'The Sun at Midnight': illustration from Arctic Expeditions from British and foreign shores from the earliest to the Expedition of 1875, by David Murray Smith.

Scene in the Arctic, William Bradford, ca. 1880

i do think it’s really funny that like. everyone is suffering and dying and starving to death and like “we’re at the end of the world……..the end of vanity……..not even god is here…….” and silna’s just like. right there. like “i live here.” like one of the first things we learn about her is that she’s eating well. on the walk from erebus to terror, the crewmen are visibly freezing, the scene immediately preceding it has a man getting a frostbitten toe amputated, and silna isn’t phased bc this is where she lives. this is her home. her clothes are appropriate for the weather and she’s used to it, while they’re wearing coats suited to english winters

ultimately the whole point of the show is made by silna just. being in the scenes. these white englishmen arrogantly stormed into this place they dont know how to live in thinking they could conquer it by sheer virtual of being white englishmen and they suffer and starve and rot from the inside out and ultimately die. and meanwhile silna is just also there, healthy and hale except for the fact that her life has been ruined by these random people showing up in her home and throwing it into chaos, because they’re the only thing wrong here

From Kathryn Schulz’s “Literature’s Arctic Obsession”:

Almost invariably, the poles appear in these works [of nineteenth-century English literature] as the place where nature reveals its horrifying indifference to humanity; where humanity itself falls away, leaving men to descend into madness and violence; above all, where the dream of universal mastery goes catastrophically awry.

That ominous vision bears virtually no resemblance to Conan Doyle’s second account of the Arctic. … This time, the search for the North Pole was “a challenge to human daring,” those who conducted it were men of “indomitable pluck, wonderful self-abnegation, and devotion,” and the Arctic itself was “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man.”

… As the later Canadian explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted, John Franklin’s entire crew died of starvation and exposure in an area where, for generations, the Inuit had raised their children and tended their elderly. It was possible to live and even thrive in the Arctic—but, steeped in the racial prejudices of colonial England, almost all of Britain’s polar explorers declined to imitate indigenous ways of travelling, hunting, eating, and staying warm. Everywhere else in the former British Empire, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of native people. In the Arctic, English chauvinism led to the death of untold numbers of Englishmen.

The Victorian English imagination takes it in turns to romanticize and demonize the lands and the peoples they conquer. When the land is not as immediately hospitable as they had hoped or imagined it to be (cf. the imaginary “Hyperborean” warm and ice-free sea theorized to exist beyond the 80th parallel), it changes from a trans-oceanic paradise ripe for the picking of resources and scientific knowledge, into a forbidding hellscape whose only aim is to crush out life. This duality of perspective is repeated again and again in the annals of British colonialism (Pacific Islands, India, early America) where both greedy enjoyment/extraction and violent fear of the Other are not at all mutually exclusive.

Of course, the Victorian obsession with nature as symbol or nature as “vehicle for philosophical or religious themes,” rather than nature as existence or fact, hamstrung explorers’ ability to take the dangers of the Arctic at simple face value and to successfully use the technologies already developed by the people who lived there.

Hull Whalers in the Arctic, by Thomas Binks 1822