The Aesthetic Mapping of Nature in the Second Franklin Expedition

Abstract

Like British travellers on the Grand Tour or in the English Lake District, early nineteenth-century British explorers recorded their responses to nature partly in terms of the prevailing conventions of landscape appreciation — the Sublime and the Picturesque. While searching for a Northwest Passage, the four British officers of the second Franklin expedition compiled in their published writing and painting an aesthetic map for portions of the Canadian North. The practice of these aesthetic conventions helped to preserve the sojourning Britons’ sense of identity, but also promised a certain blindness to the unique northern environment.