The chapter charts the cultural and literary responses to the British Admiralty’s decision to explore the Arctic after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. The main impetus for launching these explorations was reports of vanishing sea ice. Because it was erroneously thought that ice had hemmed in the Eastern Settlement on Greenland’s east coast, hopes were raised that the Admiralty’s Arctic programme would lead to a recovery of the ‘lost colony’. Several studies have dealt with Britain’s early nineteenth-century ambitions in the Arctic, but the role Greenland played in these considerations has not received the attention it warrants. By collecting and juxtaposing diverse sources, the chapter produces a new perspective on British imperial thinking. Focus is on how the hope of discovering the lost European settlers of Greenland was expressed in several nationalist poems published around 1818. Among the poets examined in the chapter are Anna Jane Vardill and Eleanor Anne Porden, whose verses about British interest in Greenland are analysed.

In Chapter Three, I move beyond plantation America’s shores to trace how the legal logic of chattel slavery projected out into the Atlantic Ocean. The idea that human beings could be treated as things at law was not landlocked. Rather, it was a legal concept that also infused the worldview of those who labored at sea. This becomes clear when we sift through the claims of the countless sailors, captains, and merchants who brought their disputes to colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, which governed life on British naval and merchant vessels. Litigants quibbled over many things in colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, but what united their disparate claims was an overarching assumption that people of African descent were valuable commodities. Vice Admiralty procedure helped to make this possible. Although English admiralty law had developed over centuries to allow European sailors and merchants to seize cargo and ships, Vice Admiralty litigants and judges extended the Courts’ in rem jurisdiction to include slaves found on captured vessels. This process of adaptation was silent and uncontested. Litigants, lawyers, and judges assumed arguendo that Vice Admiralty Courts could treat slaves as they would any other type of marine property. Without comment, they slotted enslaved people into ready-made forms and procedures, and brought black bodies before the Courts as objects that could be condemned, appraised, and sold.