‘Imagine having a hold on all these different genres!’ she says. ‘The Dalziels helped to shape the way people saw things, so they had enormous cultural power . . . Yet in many ways the artists remained so anonymous.’
George and Edward were joined in the 1850s by their brothers Thomas and John, and their sister Margaret. The business grew to encompass many employees, including Francis Fricker and James Clark, who worked for the firm for over forty years. All signed their work ‘Dalziel’.
‘What I like about these,’ Bethan says, when we reach a page of illustrations to The Great Frozen Sea by Captain Markham, ‘is how they present the Arctic as a place of geometric shapes and really unusual light.’
One image shows a man driving a dog sled under a starry sky, another a tall ship moored among improbable icebergs. Darkness, ice, dogs: it’s the essence of Greenland, although it is a bit like a dream in which everything is distorted. I am fascinated by the icebergs: one effusion looks like a municipal fountain frozen mid-cascade, another could be the turret of a chateau.
‘This artist is having fun,’ I say. ‘Look at the icebergs! That one looks just like a lady’s fan. And those lights in the sky. In all these images there’s a halo around the sun, or sundogs either side of it, or something.’
‘Do you think those white lines are meant to represent an aurora?’
‘Could be. He’s certainly packing in everything he can.’
Through this landscape bursting with archetypal Arctic marvels trek the explorers. Markham’s is a dreadful story. Subtitled A Personal Narrative of the Voyage of the Alert during the Arctic Expedition of 1875–6, the book starts, unpropitiously, with the names of three men who died; one succumbed to ‘frostbite whilst sledging’, two more ‘of scurvy whilst sledging’. The ten-week spring sledging expedition was designed to find the Open Polar Sea, but Markham returned with a more galling discovery – the fact it was unlikely to exist. Markham’s men had to drag the sledge themselves, since their dogs had died or escaped. Their equipment wasn’t fit for the terrain they found themselves navigating: ‘We found the ice exceedingly hummocky, with narrow water spaces between, just too broad to admit of our jumping over, yet not sufficiently wide to launch the boat into . . .’ The men were travelling in the direction of the North Pole and they established a record of the Farthest North, at Latitude 83°20'26" N, before being forced to turn back. It was to be the last of the ‘great’ British Arctic expeditions.
Markham would have been trained in watercolour painting as a midshipman, so that he could record topographical details on his voyages. Some of the engravings clearly draw on sketches he made in his journals. The artist worked on the compositions to make them more suitable for Victorian tastes, bringing the harrowing narrative into a known tradition. In another album, I spot an engraving of a hunter in a kayak harpooning a seal, which uses iconography familiar from medieval images of St George spearing the Dragon.
‘That seal is rather fine, don’t you think?’ says Bethan. ‘It’s much more realistic than the man.’ She tells me the designer who adapted some of the Arctic images for the page, Johann Baptist Zwecker, was a specialist in animal pictures – she gets the impression he didn’t much like drawing people. The hunter holds his harpoon high, aiming it at the seal over the prow of his kayak.
Wood engravers use blocks made from the wood of the box tree. In contrast to the soft brush, absorbent paper and delicate pigments used by Markham and other shipboard watercolourists, box is one of the hardest woods available, a material dense enough to record fine detail that could survive the rigours of printing. This also makes it tricky to carve. Jackson and Chatto’s manual, A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical, sets out the objects an engraver would keep on their desk: ‘an oil-stone, a sand-bag or cushion, an eyeglass, a lamp, and a globe.’ The globe was a glass sphere filled with water, which was designed to focus light from the oil lamp or candle onto the block. Even before the artists took up their tools to create a scene on the wood, they were playing with light.
The manual describes the choice of tools available to an artist: there were gravers and tint-tools, gouges and scorpers. The tint-tools, Jackson and Chatto explain, ‘are used for cutting tints or shades in which the series of lines are intended to be exactly or neatly parallel, or equidistant.’ This is a precise art. As with the use of any tool, the process requires the co-ordination of the body to the task; ‘leaning a little more or less heavily will make a deeper or shallower, a wider or narrower, cut or incision’. A wider incision on the block made a thicker white line in the final print. As wood engravings were generally printed with black ink, the white lines let light into the block. White is the colour of camouflage in the Arctic. Everything white disappears against the ice: the polar bear is concealed by its fur; the hunter raises a white sailcloth in front of his sledge so his approach is hidden from the seal. The Dalziels understood this balance of colour, mixing dark and light in their Arctic illustrations so the images do not disappear in a white-out on the page. They find ways to anchor the block: balancing the outlines of icebergs against dark cliff-faces; introducing calm black water to reflect stars; adding a trail of footprints to shadow the snow.
These engravings are linked with the Arctic, not only through the subject matter, but also their form. The act of engraving a boxwood block is similar to sculpture, in that both artists work in three dimensions. Carving was the traditional medium of Greenlandic artists. For a long time stone and bone were the only available materials, and occasionally driftwood washed ashore from Scandinavia. Even maps were carved, with the benefit that they could be held inside sealskin mittens on cold sea voyages, and the intricate bays and inlets ‘read’ with the hands as well as the eyes.
Bethan lets me out of the Print Room through a hidden door, on the other side of which I find myself – surprised as Alice in one of the Dalziel illustrations – in the galleries of Korean Art. As I walk through the museum, I pass some artefacts from the Arctic on display. Among many practical objects, such as toggles, pipes and netting needles, there are representations of the world in miniature: an intricate sled complete with a tiny dog team; little seals and birds ornamented with small black dots. The seven dots were used to indicate the seven openings of the head – eyes, ears, nose and mouth. These carvings were made by someone who knew the animals well, who had cut the flesh to release the bone they held. They knew about shape-shifting, and understood that a good story can animate an artwork. They knew a carving can be two things at once: a bone that looked like a polar bear from one angle, might seem human from another.
IV
The Greenlandic explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen is still honoured in his hometown of Ilulissat: his birthplace is a museum, and his statue looks out over Disko Bay from an escarpment above Ole and Thrine’s house. Like the painter Petersen, Rasmussen was the son of a Danish pastor, but his father’s parish was even more remote. He wrote: ‘My playmates were native Greenlanders; from the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me’. Rasmussen would travel far by sled. His journey from Cape York to Upernavik was the first recorded sledge crossing of Melville Bay (although far from being the first).
Rasmussen’s first ambition was for fame on the stage, and as a young man he moved to Copenhagen to work as an actor and opera singer. While he was resting (which was often) poet and journalist Mylius-Erichsen persuaded him to join the Danish Literary Expedition, which was conceived as a new kind of exploration – Mylius-Erichsen was adamant that no scientists would sully its artistic nature. The men left for West Greenland in 1902 and travelled in the Arctic for two years, meeting isolated peoples and recording their stories and songs. In one of the stories, the shaman Kunigseq travels to the world of spirits, where he encounters his mother. She is content to be among the dead, she tells him, but she has one request to make of him. ‘When you return to earth, send some ice, for we
thirst for cold water down here.’
For the rest of his life Rasmussen continued to explore the north and write about its culture. In 1910, with his friend Peter Freuchen, he returned to Cape York and established a trading base. Even this was given a literary provenance: he named it Thule, saying it was ‘the most northerly post in the world, literally, the “Ultima Thule.” ’ The name Thule has been used by writers from Pytheas onwards to designate various islands, and was included as early as 1539 on Olaus Magnus’s map. By Rasmussen’s time it had become an archetypal term from the north, still resonant with all the mystery it held for earlier writers who used it as the limits of the known world. During the winter of 1916, an archaeological dig unearthed the remains of a Paleo-Eskimo encampment not far from the trading base. It seemed Thule had been inhabited for many years, by a civilization which had stretched as far as Alaska. (This ancient culture was also designated ‘Thule’.) Rasmussen afterwards used Thule as a base for his polar expeditions, and in travelling eastwards to the Bering Strait he retraced the vast distances traversed by those who had settled at Thule before him. These migrations had been made in defiance of hunger and the harsh climate. In the thirteenth century, the Thule people followed bowhead whales east from Alaska along the receding sea ice margin, populating northern Canada and Greenland. These dramatic migrations were later reprised on a smaller scale in the annual movement between springtime and winter camps.
Not all such relocations have been voluntary excursions into new territory, or impelled by the desire to reach traditional hunting and fishing grounds. In Nunavut, the older generation still recall the resettlements between 1954 and 1975, when thousands of indigenous Canadians were classified as living in places ‘with no great future’ and moved to towns in the south with telephones, electricity, alcohol and schools where children were forbidden to speak Inuktitut. In Greenland, during the Cold War, the inhabitants of the north-western settlements close to Rasmussen’s former base were forcibly relocated to clear land for an American air base – also known as Thule. A diplomatic telegram sent in May 1953 from the district governor in Thule, Egon Mørck Rasmussen, to the Danish government runs:
for permanent under-secretary of state /stop/ village population a total of thirty families now all removed to mouth of inglefield bay staying the summer in tent camps at kanak kekertarssuak and natsilivik /stop/ the people are amply supplied from here with hunting equipment clothing provisions kerosene and medicine /stop/ the base has promised to drop kerosene for tent campers during the summer if necessary /stop/ removal began when shortly after our return we notified the population the decisions made in denmark /stop/ many people were grieved by parting with the place but everyone understood it was for common good /stop/ many hunters asked me to send their respects to permanent under-secretary of state thanking for the help already provided in form of equipment and for promise of new and good houses in compensation for those they abandoned in thule compliments mørckrasmussen
The population moved north by sleds, and Qaanaaq now lies 110 kilometres north of its original position, on a deep fjord from which glacial meltwater flows west into the Nares Strait, which in turn feeds south into the waters of Baffin Bay.
The sled trails across the sea ice of Baffin Bay and Melville Sound are etched in the minds of Qaanaaq’s hunters. These routes are older than the permanent settlements, even though they disappear with the melt each spring. In the museum at Upernavik, I had found old photographs of hunting trips from the 1960s and 1970s. The viewpoint is that of the hunter astride a sled: looking at the back of the dog team, their traces converging on a point just out of sight below the frame, where they are knotted to the slats. The wide horizon, the monotony of whiteness, is sometimes broken by an iceberg. ‘This place no longer exists,’ the hunters say. Of course the physical location still exists – what the hunters mean is that this spot will never freeze in the way it once did, even in the depths of winter. It is no longer a path over the ice, or a place to set up an overnight snow shelter during a long journey. The changing climate has removed both the possibility of movement, and the promise of rest.
Rasmussen divided the long tales he was told on his travels across the Arctic for his publisher, some longer, some shorter, parcelling them up skilfully as others might divide a seal to make best use of organs, flesh, and skin. Or so it appears. You don’t learn butchery from diagrams, but from watching others. And you improve only with practice.
Once there was a great hunter.
No, tell it properly.
Well then – in the beginning was a not-so-great hunter and his wife and they wanted a child.
No, tell it better.
In the beginning was a twist of grass and the berries on the hillside . . .
Never mind all that.
Where does the story begin? Rasmussen’s collection of folktales is like a glacier, which has emerged from the ice cap in one great tongue and subsequently split along hidden weaknesses. One glacier makes many icebergs. Can the story of Tugto’s wife and her mission to the Queen of the Sea be told without explaining how Qujâvârssuk was born? That’s how Rasmussen tells it: he explains that Qujâvârssuk was a great hunter. That is how people knew they were in trouble, because even Qujâvârssuk couldn’t catch seals any longer. Yet this is not a tale about hunters – it is about the ice. Soon, even the great hunter fades from the text, and listeners are left with nothing but the sea.
One winter the sea froze right across, and there was only a narrow flaw lead, very far out. To get to it Qujâvârssuk had to haul his kayak over the ice for several hours. By the time he reached the water it was almost time to come back. Yet he continued to make his record catches, bringing home at least two seals a day. Not everyone was so lucky. Qujâvârssuk was generous to those who came to him for food – ‘as they do in such times’ – giving his guests the best parts of the seal.
One day Qujâvârssuk found there was only room to lay his kayak on the narrow lead between the ice sheets, and the seals who came up for air found no breathing space, and sank back down again. That night he went home without having made a catch. If he could no longer provide food, everyone would starve.
Qujâvârssuk cut the last seal across at the middle. He took a hefty portion of the tail and a generous amount of blubber to Tugto’s house. Tugto and his wife were strangers who had only recently come to live among them. It was known that they had special powers, for Tugto’s wife could survive in the mountains alone, and Tugto – well, what Tugto could do is another story. Qujâvârssuk thought they would know how to remove the ice.
The entrance was so covered with snow that it looked like a fox’s earth. Qujâvârssuk dropped the gifts down the passage and crawled in after them.
He got straight to the point. ‘Please can you send away the ice?’
Tugto turned to his wife. ‘In this time of hunger we cannot reject meat that is given to us.’
Tugto’s wife blew out the lamp. She sat in darkness and called on her helping spirits. They would know where she needed to go. She saw two flames appear in the west, which took the form of a bear and a walrus. The bear took her in its teeth and flung her out over the ice. As she fell, the walrus thrust its tusks into her and hurled her even further. The bear ran along after her, keeping beneath her as she flew through the air. And so they travelled swiftly: each time she fell on the ice, the walrus was there, thrusting its tusks into her again and sending her skywards. The walrus and the bear did not leave her alone until she had passed the outermost islands.
The wind came down and with it the driving snow, and the ice began to break up. Tugto’s wife caught sight of an iceberg. She had just clambered up onto it, when this too began to break up, and there was no way for her to save herself. And so, by a journey much longer than can be told here, she came to the home of the Queen of the Sea. Along the entrance tunnel a river was flowing, and the only place where she could tread was narrow as the back of a knife. She walked along carefully, using the tips of her litt
le fingers to balance. Inside she saw an old woman lying on the bed. The woman began to curse her, then sprang to the floor with her fists clenched. They fought for a long time, and little by little the old woman grew tired. Tugto’s wife noticed that her hair hung loose and was full of dirt, and she began cleaning her as well as she could. When this was done, she put up the woman’s hair in its topknot.
‘You are a dear little thing,’ said the old woman. ‘It is ages since I was looked after so nicely. I have nothing to give you in return, but why don’t you move my lamp to one side?’
As Tugto’s wife did so, she heard the sound of wings. A flock of birds flew down the passage and continued without stopping for a long time. ‘That’s enough now,’ said the old woman at last, and Tugto’s wife straightened the lamp. Then the old woman said, ‘Why not move it a little to the other side?’ And so Tugto’s wife did just that. She thought she saw men with long hair swimming towards her, and as they came closer, she realized they were seals. When many seals had escaped, the old woman said, ‘Now that’s enough.’ And Tugto’s wife returned the lamp to its original place.
Then the old woman looked her in the eye, and said: ‘When you go home, tell everyone they must not empty their dirty water into the sea any more, for when they do that, it all goes over me.’
It was still night when Tugto’s wife came home. The next morning, people saw that her face was horribly scratched. ‘You must not think that the ice will break up at once,’ she told them. ‘It won’t break up until my face has healed.’
The Library of Ice Page 11