The Grandest Tour: The Aesthetics of Landscape in Sir George Back’s Explorations of the Eastern Arctic 1833 – 1837

Abstract

T H E G R A N D E S T T O U R : T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F L A N D S C A P E I N S I R G E O R G E B A C K ’ S E X P L O R A T I O N S O F T H E E A S T E R N A R C T I C 1833 - 1 83 7 I. S. MACLAREN University of Waterloo I n the spring of 1833, when Captain Fitzroy and Charles Darwin were charting and exploring the coasts of South America in H.M.S. Beagle, the British Admiralty commissioned a voyage on another front — its first Arctic expedition in search of a Northwest Passage since 1825. In the first of two expeditions which he was to command in the next five years, Lieutenant George (later Sir George) Back (1796-1878) was to explore a river that existed only in Indian legend — the bony Thlew-ee-cho-dezeth, or Great Fish, or, by today’s maps, the Back River. His efforts took the ostensible form of a rescue mission in search of John Ross’s Victory crew, which had not been heard from since sailing from England in 1829 under the sponsor­ ship of the gin distiller Felix Booth. But when, in the spring of 1834, Back received word at Fort Reliance (at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake) that Ross had been found, he was freed to undertake a wholly exploratory voyage through the centre of the tundra tracts of the continental northeast. Already the veteran of Sir John Franklin’s two overland expeditions along the north coast of British North America in 1819-22 and 1825-27, as well as Buchan’s 1818 voyage to Spitzbergen, Back travelled through a greater part of British North America during his lifetime than any Briton before the age of rail, with the exception of David Thompson. But the 1833-35 river expedition marked the first for which he furnished his own narrative account. And since he had spent some of the intervening years between 1827 and 1833 studying in Italy “ to improve in the arts,” 1 his Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River (1836) presents him at his aesthetic apex, capable, as the best travellers were before the days when the artist was meant to dissociate himself from society, of amassing a record of his experiences that was at once functional and aesthetic. His Narrative often reads as much like an eloquent guide book as an explorer’s journal.2 As well, this literary style, whose principal features reside in the author’s adaptations of the aesthetics of the Picturesque and E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x , 4, December 1984 the Sublime, remains apparent in the explorer’s narrative of the voyage of H.M.S. Terror in 1836-37. I Setting out from Lachine in the spring of 1833, Back leads his reader as a guide would a landscape tourist: “ turning off to the right, we entered the Ottawa [River], which (like the Moselle after its confluence with the Rhine), for some distance below the junction rolls on[,] its brown waters unmixed with the clear stream of the St. Lawrence” (32). The European allusion initiates an analogy, which Back maintains throughout his account, between the European Grand Tour and his continental tour of British North America. He also differentiates the purposes of the two types of tour by making reference to European culture, through an adroit use of art, to signal his departure from civilization and his subsequent entry into the obli­ vion of uninhabited landscapes: Leaving the Ottawa, we divurged to the left, up a deep and black stream [the Mattawa River], so overhung by sombre rocks and withered trees, and so bleak and lifeless, that it seemed the very home of melancholy and despair, and forced upon my recollection an admirable painting representing Sadak in search of the waters of...