Arctic circles: circuits of sociability, intimacy and imperial knowledge in Britain and North America, 1818-1828

This chapter examines how explorers’ wives and families managed both information and trauma during the British search for the Northwest Passage in the 1820s. In their relatives’ absence, women circulated gifts, specimens, and correspondence within elite social and scientific networks in metropolitan London, and shored up explorers’ reputations as respectable and creditable observers unchanged by their harrowing experiences on the margins of North America. As a result, explorers and family members were both entangled in the fraught intimacies of the field, relationships that developed from explorers’ reliance on Indigenous authorities, mixed-race families, and vernacular agents, as well as the close bonds formed among men suffering trauma.