'Frankenstein' and Polar Exploration, Part II
How John Ross frankensteined a new kind of ship, got lost in the weird, and returned from the dead
If you’re just joining us, on Salvage here I’m focused on the ways very old literature has influenced our technological vision; and I originally turned to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to show the form of the romance, a literary genre that’s had an outsized effect on the modern technological imagination. Also, recall that the romance, as a genre, is not so much concerned with buxom beauties swooning in the arms of Fabio-looking dudes as with adventure beyond the limits of the protagonist’s society’s knowledge. The hero/ine of the romance enters the weird, the space beyond the edge of the map, encounters monsters and wonders there, and returns, changed, to tell the tale, hopefully bearing some proof that the story is true. The romance thus functions as a new installment on a previously-less-complete map. With proof, the hero/ine’s story is taken to be true, then it’s added to what’s known back home about the outside world.
Last post I began tracing out a link between the publication of Frankenstein in January 1818 and the launch of John Ross’s expedition in search of the Northwest Passage aboard the HMS Isabella the following spring. Ross’s 1818 voyage failed to locate a route through the Canadian Arctic and he returned amid controversy among his officers over whether what appeared to be blocking their intended route was a mountain range or just a cloud front. Ross believed it was a mountain range and had named it “Croker’s Mountains” after John Wilson Croker, First Secretary of the British Admiralty, who was also a literary critic with The Quarterly Review and so reviewed Frankenstein upon its publication by an anonymous author. (Mary Shelley did not put her name to the story when it was first published.) The details of Ross’s controversial 1818 expedition are available in my previous post. Sidelined by the Admiralty over the accusation that he’d wasted an attempt, Ross spent a decade planning his next move, which reflected the scientific and cultural thinking that also shaped Frankenstein. And that’s the story I’ll tell in this post.
Shelley, Ross, and Anatomical Thinking
If you read documents from the early nineteenth century, around the time that Shelley was writing Frankenstein you’d notice a preponderance of what we might call “parts-thinking,” a view of bodies that construed them as modular, as systems made of parts.
In his January 1818 review of Frankenstein, John Wilson Croker summarized that Victor Frankenstein, having discovered how to animate dead corporeal tissue,
he hastened to put it in practice; by plundering graves and stealing, not bodies, but parts of bodies, from the church-yard; by dabbling (as he delicately expresses it) with the unhallowed damps of the grave, and torturing the living animal to animate lifeless clay, our modern Prometheus formed a filthy image to which the last step of his art was to communicate being: —for the convenience of the process of his animal manufacture, he had chosen to form his figure about eight feet high, and he endeavoured to make it as handsome as he could—he succeeded in the first object and failed in the second; he made and animated his giant; but by some little mistake in the artist’s calculation, the intended beauty turned out the ugliest monster that ever deformed the day.1
What a grammatical monster Croker fabbed when he wrote this sentence! But also note that, except for his mention of “animal manufacture,” Croker overlooked the specific sources of the materials that Frankenstein used to fabricate his monster: “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials,”2 Frankenstein tells Walton at one point. Elsewhere he says that “One of the phænomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life.”3 One implication is that at least some of the monster’s body parts have been sourced from animals; and another is that this is possible because all animals are endued with “life,” which therefore must be a singular, unified force animating all living beings. This is what “animal” means: an animated, self-moving being. To the extent life animates, both humans and animals participate in the motion-force of living.
In her preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, which constituted a major revision of the story, Mary Shelley wrote about parts-thinking in terms of invention and materials’ potential.
Invention… does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself… Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.4
Like Victor Frankenstein, the inventor works with the parts available to her/him—s/he doesn’t create ex nihilo like God does—and succeeds to the extent that s/he’s able to recognize and work within her/his materials’ capabilities. This is what Shelley did.
Here, she was echoing the zeitgeist, especially regarding animal bodies. As we saw a couple of posts ago, Linnaeus had called for a comprehensive catalog of all of Earth’s living beings and had provided a standardized naming and classification system for the work of binomial nomenclature, so that species could be referred to by universal descriptors. Linnaeus’s system made possible a major explorational push that lasted through the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century (really, it’s still ongoing), and one result of that explorational push was the proliferation of zoological gardens—zoos—throughout Europe and eventually the U.S. and other modern countries.
By 1818, zoos were not yet publicly accessible in Britain (or, at least, the London Zoo wasn’t, which matters because it had been built around an initial donation from the British royal menagerie), but already they were facing a population problem: What to do with the “extra” “specimens”? The answer was the scientific work of anatomy, which began advocating for killing the “extras” and mapping their bodies. The resulting maps proliferated the modular view of bodies and led to surgical research, whence came the notion that body parts might be replaceable or interchangeable.
This surgical research was cutting-edge in 1818, which accounts for Frankenstein’s monster, and one of the hubs of surgical research was Edinburg, Scotland.5 This matters because John Ross was himself a Scot, from Stranraer, a coastal town just across the Irish Sea from Belfast. The parts-thinking intrinsic to surgical research is evident in Ross’s thinking about ship designs in his 1828 Treatise on Navigation by Steam, which was published in both London and Edinburgh and which he used to theorize the design of a steam-powered ship capable of breaking through ice. The Treatise became the pattern the Victory, a privately funded prototype with which Ross would again go in search of the Northwest Passage in 1829.
In fact, the Victory was a pattern for other futuristic ships, too; and I’ll write about those later. But first, a bit of grammar-nerdery.
It took less than a decade for someone to verb the noun “Frankenstein.” The Oxford English Dictionary traces the verb form of the word “frankenstein” back to 1827—the year before Ross wrote his Treatise. OED defines “frankenstein” (the verb) thus: “To assemble (disparate or ill-matching parts) to form a whole in a manner resembling the creation of Frankenstein's monster; to create or construct in this way.”6 Urban Dictionary’s definition is also worth considering: “To hack off choice bits of one or more existing items and then attach them to a new project, thereby bending them to suit your own requirements (diabolic[al] or not).”7
Whether you adhere to OED’s definition or Urban Dictionary’s, the verbing of the noun “Frankenstein” generated some confusion that’s lasted well into our own century. How many times have you spoken with someone about Frankenstein (the book) and they say, “Oh yeah, the big green monster guy”? No. Frankenstein is the mad scientist who made ‘the big green monster guy.’ To be fair, not everything made by an act of frankensteining is a monster. But the verb “to frankenstein” stands in for what Shelley herself called “invention”; and “frankenstein” carries a negative connotation that bespeaks the inventor’s lack of regard for the parts—the parts are “disparate or ill-matching” or “choice bits” but “bent to suit [the inventor’s] requirements”—while remaining obsessively focused on her/his intended outcome.
While it’s difficult to say conclusively that this obsessiveness accurately describes Ross’s invention of the Victory, the resulting catastrophe certainly admits argument that Ross frankensteined it.
1829: John Ross’s Second Voyage
Ross’s Treatise proves he brooded on the disappointment of his 1818 expedition, which he attributed to problems with naval technology. Eventually he concluded that the fierce weather pattern and dense polar pack could be overcome by a steam-powered ship; but the Admiralty had never tried such a design. Ernest Dodge pretty much wrote the book on John Ross and his nephew, James Clark Ross, whom we’ll meet in a moment. According to Dodge, when it came to ship design, John Ross’s thinking “was far ahead of naval officialdom. The prejudice against steam in the Royal Navy extended all the way from the Lords of the Admiralty to the lowest rating… Sailors are notoriously conservative,”—we also saw this in Croker’s distaste for imaginative literature—“and early engines were not reliable. John Ross was one of the few men in the navy who saw the potentialities of steam-power.”8
To fully appreciate how Ross’s 1829 expedition eventually failed—because it did fail—look at how carefully he’d considered what a steam-powered polar exploration ship would need:
It is manifest that the machinery which is the least complicated, and least liable to derangement, which affords the most power in proportion to the space it occupies, which possesses the least weight, which is most speedily brought into action, and which consumes the least fuel, is that which ought to be adopted for this service.9
With this vision in mind, Ross procured private funding—the Admiralty did not fund his 1829 expedition—and he purchased the Victory, a packet ship that had been used to run parcels across the Irish Sea. Ross put her in drydock and retrofitted her with a steam engine he’d contracted from John Braithwaite, who’d had great success manufacturing railway engines. He also raised the Victory’s sides so she could haul a heavier load (boilers, machinery, fuel, and supplies), added a paddle wheel to each side, and installed two of Braithwaite’s steam boilers in the hold.
Because of Ross’s commitment to a cutting edge design, the Victory was famous before she ever left drydock. The Lords of the Admiralty and a number of foreign dignitaries, including the Duke d’Orleans, who would later become King Louis Philippe I of France, came to visit as the project continued and were present the day she departed. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent to an Apollo mission.
Or was it more like the Challenger disaster? Following Ross’s route from 1818, the Victory broke a gear tooth on her way north through the Irish Sea, injuring an engineer so badly that Ross put in at Stranraer, where he committed the injured crewman to the care of his personal physician before continuing the voyage. The gear kept breaking; the paddle wheels dragged; and the boilers leaked. Also, the boilers were supposed to have been fabricated from relatively light copper; but Braithwaite delivered iron boilers, which were much heavier, increasing the ship’s draught, the depth of her hull beneath the water line, which would slow her pace.
Anticipating the possibility of a leaky boiler, Braithwaite had told Ross to add potatoes and human feces to the boilers’ water, which would act as a sealant. An untended leaky boiler posed a risk of explosion, according to an 1829 complaint about one of Braithwaite’s railway engine boilers.10 To make matters worse, even in the coldest temperatures it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the hold, where two crewmen stoked the boilers at all times. Once the boiler leak began, that 95-degree hold reeked of burnt potatoes and human excrement, posing a serious threat to morale: no one wanted a boiler shift, which is to say that no one wanted to do the work required to power the ship.
Worse still, when the machinery couldn’t make good time, nothing could be done to remove the paddle wheels from the ship. Even after the boilers were eventually cooled off and the sails were raised, the Victory struggled across the North Atlantic and through the Davis Strait, arriving too late in the season to search for a route through the Northwest Passage before winter conditions reformed the ice pack.
And worst of all, Ross was still haunted by “Croker’s Mountains.” Convinced that the west end of Lancaster Sound was geographically blocked, he turned south toward what’s now Kugaaruk, Canada, until, at long last, the Victory stuck fast in the Arctic ice.
Dead in the Water
I would describe myself as a cautiously optimistic person; but if you put me in Ross’s situation, I might have lost my wits a bit. But in what I see as one of his greatest strokes of ingenuity at this point, Ross ordered that the paddle wheels be torn off and the machinery, including the boilers, be hauled above board. In order to appreciate what happened next, you’ve got to read his version of it:
The last of the engine was hoisted out: may I not say that there was not one of us who did not hail this event with pleasure. We could not even look at its fragments without recollecting what it ought to have been, and what it proved to be; nor without reflections, and those not kind ones, on its maker, when we remembered the endless and ever recurring trials of our patience which it had caused, the never ceasing labour of the men in its reparation, the ever renewed hopes, producing ever new disappointments, and the loss of temper, to most of us, I fear, of which it had been the fertile cause.11
(LOL— “the fertile cause”! ‘Cause it was full of dung!) He continued: “The enemy, however, was at last at our feet; and while it was incumbent on us to store it up, though it would in reality be difficult to say why, were it not from that habit, or feeling, which rebels against absolute wastefulness, I believe there was not one present who ever again wished to see even its minutest fragment.”12 Just like Frankenstein, after all of the hard work they’d put into fabricating something entirely new, Ross and his crew hated their ship’s stinking guts. And so, they heaved the boilers and machinery overboard.13
As the British might say, “it was a good job” that Ross had brought along his nephew, James Clark Ross. (Sorry. With two J. Rosses it gets a bit confusing here.) Even after the Victory was iced in, “J.C. Ross,” as he was known, wasn’t content with sitting still. The crew dropped the ship’s masts, laying them from bow to stern, and spread the sails over them, creating a large tent that insulated the hold. While they made camp at the ship, J.C. Ross set out alone and found several groups of Inuit who were willing to trade. At first he bought fish in exchange for British-made goods like buttons and beads. But eventually he acquired a dogsled and, through a series of long excursions, began exploring the peninsula west of the Victory’s final resting place; there he hunted, periodically returning to the ship to resupply and bring in his kills.
On one such excursion J.C. Ross identified, for the first time in history, the location of the northern magnetic pole. This isn’t the same as the North Pole. When we think of a compass’s tendency to point north, we normally assume that it points at the geographic North Pole, the “top” of the globe of Earth. Actually, it points at the northern magnetic pole, which rotates around the North Pole over time, for reasons scientists are still working out. In the map below, the area J.C. Ross managed to explore by dogsled is outlined in green, and the northern magnetic pole is marked with an orange circle. J.C. Ross planted the Union Jack on the nearest point of land.
John Ross and crew remained with the Victory for several years in hopes that the ice would melt and they could sail her home to Britain. But eventually those hopes waned. What happened next is an amazing and gritty story of survival.
Imagine being malnourished and freezing cold, with five years’ wear and tear on your clothes after camping in a stranded ship. Scores of your comrades have died of cold and disease. And then, after all that and now that you’re in awful shape, your captain gives the order to abandon ship. What would you do?
To their credit, Ross’s men obeyed the order. They removed the Victory’s boats and, sometimes sailing, sometimes cutting and rowing, sometimes even portaging, they traveled back north, the way they’d come years before, in hopes of reaching Baffin Bay and finding help from a European whaler. Along they way they made camp at a spot that’s now called Fort Ross, and further north they raided the wreck of the H.M.S. Fury, which had been lost on the east coast of Somerset Island; there they found canned goods among the wreckage.
Somewhere around the spot where the line on the map below turns from maroon (get it?) to orange, Ross and crew were picked up by a ship—his old command, the H.M.S. Isabella. Some of her crew had sailed with him; but Ross was so emaciated they didn’t recognize him at first. (To get a better sense of the harsh environment that Ross and crew had endured, check out the documentary The Hand of Franklin (2015).)
And so, in 1833—wonder of wonders!—the Rosses and their crew returned to London from the dead. Having lost two ships now, John Ross was persona non grata around the Admiralty and no private investor would bankroll him. But he was knighted in 1833 and deployed to Sweden and Denmark as a diplomat as Russia strengthened its presence in the Baltic. Nevertheless, he would captain a ship in the Arctic only once more, in 1850, under the direst of circumstances: to search for his friend John Franklin, commander of the H.M.S. Erebus and H.M.S. Terror, after Franklin, his men, and their ships went missing.
_-_BHC2983_-_Royal_Museums_Greenwich.jpg){kind=link}
Aftermath
Unlike is twice-disgraced uncle, J.C. Ross returned from the 1829 expedition and became the golden child of the British Admiralty, thanks to his detailed cartographic and natural information on Northern Canada, which, amid a cartographic renaissance in Britain, made him a hero. For a couple of years J.C. Ross worked on the Ordnance Survey with none other than Edward Sabine, one of the troublemakers from John Ross’s 1818 voyage. And then he received command of the Erebus and Terror.
Before I tell that amazing story though, I think it’s worth pointing out John Ross’s theory of ship design, which was nearly a century ahead of its time. In recognizing that a boiler from a locomotive could be repurposed to power a ship, even though the concept failed in the Victory’s case, Ross demonstrated the kind of parts-thinking we saw in Linnæus’s thinking in my last post.
One of the results of the Linnæan taxonomic project was a rise in anatomical research. Lurid though it may be, it sort of makes sense. Multiple ships return with similar specimens; or specimens breed in captivity. Either way, suddenly there were too many animals in zoological gardens. So the natural result was to kill some of them and cut them open in order to map their bodies’ interiors. These maps were easier to produce if one thought of bodies as comprised of “systems” and of systems as comprised of “organs,” so that during the decades before and after 1800 a paradigm emerged wherein the body was a mechanistic whole comprised of individual parts.
By conceiving of the Victory’s design in terms of this part-thinking, Ross showed his grasp of the implications of the science of his day. But one result of this anatomical thinking about ships was the translation of the animal body onto the machine, which then led to the reduction of animal bodies to machines. We see the early seeds of this in Shelley’s Frankenstein, but the real heyday of it dawned in the 1860s and I plan to address that in a future series on Jules Verne. For now, it’s worth pointing out that Frankenstein had to take a modular view of the body in order to construct his creature’s frame and bring it to life. And this connection between the ship’s body and the creature’s matters, as we will see, because Frankenstein warns Walton against continuing his Arctic expedition.
At this point, I’m past Substack’s post length limit. I’ll continue the tale of the polar Rosses, including J.C. Ross’s amazing circumnavigation of Antarctica, next post.
Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and a Lecturer in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. Here on Substack he has collaborated on The Deadly Seven. You can find him on LinkedIn and his website is here.
John Wilson Croker, “From the Quarterly Review (January 1818),” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text | Contexts | Criticism, Second Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 215-219; see pgs. 215-216. Italics in this passage are my own.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [1818], eds. Charlotte Gordon and Charles E. Robinson (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2018), 42-43.
Shelley, Frankenstein, 39.
Mary Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831),” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text | Contexts | Criticism, Second Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 165-169; see pg. 167.
Really, no pun intended. In fact, this may be where “cutting-edge” entered English; so my usage here is more historicist than humorous.
John Ross, A Treatise on Navigation by Steam; Comprising a History of the Steam Engine, and an Essay Towards a System of the Naval Tactics Peculiar to Steam Navigation, as Application both to Commerce and Maritime Warfare; Including a Comparison of Its Advantages as Related to Other Systems in the Circumstances of Speed, Safety and Economy, but Mor Particularly That of the National Defence. (London, England, UK: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green; and Blackwood and Co., Edinburgh: 1828), 125. Y’know, I love those baroque nineteenth-century titles; you just don’t see that anymore.
The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “frankenstein,” https://www.oed.com/dictionary/frankenstein_v?tab=meaning_and_use#118581902.
Ernest S. Dodge, The Polar Rosses: John and James Clark Ross and Their Explorations (London, England: Faber, 1973), 112-113.
Urban Dictionary, s.v. “frankenstein,” last modified 09 May 2009, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=frankenstein.
L. Herbert, “Braithwaite and Ericsson’s Steam-Engine Boiler,” Iron. An Illustrated Weekly Journal for Iron and Steel Manufacturers, Metallurgists, Mine Proprietors, Engineers, Shipbuilders, Scientists, Capitalists 12 (1829-1830): 199-201.
John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833 (London, England: A. W. Webster, 1835), 205.
John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage, 205.
Say you read this and you work for Parks Canada, and you’re thinking of going in search of the wreck of the Victory, and your exploration team could use a writer who’s already braved Alaska. Contact me. Seriously. I’d love to go.
When a Salvage reaches the substack word limit 🙌
No one else is talking about any of this in this way. Well done!