ABSTRACT
Explorers became a distinct species in the nineteenth century, with their own private clubs, costumes, props, and professional organizations. Foucaults identification of the author as a privileged moment of individualization, one lacking in rigorous analysis in 1969, applies today to the Explorer, a term still deployed in histories of empire, travel, postcolonialism and science. The Luminous Phenomenon enlightens as a hole in light does, making visible the making of an Explorer. Two years after the publication of Greenland, the Luminous Phenomenon appeared in the work of OReillys contemporaries with a radically different author effect. Gieseckes absence from our histories of science and of exploration is as extraordinary as OReillys controversial presence in them, and both anomalies can be explained through the same mechanisms of original authorship. Britain's Arctic fever was significantly fuelled by the ability of showmen, entrepreneurs, and men of science to exploit the Arctics unique visual properties through such new media as moving panoramas and stereoscopes.
