ABSTRACT
This essay discusses the history of scientific practices in the Arctic. As European and Euro-American explorers travelled to discover unmapped areas, they also worked within and created specific visions of the Arctic and Arctic explorers, including tropes of heroism, scientific progressivism, manliness, and terra incognita. The history of Arctic exploration and scientific investigations in the Arctic is closely entangled with imperial expansion. With a focus on the nineteenth-century British imperial context, this essay problematises the scientific and geographical discoveries of explorers through four interlinked themes: “narratives of discovery,” “cartography and geographical surveying,” “the First International Polar Year of 1882,” and “looking beyond the white explorer.”
