In Geography and Some Explorers, Joseph Conrad mapped the three phases of colonial history, beginning with ‘Geography Fabulous’, the extravagant speculations concerning distant lands, the mythical visions with their strange pageants of uncanny beings, trees and beasts; the second phase, ‘Geography Militant’, referred to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific voyages of exploration, leading to the third phase, ‘Geography Triumphant’, or modern geography. Conrad's 1924 essay draws our attention to the construction of geography, and to the revisioning of scenes of first encounters as we switch from ‘Geography Fabulous’ to ‘Geography Militant’. A case in point may be the quest for the Arctic Grail (to borrow Pierre Berton's title), the attempt to conquer the Arctic where the Other turns out to be not so much the native inhabitants of the wilderness – be they the Indians or the Inuit – as the icy wilderness itself, Mary Shelley's unpredictable ‘everlasting ices of the North’. Although the first Franklin expedition does meet an old Inuk who has only heard stories about white people, most encounters are not strictly speaking scenes of first encounters, since most Indians have come across white traders before. My purpose in this essay is to pay attention to the groundbreaking expeditions of the 1820s, and more particularly to John Franklin's journal of the first land expedition, to see how the scenes of first encounter with the Arctic shores become a rhetorical construct both disguising and revealing a cultural clash and a cultural betrayal.

Let us begin with two illustrations, in order to sketch a brief survey of the history of exploration in the 1820s. Early attempts to find the fabled Northwest Passage date back to Martin Frobisher and the sixteenth century, but little progress had been made by the time the old dream was revived after the Napoleonic Wars. Suddenly, the exploration of the Arctic was once more promoted by the Navy as a great scientific and geographical venture, turning into little less than a national obsession. The quest was adamantly pursued, even when it proved less and less likely that the mythical Passage might be found.