Robinson Crusoe, the Making of a Universal and Versatile Myth

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Travel

Robinson Crusoe Tercentenary, 1719-2019

3451C32D-A5EC-4678-A59E-FC9A8DB57BB4Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.

74E3659A-FFFB-42DA-B2B0-FCCA848D2F79Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best  of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.

A multiplicity and diversity of readings
Robinson Crusoe is a multifaceted work of fiction, viewable from a number of different perspectives. On a straightforward level its an adventure novel and a travel book (rather than a guide) tantalising the 18th century Englishman and woman with a sense of faraway “new worlds” which were still undergoing a process of discovery and exploration.

The personality of the protagonist Crusoe himself is an Everyman figure, representing a cross-spectrum of contemporary English societal types – above all he is the archetypical survivor prompting untold numbers of readers to identify with the despair of his plight and “embraced his myth of struggle, survival and triumph against all odds” [Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, Frank, K (2011)].

2334FE11-80B9-4D34-9AC4-3F8B29D8FF50
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale


Crusoe as “economic-imperialist” and coloniser
There is the hero of romantic, bourgeois individualism, the Englishman who turns his dire circumstance to his ultimate financial advantage. When others appear on the island (Friday, the boy slave Xury, the ‘savages’, the Spanish sailors and English mutineers), Crusoe reacts with a sensibility typical of the “natural superiority” of a coloniser and uses the others as ‘commodities’✥. James Joyce described Robinson Crusoe as the “true symbol of the British conquest”, embodying “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” [quoted in ‘An introduction to Robinson Crusoe’, (Stephen Sharkey), 21-Jun-2018, www.bl.uk].

A spiritual voyage
On another level Robinson Crusoe can be read as a kind of spiritual autobiography (popular in Defoe’s time). Crusoe’s journey from one exotic land to another can be seen as the “spiritual voyage” of Bunyanesque Puritan Christianity. Crusoe’s long, long sojourn on the island is a test of his faith. Being alone with infinite time on his hands he devotes himself to intense self-scrutiny, questioning the Providence that landed him in his predicament (ie, his relationship with God). Some critics have noted that Crusoe’s thought processes on the island entailed a progression from rebellion, acknowledgement of mortal sin, atonement and religious conversion [‘Robinson Crusoe Theme of Religion’, (shmoop), www.shmoop.com].

DIY Robinson Crusoe and the Conduct book
Defoe provides a very detailed description of how his hero goes about making the most of his enforced stay on the island. As Katherine Frank observes, DeFoe’s novel is the “ultimate how to book: a step-by-step guide on how to live in a particular tricky situation”, ie, a method for surviving alone on a desert island◘ [Frank, op.cit.]. On the ship and again on the island Robinson spends copious amounts of time cataloguing items and making lists of everything that comes into his head.

The novel’s preoccupation with DIY touches on something else close to Defoe’s heart, the “Conduct book”✪ (a kind of user’s guide for life in the 18th century). The self-help component in Robinson Crusoe gives a sample of the writer’s broader interest in instructional works…Defoe spilled a lot of ink in writing a series of published texts telling people how they should live their lives – with titles like The Family Instructor, The Compleat English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman.

A Defoe conduct book on the Robinson Crusoe theme

C2AA51F1-A3B6-45D4-80AC-00225FEC8EA1

Always look on the bright side of life
Defoe’s faith in the individual’s capacity for self-improvement comes through in his novels as much as in the didactic Conduct books. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s central character refuses to give up and submit to his fate no matter how glum his prospects look. With each new challenge he faces on the island, Crusoe time and again evokes the “power of positive thinking”…in his solitude he learns “to look more upon the bright Side of my Condition and less upon the dark Side” (Defoe imbues the protagonists of his later novels like Moll Flanders with this same positive disposition) [ibid.]. Defoe really had to be a glass half-full kind of guy to keep bouncing back from all the reversals life was lobbing on him (viz. a succession of self-inflicted, calamitous business ventures he managed to embroil himself in, doing gaol time for failure to pay his debts, etc).CA6103A9-E02F-4B27-B46E-DCD1A6029538

PostScript: Cashing in on the “golden egg”
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was an instant commercial success with four editions printed in 1719. Defoe, always with his mind fixated on how to enrich himself, was quick to follow-up Robinson Crusoe with a sequel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the same year, proved to be almost as much a hit with the public. The Farther Adventures (usually today called the Further Adventures) was intended to be Robinson Crusoe’s swan-song, but Defoe couldn’t resist going to the well one time too many with a third book in 1720 entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick. Serious Reflections ‘bombed’ badly and the less said about it the better⊡.
═══════════════════════════════―═══════════════════════════════
✱ it was commonplace for 18th century texts to be published either anonymously or using a pseudonym…Defoe was especially inclined to obscure textual ownership to try to cover himself when raising polemical questions [‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, (Gillian Paku), (Literature, Literary Studies – 1701 to 1800: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.37 www.oxfordhandbooks.com]
✥ Crusoe’s mercenary nature (equating with that of the money-obsessed Defoe) is best illustrated with Xury who Crusoe is happy to sell back into slavery when he is no longer required and by so doing fetch a tidy sum for himself
◘ novelist EM Forster once remarked that Robinson Crusoe reminded him of a “Boy Scout manual”
✪ Conduct books, today’s self-help guides, in Defoe’s day took the form of sermons, devotional writings, familiar letters, chapbooks and instruction manuals offering advice on social mores and manners, spiritual guidance and practical information on state and household duties, [Batchelor, Jennie. “Conduct Book”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 July 2004
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=216, accessed 29 December 2018.]
⊡ the Farther Adventures had the same trademark derivative framework as the original novel – Defoe borrowed heavily once again from Robert Knox’s autobiography and seems to have modelled the last part of Crusoe’s journey on a 17th century Moscow Embassy secretary’s travel journal (Moscow – Peking), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Frank, op.cit.]

Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Natural Environment, Popular Culture

A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.

A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.

image

Alexander Selkirk’s adventures
For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Selkirk’s Island 🔽

Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.

Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk
Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].

imageAside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.

Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe?
One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].

The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material  and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].

‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration
Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].

PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade
As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.

﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎
✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)]
♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe”
❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena

Franklin’s Ill-fated 1840s Arctic Misadventure: A Story with a Remarkable Shelf Life

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Geography, Natural Environment, Regional History, Science and society

66A71A0E-500D-42CC-9CAC-BE23BF072BE8

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the islands of the Caribbean and the opening up of the “New World” provoked a Pan-European search to find an ocean route through the American continent to reach the rich trading ports of the Orient. Within a few years efforts were being focused on locating the North-West Passage, the Arctic archipelago at the top end of Canada. Over the following few centuries various names in exploration – John Cabot, John Davis, Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, William Baffin, James Cook, George Vancouver, William Parry, James Knight and others – tried without success to navigate a route through the elusive passage.

By the 19th century “the Cape” trade route to East Asia was in full swing, but the prospect of finding a shorter route, the Northwest Passage, still beckoned to the explorer nations of the “Old World”. As mid-century approached the British Admiralty under the driving force of Sir John Barrow launched plans for yet another attempt on the Passage, this was to become the most talked-about and most tragic of all of the Arctic expeditions. Forebodings about the 1845 expedition began perhaps with the Admiralty’s choice of leader. Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin, despite a long career as a naval officer and prior experience in Arctic exploration, was not the preferred man✱. With other, more highly thought of candidates like Sir James Clark Ross and William Edward Parry declining, Franklin was perhaps as high as fourth or fifth choice! Moreover, the crews selected, though numerically sufficient for such a mission, had some question marks about them…they were mostly inexperienced in polar regions, only a few of the men had been to the Arctic before [‘Erebus and Terror – John Franklin. In Search of the North-West Passage’, Cool Antarctic, www.coolantarctic.com].9DBA385E-A689-4ADB-AC65-C41A29595DA5

Exploration vessels supplied to the max
Misgivings about the expedition commander aside, the expedition did not lack for preparation – provisions intended to last three years were taken, along with equipment for hunting and fishing. Given the extreme trials and tribulations that the voyageurs were forced to endure when things ultimately went horribly wrong, the practicality of some of the inclusions might raise a query. Room was made on the expedition’s ships (‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’) for, among other cargo items, 9,000 lbs of chocolate, 3,600 gallons of spirits, nearly 5,000 gallons of ale and porter✦ and 7,088 lbs of tobacco [‘Franklin’s Provisions’, (Arctic Passage), www.pbs.org].

A massive floating library
The expedition members had no shortage of reading material, each ship was laden with well over a thousand hard-bound books plus numerous journals … one estimate puts the total at 2,900 volumes, ‘Terror on the Ice: How Obsession Doomed Franklin’s Arctic Expedition’, (Martyn Conterio), History Answers, 27-Apr-2018, www.historyanswers.co.uk]. Religious volumes of Christian instruction formed much of the library (each of the 128 crewmen⌖ were issued with a Book of Common Prayer), but variety was provided with various works of literature popular in the day (novels of Charles Dickens, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, etc), volumes of Punch (a weekly magazine of humour and satire), as well as a host of technical volumes [‘The Library of the Erebus and the Terror’ (Russell A Potter), Visions of the North, 26-Apr-2009, www.visionsnorth.blogspot.com].

Luxury and comfort on a pro-rata class basis
The two ships were equipped and furnished in quite a luxurious fashion. The officers’ quarters (however not the crew’s) were decorated elaborately with the finest curtains and furniture, and kitchens stocked with beautiful ceramic plates and the like. The rear-admiral’s own special fiddle-pattern cutlery lined the drawers. Even more impressively, the Erebus and the Terror had built-in comforts – to counter the Arctic cold the converted bomb-vessels were equipped with hot water and heating systems, something that later proved consequential in how the story ended up. The ships were well-equipped for the task at hand with scientific instruments, navigational tools and daguerreotype cameras.

‘Erebus on Ice’ (FE Musin) NMM Greenwich ⍗
The expedition ships made slow but steady progress over the course of two years, getting as far as King William Island and Victoria Strait, where in deteriorating conditions ice entrapped the ships. After Franklin died (1847), Captain Francis Crozier, skipper of the Terror took over command of the expedition. A year later Crozier abandoned the ships to their icy graves and led the remaining men (recent archaeological findings and forensic testing suggests that four of the crew were in fact women!) on foot south to try to reach the nearest established Canadian outpost…in the process all crew members perished, possibly from starvation or other (unknown) causes.

The hunt for Franklin’s expedition
Back in London, unaware of the expedition’s end-game the Admiralty prevaricated and only really launched a serious attempt at rescue after a media campaign launched by Lady (Jane) Franklin. Over a period of more than 20 years, the lost polar expedition prompted what has been described as “the greatest rescue operation in the history of exploration”[Marsh, J., & Beattie, O., Franklin Search (2018) in The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/franklin-search]…more than 30 missions (most by sea, one from the opposite direction, some by land) were launched to try to locate the vessels’ whereabouts [‘Uncovering the secrets of John Franklin’s doomed voyage’, (Robin McKie), The Guardian, 02-Nov-2014, www.theguardian.com].

The “shock and horror” of white cannibals
By the early 1850s no one bar perhaps Lady Franklin in her most optimistic moments thought the expedition crew still alive. With public interest in Franklin’s fate at a peak the British government eventually offered a reward of £20,000 to anyone who ‘assisted’ the lost expedition. In 1854 Dr John Rae’s mission (under the aegis of the Hudson’s Bay Company) unearthed the key to the mystery while bringing upon himself great controversy and hostility. Rae learned of the missing men’s fate from local (Nunavut) Inuits who told him that members of the expedition had resorted to cannibalism, eating dead crewmen in an attempt to avoid starvation. Such a notion was abhorrent to Lady Franklin and scandalised polite society in England…Charles Dickens endorsed Jane’s view that the word of “Esquimaux savages” should not be trusted and actively propagandised to refute the accursed idea [‘How Lady Franklin led Charles Darwin to disgrace himself’, (14-Sep-2014), www.kenmcgoogan.blogspot.com].

In the fullness of time John Rae’s viewpoint was vindicated. Archaeologists examining the remains of sailors found that they had flesh and even marrow removed from their bones to feed those of the expedition who were still alive. Far from being isolated occurrences, the cannibalism committed was of several stages of the practice [“‘Pot Polish’ On Bones From Franklin’s 1845 Arctic Expedition Is Evidence Of Cannibalism”, (Kristina Killgrove), Forbes, 01-VII-2015, www.forbes.com].

Lady Franklin on the counter-offensive
In the face of the accusations of cannibalism, Franklin’s widow, horrified at its association with the expedition and with Franklin’s name, devoted the rest of her life to salvaging his reputation⊡. Lady Franklin lobbied politicians, enlisted the help of prominent and influential citizens✪, raised funds for a succession of new search parties, even consulted clairvoyants! [‘Finding HMS Terror: the Franklin Expedition and making sense of the past’, (Andrew Lambert), History Extra, 28-Sep-2016, www.historyextra.com].

Discovery – unravelling some of the mystery
The Admiralty officially called a halt to the search for the Terror and Erebus in 1859, though Franklin’s indefatigable widow continued to promote recovery attempts until her death in 1875. In the modern era the Canadian government and other organisations revived the search for Franklin’s vessels. Since the 1980s a raft of relics associated with the ships and crews have been retrieved from the Canadian tundra and subjected to new forensic scrutiny, then finally a Parks Canada mission made the dramatic discovery that had eluded around 90 previous expeditions – the two ships were located using Sonar (Erebus in September 2014/Terror in September 2016). A bonus to the great discoveries was that both vessels, preserved by the ice, were still significantly intact!

What killed the expedition’s crew members?
With a lot more information unearthed now, a lot more is known of what happened. There has much speculation over the years as to how the sailors perished – the extreme climatic conditions, pneumonia, disease (TB), scurvy✣, starvation, have all been put forward to greater or lesser degrees, and all seem to have been contributory factors to the tradegy[‘Cool Antarctic’, loc.cit.]. The reality though is that the exact nature of how the voyageurs died remains a mystery and possibly may never be resolved.

Tinned poison?
Other theories have focused on the tins of canned food on board the exploration vessels. Proportionate to the anticipated length of the journey the Terror and the Erebus was loaded with 8,900 lbs of canned vegetables and 33,289 lbs of canned meats, all up comprising an estimated quantity of 8,000 tins [‘Food on board an Arctic expedition – The Franklin Expedition’, Parks Canada, www.pc.gc.ca]. The contribution of the tinned food to the sailors’ diet has led some to speculate that the dead crews were victims of botulism or possibly a form of lead poisoning contracted from the harmful type of lead soldering used on the tins [ibid.]. This explanation gained widespread currency at one time, however others have pointed out deficiencies and inconsistencies in the argument…tinned food consumed in the earlier James Ross Antarctic expedition involving the same two vessels did not have anything remotely like the harmful effect suffered on the Franklin voyage [‘Identification of the Probable Source of the Lead Poisoning Observed in Members of the Franklin Expedition’, (William Battersby), Journal of the Hakluyt Society, Sept 2008, www.hakluyt.com].

Lead poisoning from another source?
A recent counter-argument has suggested that, rather than the soldering on the tins that was the deadly ingredient on the forlorn Franklin expedition, the poisoning of the men (abnormally high levels of lead were detected in forensic examinations) emanated from the specific boat modifications added to make the polar voyage more tolerable. Battersby has argued that the lead infusion came from the “unique distilled water systems fitted to the ships” [ibid.].

EB6DE332-F941-4FCB-9F43-5247086CCAE9
Model of HMS Erebus

Footnote: One curious caper that continue to fascinate
Franklin’s polar expedition struck a resounding chord with the popular imagination. Search party after search party trying to unravel the mystery of the explorers’ disappearance, the tragic aftermath and the anthropophagus undertones, have held an enduring fascination for people on both sides of the Atlantic. The peculiar mystique of the Franklin story has provided inspiration for the great writers of fiction such as Verne, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Twain, Conrad and Atwood, as well as numerous retellings of the narrative in book form, several TV series and popular songs. All captivated by a story which as characterised by Andrew Lambert is “a unique, unquiet compound of mystery, horror and magic” [Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation, (2011)].

34AF9F9E-C489-4B7E-A10A-D8A8868B5D81PostScript: The reason for the mission – “discovery and science”, geographical curiosity, terrestrial magnetism?
The raison d’être of the Franklin Expedition, according to the standard interpretation, was to chart a path through the Arctic archipelago to the Pacific. Franklin’s brief therefore was to find the passage that had eluded at least 60 earlier expeditions going back as far as the 1600s. This emphasis on navigating a feasible route has been challenged by some historians. Andrew Lambert for instance has refocused the mission’s objective on its scientific and geomagnetic observations. He argues that the expedition was part of a big project⋇ that sought to advance oceanic navigation by enhancing science’s understanding of the Earth’s magnetic field. According to Lambert, John Franklin was chosen not for his exploration prowess but as a leading magnetic scientist, his agenda was to get as close to the Magnetic North Pole as possible (if this was his task, judging by where the two expedition vessels were found, he got quite close) [‘Finding HMS Terror’, loc.cit].

____________________________________________________________________
✱ at 59 many considered the portly Franklin too old for such an arduous and hazardous mission. Franklin had recently come off an unhappy tenure as Lt-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) which had resulted in his being recalled early to England
✦ including extra strong West Indian rum, 35% overproof
⌖ forensic testing of recent discoveries of remains suggests that four of the crew were in fact women!
⊡ remembering also that John Franklin had been keen to accept command of the expedition in 1845 to try to restore his reputation after the events of his Tasmanian governorship left it somewhat tarnished
✪ Victorian Britons seemed to have had a soft spot for Franklin…even prior to the tragic voyage he was viewed as a hero despite being involved in two earlier unsuccessful Arctic expeditions! Much like the later Scott of the Antarctic Franklin appears to have been lionised by the public for undertaking a “noble quest” in the field of exploration albeit being a failure
✣ the sailors definitely suffered from a scorbutic disorder – the vitamin C contained in the supply of lemon juice intended to counter scurvy was rendered ineffective after the liquid became frozen, [Lambert, loc.cit]
⋇ the 1830s and’40s British scientists (with Irish geomagnetic pioneer Edward Sabine in the forefront) were instrumental in promoting a campaign to launch expeditions to establish geomagnetic observatories around the globe (labelled the Magnetic Crusade by historian John Cawood), J Cawood, ISIS, 1979, 70 (No 254), History of Science Society].

The FA and the 1921 Ban on Women’s Football: The ‘World Game’ – “Quite Unsuitable for Females”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Gender wars, Leisure activities, Social History, Sport, Sports history

Britain’s sporting lingua franca has by general consensus long been football (better known as ‘soccer’ in Australasia and the United States). For the bulk of the 19th century the “round-ball game” was exclusively the domain of men, but by the 1890s women in Britain were embracing the popular outdoor pastime with passion. Women’s clubs, many based in North London, were formed at this time, beginning with the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC), comprising mostly middle-class women (see Footnote).

Working class women discover football
What really kicked the sport along for women however was World War I. The escalating demand on manpower to feed the war effort depleted the country’s vital industrial factories of its male blue-collar workers. The same priority had a similar draining effect on the (English) FA’s (Football Association’s) player stocks. The manpower shortages took women in large numbers out of the home to meet the factory shortfall of men. With few men around to play the game, after season 1914/1915 the premier men’s competitions, the FA Cup and the English championship, were suspended and didn’t get going again until 1919/1920. Into this breach, almost by a process of natural evolution, stepped the newly employed (working class) women of England’s factories ‘FA History’, www.thefa.com].

Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC
With the new infusion of working women taking up football competitively, the stronghold of women’s football moved to Preston in the north-eastern county of Lancashire. Over the next several seasons up until the early years of the interwar period, one women’s club team stood tallest…Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was created out of the female workforce of Dick, Kerr & Co, Preston locomotive and tramcar manufacturers. The highly successful Dick, Kerr’s Ladies side was spearheaded by one of football’s most remarkable ever female players, the chain-smoking, openly gay Lily Parr who scored over 1,000 goals in a 31-year career✱.

Dick, Kerr’s Ladies were pioneers of international women’s matches with French women’s sides⍟ and the Preston team’s popularity soared through and beyond the war years. In 1920 a game between Dick, Kerr’s and St Helens’ Ladies at Goodison Park (Everton) drew a crowd of 53,000 – with the gates locked leaving thousands more outside! [‘WW1: why was women’s football banned in 1921?’, (Gemma Fay), BBC News, 12-Dec-2014, www,bbc.com].

Notwithstanding the enormous contribution of Lily Parr, Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was no “one woman band”…centre-forward Florrie Redford netted a phenomenal 170 goals for the Preston-based club in 1921 [Dick, Kerr Ladies FC 1917-1965′, www.dickkerrladies.com]. Another female football star of the day – who DIDN’T play for Dick, Kerr’s XI – was Northumberland’s Bella Reay who played in the north-east Munitions’ comp. Bella’s 130-plus goals in the 1917/1918 season propelled her unbeaten club Blyth Spartans Ladies FC to victory in the Munitionettes’ Cup (drawn from women workers in munitions factories and docks in the north-east who played amateur football to raise funds for charity) [Fay, ‘BBC’, loc.cit.].

Bella Reay, Blyth Spartans star striker ⬆️

The (FA) empire strikes back
Immediately following the Great War the women’s game was at a high point and on the ascent✥. But after demobilisation, able-bodied men who had fought in the global conflict, streamed back into the English workforce…this meant that the great bulk of the women who had filled their boots on the factory floor were now surplus to requirements and so were “quietly shunted back into domestic life” [ibid.]. Englishmen also returned to playing the number one sport with the Football League recommencing in 1919/1920. The FA authorities in England had tolerated rather than supported women’s football during the enforced absence of the men’s league.

Football – a “health hazard” for women!
The FA’s disapproval had an ally in some prominent members of the medical profession which shared its lack of enthusiasm for female football – on medical grounds!◘ These medicos tended to endorse the assumption of Harley Street specialist Dr Mary Scharlieb who opined that football was a “most unsuitable game, too much for a women’s physical frame” [ibid.]. At this point (1921) the FA stepped in, banning women and the country’s female competitions from using FA grounds, echoing the (predominantly male) medicos’ sentiments that the sport was “quite unsuitable for females, and ought not to be encouraged” [‘The FA’, op.cit.]. Aiming for overkill, the FA decreed that its officials (referees and linesmen) could not take part in women’s matches, a step intended to further hamper the development of the female game.

To underscore the justification for its arbitrary and discriminatory treatment of the women’s’ leagues, the FA alleged (without any proof) that the women’s setup had failed to give an adequate percentage of its gate revenue towards charitable objects”. This was a classic double standard posture as the men’s clubs was never asked to donate any gate receipts to charity. In response, the captain of the Plymouth Ladies team accurately described the FA as being “a hundred years behind the times”✫ and said the ban was nothing more than “purely sex prejudice” [‘1921: the year when football banned women’, History Extra, (Jim Weeks), Dec. 2017, www.historyextra.com].

So was the FA simply exhibiting a blatant, sexist chauvinism towards the women players? The short answer is yes…but could there be something else behind their draconian action as well? During the war the women’s leagues had built up a considerable following and were enticing impressive crowd numbers to the matches. The FA’s overwhelming remit has always been the health of the men’s game and it was concerned that the women’s demonstrable pulling power might have a detrimental affect on attendances to the Football League (men’s) games [ibid.]. Applying a handbrake to the burgeoning women’s game, indeed sidelining it altogether, was considered a great ‘leg-up’ boosting the FA’s objective of rebuilding men’s professional football after the WWI hiatus.

Aftermath of the ban
The FA’s ruling did not put an end to women and girls playing football altogether, but the effect of it was to relegate the top-tier players in England to mostly friendly matches. The elite Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team (later renamed Preston Ladies FC) did its best to stay active. In 1922 it organised a tour of North America but even here the meddling hand of the English FA was at work doing what it could to stymie the club’s tour. On direction from the FA the Canadian FA banned the Dick Kerr women from playing in Canada. The team did however manage to organise nine matches in the US which were played against men’s sides [ibid.].

Preston Ladies, 1939 ➡

“Fem-soccer”: Women’s football goes “gangbusters!”
The ban stayed in force…beyond the formation of the Women’s FA in England in 1969. It was not until July 1971 that the FA, and then only under pressure from UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), finally lifted the ban. Held back no more by gender stereotypers, the women’s game has gone from strength to strength – in 1972 the first women’s FA Cup, in 1984 the first women’s European Championship, followed by the World Cup in 1991 (the 2011 World Cup Final was played in front of a packed 83,000-strong crowd).

Footnote: “Nettie Honeyball”
The founding of the first women’s team British Ladies’ FC is attributed to ‘Nettie Honeyball’…this was a pseudonym for the middle-class female activist (identity unknown, possibly one Mary Hutson) who organised the first women’s match in North London in 1895 (“The North” thrashed “The South” 7-1 before an estimated 11,000 spectators) [‘British Ladies’ Football Club’], Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

PostScript: The Scottish FA, closed ranks with its English brethren
The FA in England was not “Robinson Crusoe” among the home countries in enforcing discriminatory practices against women players. Other football associations took a similarly blinkered view. In the 1924/1925 season three Scottish clubs (Aberdeen, Queen of the South and Raith Rovers) all had their requests to use their club grounds for women’s matches uncermoniously vetoed by the men of the Scottish FA [‘The Honeyballers: Women who fought to play football’, BBC News, 26-Sep-2013, www.bbc.com].

– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —– —– —– ——–– — -– ——–– —–—- ——- —
✱ in 2002, many years after her death, Parr was the first (and so far only) woman player inaugurated into the FA’s Hall of Fame
⍟ although there had been a much earlier women’s match between a Scottish XI side and an English XI that took place in 1881
✥ in 1920 there was around 150 women’s teams playing the sport in England plus many more in Scotland and Wales
◘ back as far as 1894 medical professionals had advocated that women and girls be barred from taking part in football [‘The Honeyballers’, loc.cit.]. Aside from “medical concerns”, another reason that has been suggested for the opposition to female footballers at the time was that they were seen as threatening the perception of football as a “masculine game” [Mårtensson, S, ‘Branding women’s football in a field of hegemonic masculinity’, Entertainment and Sports Law, 8 (June 2010)].
✫ 8.4M British women had recently received the vote, the breakthrough achievements of women’s football was paralleling the Suffrage Movement [Weeks, op.cit.]