Whitstable, by Stephen Volk

For those who visit upmarket Whitstable these days, it is difficult to visualise quite how drab and neglected it was in the 1970s.  Yet Peter and Helen Cushing found its very sleepiness a refuge from metropolitan life, and it was here that Helen died in 1971.

Stephen Volk has written a novella to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Peter Cushing’s birth in May 1913.  He picks up the story a month after Helen’s death, with Cushing, actually aged only 58 though he seems much older as depicted, grieving desperately.  With no interest in life, unsustained by his faith and cut off from those who care about him, he looks forward only to his own death so that he can rejoin his wife.

One day, sitting by the beach, he is approached by a young boy who thinks Cushing is Van Helsing, and has the power to slay monsters.  The boy confides that there is a vampire who visits him at night: his mum’s boyfriend Les.  Cushing realises that he is morally bound to do all in his power to defeat this horror, so different to the stylised and contained version in his films.

To do so he turns detective, and the plot draws a portrait of two damaged individuals.  One is damaged by the loss of all he holds dear, leaving him emotionally stunted and unable to cope because of the strength of the relationship he had had with his late wife.  The other is scarred by having experienced the same kind of abuse that he now inflicts on another in turn, acts predicated on self-deception and rationalisation of perversion.

The climax occurs in the local flea-pit – a dispiriting place as many cinemas were at that time, more bingo hall than cinema – while the pair sit together watching Cushing’s performance in The Vampire Lovers.  No stakes are employed in their off-screen confrontation, but words are just as devastating in their consequences.

His crucifix firmly in his pocket, Cushing, surprised at the strength of his inner resources, quietly but firmly shows that, while outwardly frailer, he is the stronger of the two in their verbal duel.  Finally Les sees himself for what he is, and acknowledges what made him.  In urging Les to redeem himself, Cushing is able to let go of the self-absorption of grief, and learn to live again, even if waiting for the day he can be reunited with Helen.

Volk very convincingly fleshes out what we know of how the loss of his wife affected Cushing.  We see an icon from the inside, the narrative interweaving biographical details with the fictional story of how he found meaning outside his obsession with Helen, learned to face the world again, and in so doing made one sleepy little corner of Kent a better place.

Whitstable is the third in the series of SPECTRAL VISIONS novellas

Publication date: May 26^th 2013

Available from the publishers: Spectral Press, 5 Serjeants Green, Neath Hill, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK14 6HA, United Kingdom.

Web: http://spectralpress.wordpress.com

Jo Shapcott and Erebus at the Polar Museum

Jo Shapcott is one of ten poets currently in residence at University of Cambridge museums and collections under the umbrella of ‘Thresholds’, an outreach project launched in November 2012 which is supported by the University of Cambridge and Arts Council England, and organised by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.  Linked to the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, the aim is for each poet to spend a fortnight during January to March 2013 in a particular museum.  They interact with staff, give readings and talks, and work with young people to develop creative writing and critical skills, in addition to developing their own responses to the collections with which they are working.  Out of this creative fusion the museums are able to promote their activities and hopefully attract new audiences.

Shapcott has been at the Polar Museum in Lensfield Road.  Her interest in Sir John Franklin is evidenced in her drama – her first – about the Franklin expedition to find the North-West passage, and the subsequent searches for the missing party.  On 28 May 2013, she was present at the museum while a capacity audience listed to Erebus, written as an afternoon play for Radio 4 and first broadcast in January 2012.  Accompanying her were the drama’s producer, Tim Dee, and sound designer Jon Nicholls, and after introductions by museum staff the three set the context for the piece, and responded to enthusiastic questions afterwards.

The play is evocative and moving, a series of voices and sounds that together build up the world of the Franklin expedition.  Sir John does not appear, but Jane Franklin does, here as in life one of the dominant voices in the tragedy.  We hear a crew member, William Braine, coincidentally a surname in Shapcott’s own family, commenting on the crews’ struggle for survival, both before and after his death.  Also providing perspectives are an “ice master” who supplies information on the varieties of ice to be found, an Inuit bemused by the strange ways of the Europeans, and explorer Elisha Kent Kane, who mounted two rescue expeditions to find Franklin.  The resulting portrait is one of superhuman effort, naivety, and magnificent courage.  To give the eyes something to do, the Museum had added a slide show of vintage polar images on a loop.

A concluding image in the play is that of the Inuit using the expedition’s discarded materials.  But they have no use for paper so their children use the sheets as toys, launching them into the wind and watching them swirl about and fly off.  These could be seen for many years afterwards, driven by the wind, much as the words in the play floated on the airwaves. Despite their fragility, the papers achieved a longevity denied to Franklin’s endeavour, but through such efforts as Erebus, Franklin’s name will live on.

The question and answer session covered a wide range of topics.  One audience member noted the interaction of sound and the (arbitrary) images, how the meanings read into the images altered as the play progressed.  Naturally Nicholls was questioned on how he developed the soundscape to capture the desolation of the region.  Shapcott was asked to what extent the words she used were those of the individuals and to what extent she had created them.  The answer was that she had used some words from contemporary sources, but had invented the bulk of them (including, rather controversially, the statement by Jane that she had never really lover her husband).

A particularly interesting comment noted how unusual it was to experience a radio play as a communal activity when it is usually a small-scale domestic experience.  I suspect we listened more attentively than we might have done at home or in the car, with their distractions.  Given this novel setting, the three who created Erebus were asked how they felt hearing the play with such a large audience: a little bit uncomfortable seemed to be the consensus.

Shapcott said that were she writing the play again she would include references to the psychic investigations into what had happened to the expedition that went on alongside the physical efforts.  She said she had had conversations with someone at the museum who was working on this topic, a clear reference to Shane McCorristine, who had given a presentation, ‘PolarDreams, Ghosts and Psychics’, on the paranormal connection with polar exploration, much of which dealt with the clairvoyant efforts to locate Franklin’s party and determine its fate.

It is easy to see why Shapcott was drawn to spend time at the Polar Museum, given her existing interest in Franklin.  A collection by all ten Thresholds poets reflecting their time at the museums will be published later in the year.  It will be interesting to see what Shapcott produces; Erebus, it is fair to say, will be hard to beat.

The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy

A book on the mummy’s curse, or rather curses, might seen a topic as thin as a bandage, but Roger Luckhurst unwraps it with more vitality than displayed by Boris Karloff’s Imhotep in The Mummy.  (Anyone hoping for a detailed analysis of the Hollywood mummy films, despite the title’s nod to the 1944 Lon Chaney vehicle, will be disappointed.  Universal’s 1930s/1940s cycle gets merely a page, though there is a fantastic photograph of Karloff as Imhotep, showing his remarkable mesmeric eyes to best advantage, and the 1999 film and its sequels do not even warrant a mention; Luckhurst is more interested in James Frazer than Brendan Frazer.)  The aim is to rescue the idea of the mummy’s curse from academic indifference and demonstrate that it has much to say about the culture generating it.  Given that the ancient Egyptians were not given to including curses in their tombs’ appurtenances, such myths must say something about a society which takes seriously belief in the ability to reach across the millennia with a power that we cannot fathom.

The book is divided into two parts, of unequal length.  The first traces three curse stories, the most famous being the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922.  The earlier ones, though less well known, are interesting in their own right and show the ways in which the curse put flesh on its bones, demonstrating an ambivalent push-pull fascination with corpses that mixed fascination and distaste.  The first involves Thomas Douglas Murray who in 1865 acquired what was later catalogued as 22542 (popularly known as “The Unlucky Mummy”), said to have brought bad luck on all who came into contact with her and which eventually, to put a stop of the chaos, was given to the British Museum in 1889, where its baleful influence supposedly continued.  This isn’t actually a mummy at all, but a gessoed wooden “mummy board”, or inner coffin lid, painted with the image of a woman, possibly a priestess of Amen-Ra, of the 21^st dynasty (c.950 BC).  Murray, a Spiritualist and member of the Ghost Club, was a friend of Henry Morton Stanley, the brother-in-law of Frederic Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research.  He actually was somewhat unlucky, managing to shoot his arm off while out hunting quail just after making the purchase, thereby launching the curse tale.

Having got off to a memorable start, the curse pulls in such figures as Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Bertram Fletcher Robinson (a well-known journalist in his day but most famously associated with the genesis of The Hound of the Baskervilles), who wrote an articled on the mummy board for the Express and died shortly afterwards; W. T. Stead, Spiritualist and muckraker; Ada Goodrich-Freer, adventuress, sadomasochist and psychical researcher who co-edited Borderland with Stead; Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, Keeper of the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms who engaged in ethically dubious archaeological practices; and an equally colourful cast of minor characters.  These personnel allow Luckhurst to explore the psychical research nexus of the allegedly unlucky mummy.  This was the item that was supposed to have been lost on the Titanic in 1912, along with Stead, the ship sunk as a result of the curse.  Yet as an example of a free-floating rumour, it was also said to be on both the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania when they sank in 1914 and 1915 respectively.  Despite these supposed misadventures you can still see it at the British Museum, where it has enjoyed an uninterrupted sojourn since it was deposited.  Murray himself, it is worth noting, lived to 70, hardly a life cut short.

The other pre-Tutmania curse story concerns the mummy and coffin of a priest called Nesmin which Walter Herbert Ingram bought as a souvenir of his participation in the failed Gordon Relief Expedition in 1885.  The case was said to include a “blood-curdling inscription” to the effect that anybody who disturbed the resting place would be killed by wild animals, seemingly fulfilled when Ingram was trampled to death in Somaliland in 1888 at the age of 33 while attempting to shoot an elephant with insufficient firepower, his remains washed away and scattered.  The British Museum acquired the gilded cartonnage mummy mask in 1885 (no 24402), while the mummy and coffin were given to Lady Meux for her collection of Egyptiana.  The curse was supposed to have affected the family, but as is the way with these things it was selectively perceived, being retrofitted to suit circumstances, while emphasising hits and ignoring misses (thus the curse evolved to inflict childlessness, so Mrs Ingram, who bore a child after Walter’s death, was ignored, but Lady Meux, who died childless, was clearly a victim).  Lady Meux’s ownership intertwines the curse with narratives of aristocratic decadence and downfall (clearly under her spell, Luckhurst spends more time on the racy Lady than is strictly necessary for the narrative).  After her death in 1910 mummy and coffin were purchased by William Randolph Hearst (who suffered his own share of misfortunes), and in 1939 by the Rhode Island School of Design, where they still reside.  The blood-curdling inscription, naturally, never existed.   In any case, both the Murray and the Ingram curses seem to have run their course.

The daddy of such curse stories is that of Tutankhamun.  George Herbert, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, financed Howard Carter’s archaeological excavation that uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November 1922.  The journalists who descended on the excavation hoped to see something to write home about, but as Carnarvon had signed an exclusive deal with the Times, they were obliged to cast their nets wider in the search for copy to justify their expense accounts.  The death of Carnarvon in April 1923 from blood poisoning complicated by pneumonia was manna from heaven as the Times’s stranglehold on activity within the tomb was irrelevant, and rumours claiming that he was the victim of a curse began to circulate, soon growing to mythic proportions: at the moment of his death the Continental hotel, where he had died, was blacked out (or was that the whole of Cairo?), while back at Highclere Castle, the Carnarvon estate, the family dog had howled mournfully and keeled over at the exact moment of her master’s death, allowing for the time difference.  Were these dramatic events the result of a curse?  It was claimed that over the entrance to the tomb was a clay tablet bearing the warning that “Death shall come on swift wings to whoever toucheth the tomb of the Pharaoh”, clear proof if any were needed.  As it happened there was no such tablet, but such details cannot stand in the way of a good story.  Any misfortune that befell anyone connected with the operation, eventually extending to some twenty individuals, was attributed to revenge heaped on those who would dare desecrate the tomb, even though the mortality profile of those involved was statistically no different from the general population; Carter for instance soldiered on until 1939, when he died of cancer, aged 64.

The second half of The Mummy’s Curse is less focused.  Luckhurst examines the presence of Egypt in London in its various forms as it became more familiar during the course of the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how slow the curse motif was to develop.  England started to take serious notice of Egypt in 1801 when it bagged Napoleon’s loot from his disastrous Egyptian campaign, humiliatingly exchanged to get his army home safely.  At this point, Egypt evoked feelings of awe at the massiveness of its ancient monuments, mixed with a sense of their vulgarity compared to classical models.  While it did not catch on to any extent, the architectural style, which for example was notably employed in Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall in 1811 (actually a somewhat hybrid facade), proved popular.  Artefacts placed on show generated interest in their exoticism, but there was no sense of fear that they might possess dark powers.  Even the public mummy unwrappings, which like the wider culture of popular science demonstrations were mixtures of scientific lecture and showmanship, did not generate the distaste that such close proximity to corpses might be expected to create, perhaps because the bodies were dessicated (one might compare them to the churches where bodies are on display, such as at St. Michan’s in Dublin, or to Lindow Man, which may produce debate on the ethics of display, but not general disgust).  When the Crystal Palace was re-erected at Sydenham in 1854, it contained an Egyptian Court full of enormous recreated statuary in an immersive experience that transported the visitor back to Pharaonic times while linking the Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian and British empires in a positive way.

Luckhurst then traces the shift of these attitudes during the second half of the century, focusing on the development of the curse tale in its museum setting and in wider literature.  This was not a sudden switch, and Egypt could inspire cemetery architecture while punters enjoyed the vicarious pleasures of Egyptian travel at their local panorama or diorama.  The earliest fiction with an Egyptian theme was either romantic or tended to take a tone satirical of contemporary culture.  However, as the earlier sense of awe gave way to an emphasis on threat and fear, the association with the curse developed and became embedded in the late Victorian Gothic, exemplified by stories such as Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’ and ‘The Ring of Thoth’, Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian, Bram Stoker’s Jewel of Seven Stars, stories by Sax Rohmer, and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.  After covering these, Luckhurst devotes longer sections to the stories of Sir Henry Rider Haggard (noting efforts also by his brothers, both army officers with direct experience of Egypt) and Algernon Blackwood.  This literary subset of the Imperial Gothic became a context for the later Tutankhamun curse narrative, though it is the way of these things to be mutually reinforcing; a late entry Luckhurst does not mention is John Metcalfe’s peculiar 1931 story ‘Mr. Meldrum’s Mania’, in which the unfortunate Mr. Meldrum finds himself transforming into the ibis-headed scribe Thoth.  A couple of scenes are set in the British Museum’s Egyptian galleries, showing that even after the peak of the mummy curses, the displays still retained uncanny associations.

The final chapter becomes still more diffuse, but is the most entertaining in the book, examining Egyptian influences on the fin de siècle Occult Revival in the shape of the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, with their ludicrous astral battles (W. T. Stead coining the term “killer-willer” to describe occultist and medical doctor Anna Kingsford’s alleged psychic assassination of a vivisectionist).  The notion of the evil eye is presented as a force linking the ancient mysteries of the East with late-Victorian anthropology and fiction.  The Unlucky Mummy was said to have a malevolent gaze, but these things are in the eye of the beholder because to the modern viewer, unencumbered by fears of curses (but you can’t be completely sure of course) she merely looks a little boss-eyed.

With all these curse stories there is a curious ambivalence to the reporting, one of superior dismissal of primitive superstition mixed with the nagging concern that there might be something in it.  Luckhurst shows how the mummy stories reflected anxieties that grew during the nineteenth century.  The gradual association of Egypt with supernatural menace was overdetermined, drawing together a number of issues of contemporary concern, though not always in an articulated way.  Imperial expansion was vigorous in the 1880s – Egypt was occupied militarily in 1882, the year the SPR was founded.  Yet despite this apparent display of self-confidence there was a certain insecurity in the Imperial project following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and its brutal suppression, a sense of guilt accompanying the realisation that the mission to civilise the heathen had a dark side; the return of the – literally – repressed.  Similarly the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb came at a time of resurgent Egyptian nationalism, as British influence was on the wane.  Curses are not about our attitudes to the past, but are about the disguised working-through of present anxieties.

Additionally, underlying the apparent optimism of Empire were Western fears that, despite a perceived superiority over colonised subjects in technical matters, what seemed on the surface ignorant superstition among the dismissed ‘other’ hid a sophisticated understanding of forces beyond our control, and that would be employed to wreak revenge.  Allied to this was a sense that by delving too deeply into these mysteries, 'we’ might become contaminated, either literally or figuratively.  The thought that there could be forces superior to our technology, drawing on ancient wisdom that we are unable to fathom, challenges the assumption that Enlightenment rationality is naturally superior to other world views.  A curse said to stretch back thousands of years is actually a critique of modernism.

Looking at the massive monuments of Egypt, the civilisation that spawned them must have appeared permanent to its inhabitants.  Shelley had already spelled out the dangers of such complacency at the end of ‘Ozymandias’, a warning surely not lost as the British Empire reached its zenith:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

There are occasional lapses into academese in The Mummy’s Curse, but unlike much humourless institutional output, Luckhurst is knowing about his use of it.  Towards the end of the book he breaks out of character to put formal assessment into a demotic framework: “The jargon of secularization, disenchantment and re-enchantment [of which he has given us quite a lot] can sometimes make you lose sight of how simply bug-out crazy many of the beliefs of the inner circle of secret societies like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were.”  That is so refreshing to hear.

Roger Luckhurst. The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. Oxford University Press, 2012.

'Dangerous Work': Diary of an Arctic Adventure, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s large corpus grows ever-larger.  In 2011 the British Library published his first attempt at a novel, The Narrative of John Smith, and now it has released an even earlier piece of writing, his record of a whaling trip to the Arctic in 1880.  Only a third year medical student at the time, he signed on as ship’s doctor; all British whaling ships had to carry a medical officer as a legal requirement, but clearly the level of expertise was not considered to be a determining factor.  He secured the position by chance because one of his fellow students couldn’t go and offered his place to Conan Doyle, even providing the necessary gear.  Conan Doyle took time off from his studies to supplement his hard-pressed family’s income – earning £2. 10s. 0d a month, plus a bonus of 3/- per ton of whale oil obtained – making his presence on the voyage in effect a kind of early gap year.  He was only twenty, and actually gained his majority while at sea.

The SS Hope left Peterhead on 28 February 1880, under Captain John Gray, a member of a notable whaling family (the Hope spent part of the trip in company with the Eclipse, captained by John Gray‘s brother David).  Most injuries on board fortunately were minor, though Conan Doyle experienced the first patient death of his career.  As his medical duties were not arduous, much of his time was taken up with clerical tasks, including keeping the ship’s log for the captain.  In addition to the official record, he maintained his own journal, and it is this that the British Library has reproduced.

If all he had done had been to keep the ship’s log and dress the occasional finger, it might have been a dull read.  However, he was never one to sit around waiting for something to happen, and threw himself into the life of the ship to such an extent that the captain offered to take him again the following season as harpooner as well as doctor.  Conan Doyle declined the offer, fortunately for us, given the number of times he fell in the sea.  He was comfortable with the captain, whom he admired greatly and in whose company he spent much time in this stratified community, and also with those below decks, enjoying their conviviality.

This was a formative experience for the young man.  As he later put it, he left “a big, straggling youth,” but returned “a powerful, well-grown man.”  His writing, assured for a twenty-year old, is a valuable unvarnished snap-shot of an industry that was becoming harder to sustain even in the 1880s because the level of hunting had reduced whale numbers significantly.  In fact the Hope didn’t have a great deal of luck with whales this time out, and much of the trip was taken up with killing seals.  The total haul was a poor one for nearly six months at sea, just two whales, 3,600 seals, five polar bears, two narwhals, twelve elephant seals and miscellaneous seabirds

The descriptions of how these were obtained are not for the faint-hearted, as he nonchalantly describes harpooning whales and clubbing and shooting seals.  He exhibits little sentiment, happy to shoot rare seabirds with no thought of his impact on the survival of the species.  Nothing seemed sacred, and while he may have felt a twinge of remorse occasionally, it did not stay his hand, and he happily took part in the slaughter, priding himself on being a better shot than many of his shipmates.  He saw himself as a sportsman, and listed his and the Hope’s tallies as “game bags”.  One harrowing passage describes an elephant seal “sitting on a piece of ice very little larger than itself“, surrounded by killer whales which were “striking the poor creature with their long fins, trying to knock him off his perch.”  The desperate animal leapt off the ice and made for a boat, trying to jump in it for safety, whereupon the men clubbed it.

Conan Doyle drew on his Arctic experiences in later writings, and had a tendency to elaborate and romanticise them, but this is the first draft, without risk of the embellishments that came later (though probably not immune from its own share of sailors’ exaggerations).  After a lapse of 130 years, Conan Doyle’s estate, better known for the undignified behaviour of his heirs, has now approved its publication.  The diary is beautifully printed in full-colour facsimile, displaying Conan Doyle’s clear handwriting, and revealing the stains and marks of the journey.  He was good at drawing, and frequently pasted his illustrations, some of which he later coloured, into the text.  Where they were folded over, the relevant pages have been reproduced twice, once with the picture folded to show the text, and once with it unfolded.

The volume has been edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower, who also edited Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and The Narrative of John Smith.  In addition to the facsimile, they have supplied an annotated transcription, with footnotes elucidating the entries, both personal and relating to the whaling industry, and including the text of two letters he sent home while at sea (amazing to think that any kind of postal service could operate in those latitudes).  This is topped and tailed with an introduction and afterword.

The former sets the scene for the trip, and sketches its course.  The latter traces how his Arctic experiences weaved through his career, from a talk to the Portsmouth Literary & Scientific Society in 1883 (the lengthy report of the meeting in the Hampshire Telegraph is included) to articles which drew directly on the voyage, as well as less explicit references bearing the influence of that seminal trip which appear in his work.  Two articles and two short stories are included: ‘The Glamour of the Arctic’, which appeared in the Idler in July 1892;‘Life on a Greenland Whaler’ from the Strand Magazine for January 1897 (the ending seems to be missing some lines, as it makes an abrupt transition from a reference to arctic foxes to the method polar bears use to catch seals.); the early Arctic-set ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’; and the Holmes story ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’.  Photographs and a map of the voyage complete an elegant and comprehensive volume.

The journal would have been an interesting account whoever had written it, but naturally it gains extra interest coming from the pen that later gave us Sherlock Holmes.  Conan Doyle demonstrates in embryo his burgeoning capabilities as a story-teller, with an eye for quick detail, a fluent style, and ability to evoke atmosphere.  And this glimpse of his developing style makes one wonder about a claim by the editors.  They feel that after his early stories ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ and ‘J. Habakuk Jephson‘s Statement‘, “Sherlock Holmes was but a matter of time.”  Conan Doyle certainly shows more literary promise here than he does in the leaden The Narrative of John Smith, but bearing in mind the vigour of his maritime exploits, and the zest of his early adventure stories, it is rather a surprise that he attempted the detective puzzles of Sherlock Holmes rather than concentrating on producing the ripping yarns that characterised much of his output.  It is fortunate for lovers of Sherlock Holmes that he did.

As a footnote, looking at the famous photograph of Conan Doyle with other members of the crews of the Hope and Eclipse standing on the deck of the Eira, the ship owned by Benjamin Leigh-Smith that they encountered on 11 July 1880, I realised that there are in fact two different shots, taken close together in time.  Both versions are included in the book, one credited to Hull Maritime Museum, the other to Hull Museums and Art Gallery. The men are standing in slightly different positions, with Conan Doyle (third from the left) much more visible in one than in the other.  Conan Doyle wrote in his journal that when photographed he was smoking a cigar, and worried that he might look “misty”, but he does not appear to be smoking in either of these.  Most likely the photographer, W. J. A. Grant, discarded that one at the time, but prints of yet a third picture may have survived.

Polar Dreams, Ghosts and Psychics, a talk by Shane McCorristine

 On Hallowee’n 2012, Shane McCorristine gave a talk to a mixed audience at the Polar Museum in Cambridge, examining cultural meanings of the Arctic.  It turns out that we betray a surprising ambivalence to what at first glance might just seem an unproblematic place of ice and cold.  McCorristine has utilised a wide range of sources, from explorers’ diaries, memoirs and anecdotes, to folk tales and ghost stories, in order to build a picture of the underside of the top of the world, its, as he called it, “Supernaturality.”  Our standard image of the Arctic is of the landscape as majestic and starkly beautiful, a magical environment, carrying connotations of purity, magnificent beauty, and wonder.  Concomitantly, the image of polar exploration is of the rational masculine explorer, valorising sacrifice and achievement, a story of endeavour, teamwork, of comradeship in a challenging environment, imposing a human presence on a blank canvas.  In short, a Boy's Own story.

Yet but the ice can also be seen as female, an ice maiden, comforting yet treacherous.  There is a dark side to polar exploration, and magic can be two-edged, black as well as white.  Of course the obvious point is that death and injury are ever-present, as is starvation, and even the necessity for cannibalism to survive.  McCorristine had some graphic examples of the damage extreme cold can do to the body, especially hands and feet, from losing fingers to skin sloughing off feet “like a sock”, or a foot becoming so welded to a boot that it was impossible to know where one ended and the other began.  In addition to the physical pain, there is the risk of mental anguish and paranoia.  Even hypothermia is not the peaceful gradual falling asleep of common belief: the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane (who was romantically linked to Margaret Fox, a pioneer with her sisters of the Spiritualist movement) described it as like being electrocuted.

The typical Victorian view of the Arctic was that it was a tablua rasa, a lonely empty region (a common colonial attitude).  But this was wrong, as it is inhabited, with a history and culture.  However, this perceived emptiness, while it made it another place to be conquered, at the same time gave it the character of a realm of enchantment, an entry point to the supernatural.  It was a borderland, liminal, state where science and superstition met and where the supernatural threatened boundaries between worlds, where hallucinations undermined confidence in one’s abilities to distinguish reality from fantasy, and hardened explorers yearned for wives left behind; a dreamscape as much as a landscape.  McCorristine argues that it is the focus of cycles of enchantment in which we become enchanted, disenchanted and re-enchanted.

He touched on Shamanism and traditional beliefs in the region, the use of spirit guides by indigenous peoples to assist with survival in an unforgiving environment.  Their tent ceremonies link to nineteenth century séances as a method of utilising psychic abilities to obtain information.  The talk though focused on two aspects of the region’s uncanny.  The first is the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), a sight guaranteed to fill the viewer with awe in any case, but accompanying which, folklore had asserted, are strange rustling noises, just at the threshold of perception.  The Lights bestow a kind of anthropomorphic quality, and the locals attribute the mysterious sounds to the souls of the dead.  Hesitation in determining the cause is a sign of the uncanny, unheimlich, as we struggle with interpretation.

Drawing of an aurora in Fridtjof Nansen's In Northern Mists (1911)

The bulk of the talk was devoted to the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin and his gallant crew who in 1845 set out with two ships to locate the Northwest Passage, and then vanished.  The resting place of the ships, and Franklin himself, are unknown, and only a few bodies, remarkably well preserved, have so far been recovered.  McCorristine discussed the place of Franklin’s expedition in cultural history.  Its disappearance was a topic of enormous importance in the 1840s, fuelled by Jane Franklin, who refused to believe her husband was dead.  Sir John pushing out into the wastes while Jane stayed at home mapped directly on to the ideal of Victorian domesticity, but her behaviour after his disappearance indicated that she possessed steely determination of her own as she did all she could to locate her lost husband.


Franklin and his officers, Gleason's Pictorial, 18 October 1851


Efforts to find out what had happened took two forms, one physical, the other mental, as naval expeditions were supplemented by psychical investigations.  The mystery came at a time when interest in mesmerism was at its peak, and ascertaining the expedition’s whereabouts was a prime focus of animal magnetism’s “higher phenomena”, with clairvoyants submitting their accounts of what their visions told them.  Reports were generally positive, with most claiming that Franklin was still alive.  McCorristine gave us some examples, including the ‘Seeress of Bolton’ (a name perhaps modelled on the more celebrated Seeress of Prevorst) who psychometrised Franklin’s possessions, and Louisa “Weesy” Coppin, a dead four-year old child who appeared as a ball of bluish light.

This clairvoyant network covered the globe in parallel to more conventional methods of communication.  Information gleaned from mesmerised subjects from as far away as Australia and India was the best they had, given the information vacuum into which the expedition had sailed.  Given the vast publicity which caught the public imagination, Franklin became an industry, with ballads and knick-knacks to commemorate him, perhaps the best known being the folk song Lord Franklin (which begins, appropriately, with a dream).  McCorristine played a snatch of Martin Carthy’s version, but it is also well known through versions by A L Lloyd and more recently by Eilis Kennedy.  The Franklin industry continues today in both non-fiction and fiction, attempts, like the efforts of Victorian clairvoyants, to re-imagine his fate, while Sir John enjoys a vigorous afterlife online.  You could perhaps call it a Franklin mint.



HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, Illustrated Lonon News, 24 May 1845



The disaster was a turning-point in our view of the Arctic, as it became ghostly (a Canadian blog devoted to the search is called ‘Franklin’s Ghost’).  The linking of the Arctic to the controversial pursuit of mesmerism served to promote the frozen north as a region of secrets, and a gothic atmosphere was incorporated into its persona.  Even the names of Franklin’s ships – Erebus and Terror – seem to claim a mythic status.  The hunt for the two lost ships continues today, with Parks Canada still looking on an annual basis.  According to McCorristine, Canada has claimed Franklin as their own as part of their geopolitical aspirations in the region, with its considerable untapped resources.  Unlike earlier searches, the Canadians have taken Inuit testimony into account and found it surprisingly accurate, including accounts of cannibalism among the crew which have been confirmed by autopsies of the recovered bodies.

Part of McCorrstine’s research builds on Ralph Lloyd-Jones ‘The Paranormal Arctic: Lady Franklin, Sophia Cracroft, and Captain and 'Little Weesy' Coppin’  (Polar Record Vol. 37, pp.27-34, 2001), much of the research for which was also undertaken at Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, but as this fascinating talk demonstrated, there is a huge amount of mileage in exploring the polar uncanny.  Perhaps though, as the ice recedes and sea routes are opened, much of this mystery will be lost.  The sea passage, and exploitation of resources, may make the place grimy and banal, and its associations with exoticism seem as quaint as mesmerism does today.  In the meantime, McCorristine has done an absorbing, if occasionally macabre, job of highlighting the Arctic’s darker side, and our consequent fascination with the mysteries it refuses to yield.  One wonders what will happen when we voyage out into deep space.   Will that become a dreamscape as much as the Arctic was in the Victorian imagination?