Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image

265 Pages·2019·16.763 MB·English

by  Christopher P. Heuer

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