‘Ancient lore with modern appliances’: networks, expertise, and the making of the Open Polar Sea, 1851–1853

Abstract

This article provides a transnational analysis of the campaigns for the organization of expeditions to the central Arctic region by the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the Prussian cartographer August Petermann between 1851 and 1853. By adopting a comparative approach, this study focuses on three interventions in the history of Arctic science and exploration: the construction of scientific expertise surrounding the relationship between the ‘armchair’ and the field, the role of transnational networks, and the significance of maps as travelling epistemic objects in the production of knowledge about the Arctic regions. In bringing both campaigns in conversation with each other, this article demonstrates that the histories of Kane's and Petermann's campaigns did not constitute isolated episodes but form part of a transnational nexus of imperial science and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century. Moreover, based on research in libraries and archives in the United States, Germany and England, this study reconnects otherwise siloed collections and contributes new findings on the interpersonal networks of science and exploration. Finally, this article illustrates the importance of adopting comparative transnational approaches for understanding the fluid and reciprocal nature of Arctic science throughout the transatlantic world.

The ‘deer‐men’ and the ‘bowhead‐men’: The colonial co‐optation of Arctic Indigenous knowledge within the ‘origins of the Inuit’ debates

“…These studies have revealed that much of the vast range of information generated through exploratory processes in different parts of the world was in fact regularly produced in collaboration with local Indigenous peoples. Of particular relevance to this article, scholars have more recently turned their attention northwards and have applied these particular approaches to the Arctic context (Cameron, 2015; Kaalund, 2021, 2022; Kaalund & Woitkowitz, 2021; Martin, 2020, 2022; Woitkowitz, 2021). As a result, we now are beginning to understand the various ways in which Indigenous peoples inhabiting the circumpolar Arctic have exerted a profound influence in shaping geographical knowledge of this region and have thus been central to many of the key debates within the discipline's history.…”

The Cartography of Kallihirua?: Reassessing Indigenous Mapmaking and Arctic Encounters

“…A hydrographical contribution was also made by Admiral Irminger of the Danish Navy. i As a whole, the book is a considerable compendium of contemporaneous Arctic knowledge and provides evidence of the increasingly transnational approach to Arctic exploration and knowledge production that was emerging during this period Kaalund and Woitkowitz 2021). Importantly, the book must also be understood as an attempt by Markham, and the wider RGS Fellowship, to project this ambiguous institution's authority in geographical matters during a period in which when the Society's overarching raison d'être was far from certain (Stoddart 1986).…”