Institution: University of California, Riverside

Author: Adriana Craciun

E-mail:

Department: English Department

Institution: University of California, Riverside

Title: The Site of Disaster: The Franklin Disaster as Historic Site, Tourist Destination, and Sovereign Space

Abstract:

This paper uncovers the connections between the lasting significance of the Franklin Expedition Arctic disaster in popular imagination and its emerging importance in questions of Canadian sovereignty and international access to the Northwest Passage. After John Franklin’s 1845 British expedition in search of the Northwest Passage vanished with all hands lost, international searches began a profitable tradition of locating, displaying, representing, mapping and memorializing the scenes and material objects (including human remains) associated with the Franklin disaster. By the late nineteenth-century, Franklin relic hunting was a veritable tourist industry, popularized by decorative maps, panoramas and popular narratives that allowed metropolitan audiences to imagine, and eventually to visit, the Arctic places in which Franklin’s men died. Franklin’s two vanished ships, Erebus and Terror, and the expedition’s written records, continue to be sought to this day by private salvage companies, tourists, indigenous and local people, and the Canadian government.

The Franklin disaster’s nineteenth-century transformation into a thanatourist destination is not unique, but its twentieth-century status as a National Historic Site is. In 1992 the unknown locations of Erebus and Terror were together designated as a National Historic Site by the Canadian government, the only such site for which no specific location exists. The National Historic Sites Directorate thereafter negotiated a special Memorandum of Agreement with the British government giving Canada control of the site. As a supreme example of a placeless place, the imagined site of the Franklin disaster has long served multiple and conflicting interests (including a Canadian Armed Forces “Project Franklin” search, commemorating the centennial of Canadian confederation).

In its newest incarnation as a historic site, the imaginary location of the Franklin disaster is being transformed into a fixed marker of Canadian historic presence in the Northwest Passage, a priority in Canada’s recent push to strengthen its profile as an Arctic nation. Parks Canada recently began funding a three-year search for rebus and Terror, part of the renewed scramble for the Arctic in which northern nations are rushing to strengthen their complex claims to the Arctic seabed, coastlines and waterways. This latest search uncovered in July 2010 the wreck of the HMS Investigator (one of the early ships in search of Franklin), a discovery “fundamental to Canadian sovereignty in the North” according to the Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice.

In the nineteenth-century popular imagination, the Franklin expedition’s detritus, remains and records became enshrined as relics in sacred ground almost as soon as they were created by disaster. So powerful is the draw of this imagined disaster and its scattered objects, that the void at its center (the absence of the ships, the expedition records, most of the bodies) is continuously presented as a productive site of meaning, including a heritage site one could attempt to visit. The extraordinary range of meanings generated through this absent place, open to state authorities, indigenous agents, and popular imaginaries, is unique, and may soon play a role in our understandings of the status of the Northwest Passage waterway. How absent ships in search of an imaginary threshold (the NW Passage to China, the ice-free pole), and even the ships sent to find them and lost, have come to accrue such significance as to enjoy a distinct presence on the map of twenty-first century Arctic geopolitics is the subject of my inquiry.

Author Bio:

Adriana Craciun is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she holds a UC President's Research Fellowship for 2010-11, and is completing her book project, Northwest Passages: Authorship, Exploration Disaster, an interdisciplinary study of the interrelations of print, manuscript and material culture with Arctic exploration. She recently published two essays drawn from this research, in Interventions and in PMLA, and her essay on the ongoing understandings of the Franklin disaster site and relics grows from the extensive archival work she has conducted in UK archives. Craciun is also the co-organizer of a series of six multidisciplinary conferences, 'The Disorder of Things: Predisciplinarity and the Divisions of Knowledge 1660-1850'.