two large ships and masses of provisions -- including 600 tins of meat, almost two and a half thousand books and two organs -- had simply vanished into thin Arctic air. The episode moved from a cause celebre, with Lady Franklin tirelessly raising funds for ever more rescue expeditions, to a lost cause, as the Admiralty finally declared the men dead. Franklin was given posthumous credit for discovering the Northwest Passage after a final rescue foray led by Francis McClintock in 1859 found a record by one of Franklin's crew of their three years in the Arctic before they were overcome by starvation.

Franklin's famous expedition serves as the real-life backdrop for Andrea Barrett's novel. In the foreground is a fictional expedition the author has vividly imagined taking place in the sliver of time between a search party of 1853, which discovered human joints in cooking pots -- corroborating Eskimo stories of cannibalism among the survivors -- and McClintock's 1859 trip. The expedition Barrett imagines is a failure. ''Who ever writes about the failures?'' says the central character, Erasmus Darwin Wells, a naturalist named by his father in eager anticipation of his son's contributions to natural science. Indeed the whole novel takes place in the lee, as it were, of Charles Darwin's ''Origin of Species,'' which would appear four years later but whose ideas were already in the air -- along with debates about slavery, racial superiority, the Irish potato famine and the young author Thoreau, whose books the ship's surgeon pores over on the voyage. Thus fiction and fact are intertwined.

Erasmus signs up for the voyage to lay to rest the ghost of the past. Seventeen years before, as a naturalist on a troubled expedition to the Pacific and Antarctic, he had been powerless to prevent the captain from bullying the crew and then cannibalizing his own scientific work. Erasmus glumly takes stock of his life: ''He was 40 years old and had a history of failure; he'd sailed, when hardly more than a boy, on a voyage so thwarted it became a national joke. Since then his life's work had come to almost nothing. No wife, no children, no truly close friends; a sister in a difficult situation.'' What he has now is a second chance.

Little does Erasmus know what a precarious venture he is committing himself to this time. He tries to do the right thing by the only method he knows: classic Victorian cataloguing, listing, collecting. He has been detailed to muster the equipment and stores by Zechariah (Zeke) Voorhees, the young commander of the Narwhal, who is engaged to Erasmus's sister, Lavinia. Zeke is blond, dashing, resourceful, but also untested and riddled with ambiguities -- not least of which are his motives for this trip. Cleverly, since underneath the surface this is also a story about stories, Barrett lets the narrative unfold at first in the messy and unclear way life does, before we retrospectively tidy it up into stories. So, for example, the reader is just as baffled as Erasmus as to whether Zeke is naive, or whether his book learning and intuitions might not trump the gritty seamanship of old hands like Amos Tyler, a former whaling captain now resentfully under the command of this whippersnapper. In the end, just as the Victorians believed, we find out most about who people are from their actions, particularly under stress. Even that's not quite the last word, though ......

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You can read the first chapter of the book here