Clements Markham, consummate colonialist

Born in 1830, Sir Clements Markham was educated at Westminster and entered the Royal Navy in 1844 as a first-class volunteer. He served in the Pacific as well as the Arctic before leaving the service to join the imperial bureaucracy which he spent the rest of his life in dedication to. For 25 years, beginning in 1863, he was the Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographic Society; subsequently, he was elected President of that organisation in 1896. What he is most remembered for today is his contribution to the history of polar exploration—“few men of his time could claim such prolonged involvement in polar affairs” (Holland, Reference Holland1986, p. ix). He served as a midshipman on an 1851 Royal Navy expedition in search of Sir John Franklin in the Canadian Arctic and a love for the polar regions stayed with him throughout his life. He was more or less solely responsible for ensuring that the turn-of-the-century expeditions sent out by Britain were naval expeditions, hewing close to his ideals of military valour, rather than the scientific civilian expeditions that many others were campaigning for—“he made himself the chokepoint, the bottleneck, through which British polar lore passed through on its way to Scott” (Spufford, Reference Spufford1996, p. 277).

While still working at the India Office, he went out as the geographer in residence on the 1867 British expeditionary force to Abyssinia, a venture which Felix Driver selects as an exemplar of the RGS’s role in the 19th century as an “intermediary role between geographical science and the imperial state” (Reference Driver2001, p. 43). Also at the India Office, Markham presented a plan to completely reorganise the archives according to a scheme of complex taxonomy of his own devising that “sought to produce a synoptic view of India, rendering it both known and knowable, and producing it as a singular entity in the political imaginaries of both [coloniser] and [colonised]” (Mitchell, Lester, & Boehme, Reference Mitchell, Lester and Boehme2017, p. 17). This sort of ostentatious ambition is typical of him, especially in the realms of knowledge production and exploration.

He was a controversial figure throughout his life, and made many enemies, including Shackleton and Amundsen, thanks to his caustic and domineering personality. But he led a busy social life and was popular enough to be mourned at his death at age 86 (after having accidentally lit himself on fire while reading in bed) and receive a complimentary obituary from the then-current head of the RGS, J.S. Keltie. Amidst lauding him for his accomplishments in the fields of geography and exploration, Keltie comments offhand that “one of his striking characteristics was his love for the company of young men—Westminster boys, naval cadets, aspiring explorers, and others preparing for their career in life” (Keltie Reference Keltie1916, p. 6).

Markham’s homosexuality has been to some degree or another accepted by some researchers (most prominently Huntford and Spufford) and ignored or deemed irrelevant by others. Viewed through a modern lens, it is difficult not to “see the obvious” in Markham’s documented affinities, but a degree of caution against that very thing must be maintained, while yet still allowing for the ways in which queerness as a valid lens can lend analytical depth to historical research. In his analysis of Markham’s eccentricities, Spufford specifically emphasises the lack of concrete evidence, speculating that the married Markham led a “clenched life” (1996, p. 274). But as Robert Aldrich (Reference Aldrich2003) carefully explains in his landmark study of colonialism and homosexuality, “such a conclusion, implying sterile lives of fearful frustration, tortured celibacy or assignations so clandestine as to go unrecorded, places overly great weight on physical (particularly genital) satisfaction. A demand for physical consummation may not have been felt strongly by all these men, especially in an age that valued chastity and sexual abstention” (p. 100). Certainly, Markham falls squarely into the category of prominent colonialist men examined by Aldrich for whom intense relationships, whether patronage-based or otherwise, with men and boys formed a primary and necessary element of his emotional life throughout his adulthood, a category which includes other notable figures in the history of exploration as Richard Burton and James Brooke.

Though he departed the Royal Navy as an adolescent and never returned, he maintained a close affiliation with it through his participation as observer and mentor to the cadets of the Training Squadron beginning in the late 1880s (through which he first encountered Scott), as well as his promotional efforts on behalf of Naval polar exploration. Using his own manuscript as evidence, I would add that in the case of Markham, another one of these primary emotional attachments, lasting over half a century, was not to a real living man nor even one that he had ever met, but to an idea of Commander James Fitzjames which he had built up second-hand inside his head.

The manuscript

Thanks to its inherent ambiguity and open-endedness, the Franklin expedition has been at the centre of fictional explorations since shortly after it disappeared (Moss, Reference Moss2006). Novels such as Mordechai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness (1983), William T. Vollmann’s The Rifles (1994), and especially Dan Simmons’ The Terror (2007) and its subsequent television adaptation have brought the expedition’s history to the forefront of popular culture, creating and sustaining versions of polar history in the public imagination for the late 20th and 21st century (Potter, Reference Potter2013). According to Russell Potter, the first fictional adaptation of the Franklin story was published as early as 1851, and at least two dozen have been published since 1965 (Potter, Reference Potter2023, p. 222).

A half-century before Markham’s manuscript, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins adapted the Franklin story into their sensational and popular melodrama The Frozen Deep. But for the most part throughout the Victorian and Edwardian period, however, nonfictional first-person accounts of exploration were much more important than fictional adaptations, not only as accessible and popular documentation of the events which occurred, but for dictating the frame by which those events would have been be understood and analysed, as well as for creating via authorship the idea of the explorer himself (Craciun, Reference Craciun2011).

James Fitzjames, the third-in-command of the Franklin Expedition and the captain of HMS Erebus, never became mythologised in the popular imagination the way that Sir John Franklin himself did, following the loss of the expedition. Unmarried and childless, he did not have a Lady Franklin to cannily engineer the collective emotional investment necessary for a hero to be established in the public consciousness (Jones, Reference Jones2007, p. 441). And vitally, the Franklin expedition left no written records behind, so there were no first-person accounts from the expedition itself which recounted its narrative from beginning to end. “Explorers fashioned themselves as heroic figures through the stories they told,” but Fitzjames’ fate denied him this opportunity for authorship and fame as an explorer, and thus by the 1890s he had faded into obscurity (Jones, Reference Jones2004, p. 27).

It is clear Markham was dissatisfied with the existing Franklin-centred history, and found it necessary to right this wrong. He would create a record of the Franklin expedition, in the form of a lengthy romance centring on, and meaning to elevate, James Fitzjames—whom, for whatever reason, he had identified as being worthy of such elevation since first hearing of him as a midshipman. A project this ambitious was not out of character for Markham by any means. As an “inveterate scribbler,” Markham embodied the “distinctly Victorian pathology of graphomania” (Baughman, Reference Baughman1999, p. 11; Brophy, Reference Brophy2010, p. iii). He constantly had in print new lectures, articles and pamphlets, as well as a flow of books dedicated to various historical, geographical, and colonial subjects. His archive demonstrates the true extent of his inscriptional obsession. The preserved notebooks run from journals kept aboard his first naval posting on HMS Collingwood in 1844 to entries of dinner parties kept in the last years of his long life.

The manuscript I examine in this paper is one of many dozens of handwritten books which are held in Markham’s section of the Royal Geographical Society archive. It is over 550 pages long, closely written in his recognisable spidery hand. The full title is as follows: James Fitzjames: the story of the friendship, devoted zeal for the service, high souled courage, self denial, and heroic deaths of 129 British Naval Officers and Seamen—A Romance based on information and on facts so authentic and so numerous that it must be very near to the truth. Out of all of this, an intriguing word is “information.” Previously, it had meant no more and no less than the knowledge or sensory qualities through which one is informed, empirically, by the outside world, but was by the time of Markham’s writing, and the rise of imperial bureaucracy that he was so closely identified with, coming to mean “knowledge beyond the range of one’s experience,” collected and organised in order to efficiently manage and control people and processes (Peters, Reference Peters1988, p. 15-16). By invoking the then-novel meaning of “information” in the subtitle of the manuscript, Markham indicates the work’s eccentric interplay between fin-de-siècle bureaucratic empiricism and the imperial imagination, and his intention to establish the work’s authority as convincing narrative.

As an archivist and geographer, it was Markham’s job to embody and further the “task of nineteenth-century science to radically expand the margins of the legible world” (Brophy, Reference Brophy2010, p. 42), as seen in his attempts to reform the archives of the India Offices, but he was also an obsessive fantasist, in that scheme as well as others. It is noted that his fantasy of a totalising system of indexical completion that would organise the entire Indian project “resembles the ‘imperial archive’ that Thomas Richards identifies as a presiding trope of much late Victorian fiction: a bank of data dedicated to maintaining ‘the possibility of comprehensive knowledge …’” (Richards quoted in Mitchell, Lester, & Boehme, Reference Mitchell, Lester and Boehme2018, p. 17). His powers of imagination allowed him to conceive of this scheme and many others, such as the manuscript of James Fitzjames, and his powers of recall and organisation allowed him to attempt to manifest them.

In the preface, Markham justifies the unimpeachable accuracy of his book by stating: “Only one could venture upon such a narrative who has intense and long enduring sympathy, who has special knowledge of the actors in the events he undertakes to relate, and personal knowledge of the environment, and whose lips have felt the freshness of the ‘fount of poesy’” (p. xiii). Supporting this “special knowledge,” the manuscript begins with biographies of the officers on the Terror and the Erebus, collected from accounts Markham had in turn collected from men who knew those officers over the years. This second-hand information means that certain facts about the officers can only be found in this volume, but quite a bit of it is inaccurate and unreliable, making it a fraught source for historical research. William Battersby, for example, discovered Markham’s misconception about the identity of Elizabeth Coningham. Elizabeth, to whom Fitzjames wrote the letters home which Markham drew on heavily for the first section of the book, was not Fitzjames’s sister, but in fact his sister-in-law. Such a mistake, lifted from Markham’s work and repeated elsewhere, had led to the obscuring of Fitzjames’s real background for over a century until the truth was revealed by Battersby in 2010 (Battersby, Reference Battersby2010). (In an echo of that, Battersby in telling the story of the error mischaracterised this very manuscript as belonging to Sir Clements’ cousin, Sir Albert Markham, a mistake I aim to correct here.) Another error can be seen in the fact that Markham clearly did not have access to an accurate crew list with ranks, only the muster rolls with names—possibly those held at Kew. This resulted in a chaotic jumbling-up of the roles of all men (save the officers and the Marines), such as caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey as Terror’s cook, and steward Edmund Hoar as captain of Erebus’s afterguard.

The book can be divided into three main sections, fronted by a preface that explains Markham’s own personal history in relation to the Franklin Expedition. Firstly, Chapters I-IV, which include biographies of all officers of Erebus and Terror, and the narrative of the expedition’s fitting-out and voyage as far as Disco, recreated from extant sources. Chapters V-XIX consist of Markham’s interpretation of the rest of the story, based infallibly (he tells us) purely on his own knowledge of Arctic exploration and of the character of the men who participated in the expedition. This narrative winds down to its expected end, followed by epilogues in Chapters XX and XXI detailing the subsequent search expedition, including the one which Markham participated in.

For the first few years of the expedition, chronologically, Markham’s narrative mainly focuses on the delightful, spirited polar adventures of his protagonist and his friends. This fictional imagining of the “lighter” side of the expedition is a reflection of Markham’s experiences on the Franklin search, tinged with nostalgia for the winter spent trapped in the ice on the Assistance. It features as its main character Robert Thomas, the real-life 2nd mate of Terror, who is identified explicitly as a Markham stand-in (Markham, Reference Markham1899). Markham, like Thomas, was the youngest officer on the 2nd ship of his own two-ship expedition in 1851. Thomas takes on a myriad of traits favoured by Markham: always high-spirited, mischievous, fond of theatre and music, creative and energetic, but also pious, obedient, and, most importantly, ardently worshipful of James Fitzjames. Though he is a “chartered libertine” and an “audacious young ne’er do well,” he manages to effortlessly win over even the hardest-hearted of his superiors; he spends his time variously organising masquerades, playing with his cup-and-ball, and singing songs. He is adept at “the arts of laughing and making a noise” and giving out nicknames.

The young Thomas, Markham asserts that he heard from someone who knew him personally, had rejoiced in the nickname of “The Baby” and so that becomes how he is referred to throughout the narrative. This frequently results in eyebrow-raising sentences such as “‘O Baby! Baby,’ thought Fitzjames, ‘you young tempter’. and ‘Come to bed Baby’ cried the Commander out of his wraps” (p. 200). The Baby’s best friend is his opposite number on Erebus, mate Robert Orme Sargent. Together they swear fealty to “Sir James Fitzjames,” The Knight of Snowden (p. 225) (referencing Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady Of The Lake, in which James Fitz-James is the true King in disguise, and after whom Fitzjames the man may have actually been named) and, eventually, devote themselves to him unto death.

Needless to say, Fitzjames is the very last to die at the end of the narrative, but not before he takes up the role as leader of the expedition, one which Markham imagines he had always been destined for:

Markham acknowledges the inspiration he took from his own experiences on the Franklin search to depict the men of the lost expedition, their relationships and hierarchies, how they spent time amusing themselves during the Arctic winter, and the geographical and meteorological specifics of how they navigated the polar archipelago. His biography, written by his cousin Admiral Albert Markham, offers further insight into how Markham’s earlier adolescent experiences in the Royal Navy inspired the depiction of the relationship between the Baby and Fitzjames. One Lieutenant Peel aboard the HMS Collingwood was a 14-year-old Markham’s mentor throughout his maiden voyage, and Markham came to adore him. When he departed the ship at Valpairaso in order to carry despatches to England, Markham wrote in his diary: “My heart is like lead. I went down into one of the cabins, and shed bitter tears.” Albert Markham goes on to state that “the intensity of his interest in the Navy considerably diminished after the departure of Lieutenant Peel,” and indeed he began to contemplate leaving the service at this point, having served less than a year, though in the end he would stay long enough to participate in the 1850-51 season of the Franklin search (Markham, Reference Markham1917, p. 40–41).

This romanticised mentorship is seen in the narrative as a repeated motif: between the Fitzjames and “his young esquire” the Baby and also notably in the loyal Boy Chambers who refuses to leave Edward Couch, carefully nursing his “young master” in the boat at the Boat Place until he at last becomes “A boy hero! Setting out to his death to save his master” as he leaves to hunt for food and never returns (p. 269-70). Earlier in the story, after the death of Braine, who had previously been Couch’s servant, Boy Chambers “came to Couch’s cabin one evening, and begged to be taken as his servant” (p.140).

In addition to depicting pivotal scenes at the Boat Place and Victory Point, the narrative, as it moves forward past the abandonment of the ships, accounts for every single relic recovered by search expeditions, as well as for a large proportion of the Inuit testimony acquired by John Rae and Charles Francis Hall that detailed the movements of the expedition post-1845. Markham also used his professional knowledge of geography and cartography to map out the various hunting, sledging, and exploring routes taken by the expedition. This method of narrative construction connects Markham’s novel to the contemporary genre of “Franklin novels” described above and to the genre of polar exploration fiction as a whole, which “explores the gaps, contradictions and subtexts of polar expedition records” by incorporating real textual records and expedition documents (Leane, 2023, p.5). The authoritative and realistic elements of the lengthy account exist inseparably from and support the idealised, stereotyped interactions between the characters, which provide a utopian view into Markham’s conception of the past and future of polar exploration.

The male romance

While Markham establishes in his prologue that the concept for James Fitzjames had been a subject of contemplation ever since his own journey to the Arctic in the 1850s, it took him nearly a half-century to get it written down. By the time he did, he had been active in the promotion of British Antarctic exploration for six years. Since 1893, he had been constantly writing letters and lobbying for funding, and for the most part, he had been unsuccessful, but slowly the tide was beginning to turn (Baughman, Reference Baughman1999). The literary juncture at which his manuscript (at least this final draft of it) arrived was a critical one, as the 1890s was the peak of the imperial adventure story. Michael Saler’s account of the New Romance is helpful here. The New Romance, beginning with Treasure Island in 1887, had “the expressed intention of combining the objective style of realism with the fantastic content of romance” (Saler, Reference Saler2012, p. 59). Somewhat coterminous with the “King Romance” genre as defined by critic Andrew Lang at the time, the New Romance in all its imperial glory was deeply interested in maleness, strength, and re-capturing or rescuing a “lost” British race from the perils of perceived fin-de-siècle emasculation (Arata, Reference Arata1996). Notable works of this period included Haggard’s She and The Mines of King Solomon, as well as Kipling’s works. According to his diaries, Markham was a habitual reader of novels, so it’s likely he osmosed the trappings of this genre. The combination of romance and adventure was a very specifically imperialist form during this era. In the manuscript, Markham intermixes realism with emotional description of the Franklin Expedition’s noble sacrifice. This has the effect of making narratively explicit the sense of loss and pre-emptive grief which the broader genre of male romance was imbued with (Arata, 1996).

According to John Miller (Reference Miller2012), the contradiction between realism and fantasy is an essential element of imperial romance: “the documentary [candour] required by colonial discourse in its romances finds itself haunted by elements of fantasy that combine with these sober intentions” (p. 28). It is clear that despite his deep authorial affection for Fitzjames and his young wards, Markham cannot allow himself as a rational geographer and man of science, to delve at all into pure romantic fantasy—in the sense of imagination, speculation—and ask the question, “what if they had been saved?” But vitally, he carefully avoids the specific kind of moral frailty which brings failure in the imperial Gothic tales of Conrad, in which “adventure turns sour or squalid” (Brantlinger, Reference Brantlinger1988, p. 239). Absent throughout the manuscript are any hints of the cannibalism and mutiny which feature prominently many fictional interpretations of the expedition, which shows Markham’s desperate wish to prove the civilising effect of religion and naval discipline even at the ends of the earth. Instead, the failure of the expedition is carefully delineated as being absolute and inevitable due to factors outside of the protagonist’s control. Failure is caused initially by the agedness of Crozier and Franklin—too inflexible and bull-headed to take note of the spry and intuitive Fitzjames’s correct advisement on their route, and then magnified by the poison contained in the canned foods supplied to the expedition by Stephan Goldner (even though Goldner had been exonerated years prior in court—see Carney, Reference Carney2020). Finally, blame is assigned to Inuit encountered by the expedition members, who only appear briefly in a violently racist depiction which jars against their total prior absence in the narrative. This depiction contrasts with the encounters of trade, entertainment, and hospitality which Markham surely would have read of in the narratives of Parry’s earlier expeditions. Characterised as universally bloodthirsty thieves, the Netsilik as xenophobically caricatured by Markham are much worse even than Charles Dickens’ canard of “covetous, treacherous, and cruel” and are depicted as solely responsible for the brutal murder of innocent crew members. This depiction has much in common with the tale of the massacre of Franklin survivors by Inuit as told by interpreter Adam Beck to Sir John Ross in 1850; Markham would have heard this story on the Assistance as it spread between ships of the search fleet and may have embedded in his personal narrative of the expedition’s fate then and there, unable to be dislodged by subsequent conviction of Beck as a liar by Ross and Austin (Woodman, Reference Woodman2015).

The displacement of blame, and the characterisation of the expedition’s failure as wholly inevitable, emphasises how noble sacrifice is central to the narrative and does not damage but in fact upholds the imperial ideals of the expedition. In this way, Markham wholly abjures himself of any relation to the actual fantastic and instead is able to state with perfect self-assurance that “They never prayed for deliverance or safety, but only that they might be given strength to bear themselves like true Englishmen, and to do useful and loyal service to the leader they loved so dearly” (p. 240).

This forbearance and seeming passivity are far from incompatible with the heroic ideal of the Victorian polar explorer, and in fact are characteristic qualities of the masculine, Christian hero braving the unforgiving environment which had been well established in the post-Franklin era (Cavell, Reference Cavell2008, p. 134). By combining this existing narrative with the contemporary, popular framework of the New Romance, with all of its tropes and trappings, Markham thus attempts to re-templatise the existing legend of the heroic sacrifice of Sir John Franklin, erasing Franklin and instead centring Fitzjames and his young ward, Markham’s self-insert.

Not only did Markham attempt with this manuscript to produce a realistic portrait of the historical figure of James Fitzjames but also he aimed specifically to uplift him into this more recently reified category of imperial hero, by relying on imagery of virtue and self-denial familiar from the literature of heroism of the late 19th century, and thereby evoking popular figures who “invariably wedded the Christian and the military virtues that were so characteristic of the age” such as Havelock and General Gordon (MacKenzie, 2017, p.15). This is the rhetorical device that Annette McClintock was responding so emotionally to in her letter to Lady Markham, which conjured up vivid images of the young men then engaged in the fight against the Boers.

To support his narrative, Markham relies on hard bureaucratic “information”: experience, material artefacts, and transmitted knowledge. Almost as if anticipating hypertext, he underlines all proper names in red, and inserts page references to other appearances of that name in the margin, as if beckoning readers to click (by page-turning) and explore. The emphasis on indexical completion, not to mention the cartographic perfection of his maps, invokes “a promise of perfect fidelity resulting from direct commerce with natural phenomena” (Brophy, Reference Brophy2010, p. 50), and attests to the true, correct reality of the idealised English bodies which Markham compulsively dwells upon. This then permits an alternative “exaltation of the hero” through righteous and uncomplaining death. Spufford (Reference Spufford1996) suggests that Markham’s recourse to collections of facts “stimulated his emotions without him having to look at the emotions’ source” (p. 281) and while that may be true, perhaps moreso in the wholly nonfictional narrative of the Discovery expedition that Spufford examined, readers of the romance of James Fitjzames are able to perceive a great deal of emotion. Markham argues the factuality of the affecting scenes he presents, using the hard bureaucratic reality of organised information in order to support the dangerous, redeeming, and imperial nature of his ideal form of exploration:

And imagination and fantasy are especially visible in the text in the clear passion for the relationships he depicts, most prominently those between the Baby and Sargent, between the two boys and Fitzjames, and between Fitzjames and his loyal men:

Staging Fitzjames

Amidst Markham’s biography, one characteristic feature is his obsession with theatre. In his Arctic Navy List, an exhaustive 1875 publication which details the biographies of every Royal Navy officer who served in the polar regions up to and including the members of the 1875 Nares expedition, Markham includes not only each man’s service record and the islands and capes named after him, but also the roles he played in the all-male productions put on during expeditions. In James Fitzjames, the idyllic first half of the romance records a great deal of play-making and masquerading: “She Stoops To Conquer” and “Blue Beard” are performed by the officers, and it is even noted the Baby is “gorgeous in his eastern costume, as ‘Fatima’” (p.133).

These depictions of performance reflect Markham’s nostalgia for the shipboard plays and masquerades that he enjoyed on board the Assistance. The tradition of polar theatre was established by W. Edward Parry in part to ward off the possibility of non-normative, disruptive behaviour and disease amongst expedition members during the polar winter. It diffused a potential build-up of homoerotic impulses by providing, via the medium of cross-dressing performers, acceptably heterosexual outlets for desire (Mossakowski, Reference Mossakowski2015). On the Assistance, Markham participated in the staging of the only original play written aboard a Franklin search ship, “Zero: Or, Harlequin Light,” penned by the ship’s purser. The play was enthusiastically reported and reprinted in his 1853 volume Franklin’s Footsteps, as a centrepiece of his remembrances of the expedition. Heather Davis-Fisch examines how the performance neutralised the threats of the Arctic environment, showing how frostbite and scurvy “could become, through the slap of the imperial bat, as familiar and domestic as the archetypically British characters of Clown and Pantaloon” (2012, p. 59). In the manuscript, the Baby finds an appropriate outlet for his mischief in his participation in shipboard entertainments. He even seeks special permission from Fitzjames to put on an entertainment featuring a mixed group of officers and men, a transgression of hierarchy which is allowed and encouraged as an innovative idea by a young officer.

Another reflection of his passion for the theatre is how Markham also often deploys stage devices in his own text: “The scene changes to a few hundred yards to the ships,” he writes as the men beat a retreat to Terror after their initial walk-out (p. 273). Viewing this work as a type of performance aligns it with the idea of “performances […] that testify to experiences” (Davis-Fisch, Reference Davis-Fisch2012, p. 15) situating it within a personal repertoire of emotion and interpretation on the part of Markham’s naval and Arctic past. It also calls forward to his ongoing performance, during and after the completion of the manuscript, as the loud and forceful leading voice behind the promotion of Antarctic exploration at the turn of the 20th century.

The attempted recovery of the “real” story of the Franklin expedition as centrepiece of Markham’s literary effort engenders the “same structures of substitution and surrogation that characterise theatrical performance” (Davis-Fisch, Reference Davis-Fisch2012, p. 17). He makes use of the story of the Franklin Expedition to put on a play, so to speak, which uses Arctic as an empty stage for a performance of colonial erotics. This performance has as its central dramatic theme the claim that the horrors of the expedition, as reported, did nothing to diminish the true English spirit of loyalty, bravery, and adventure—and that it allowed or even actually enhanced the expression of loyalties and intimacies demonstrated between his depicted characters. Like the polar balls and masquerades which allowed Markham and his fellow officers “significant license [.] to rematerialise their personas and explore other subjectivities” (Mossakowski, Reference Mossakowski2015, p. 91), the process of writing James Fitzjames involved Markham inhabiting the subjectivities of the Baby, Fitzjames, and other members of the Franklin expedition, in a performance which explicitly emphasised his authority and expertise, and implicitly revealed his emotional and ideological priorities.

Throughout the story, the characters of James Fitzjames again and again express Markham’s romantic ideals. The narrative acts as a total refutation of what Patrick Brantlinger (Reference Brantlinger1988) describes as the central themes of the “imperial Gothic,” which included during this era apocalyptic themes of “individual regression or going native; an invasion of civilisation by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world” (p. 230). The death scene of Charles Frederick Des Voeux exemplifies this “anti-Gothic” approach: “The Captain [Fitzjames] loved him as his own son, and had formed the highest opinion of his abilities and qualities as an officer. ‘I did my best Sir! the service was my first thought’. These were his last words. He had done his best” (p. 296a). The lengthy sequence of the doomed walk-out in the manuscript is a montage of the homoeroticism of military death, the “bodily intimacy in times of physical extremity [leading] to a state of nakedness” (emotionally speaking) that would subsequently come to be a hallmark of trench warfare (Das, Reference Das2002, p. 53). It reaches a fever pitch when Fitzjames tenderly cares for Boy Young in his last moments, shortly before he himself dies at last:

Shortly after the completion of this novel, Markham organised the publication of the Antarctic Manual, a lengthy volume produced for and carried by the Discovery expedition, meant to provide guidance on every possible opportunity and obstacle that might be met in the Antarctic regions. As a fictional counterpart to the Manual, James Fitzjames presents in amateur, passionate form Markham’s outline for the specific way in which polar disasters should proceed. The subjectivity of the explorers depicted in his narrative is thus strictly templatised, never permitted to overstep the boundaries into transgression, but allowed a great deal of physical intimacy as occasioned by proximity to death. Though James Fitzjames never circulated widely, it is substantial evidence of Markham’s broader endeavour to write the history of polar exploration in two parallel but interrelated ways, in accordance with his personal set of ideals: as it was ongoing, in his role as expedition organiser, as well as retroactively, in the form of his Franklin expedition retelling.

Markham as artist, Markham as fan

Markham was a professional, a consummate one, with multiple prestigious postings and a knighthood, but in the context of this manuscript he was an amateur in all senses. He was a fan, even, with a “love of camp horseplay” which extended from his affinity for polar theatricals through to the dramatic excesses of the expeditions he shepherded (Mossakowski, Reference Mossakowski2015, p. 83). Spufford (Reference Spufford1996) observes with regard to his role in polar affairs that “[even] as he produced it—made it happen—he consumed it, like a star-struck impresario who knows exactly what is happening backstage but falls for the magic of the performance every time” (p. 279). I argue that James Fitzjames provides vivid proof that not only did he consume the Franklin expedition as a fan, but he transformed it as one too. Creating this odd work involved participation in a one-man community, what Lisa Gitelman (Reference Gitelman2014) in her study of 19th-century Amateurdom calls a “self-imagined realm of belonging […] in opposition to the larger public sphere” (p. 149) in which Markham “textually poached” all possible available facts of the expedition, up to and including the name of each individual crew member from the muster rolls (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins1992).

Borrowing and inflecting the Franklin Expedition as Victorian mass-culture phenomenon, and thus transforming it into his own personal fantasy devoted to the worship of its title character as a hero, Commander James Fitzjames, whom Markham never actually met in life, Markham produced a singular document which could well be described as a “fanfiction” per Francesca Coppa’s definition (Coppa, Reference Coppa2017). The 21st-century concept of a “transformative work” provides a useful lens through which to understand Markham’s approach in conjunction with the genre background of the New Romance. To say Markham was a fan—one might call him a fanboy specifically of Fitzjames, to emphasise the youthful origins of his obsession in his experience as a midshipman on the Assistance in the Arctic—and was engaging in a practice based on his own affinities for the world of the Franklin Expedition, is not to downplay the importance of this manuscript as a vital artefact in understanding Markham’s psychology. Precisely the opposite: after all, fan play and pleasure “can demand engagement with some of our own and other people’s most disturbing feeling, memories, and desires, and can invite and withstand rigorous analysis” (Moon, Reference Moon2012, p. 4). And the serious pleasure Markham took in creating the work is more than evident, in the elaborate nature of the manuscript, and its peritextual effusion of poems, photographs, quotations, drawings, maps, and charts. Additional evidence of pleasure can be found in the act of self-insertion, which is an activity often performed by modern-day fans who write themselves into stories alongside their favourite characters, often as love interests (Sapuridis & Alberto, Reference Sapuridis and Alberto2022). By drawing a parallel between himself and the Baby, whom affection is lavished on by Fitzjames, Markham underscores the desiring nature of his own text.

Another lens through which to consider Markham’s opus is that of outsider art. While Markham was rich, privileged, socially prosperous, renowned, and held a great deal of power to affect the world around him—the very inverse of the poor, isolated American outside artist Henry Darger (1892–1973)—commonalities can be identified. The obscurity of the production, for one, being composed alone and shared with few others (one can assume) after its return from the McClintock household. Like Darger, Markham had a fixation with youth and innocence; like Darger he was densely prolific, a compulsive writer and creator, in whom scholars have identified the possibilities of a repressed sexuality. Tracing the various cultural sources that Clements Markham drew on to create James Fitzjames provides the opportunity to construct a kind of pop-cultural genealogy, just as Michael Moon does in his study Darger’s Resources: such as the characters the Baby assigns to the various officers for the masquerade, including the celebrated dandy Beau Nash (The Baby), Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax (Gore), and the swindler Jeremy Diddler from 1803 farce Raising The Wind (Fitzjames).

Markham’s Arctic experiences on the Assistance are accepted to have “permanently shaped [his] thoughts on how a polar expedition ought to be conducted” and thus influenced the Heroic Age expeditions (Holland, Reference Holland1986, p. xii), but less known and accepted is how the Franklin expedition story also impacted his life and his Antarctic organising career. Because Markham received the story of the Franklin expedition second-hand, and subsequently appropriated it into his own creative works, viewing him as an outsider, an amateur, and a fan can provide a useful framework for acknowledging this influence, and it can also complicate understandings of his accepted role as a authoritative leader and consummate professional.