Situating ‘Books of Travel’: Intertextuality in Antarctic Whaling Narratives 1892-1896

Abstract

$\textit{From Edinburgh to the Antarctic}$ by William Burn Murdoch and $\textit{The Cruise of the “Antarctic” to the South Polar Regions}$ by Henrik Bull are both travel narratives that detail the authors’ experiences on board Antarctic whaling vessels in the late nineteenth century. In Europe and Australia, the 1890s saw growing scientific and commercial interest in Antarctica. The period examined in this dissertation begins in 1892, when the whaling ship $\textit{Balaena}$ steamed from Dundee, and concludes with the publication of Bull’s narrative $\textit{The Cruise}$ in 1896. It examines how Burn Murdoch and Bull used intertextual references in their narratives to situate themselves on board their expeditions and within their wider respective expeditionary social networks. $\textit{From Edinburgh}$ and $\textit{The Cruise}$ show the contingencies of each expedition’s context and the ‘imperial forces’ that were significant to the development of Antarctic exploration in the late nineteenth century. The first study examines William Burn Murdoch’s account of the Dundee Sealing and Whaling Expedition titled $\textit{From Edinburgh to the Antarctic}$. I argue that Burn Murdoch represented himself in the narrative as a ‘man of science’ to demarcate his position on board the ship $\textit{Balaena}$. His narrative also speaks to the scientific community in Edinburgh that played roles in both securing his place on the expedition and educating him about Antarctica. The second case study analyses the relationship between $\textit{The Cruise of the “Antarctic”}$ and Sir James Clark Ross’s narrative of his expedition to Antarctica. It describes how Bull represented the temporal relationship between his own voyage to Antarctica and Ross’s. Bull’s flexible representation of the half a century of time that elapsed between Ross’s expedition and his own in $\textit{The Cruise}$ was fundamental to establishing the credibility of his narrative. I argue that this temporal representation also allowed him to justify his decision making as expedition leader to his expedition community. This is a cultural historical analysis of two published Antarctic narratives that draws on recent scholarship about the mobility of scientific knowledge, anthropological concerns with the traditions and cultures of expeditions and literary scholarship on Antarctic texts and imaginaries.

This dissertation shows the potential of approaching Antarctic expedition narratives as historical, as well as literary, sources. Research on the Arctic, and the second half of the twentieth century in Antarctica, has illuminated the importance of communities and individuals to the knowledge produced about these regions. The narratives analysed in this dissertation were implicated in and contributed to the function of expeditionary social networks in the late nineteenth century. Understanding the complexity and nuance of past Antarctic narratives is vital to analysing contemporary imaginaries and stories of the Antarctic continent.