ABSTRACT
Lemercier-Goddard reminds us that Arctic ice was both an obstacle and an object of desire in England’s attempts, during the sixteenth century, at building an empire overseas. A series of English expeditions to discover northerly trade routes to both East and West Indies promised riches but ended in disaster. Sir Hugh Willoughby, leader of the expedition of 1553 which was to find a northerly sea route to the Far East, initiated for example a long list of catastrophes in the Arctic. Yet at the same time, winter fairs on the frozen Thames (1564, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635) celebrated the strange new cold that reached England itself. Against all odds, small pamphlets like The Great Frost (1608) and The Cold Yeare (1615), both attributed to Thomas Dekker, not only promoted the benefits of coldness but also echoed the rationale found in traditional discourses of imperial expansionism. Ultimately, this chapter suggests that the Arctic took shape in the early modern imagination between monstrous ice and a wonderful land of snow.
