5
Oceans became a grand stage, and Kane performed within a transatlantic melodrama inspired by Lady Franklin: To return her long-suffering husband to the sanctity of their domestic hearth, or at least a sacred burial, would furnish the only adequate denouement to a Victorian audience. In another light, however, Kane subverted the Franklin tragedy to American tastes and needs. To launch his expedition, he produced a spectacle well-packaged for the nation’s mass entertainment market. In presenting himself as the scientist-hero, he thrilled a population assured of science’s progressive mastery of their expanding country, and eager to imagine Kane at its helm. And in conjuring an Arctic polynya on which shores Franklin waited, he offered the nation a pristine and remote space to be seized, collectively, beyond the bounds of its imminent geopolitical breach at home. In the Arctic, an idealized Kane could claim space that need not be ethnically cleansed, coercively labored upon, or peopled with immigrants. This was a variety of empire without the iniquities that for decades had troubled Americans’ belief in their sacred destiny.
MASKSthejournal 2 : SIRENS AS MUSES
To fund this voyage, Kane laid his case before the public in an exhausting lecture tour, lobbied scientific institutions and the federal government, and drew on the wealth of elite merchants.3 His showmanship captivated and entwined popular, learned, and political imagination. The expedition was bankrolled and promoted by the American Philosophical Society, the new Smithsonian Institution, and the Geographical Society of New York—the nation’s leading scientific bodies and the public’s gateway to science. With their cachet, he successfully beseeched further government support. In the instructions to Kane issued by Secretary of the Navy John P. Kennedy in 1852—and then published as preamble to Kane’s hit 1855 account of the voyage—we see how a sentimental mission endorsed with federal power, urged by the scientific community, abetted by private patronage, and announced through mass media all found confluence in an imagined Arctic sea: Lady Franklin having urged you to undertake a search for her husband… and a vessel, the Advance, having been placed at your disposition by Mr. Grinnell, you are hereby on special duty for the purpose of conducting an overland journey from the upper waters of Baffin’s Bay to the shores of the Polar Sea.4 With onlookers throughout the nation galvanized, Kane departed.5