Author: Adriana Craciun
E-mail: adriana.craciun@ucr.edu
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'.