The Frozen Ocean

• Published in: PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
• Main Author: Craciun, Adriana
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Modern Language Association (MLA) 2010
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Pacific
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.3.693; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0030812900142130

We'll get crushed by the ocean but it will not get us wet. —Isaac Brock, “Invisible” (2007) “There is no Sea With Which Our Age is So Imperfectly Acquainted as the Frozen Ocean,” Wrote the Eighteenth-Century Russian hydrographer Gavriil Sarychev, “and no empire which has more powerful motives and resources for extending its information, in this quarter, than Russia” (iii). Russia's Great Northern Expedition of the 1730s and later expeditions, like Sarychev's in 1785, mapped the shores of the Arctic Ocean across continental Asia, an impressive feat by any century's standards. Meanwhile, the American shores of the Arctic Ocean remained entirely unknown to the European empires (England, France, Spain) most interested in passing to and from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the Northwest and Northeast passages. Alexander MacKenzie, Samuel Hearne, and John Franklin, each traveling with native people, walked thousands of miles to reach the Frozen Ocean, leaving in their wake the occasional human disaster and an unimpeachable record of publishing successes, like MacKenzie's Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen Ocean (1801) and Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea (1824).