Both ice and snow
Mar. 26th, 2010 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustDuring the white days after Christmas and the New Year, I was reading a book I had bought at the Maritime Museum in Greenwhich: Ken McGoogan's Fatal Passage, which is a biography of John Rae.
It's a partisan account, but mostly this didn't bother me because I am partisan myself, having first learned about Rae in Orkney, where his memorial sleeps, wrapped in his arctic furs, in St Magnus Cathedral. On one occasion we saw a small exhibition about him in the museum in Stromness, including a rather uncanny life-sized figure paddling an inflatable boat. So I knew that Rae has some claim to be regarded as the discoverer of the Northwest passage: he had established that the strait (later named Rae Strait) was indeed a strait rather than an inlet; this provided the crucial link through which Amundsen sailed. Perhaps my exasperation with the Maritime Museum's exhibition, and its assumption that the Passage could only be found by a naval expedition, had something to do with the eagerness with which I pounced on McGoogan's book in their shop.
I didn't regret it. It would have been interesting reading at any time, but to sit at home, warm and comfortable but frustrated by the difficulties of getting on with life when there were six inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature was a degree or so below freezing, and to read about Rae walking thousands of miles in snowshoes in a couple of months, in temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit, gave the book an extra dimension. Yet it's not a grim tale of hardship and endurance; as I noted in my New Year's Day post, Rae and his companions found moments of enjoyment in their travels. Dedication to extremes of fitness does not necessarily go alongside great charm, but in Rae, apparently, it did, and McGoogan's portrait of him abounds in warmth and good humour.
Not only did Rae come as close as anyone to discovering a Northwest Passage, he was also the first to bring home news of what had become of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition, and at this point I found myself resisting the narrative I was reading. For McGoogan, it was Rae's truthfulness in reporting what he had learned, including the suggestion that survivors of Franklin's expedition had been driven to cannibalism, that made an enemy of Lady Franklin and so prevented him receiving the recognition he deserved. Perhaps; and perhaps Lady Franklin really was a Lady Macbeth figure, a stronger character than her husband cornered by contemporary assumptions into living vicariously through him. It's probably just contrariness that makes me suspect that her hostility was particularly persuasive to those for whom Rae - not an officer, not the leader of a naval expedition, not an upholder of British superiority (he adopted Inuit techniques and clothing, as if they might have something to teach us about survival in their homeland!) didn't fit the profile of the required hero, simply wasn't "one of us".
Since it was still snowing, I picked off the slush pile another book about the arctic: Kabloona, by Gontran de Poncins, who spent fifteen months in the arctic in the late 1930s. I don't remember where I came by this book, and I bought it for the fascination of these northern adventures, and the charm of old travel books, the ability to visit places that no longer exist. My copy is a Readers' Union edition, with line illustrations by the author and an introduction by Eric Linklater: I was surprised to find it available online, drawings and all - it can't be out of copyright, surely? Wikipedia tells me that Jean-Pierre Gontran de Montaigne, vicomte de Poncins died in 1962 (and that he was a descendant of Montaigne).
The two books form a fascinating diptych, meeting at just one point. Fatal Passage ends with an expedition to place a plaque to John Rae at the point from which he "discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage", and one of McGoogan's companions on this expedition was Louie Kamookak, an Inuit whose grandfather was William "Paddy" Gibson of the Hudson's Bay Company. The first chaper of Kabloona describes the journey undertaken by Gontran de Poncins, travelling from Paris ever further north and into wilder and wilder territory, until finally he reaches Gjoa Haven, the base from which he plans to make contact with the local Inuit people - and meets the Hudson's Bay Company representative based there, Paddy (born William) Gibson. From this one point of contact, the two books diverge symmetrically: Fatal Passage is pure narrative, an external view of a sequence of events extending over a whole lifetime. Kabloona complements this: it is descriptive, subjective, the internal impressions of someone who has spent barely a year in the land he describes, but who intends to tell you what it is like. Rae, as described by his admirer, trudges imperturbably through the snow and blizzards; Gontran de Poncins is constantly perturbed, cold, exhausted, anxious, frustrated, human.
Gontran de Poncins calls his book Kabloona, the word by which the Inuit describe him, a non-Inuit. The focus of the book is not himself, but the Inuit, but the Inuit as seen, and gradually to some extent understood by the Frenchman. The whole purpose of his journey is to "live with the Eskimos", but his first reactions to them are harsh, unfavourable: they are dirty, they smell, they make unreliable guides and have designs on his store of tea. From the first he recognises their skills - after all, he can travel through this land only if one of them will consent to guide him, to manage the dogs and sledge that carry his belongings, to build the igloo where he shelters at night - but he only gradually comes to see how the features which irritate him are the other face of those he admires. Only at the end of his stay in the arctic does he meet the genuinely 'noble savages' for whom he has nothing but praise, living far enough from the trading post not to be corrupted by the white man's ways.
It's beautifully written: the landscapes are all vivid, the people are all individuals. Although the author is French, the English-language edition is the original, and presumably some of the credit must go to Lewis Galantière, credited as a collaborator of the author. I'd never heard of him, either, but he was sufficiently successful a translator to give his name to an award of the American Translators Association (and a friend of Saint-Exupéry, too).
It's a partisan account, but mostly this didn't bother me because I am partisan myself, having first learned about Rae in Orkney, where his memorial sleeps, wrapped in his arctic furs, in St Magnus Cathedral. On one occasion we saw a small exhibition about him in the museum in Stromness, including a rather uncanny life-sized figure paddling an inflatable boat. So I knew that Rae has some claim to be regarded as the discoverer of the Northwest passage: he had established that the strait (later named Rae Strait) was indeed a strait rather than an inlet; this provided the crucial link through which Amundsen sailed. Perhaps my exasperation with the Maritime Museum's exhibition, and its assumption that the Passage could only be found by a naval expedition, had something to do with the eagerness with which I pounced on McGoogan's book in their shop.
I didn't regret it. It would have been interesting reading at any time, but to sit at home, warm and comfortable but frustrated by the difficulties of getting on with life when there were six inches of snow on the ground, and the temperature was a degree or so below freezing, and to read about Rae walking thousands of miles in snowshoes in a couple of months, in temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit, gave the book an extra dimension. Yet it's not a grim tale of hardship and endurance; as I noted in my New Year's Day post, Rae and his companions found moments of enjoyment in their travels. Dedication to extremes of fitness does not necessarily go alongside great charm, but in Rae, apparently, it did, and McGoogan's portrait of him abounds in warmth and good humour.
Not only did Rae come as close as anyone to discovering a Northwest Passage, he was also the first to bring home news of what had become of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition, and at this point I found myself resisting the narrative I was reading. For McGoogan, it was Rae's truthfulness in reporting what he had learned, including the suggestion that survivors of Franklin's expedition had been driven to cannibalism, that made an enemy of Lady Franklin and so prevented him receiving the recognition he deserved. Perhaps; and perhaps Lady Franklin really was a Lady Macbeth figure, a stronger character than her husband cornered by contemporary assumptions into living vicariously through him. It's probably just contrariness that makes me suspect that her hostility was particularly persuasive to those for whom Rae - not an officer, not the leader of a naval expedition, not an upholder of British superiority (he adopted Inuit techniques and clothing, as if they might have something to teach us about survival in their homeland!) didn't fit the profile of the required hero, simply wasn't "one of us".
Since it was still snowing, I picked off the slush pile another book about the arctic: Kabloona, by Gontran de Poncins, who spent fifteen months in the arctic in the late 1930s. I don't remember where I came by this book, and I bought it for the fascination of these northern adventures, and the charm of old travel books, the ability to visit places that no longer exist. My copy is a Readers' Union edition, with line illustrations by the author and an introduction by Eric Linklater: I was surprised to find it available online, drawings and all - it can't be out of copyright, surely? Wikipedia tells me that Jean-Pierre Gontran de Montaigne, vicomte de Poncins died in 1962 (and that he was a descendant of Montaigne).
The two books form a fascinating diptych, meeting at just one point. Fatal Passage ends with an expedition to place a plaque to John Rae at the point from which he "discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage", and one of McGoogan's companions on this expedition was Louie Kamookak, an Inuit whose grandfather was William "Paddy" Gibson of the Hudson's Bay Company. The first chaper of Kabloona describes the journey undertaken by Gontran de Poncins, travelling from Paris ever further north and into wilder and wilder territory, until finally he reaches Gjoa Haven, the base from which he plans to make contact with the local Inuit people - and meets the Hudson's Bay Company representative based there, Paddy (born William) Gibson. From this one point of contact, the two books diverge symmetrically: Fatal Passage is pure narrative, an external view of a sequence of events extending over a whole lifetime. Kabloona complements this: it is descriptive, subjective, the internal impressions of someone who has spent barely a year in the land he describes, but who intends to tell you what it is like. Rae, as described by his admirer, trudges imperturbably through the snow and blizzards; Gontran de Poncins is constantly perturbed, cold, exhausted, anxious, frustrated, human.
Gontran de Poncins calls his book Kabloona, the word by which the Inuit describe him, a non-Inuit. The focus of the book is not himself, but the Inuit, but the Inuit as seen, and gradually to some extent understood by the Frenchman. The whole purpose of his journey is to "live with the Eskimos", but his first reactions to them are harsh, unfavourable: they are dirty, they smell, they make unreliable guides and have designs on his store of tea. From the first he recognises their skills - after all, he can travel through this land only if one of them will consent to guide him, to manage the dogs and sledge that carry his belongings, to build the igloo where he shelters at night - but he only gradually comes to see how the features which irritate him are the other face of those he admires. Only at the end of his stay in the arctic does he meet the genuinely 'noble savages' for whom he has nothing but praise, living far enough from the trading post not to be corrupted by the white man's ways.
It's beautifully written: the landscapes are all vivid, the people are all individuals. Although the author is French, the English-language edition is the original, and presumably some of the credit must go to Lewis Galantière, credited as a collaborator of the author. I'd never heard of him, either, but he was sufficiently successful a translator to give his name to an award of the American Translators Association (and a friend of Saint-Exupéry, too).
