Seeing Icebergs and Inuit as Elemental Nature: An American Transcendentalist on and off the Coast of Labrador, 1864

Abstract

In 1865 a series of Atlantic Monthly articles written by the Transcendentalist minister David Atwood Wasson described the voyage to Labrador organized by American landscape painter William Bradford. Bradford was inspired by the success of fellow Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental painting, The Icebergs (1861), and Wasson’s role was to generate publicity for what would be Bradford’s own “great picture,” Sealers Crushed by Icebergs. Wasson produced many colourful descriptions of the icebergs encountered on the voyage, but he also depicted the Labrador shorescape as the planet earth at the dawn of time and the Inuit of Hopedale as unevolved, pre-adamic man. This article suggests that Wasson’s racism and rejection of the benign, mystical Nature of first-generation Transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson reflects the rise of evolutionary theory and the cultural impact of the American Civil War.