Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-jbqgn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T04:32:30.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The first Antarctic voyage of Edgar Allan Poe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2009

Ian N. Higginson
Ian N. Higginson
Affiliation:
Unit for the History of Science, Physics Laboratory, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NR
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Palmer-Pendleton sealing and exploring expedition (1829–1831) was the first American voyage of discovery to the Antarctic that had official government sanction. For the writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), this expedition was an important landmark in an age when science was beginning to change the American continent socially, politically, and geographically. The shift away from Jefferson's agrarian Utopia was marked tangibly by increased industrialisation, the advent of the railroad, the growth of scientific societies, the beginning of elite professionalisation in the sciences, and this major American Antarctic voyage. In the same year as the expedition left the US, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), philosopher and author, recorded the effect that such scientific and technological changes had wrought upon the literary artist when he characterised the era metaphorically as: ‘the Age of Machinery in every outward and inward sense of that word.’ The belief that a repetitive, blunt mechanism that stifled artistic imagination had entered society led Poe to offer a stark criticism of science and scientific method in his tale ‘MS found in a bottle’ (1832). This tale, written shortly after the return of the Palmer-Pendleton expedition, centres upon a voyage to the Antarctic and embodies some of Poe's finest early writing. Interleaved with the critique of science are contemporary themes of discovery, and the Romantic preoccupation with man's relationship to nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Polar Record , Volume 30 , Issue 175 , October 1994 , pp. 287 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bear, J.A. 1973. The last few days in the life of Thomas Jefferson. The Magazine of Albermarle County History 32: 62–79.Google Scholar
Beaver, H. (editor). 1977. The science fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bertrand, K.J. 1971. Americans in Antarctica 1775–1948. New York: American Geographical Society (Special Publication 39).Google Scholar
Bittner, W. 1962. Poe: a biography. Boston and London: Elek Books.Google Scholar
Carlyle, T. 1833. The life of Friedrich Schiller. Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Company.Google Scholar
Carlyle, T. 1857. Signs of the times. In: Carlyle, T.Critical and miscellaneous essays. 2 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall: II, 98–118.Google Scholar
Carlyle, T. 1870. Sartor resartus. London: Chapman and Hall.Google Scholar
Fogg, G.E. 1992. A history of Antarctic science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Froude, J.A. 1882. Thomas Carlyle: a history of the first forty years of his life. 2 volumes. London: Longmans, Green and Co.Google Scholar
Mabbott, T.O. (editor). 1978. Collected works of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Marx, L. 1964. The machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Melville, H. 1851. Moby Dick; or, the whale. New York: Harper & Brothers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, J.J. 1849. Letter to Maria Clemm. Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library: Amelia F. Poe Collection.Google Scholar
Morrell, J., and Thackray, A.. 1981. Gentlemen of science: early years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Ostrom, J.W. (editor). 1966. The letters of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume I. New York: Gordian Press.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A. 1827. Tamerlane and other poems. Boston: CFS Thomas.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A. 1829. Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and minor poems. Baltimore: Hatch & Dunning.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A. 1838. The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. New York: Harper Brothers.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A. 1840. Tales of the grotesque and arabesque. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard.Google Scholar
Silverman, K. 1991. Edgar A. Poe: mournful and neverending remembrance. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Starke, A. 1939. Poe's friend Reynolds. American Literature 11: 152–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swift, J. 1977. Gulliver'stravels. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (First published 1726.)Google Scholar
Symons, J. 1978. The tell-tale heart: the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Thomas, D., and Jackson, D. (editors). 1987. The Poe log: a documentary record of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. Boston: G.K. Hall.Google Scholar
Torrey, B., and Allen, F.H. (editors). 1906. The journal of Henry David Thoreau. 14 volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.Google Scholar
Vance, W.S. 1935/1936. Carlyle in America before Sartor resartus. American Literature 7: 363–375.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, I.M. (editor). 1986. Edgar Allan Poe: the critical heritage. London: Routledge; New York: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Walker, T. 1831. Defense of mechanical philosophy. North American Review 33 (72): 122–136.Google Scholar
Webster, N. 1830. An American dictionary of the English language; exhibiting the origin, orthography, pronunciation, and definitions of words. New York: E. H. Barker.Google Scholar