Profiles in Canadian Literature 7: Volume 7

1982).

by

I.S. MacLaren

Sir George Back, although a good example in many respects of the post-Napoleonic British naval officer and explorer, was unique, for he managed, within the strictest of Britain’s imperial institutions, to remain an individual. He was admired by some, despised by others, but always distinctive. Intrepid as an explorer of the northern latitudes of North America – he made five expeditions to the Arctic (three by boat and canoe along rivers and coastlines, and two by ship) between the ages of twenty-three and forty-one, and covered as much of its vastness as any explorer before Vilhjalmur Stefansson – he quite often gave the impression of being a sort of imperious dandy, like his near contemporary Beau Brummel. Never an intimate with, or liked much by, Sir John Franklin, his commanding officer for three of the five expeditions, Back was everything Franklin wasn’t. Witty in French and English, and otherwise socially polished with pen, brush, voice, and manner, he was physically as able as any British officer in the decades that saw the birth of imperialism’s ethos of muscular Christianity. Whether in letters, private journals, official logs and reports, or books – even poetry – he wrote engagingly and sometimes feelingly, where Franklin plodded along dutifully. Clearly, Back was possessed of a sense of occasion; ever ambitious, he was also possessed with himself.

George Back was born on November 6, 1796, in Stockport, south of Manchester, the second son of John and Ann Back. In September 1808, before his fourteenth birthday, he had signed on with the Royal Navy, but within a year he was captured by the French off San Sebastian, Spain, and imprisoned at Verdun, where he spent more than four years. There, he learned French, drawing, and something of vice and roguery.¹ Soon after his release and return to England, he was commissioned to HMS Akbar on the Halifax station, where his father wrote him on October 14, 1815, with some fatherly advice about how to make his way in a Royal Navy about to reduce its size considerably following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo four months earlier:

I have no occasion I hope to recommend to you every attention to perfect yourself in making a good Seaman, & good officer & that your conduct in every respect is that of a Gentleman. If it shoud [sic] be[,] from your own ability & qualifications with the Interest that will be made for you[,] so fortunate as to get you rated as Lieutenant – I shall be most Happy. I dont [sic] know any thing in my concerns that I more anxiously hope for – [family friend] Harry Cook have [sic] known many Instances of young men having been confined as prisoner for some years have helped them towards passing to the desirable rank of Lieu¹[,]² that is provided they possess the proper qualifications.²

Back heeded his father, and followed his advice by showing, if various reports by individuals throughout his life can be trusted, a measure of obsequiousness to those whom he thought were in a position to further his Interest. By March 1817, when the Akbar was back in England, he was made a midshipman, and when further promotion eluded him he volunteered for arctic service, obtaining appointment to HMS Trent (with Lieutenant Franklin), which sailed from England on April 25, 1818. The ship formed part of an expedition seeking two passages to the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic. Almost no discoveries were made, and the Trent, after struggling in the ice off Spitsbergen (east of Greenland), returned without success to the Thames on October 22. But the expedition inspired new plans by the Admiralty, plans which involved Back because his conduct and artistic skill had impressed Franklin. Franklin recommended him for another appointment, this time to what has come to be known as the first Franklin expedition, which departed England for York Factory on May 23, 1819. Before Back returned home in 1822, his father’s and his own anxious hopes for a lieutenancy had been realized.

This first Franklin expedition (Franklin; surgeon-naturalist Dr. John Richardson; fellow midshipman Robert Hood; servant John Hepburn; and fifteen other men – voyageurs, Indians, and Inuit) forsook ships by making its way to the northern continental coastline in York boats and canoes, and on snowshoes, along fur-trade routes at first, and then north down the Coppermine River to its mouth, to which Samuel Hearne had walked in the company of Chipewyan Indians fifty years before. Then, after a rash survey by canoe of the tundra coastline east of the Coppermine for 800 kilometres, the party attempted to return by foot to Fort Enterprise, their previous winter’s quarters, near the Coppermine River, about 450 kilometres away. Eleven of the twenty perished, most by starvation, several, it is thought, by cannibalism. Back happened to be in the vanguard when Copper Indians encountered him and his interpreter, Pierre St. Germain, and brought relief to the survivors in November 1821.

Back’s journals of this and the second Franklin expeditions were, like his water-colour sketches and his maps, the products of his duty, not drafts intended for publication or private undertakings of any kind. The journals, which await imminent first-time publication, are written up retrospectively from rough notes and diaries, but despite being dutiful records they display a lively, engaging style that bears witness to Back’s assessment of his temperament less than a decade later: It is part of my being to feel strongly.³ Where Franklin’s published accounts, which apparently come closer than most explorers’ books to the original journals,⁴ aim for the moderate, controlled tone, Back’s prose ranges comparatively more widely from that decorous, sober, and utterly conventional demeanour.⁵ To this extent it resembles, in kind if not quite in degree, the personal tone of his letters, candid more often than one might expect, and lively often enough to seem not entirely restrained. In a letter of May 25, 1820, to his brother Charles, from Fort Chipewyan, Back congratulates himself on his worth: I thoroughly understand the routine of the voyage and the country as far as it has been explored and my conjectures of the coast I am almost certain are correct.⁶ In light of the fact that he had yet to leave the boreal forest, this last remark is a confident boast indeed; in light of the ensuing catastrophe of the first expedition, this proud declaration seems a tempting of Providence. In the same letter, after censuring his commander for being out of shape for the 1100-kilometre trek on snowshoes (see Comments by Sir George Back below), he declares his own constitution perfect. Here is Back at his most forthright, writing to a family member at his least guarded and most ambitious. Despite indifferent success to this point in their travels – supplies had proven difficult to acquire; the logistics of directing twenty men through the continent in unfamiliar vessels had given Franklin, a sailor of seas after all, all the trouble he could handle – Back could depend on his own youthful vigour and strong feeling of his worth.

What seems lacking, however, is an understanding that Back’s attainment of success and career recognition was inextricably bound to the expedition’s. Anyone experienced in wilderness travel will quickly confirm how dismaying, dispiriting, even dangerous an individualist can prove to be to the group. Exploiting his youth and ambition, but also, perhaps, aware of his threat to the group’s welfare, Franklin regularly seems to have sent Back off on his own, at one point even giving him the option of returning to Hudson Bay and trying to sail a ship up its west coast until he found a passage that would bear him westward to meet the canoes coming down the Coppermine River. The offer must have tempted Back’s ambition greatly, but he somehow saw it as his duty to remain with Franklin. Less than two decades later, however, on his last arctic sojourn, his voyage attempted to do precisely what Franklin had suggested, for the glory of finding the Northwest Passage had still eluded them all.

One feature of the prose in Back’s journal is typical of the nineteenth-century British officers’ imperial attitude to the people of the country. Back often denies credit to the labourers of the expedition – the voyageurs, hunters, and interpreters – by using the passive voice. So often neglected in narratives of exploration (Hearne’s is the great exception, but only sporadically), these labourers pass like ghosts through the Eurocentric accounts of events. Some examples (which strike me as remarkable for what they do not reveal when I recall that on a canoe trip in 1988 along the route covered by Franklin’s men, six people could travel in one day only one-quarter of the distance reached by them in the same time) are as follows: the canoe was patched; the [fishing] nets were searched; A road was cut for the canoes which were then forced through the mud and herbage of the lake; and so forth. Far more than in Hearne’s journal, because Hearne, the solitary white man in his party, travelled à la mode du pays, Back’s journal syntactically mirrors his relation to the labour expended by others. His use of the active voice is similarly instructive: We encamped.⁷

Back’s poetry from this and later expeditions also requires consideration because it provides a cautionary note when one is tempted to regard Back’s character in too simplistic a light. On the first Franklin expedition, Back wrote a poem entitled Recollection of our unfortunate voyage.⁸ It exists in two drafts, the first dated January 1822 and the second in May of the same year, both with the location of Great Slave Lake given in Back’s hand. In addition, Back supplies a Wordsworthian claim at the head of the poem: The following lines are set down – just as they occurred to me during a quick walk – approaching to a run one evening – in the cold and gloomy month of January. Thermometer – 40 minus zero. This proud remark comes as no surprise to the reader, but some of the attitudes expressed in the fifteen quatrains of cross-rhymed iambic pentameter and in the annotations following each stanza suggest that his close call with death by starvation eight weeks earlier had tempered and humbled him somewhat, if only for a while. The poem traces the fate of the expedition from the time it set out from Fort Enterprise in June 1821 until its rescue by Akaitcho and his fellow Copper Indians in November, five months later. It starts in high spirits, spending three stanzas on the journey to and descent from the Coppermine. The next three stanzas strike an ominous note by recounting the massacre at Bloody Falls fifty years earlier, as related by Hearne. Stanza seven hails the discovery of salt water at the mouth of the river (majestical in View – / Is seen the Icy bosom – of the Arctic deep), while stanza eight dramatizes the apprehension that the British officers said they detected in the voyageurs, when, never before having seen tidal ice floes, they face the prospect of launching birchbark canoes out onto the water. Stanzas nine and ten recount the traumatic coasting of the continent’s north shore for eight hundred kilometres, a Herculean and crazed exercise, all in fair Science’s name, and stanza eleven turns the expedition homeward: Once more we ’tempt the gloomy barren steep. Stanzas twelve and thirteen detail the horror of the pedestrian traverse of the tundra to the fort. One annotation refers to the eleven who had now fallen victims to famine – unable to proceed in the deep snow – they reeled backwards – fixed their Icy Eyes – foamed at the mouth – and expired in profound stillness – .⁹ One line of verse alludes to Michel Terohaute’s alleged cannibalism: Whilst some prepare fresh horrors to review. Stanza fourteen is interesting for its attitude: Back gives credit for the survivors’ rescue to the hand of heaven; in the subsequent annotation, however, he takes the credit:

Note – I arrived at our house, some time before my Companions[;] when not finding the supply We expected – I hastened on – scarcely Knowing whither – after losing my poor Servant who dropped down a corpse – I was fortunate enough to discover the tracks of Indians – the next day I joined them – and the evening sent abundance of Provision to my friends – and thus by the blessing of heaven – saved them from an early grave –

The elision of the subject for sent and saved conveniently leaves the agency of the rescue ambiguous; the note also omits reference to Pierre St. Germain, the Indian interpreter, who was the first to reach Akaitcho’s camp, or to Solomon Belanger, who was the first to see and report Footsteps of Indians. Instead of mentioning them, Back refers only to the one among them who died, Gabriel Beauparlant. The upshot of this telling leaves Back solitary, the valiant Romantic hero defying all odds by finding the Indians and, thereby, saving his fellows all on his own.

Stanza fifteen therefore sounds somewhat sheepish; it contradicts the claims of the previous stanza’s note: The generous Indian soon supplied our wants / And timely snatched us from impending fate. Equally, its note is fulsome in its contradiction: We owe every thing to the Kindness of the Leader and his tribe – they not only supplied us with meat but were anxiously careful of our health – . The praise cannot, however, go unqualified. Both the final lines of this last stanza and the conclusion of the note cast a profoundly Christian glow over the providential arrival of the Indians: Blessed by such efforts – gratitude and thanks / – Attend those feelings in a savage state –; We saw the parable of the good Samaritan realized – and – ‘can such things be without our special wonder’ – I fear so much could not be said of three fourths of the civilised world – . Clearly, the Indians are the agents, but they participate in God’s grand design for the expedition’s rescue. Yet the final narrative remark repays whatever is left of the gratitude to the Indians, however backhandedly.

The complexity of Back’s response to his wilderness experience may only be what one ought to expect when assessing a variety of written forms which were never shaped into a single work for publication. Reading only Back’s two books, his narratives of the two last voyages, which he commanded, and studying only those of his water-colours which were engraved to illustrate his and Franklin’s books, one gains an inaccurate-because-too-straightforward impression of him, the impression of an unquestioning practitioner of the aesthetics and ideologies of his age.¹⁰ As a career officer, he does maintain these tenets on official occasions – he could not have hoped to realize his ambition had he not – but his private responses provide fascinating and complex attitudes; in them, the strong feelings that one only suspects in the publications shine through clearly. A good final example comes from a letter that he wrote to his brother John during the largely uneventful and almost completely successful second Franklin expedition. In 1825, Fort Franklin had been erected on Keith Bay, Great Bear Lake. The next year, the continental coast was surveyed both to the west and east of the Mackenzie Delta. Even before the summer’s survey was under way, however, Back was plotting his future expeditions. Hearing of the lack of success obtained in 1824 by the navy’s expedition into northern Hudson Bay under Captain George Lyon,¹¹ Back reflected:

I find Capt. Lyon is going out to the Real del Monti [Realmonte, Sicily] – at a salary of 1,000£ [sic] per Annum – This in my opinion will about dish him in his Profession, though he has leave from the Board – [page here destroyed by seal] not sorry for it – that is, his going out – f[or I?] hope to be sent in command of an Exp[edition] to that Place which he did not reach – At least Franklin is desirous of it – and I am now going to write to [Second Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John] Barrow about it – even before we have accomplished the one we are about. By this you will observe that I have little dread of those Things – which the World is sometimes apt to eulogize. I suppose I am made a Commander [on December 30, 1825] by this Time – I know not if I shall command the faithful – but I Know that I’ll make things move when I am in Power and I’ll answered [sic] for my being esteemed – so much for Vanity – I am in capital health – and have sanguine hopes of tolerable success –¹²

That next summer, Franklin’s expedition did meet with tolerable success; members returned home to great acclaim. Back, however, did not see his grand plans realized, and for three years languished in despair of another commission. Then, for his peace of mind, he toured the continent, where, occupying himself otherwise, he gradually regained his ambitious spirit. His European journal erupts on occasion with bitter remarks about his professional frustrations, and one can readily discern that they prey on his mind despite his itinerary of galleries, historic sites, high society, even an illicit love affair; but the journal also confirms the great variety of Back’s interests, which make him such an interesting figure. He is fascinated by the paintings of Guido, Titian, and Rubens; he has an advanced sense of European politics; his spirit soars religiously at the sight of sublime landscapes; he has very correct and proper notions of civility, is appalled for the most part by improprieties in his fellow travellers, and is humiliated when he suffers any indignities, as when a nubile fille de chambre is sent to his room in Koblenz to apply leeches to relieve a bad case of the piles; and his taste for poetry is widespread and includes Byron, Voltaire, Ovid, and almost any Italian minstrel’s singing: … a Minstrel entered and accompanying himself on the Guitar sang several Songs in a full and harmonious voice. – This indeed was delightful – and for a few minutes I forgot the Admiralty – and every mundane disappointment – wishing for no other talent but the skill of that poor Minstrel.¹³

Just when he is languishing in Naples, Back hears of John Ross’s expedition of 1829 not having returned and of the Admiralty’s concern to reopen the arctic campaign (Ross’s voyage had been privately mounted). By the summer of 1833, he is back on Great Slave Lake, now for the seventh time, and prepared to find the Thlew-ee-choh, the river that Indian reports tell him flows from near the east end of the lake northeastward to the continental coast in the vicinity of Ross’s intended route. His narrative of this most successful and arduous expedition down the ninety-six sets of rapids and falls on the dangerous river that today bears his name, is told in journal but also in book form; finally, with an expedition under his command, his opportunity not just to illustrate but also to narrate a published account arrives. And, as Victor G. Hopwood has noted, Back distinguished himself as both a writer and a painter in Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition (1836). The patina of refinement that he had acquired from his travels on the continent shows to advantage, both in his considerable allusiveness to literature and in his continued progress with his art. Although examples of this development may be found both in this book and in Narrative of an Expedition in HMS Terror, his account of the nearly catastrophic voyage to find what Lyon had not, a passage westward out of Hudson Bay, one may suffice here. It describes Back’s response to a burnt-over landscape to the east of Great Slave Lake. He came across it after determining the headwaters of the Back River, on his way back to Fort Reliance, which some of his men had remained behind to build on Great Slave Lake’s McLeod Bay, and which would provide shelter for the winters of 1833-34 and 1834-35:

It was a sight altogether novel to me; I had seen nothing in the Old World at all resembling it. There was not the stern beauty of Alpine scenery, and still less the fair variety of hill and dale, forest and glade, which makes the charm of a European landscape. There was nothing to catch or detain the lingering eye, which wandered on, without a check over endless lines or round backed rocks, whose sides were rent into indescribably eccentric forms. It was like a stormy ocean suddenly petrified. Except a few tawny and pale green lichens, there was nothing to relieve the horror of the scene; for the fire had scathed it, and the grey and black stems of the mountain pine, which lay prostrate in mournful confusion, seemed like the blackened corpses of departed vegetation. It was a picture of hideous ruin and combustion.¹⁴

Here is a conventional sublime landscape description; neither the sublimity of the Alps, nor the picturesqueness of England could, apparently, furnish the appropriate analogy to this scene. By employing the noun nothing three times, Back emphasizes the superlative quality of the landscape, so that it is more sublime than anything that the grand tourists among his readers might have seen in Europe. As well, he emphasizes his own, personal response, more in the way of a Childe Harold (to whom he alludes later) than a dutiful officer. Finally, he renders his account more like travel than exploration literature by means of allusion; there is nothing new in quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost (here, Book I, 46) to describe sublime landscape, but it is new for the barrens of North America. Similarly, he incorporates Milton’s description of the fallen angels in order to describe the burnt tree trunks that lay prostrate in mournful confusion, [and] seemed like the blackened corpses of departed vegetation. That allusion actually renders the scene more conventional to his contemporary reader than a factual enumeration might have made it. Indeed, although the attempt to be more sublime than the sublime is common in early nineteenth-century landscape descriptions, Back is being disingenuous in order to be conventional here, for his own Grand Tour journal of two years earlier contains a similar description of Mt. Vesuvius’s crater. On that occasion, Back found that the beauty of the view of Naples and the country around did relieve the sublimity of the crater, which had produced a loud explosion and opened a large crevice … within a foot of the spot where we had been seated. It is difficult to imagine that he had not that experience in mind when describing the scene around Artillery Lake. The description of Vesuvius goes on to use the simile of a petrified sea and another of Milton’s satanic phrases (Book II, 1. 996):

Then indeed on looking down into the abyss below, all its demoniacal horrors were visible at once – It seemed like a tempestuous Sea, suddenly petrified – confusion worse confounded – Wave after wave – Mass upon mass – jagged – splintered and broken – then long even surfaces like large slabs – or the surface of molten led [sic] – tinted with brownish yellow – sulphuric and pale livid green – all this was contrasted by sooty black – the fizzing of smaller volcanic Apertures – and the Thunder like eruption of the cone in the Centre.¹⁵

As if he despairs of getting down more than notes for a future painting of the scene, Back then quotes the French guidebook that has led him through tough descriptions on other occasions on his tour. That he can revert to the guidebook helps clarify the manner he chose to adopt when it came to publishing books about his explorations. Coupling the vivid descriptions with the immediacy of the eyewitness, first-person testimony, Back quickly found an engaging and recognizable style. His earlier impetuosity has not disappeared, but has been channelled into acceptable tropes in an age when the effect of a scene on the traveller’s sensations was as much a part of an adequate description as the enumeration of the properties of the scene itself. Though far from the plain style ordered by Thomas Sprat and the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, Back’s style nevertheless captured a wide audience. Complemented by his ability to transcend the merely topographical, picturesque, or even formulaically sublime in his art, that style brought a new romantic aspect to the world’s understanding of the Arctic.

That aspect was taken up by others, including Charles Dickens, whose co-production with Wilkie Collins of The Frozen Deep was played before Queen Victoria and Sir George Back on September 5, 1857, two weeks before Sir Francis McClintock returned with the irrefutable news that the entire crew of Franklin’s third expedition had perished. In thanking him for attending and in apologizing for calling him only Captain Back, Dickens wrote, But he [Dickens] has so long known and sympathised with Sir George Back in the earlier endurances and glories of his great career that he trusts his best excuse may lie in the fidelity with which he followed Sir George in print long ago.¹⁶ One cannot help thinking that Back’s ambition would have been flattered.

¹ Cited in Clive Holland, Back, Sir George, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, X, 26.

² Letter, John Back to George Back, October 14, 1815, private collection, Montreal.

³ George Back, Journal kept during a tour of the Continent, 3 August 1830-April 1832, 2 vols., holograph; Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, MS 395/10/2, September 24, 1831.

⁴ I acknowledge the discussions with and opinions given at conferences by Richard Davis, University of Calgary, who, with Clive Holland, is preparing editions of Franklin’s journals and papers concerning his two overland arctic expeditions.

⁵ For a discussion of the prose of Franklin’s published accounts, see I.S. MacLaren, John Franklin, Series 5 of Profiles in Canadian Literature, 25-32.

⁶ Letter, George Back to Charles Back, May 25, 1820, private collection, Montreal.

⁷ I acknowledge with gratitude the transcription made of Back’s journal by C. Stuart Houston, who is preparing an edition of it for publication by McGill-Queen’s University Press, under the working title Arctic Artist, the Journal of George Back, 1819-1822.

⁸ Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, MS 395/71/1-2. For the most part, the later version merely attempts, not always successfully, to improve the meter of individual lines.

⁹ This description seems to claim poetic licence. Back may have had the deaths of some of the members described to him, but he did not actually see anyone die, and saw the body of only one dead man, Gabriel Beauparlant. On the other hand, his early naval career must certainly have provided ample opportunity for witnessing death. His nearly five years in prison might also have afforded such occasions.

¹⁰ The three articles listed under MacLaren in the selected bibliography below examine the published work of Back.

¹¹ See Capt. George Lyon, A Brief Narrative of an Unsuccessful Attempt to reach Repulse Bay, through Sir Thomas Rowe’s Welcome, in His Majesty’s ship Griper, in the year MDCCCXXIV (London: John Murray, 1825).

¹² Letter, George Back to John Back, February 8, 1826, George Back Letters, Royal Geographical Society, London.

¹³ Journal kept during a tour of the Continent (see note 3), October 3, 1830.

¹⁴ Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River, and along the Shores of the Arctic Ocean, in the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835 (1836), facs. rpt., introd. by William C. Wonders (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1970), p. 178.

¹⁵ Journal kept during a tour of the Continent (see note 3), October 1831.

¹⁶ Letter, Charles Dickens to Sir George Back, September 8, 1857, George Back Letters, Royal Geographical Society, London.

Chronology

Comments

by Sir George Back

In the early part of the morning a person feels brisk and after four hours thinks it is no little comfort to make a meal of pemican [sic] and a tin pot of tea – which by the way if removed two feet from the fire though the tea be quite hot will adhere firmly to the lips – this you should observe in our public journals – an hour passes in eating – and you proceed – an Englishman always feels satisfied after eating and three or four leagues pass by unheeded – but continual exertion of the muscles depresses the spirits and however firm the mind yet nature but can do her utmost, and the languour of the body is soon seized by fatigue – you soon feel the thongs of the snowshoes chafing your feet particularly the toes, both under and above, and this evil cannot be remedied – weak and tortured with oppressive pains, you drag your listless form along (far behind the rest) till dark, and when you hear the busy noise the falling tree or the sounding ax or by some chance perceive the spiral column ascending high, you rally your remaining strength and bless God that repose is near. … There was a wide difference between Franklin and me – and he suffered every evil I have mentioned whilst mine was a slight chafing of the toes occasioned by the snowshoes – he had never been accustomed to any vigorous exertion[;] besides[,] his frame is bulky without activity – In fatigue I found my constitution could surpass even the old travellers [sic] and as for the climate it has no effect on me but to spur me on in my undertaking – however before we got to the end of our journey Franklin recovered and was as lively as any. … I was not frost bit the whole winter[.] The whole party except myself was.

Back to his brother Charles, from Fort

Chipewyan, May 25, 1820.

The Crew marched cheerly o’er the barren hills

Laughing at worn out jests – with toilsome glee – *

Nor e’er reflected they – on any future ills –

So their loved Plenty – they could see – **

(Note) *Our Men were laden with upwards of 80 lb. each and had to cross an extremely mountainous country intersected by Lakes and Streams – which frequently impeded them – but however tired – they could not avoid laughing at a good joke –

**The Canadians – or those which belong to the class of Voyageurs – are in general so thoughtless – and so addicted to gourmandizing – that they may be led any where – or to any distance – providing you can but supply them amply with food. As a proof of their excess – I shall only remark – that the common daily allowance is – 8 lb. – of Meat per Man – nevertheless – there are perhaps no class of Persons who can better suffer fatigue and privation when compelled to it –

Their Tents o’erturned – and the poor Natives fled For much they feared th’ approach of numerous band-But well remembered – whilst in peaceful bed Their fathers scalped by Matonnabee’s hand –

(Note) On the Esquimauxs [sic] discovering our Party – they were seized with immediate panic and throwing down their Deer Skin dwellings – dried fish &c – fled in the utmost confusion – the retrospection of the fact was too dreadful even to think upon – but infinitely more so, when in these poor creatures [sic] minds; [sic] it was about to be realized again – (See Hearnes [sic] description of the Massacre at the fall near the Sea).

Stanzas 2 and 6 of Back’s poem, "Recollections

of our unfortunate voyage …".

[Monday, July 22, 1833, along the Methye or La Loche Portage, a carry of nineteen km on the fur trade route linking the Churchill River system in the Hudson Bay Watershed to the Clearwater River in the Arctic Ocean watershed] … having crossed the little lake which, like the oasis in the desert gladdens the sight of the weary and parched Voyageur, pressed down with his load and stung and tormented by myriads of insatiable Mosquitos [sic] and house flies – We again recommenced carrying and on arriving at that point suddenly from which the beautifully picturesque view of portage la Loche is seen a thousand feet beneath and extending 36 Miles – in all the wild luxuriance of vernal foliage – even the most jaded of the party halted with his burden to gape a brief moment on so novel and imposing a spectacle. To me it simply afforded the same sensations that an often seen and well executed painting would – there were no new points of admiration [,] no unnoticed spots or shaded excellencies to excite surprise or admiration, delight, not even a gleam of light or strayed accident flashing across the deep Valley – To me: it was portage la Loche – the same unchanged beautiful solitude I had passed and repassed on two former Expeditions – It excited that sort of melancholy which not unfrequently assails us at beholding the rapturous joy of those around us – when we have long been satiated and cannot participate with of [sic] their sensations – I reloaded my Gun and stepping cautiously down the narrow ridge of the descent – glided silently into the Valley apparently the only living Being in the Wilderness. – Such were my feelings, that it was a comfort to hear the hollow sound of the mens [sic] footsteps as they passed quickly through the thick shade that screened them from my sight; and when the White Tent was pitched and the curling smoke rose among the green of the Forest – it gave a life and animation to the whole landscape that totally dissipated every former idea.

Back’s Rough Journal of the Arctic Land Expedition in search of Captain Ross, 1833-35, 2 vols.

Comments

on Sir George Back

George Back’s Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River (1836) … is among the more readable of the travel books of the period, in spite of Victorian diction and roundabout sentence structure. One reason is Back’s sense of scenery. He was a landscape artist of considerable ability who had the gift of putting what he saw into words. Also, he was a much easier character than Franklin, enjoyed whatever company he was in, relished conversation and anecdote, and had some facility in catching them in words. His writing is cumulative in effect rather than strikingly apt in individual phrase.

Victor G. Hopwood, Explorers by Land to 1867, p. 46.

[John] Hepburn [an English servant on the first Franklin expedition] recalled a quarrel between Back and Hood over an Indian woman, which nearly ended in a duel – behaviour in line with Back’s later reputation as a dandy and a womanizer. He also held that Back is not very brave … he is charming to those from whom he hopes to gain something. There are echoes of this remark in the description of Back that Sophia Cracroft, Franklin’s niece, gave to Henry Grinnel in 1856: He is never the man to originate a handsome act, but if he finds it popular, and that it will be successful, he steps in to take as much of the credit as he can secure. You must not think it harshness or severity when I describe him as intensely selfish, sly, and sycophantic.

…

Franklin made free use of Back’s watercolours and drawings