Silent Participants. Intermediaries in Canadian Arctic Exploration

This M.A. thesis looks at the contribution that silent participants made to exploration in the 1820s and 1830s in the Canadian Arctic. Silent participants are defined as people, who joined expeditions, providing workforce, knowledge or other contributions and were marginalized to the role of «subordinate» figures in favor of some aggrandized notion of the expedition. It is important to understand that this silence is not self-inflicted, but a consequence of the process of publication and the societal expectations explorers had to conform with. Exploration history had been continuously read in favor of the lone explorer forging a path that no one had gone before and paradoxically allowed to discover the known anew. Only recently, scholars have begun to uncover the untold stories of such marginalized people, yet, the Arctic remained a blank sheet in this regard. Instead of focusing on perpetuated hero myths of these expeditions, this thesis reinterprets exploration as a collective enterprise and sheds light on the silent participants. For this purpose, the author conducted research in Canada to gather data on the people behind the explorers. In the Libraries and Archives Cana- da (Ottawa, Ontario), George Back’s four sketchbooks of three Arctic overland expeditions provided valuable insight beyond the written journals. The three expeditions were Franklin’s Coppermine Expedition (1819–1822), Franklin’s Second Arctic Expedition (1825 – 1827), and the Arctic Land Expedition (1833 – 1835) lead by Back himself. In the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (Winnipeg, Manitoba), material of the fur trade company allowed to reconstruct the lives of those who did not leave written sources themselves. A list of people employed on expeditions between 1819 and 1859 highlighted the fact that the work of intermediaries in overland expeditions in the Arctic was common. Supplemented were these primary sources with the published journals, which did not accommodate the true extent of reliance on intermediaries or only in a distorted view. In order to open access to silent participants, it was necessary to adopt a micro-historical approach coupled with a visual discourse analysis to sort the findings in the sketchbooks into groups. These groups contained food and hunting, local knowledge, relationships, and labor. ThefindingsofthisM.A.thesissuggestconsiderable discrepancies between the published journals and views from the sketchbook. For instance, Franklin reported on 4 July 1821 that Akaitcho, an Indigenous chief, together with other hunters successfully killed several musk oxen. Whereas in the journal Franklin appeared to be present at the hunt since one calf that was wounded almost ran him over, Back’s painting showed a different story by depicting that only the hunters were in close proximity to the animals and the rest of the group was hardly visible on the horizon. Furthermore, intermediaries inherited the crucial role of the most important means to survive in the Arctic and therefore were valuable companions. A particularity of the Canadian Arctic was the availability of European descendants, who had learnt from Indigenous people how to live off the land and adopted transportation techniques. These so-called voyageurs, who were mostly French-Canadian and worked in the fur trade, were exceptional in the way that such help with European roots did not exist in Australia, India, Africa, or South America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the continuous overland exploration in the Arctic established a lasting professional field for Indigenous guides, who participated over two generations. By conducting research with unpublished sources, this M.A. thesis was able to dismantle biased opinions. Among others, the diverging realities between pictorial sources and their published accounts revealed more appreciation for silent participants’ contribution. In this way, this study is a rebuttal to the perpetuated hero myth, which must be relativized by looking at the help of silent participants, who have consistently met with marginalization, misrepresentation and omission.