What Is an Explorer?

Abstract

This essay argues that the undertheorized “Explorer” was a later nineteenth-century back-formation, and not the origin of exploration practices and texts. Comparing diverse early nineteenth-century Greenland voyages to 1730s geodetic expeditions, we can see how and why the Explorer began to appear at the turn of the nineteenth century. The distinct regulatory and corporate domains, predisciplinary vantage points, and bibliographic codes, through which exploration accounts were produced often differed radically from those in commercial authorship in the long eighteenth century. I suggest that the commonplace identification of Explorer with the proprietary commercial Author is misleading, and that it provides an opportunity for discerning asynchronous strands in the history of authorship and print.

How realistic are painted lightnings? Quantitative comparison of the morphology of painted and real lightnings: a psychophysical approach

“…These drawings and paintings could also be realistic and prove to be the first observations of an extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon. For example, Parry arc was named after the famous polar explorer William Edward Parry (1790-1855), who first described this rare halo on 8 April 1820 when his ships became trapped in the ice during the expedition to find the North West Passage [31,32]. The two earliest observations of polar stratospheric clouds are also known from paintings and diary recordings from 1901 by the Danish artist, Aksel Jørgensen (1883-1957) and from 1903 by the scientist-artist member of Scott's Antarctic expeditions, Edward Adrian Wilson (1872-1912) [33,34].…”

“A romance based on information”: The curious case of Clements Markham’s Franklin Expedition novel

“…A half-century before Markham's manuscript, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins adapted the Franklin story into their sensational and popular melodrama The Frozen Deep. But for the most part throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period, however, nonfictional first-person accounts of exploration were much more important than fictional adaptations, not only as accessible and popular documentation of the events which occurred, but for dictating the frame by which those events would have been be understood and analysed, as well as for creating via authorship the idea of the explorer himself (Craciun, 2011).…”

Geographies of the Book: Review and Prospect

“…Books of travel were packaged and were transportable representations of geographical knowledge, but their written content was never an unproblematic statement of fact. Historians of the book and geographers interested in the making of travel texts have shown how authorial strategies and practices of editorial mediation combined to shape both style and substance in particular ways (Cavell , ; Craciun , ; MacLaren , , , ; Withers & Keighren ). Travellers and their publishers—keen to assure readers of the truth of what was written—employed a variety of occasionally contradictory approaches to demonstrate the credibility and authority of texts and their authors (Keighren & Withers ).…”