Polar exploration history is an unusual field. Arctic and Antarctic expeditions were long the realm of popular writers; until the mid-twentieth century, most published accounts exalted British heroes such as Sir John Franklin and Robert Falcon Scott. Later, a strong revisionist trend developed. From the 1960s onward, popular historians and some academics portrayed Franklin and Scott as incompetent, racist fools, while other explorers such as John Rae and Roald Amundsen received lavish praise. The revisionists were often no more accurate than their predecessors; for example, they ignored the racism shown by Rae and Amundsen. Many theoretically oriented scholars have now taken up polar themes, but not all carry out enough empirical research to distinguish the facts from the revisionist fiction.

Annaliese Jacobs Claydon has done more archival digging than most, turning up some exceptionally interesting details about the role of Franklin’s second wife, Jane, and his niece, Sophia Cracroft, in shaping public responses during the years when a long series of expeditions searched for his missing ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. In Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge, Claydon demonstrates how Lady Franklin and Cracroft deftly manipulated the intellectual networks of mid-Victorian London, inducing several well-known figures to support their views and plans through articles or pamphlets. Yet on the whole, the book must be considered a disappointment—mainly because Claydon has not accurately placed her discoveries within the factual framework of her subject, but also because of structural flaws.

Arctic Circles is a set of episodic studies extending from 1819 to 1859. Readers without background knowledge may sometimes feel like lost explorers themselves as the book jumps from early nineteenth-century expeditions and Franklin’s first marriage (1819–27) to the colonial politics of Tasmania (1837–44) and back to the Arctic with a drastically truncated account of the search efforts (1848–59). Claydon seems to have been unable to decide whether Arctic Circles should be about the role of Indigenous intermediaries in overseas spaces—whether colonized, potentially colonizable, or seemingly unsuitable for colonization—or about the processing and dissemination of information from these spaces in Britain. Both are worthy subjects, but to combine them satisfactorily would require a longer book than this one.

The account of Franklin’s 1819–22 expedition and his relationship with his first wife, the poet Eleanor Porden, does not add much that is new. Claydon hints that Porden doubted Franklin’s trustworthiness, suspecting him and his comrade, John Richardson, of hiding unspecified discreditable conduct (39, 46–47). That Franklin and Richardson concealed a dark secret was a favorite revisionist theme, and although Claydon seems to acknowledge that there is no “hard evidence” (51n76), she evidently inclines toward this interpretation. Unfortunately, she neglects the most important primary source on the period when the mysterious episode supposedly took place. This document by Richardson was long thought to have been deliberately suppressed and likely destroyed. In fact, it is in the Colonial Office file on the expedition (see Janice Cavell, “John Richardson’s ‘Missing’ Arctic Journal, 6–29 October 1821,” Polar Record 53, no. 6 [2017]: 617–30).

The section covering Franklin’s governorship of Tasmania was presumably included because this was the only time when his second wife came into direct contact with Indigenous people. Still, all that is truly essential to the theme of imperial knowledge and the Arctic could have been condensed into a few pages, leaving room for a fuller treatment of Jane Franklin’s activities during the search period. If Claydon had limited her focus to the search expeditions, accurately correlating her new discoveries with the relevant chronological and geographical details, Arctic Circles would be a major contribution to the literature.

In the search chapters, Claydon highlights episodes involving Indigenous knowledge. The first of these is a statement made by an Inuk to whalers at Pond Inlet (Mittimatalik), Baffin Island, in 1849. Allegedly, four ships were in the ice to the westward, two in one spot and the others some distance away. When the report reached Britain, the public eagerly grasped at the idea that these were the Erebus, the Terror, and the vessels belonging to an early search expedition, led by Sir James Ross. Soon afterward, Ross returned with the news that although he had indeed wintered west of Mittimatalik, he had traversed the surrounding area without meeting any Inuit or finding signs of Franklin. Claydon denies that these tidings destroyed public belief in the Mittimatalik report. As proof, she cites a lecture by the Arctic expert William Scoresby, Junior, which she claims was delivered “a week after Ross’s return” (156). This dating is incorrect; the lecture was given the day after Ross reached London, and before his full official account appeared in the press. Unlike the lecture, Scoresby’s later writings “utterly erased” the Inuit testimony; Claydon presents the change as both unwarranted and atypical. She insists that the Mittimatalik report spurred the Admiralty to send out more ships in 1850 (158–60). However, the new expeditions were actually directed west and north of the area indicated by the Inuit statement.

A second episode involves a claim made in 1850 by a Greenlander, Adam Beck, but vehemently denied by another Indigenous man, Qalaherhuaq or Qalasirssuaq (Erasmus York). According to Beck, Qalaherhuaq’s people, who lived at the northern end of Baffin Bay, had killed the missing explorers. Strangely, Claydon frames this not as a case of two clashing Indigenous accounts, but rather as the unjustified rejection of Beck’s knowledge by Jane Franklin and others. She never admits that, since the lost expedition did not meet its end in Baffin Bay, Beck obviously was either mistaken or lying, nor does she concede that Qalaherhuaq was far better placed to know the truth. At the time, the controversial and eccentric explorer Sir John Ross (not to be confused with Sir James Ross) supported Beck, arguing that Qalaherhuaq had been intimidated by unscrupulous Europeans. Claydon uncritically accepts Ross’s view (174, 177, 184–85), without considering that Ross was eager to boost his own status by commanding an Admiralty expedition, and that as the only Danish-speaking officer in the Royal Navy, he was particularly well-qualified to lead a search of the Greenland coast. These and other discrepancies between Claydon’s assumptions and the actual facts severely undermine what might, with more care, have been a fine piece of work.