Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image PDF
Preview Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image
Into the White Into the White The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image Christopher P. Heuer Z O N E B O O K S • N E W Y O R K 2019 © 2019 Christopher P. Heuer zone books 633 Vanderbilt Street Brooklyn, NY 11218 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Heuer, Christopher P., author. Title: Into the white : the Renaissance Arctic, the end of the image / Christopher P. Heuer. Description: Brooklyn, NY : Zone Books New York, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 2018045506 | isbn 9781942130147 Subjects: lcsh: Arctic regions — In art. | Arts, Renaissance — Themes, motives. Classification: lcc nx653.a68 h48 2019 | ddc 709.02/4 — dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045506 I like places . . . where, if you make a mistake, you die. — Lawrence Weiner, on the Arctic Contents i We Could Not See Out of Our Eyes 9 ii The Stars Down to Earth 25 iii “A Strange Quantity of Ice” 49 iv The Savage Episteme 81 v A Roman Interruption: Olaus Magnus, 1555 121 vi Arctic Ink 135 vii There Are No Fortresses 177 Acknowledgments 199 Notes 201 Image Credits 249 Index 253 chapter one We Could Not See Out of Our Eyes In June of 1578, the English privateer Martin Frobisher launched the last of three doomed voyages in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia. His fifteen ships left Plymouth one month later than planned, headed for eastern Greenland. Weeks into the trip, Frobisher’s fleet encountered a colossal storm of fog, snow, and ice. The expedition’s chronicler, a sailor named Thomas Ellis, described what happened next: “The storm increased, the ice enclosed us . . . so we could see neither land, nor Sea . . . the rigorousness of the tempest was such and the force of the ice so great that [the ice] raced the sides of the shippes . . . thus continued we all that dismall and lamentable night plunged in this perplexitie, looking for instant death.”1 One of the ships sunk, and at least two others were put so far off course that they ended up backtracking by weeks. Three vessels were eventually able to make landfall near Baffin Island. They succeeded in filling their holds with 1,350 tons of a mysterious ore that Frobisher had discovered on a previous voyage, which he believed to be gold. Setting off for England, more storms set in, with twenty sailors lost. When at last the haul of Frobisher’s ore was unloaded back in Bristol that August, it was melted down in Dartford, and the result, as one investor put it, “wrought far from the riches looked for.”2 The stuff, it turned out, was pyrite — fool’s gold — and entirely worthless.3 It was eventually dispatched as brickwork, still visible today in walls around Portsmouth and southern Ireland. But after the ships drifted home, a remarkable little book- let was published to document (and partially defray the costs of) 9
The list of books you might like
