Americas and Oceania Collections blog

Exploring the Library’s collections from the Americas and Oceania

2 posts from November 2014

24 November 2014

Bringing the Arctic to Leicester Square

Arctic panorama 3

Above: an overview of Henry Ashton Barker's Panorama, from 1819.

Lines in the Ice is now open and continuing a long tradition of bringing the sights, sounds and experiences of the Arctic to the heart of the city. One thing that struck me in researching and selecting material for the exhibition is how much has been published about the Arctic and our exploration of it - the volume suggests a ravenous market for accounts, stories and information.

This is undoubtedly true. A number of items in the exhibition speak to the market for Arctic tales, especially during the British Navy's nineteenth-century quest for the Northwest Passage. One display item in particular, The Illustrated Arctic News, is a lavish facsimilie of the onboard newspaper of HMS Resolute. It tells two stories simultaneously, the lengths officers and their crew went to in order to stave off the boredom of a dark winter in the Arctic and the hunger the population of Britain had for stories from these expeditions.

Many similar items did not make it into the exhibition. One that almost did, and is well worth mentioning here, is a book related to Henry Ashton Barker's Panorama in Leicester Square. During the nineteenth century panoramas were a popular entertainment, giant works of art that brought the foreign landscapes of the empire home for metropolitan Londoners to see. The expeditions of Franklin and others generated a number of these installations, but this one from 1819 captured my attention. 

Arctic panorama 1

Above: detail from the panorama.

This book, a souvenir and guide to the panorama, provides written details of the content of the panorama but also a handy sketch, presumably to help the reader orientate the account with particular parts of the display. The sketch, while not lavishly reproduced, suggests the scale of the panorama and the sheer volume of things to see. It is worth noting that some of the details are a little off - viewers would be forgiven (despite this being about the wrong Pole) for thinking the above birds (noted as point 8) are penguins, or more realistically, Great Auks. Instead, they are puffins...

Arctic panorama 4

Above: a later Leicester Square panorama, depicting Capt. James Ross' 1848-49 survey of Somerset Island.

Erroneous depictions aside the book reminds us of the hold the Arctic has long had on our imagination and the connection to the entertainments of Leicester Square also provides a sense of the scale of interest in the high north. Indeed, it was far from the only Arctic panorama on display in Leicester Square between 1819 and 1860, as a flick through a compendium of these panorama guides (found at shelfmark: 10349.t.15) will show. That being the case, we're pleased to continue this tradition of bringing the Arctic to central London. Hopefully it will inspire as much curiosity, interest and questioning about the Arctic as the panoramas of previous centuries.

[PJH]

13 November 2014

Mark Twain and the SS Batavia

HolbrookMudHouse

Last week, taking some time away from the redbrick and slate beehive that is the British Library, I headed to the Jeffersonian columns and crinkle crankle walls of Charlottesville, VA. Taken from the third best coffee shop in town, this cameraphone photograph shows – if you look hard enough – one of America’s best-loved actors, Hal Holbrook, in town for a performance of Mark Twain Tonight! at the Virginia Film Festival. Holbrook has been performing his one-man Twain play for over sixty years (and filmed in 1967). A documentary, Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey, which explores his iconic portrait of the writer, was also screened during the festival.

Sadly, I didn’t catch any of it (although I did manage to do some work in the coffee shop). But there is never an excuse to miss a dose of Twain, thanks to The Mark Twain Papers & Project (MTP) at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For the second of a possible series of posts on Atlantic crossings (see the first, Taking the Train to America), we can join Samuel Clemens on board the Cunard Steamer SS Batavia in November 1872. Twain had been touring Britain but was returning to his wife and surviving child. He had planned on publishing a book about his tour, and was looking forward to satirizing English ‘institutions and customs’, the MTP editors suggest, taking this quotation from an interview in the Chicago Evening Post in December 1871 as a harbinger of the tone he would take (on the Prince of Wale’s recovery from typhoid – see the medical bulletins and other materials in the Lowe-Elkington papers at Add MSS 78749, ff. 91-115; 78751 A & 78752 A).

I’m glad the boy’s going to get well; I’m glad, and not ashamed to own it. For he will probably make the worst King Great Britain has ever had. And that’s what the people need, exactly. They need a bad King. He’ll be a blessing in disguise. He’ll tax ’em, and disgrace ’em, and oppress ’em, and trouble ’em in a thousand ways, and they’ll go into training for resistance. The best King they can have is a bad King. He’ll cultivate their self-respect and self-reliance, and their muscle, and they’ll finally kick him out of office and set up for themselves. (“Brevities,” 21 Dec 71, 4)

But once in England, the writer instead ‘found himself reluctant to mock cherished beliefs or traditions for fear of offending his new English friends’, the editors note. As Twain put it, it did not want to cause a 'a violation of the courteous hospitality'.

During his stay, Twain travelled, met Henry Morton Stanley, inspected the London Zoological Gardens and the Brighton Aquarium, was startled by a cat in Westminster Abbey, made a meal of a Dover sole (or 'soul') and visited the Albert Memorial – on which a ‘group [of statuary] represents America—an Indian woman seated upon a buffalo which is careering through the long prairie grass; & about her are half a dozen figures representing the United States, Canada, South America &c…. One cannot convey, with words, the majesty of these stony creatures—the ease, the dignity, the grace, that sit upon them so royally.’ And, of course, he visited the British Museum:

I am wonderfully thankful for the British Museum. Nobody comes bothering around me—nobody elbows me—all the room & all the light I want under this huge dome—no disturbing noises—& people standing ready to bring me a copy of pretty much any book that ever was printed under the sun—& if I choose to go wandering about the great long corridors & galleries of the great building, the secrets of all the Earth & all the ages are laid open to me. I am not capable of expressing my gratitude for the British Museum—it seems as if I do not know any but little words & weak ones.

This all achieved, he sailed back to the States from Liverpool on the SS Batavia after concluding ‘I do like these English people—they are perfectly splendid—& so says every American who has staid here any length of time.’

En route, some 1,500 miles from land, the SS Batavia caught sight of a foundering barque, the Charles Ward, after a night of howling gale. The barque had lost its sail and was in a pitiful state; the survivors were close to losing their minds. Twain watched on as the captain of the Batavia and her crew staged a daring rescue of nine souls, while offering as much assistance as he could (despite his lack of umbrella).

Twain may not have been a great deal on use on board deck, but he then did what he knew best, and took up his pen, writing to the newspapers from the ship, requesting recognition for the captain and crew by the Royal Humane Society:

If I have been of any service toward rescuing these nine ship-wrecked human beings by standing around the deck in a furious storm, without any umbrella, keeping an eye on things & seeing that they were done right, & yelling whenever a cheer seemed to be the important thing, I am glad, & I am satisfied. I ask no reward. I would do it again under the same circumstances. But what I do plead for, & earnestly & sincerely, is that the Royal Humane Society will remember our captain & our life-boat crew; &, in so remembering them, increase the high honor & esteem in which the society is held all over the civilized world.

The editors suggest that the letter to the Royal Humane Society is now lost, but you can read his account, and a good deal more besides, on the MTP site, as well as in several newspapers, for example, the Somerset Herald (Pennsylvania) (.pdf on the Library of Congress's site].

Twain was clearly quite struck by the event, and followed up on it, and enquired avidly about the medal and monies the men should have received (see his letter to the captain of the Batavia, 22 Jan 1873). He was also impressed by the work of the Royal Human Society, which he noted had no American equivalent, and aimed to donate the income from a lecture to them.

The SS Batavia continued to plough the seas, and some thirty years later set a record for the number of passengers to arrive in New York City – 2,584 (8 June 1903).  And, closer to home, albeit slightly further north than in Twain's day, people still stand ready to bring you pretty much any book that ever was printed under the sun – and more besides.

[Matthew Shaw]