weather. They wait for the moment when they can see the faces of the ‘islands of ice’, as Captain Cook called them, up close. They are on the lookout, as eager as trappers, for an unusual catch. They are on guard, day and night, sleep poorly and flinch at the slightest sign. The swell makes their stomachs groan.
They made inquiries before leaving. They know that icebergs are a sailor’s nightmare.
For the past ten years or so, the northern latitudes have been the focus of attention. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the two warships that Sir John Franklin commanded in 1845 in an attempt to open the Northwest Passage, have been lost. Jane Griffin, otherwise known as Lady Franklin, moves heaven and earth to find her husband. She convinces the British Admiralty to mount several search expeditions. Other governments quickly follow suit. The physician and explorer Elisha Kent Kane publishes two first-person accounts of the campaigns organised by the American businessman and philanthropist Henry Grinnell. His descriptions of desolate Arctic landscapes provided a stock of images that inspired an entire generation.1
Everyone wants to know what happened to Franklin. Significant economic and political interests come into play. Curiosity becomes bankable. Public opinion is intoxicated. A nation’s reputation depends on this desire to know. But the research stalls. Until the mystery suddenly becomes clearer. In the spring of 1859, Francis Leopold McClintock, a regular member of the Royal Navy, and his officers collect evidence from an Inuit tribe on King William Island. They add more evidence and eventually find scraps of clothing, guns, bodies, a cairn, a small tent and a tin box on the ground with a clear message: the two ships had been icebound on 12 September 1846 and Franklin had given up the ghost on 11 June 1847. After this fatal winter, the survivors had decided, on 22 April 1848, to set out on a journey over the ice pack in an attempt to reach more hospitable lands. No one returned.2
Apart from a few minor scares, Church and Noble’s journey goes off without a hitch. The skies are clear, the sea is friendly. One fine day, the deckhand calls out: ‘Icebergs! Icebergs!’ Relief and euphoria: their goal is in sight. The passengers move towards the bow. Two elegant masses of unequal size emerge. The ship is slowly approaching the bigger one. The companions’ eyes widen. But a thick fog starts to spread. Clouds fall over the sea like a stage curtain. They cover the horizon and the show comes to an end. Having their final act taken away, the travellers are disappointed, almost offended.
During a stopover on land, fishermen explain to them that iceberg hunters must be patient. It is always a game of hide and seek. In this game, the roles are unequal and the rules are constantly changing. Icebergs know the winds and currents better than humans. They are mischievous and do not let themselves be caught. They disappear as suddenly as they reappear. If you get too close, they run away or get angry. They are more intelligent than their pursuers.
The icebergs have made a pact of friendship with the fog. No one can break it. When the clouds transpire, water droplets become ice crystals that pile up on top of each other. Then these crystals return to the clouds as they evaporate. In the meantime, the blocks take advantage of the moments when the air becomes thick with moisture to escape from view. Icebergs and mists unite the sky and the sea. Their relationship is mutual. Each partner benefits. By way of encouraging them to turn back, the fishermen tell our two dilettantes a secret worthy of the best pirate stories: ‘No jackal is more loyal to its lion, no pilot fish to its shark, than the fog to its berg.’3 A chill runs down Church and Noble’s spines: they understand that, in such reciprocal living pairs, the iceberg is the predator. Mists follow it everywhere. They are inseparable.
At the beginning of July 1859, a group of thirteen icebergs encircles the schooner. The painter and the narrator are ecstatic. They will finally be able to examine them closely. The boat is lowered. With the necessary care. When icebergs roll over, they take everything with them in their chaotic movements and cause panic around them. Sections of ice can collapse and crush the boat. The captain on board orders the rowers to keep a respectable distance.
For several minutes they make their way through the floating masses, taking advantage of a clearing in the sky and a calm sea. They hear all kinds of creaking noises. Intrigued, they turn around this group, whispering incomprehensible words. The reverend fills in his notebooks. He describes the electric murmur of the wind, the sounds of the water carving the walls, the countless plays of light. The show reinforces his conviction that nature is not monochrome but ‘polychrome’. Church, for his part, paints one gouache after another with a precision that belies the low swell.
Icebergs are multifaceted. They are always changing their appearance. So much so that Noble has the feeling that he’s seeing more than one iceberg when he walks along one of them. The first two bergs of a few days earlier had already captivated him. His imagination had been fired: he had seen the tent of a nomadic people in the thinnest iceberg and the vault of a greenish marble mosque in the thickest. It was as if there were secret correspondences between deserts of ice and deserts of sand. Then the masses disappeared in silence. The narrator had not even heard a sound as they fled.4
Among the icebergs, Noble experiences a kind of joyful stupor, like a deep empathy with another being. It is the joy of the ‘Indian’ faced with a deer, the unprecedented happiness of finally finding a ‘wild’ world. He no longer knows which metaphor to choose. One after another, he makes out Chinese buildings, a Colosseum, the silhouette of a Greek Parthenon, a cathedral in the early Gothic style, and the ruins of an alabaster city. Icebergs are great imitators. They recapitulate the history of world architecture with disconcerting ease. The Arctic Ocean becomes an open-air art gallery, a sanctuary of human creativity. Icebergs also summarise geological history. They evoke natural landforms located in the four corners of the globe. Sometimes they resemble ‘miniature alpine mountains’, sometimes the eternal snows of an Andean massif that the ocean has submerged. At this point in the story, Noble assures his readers that he and his painter friend share the views of the famous geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt had just died in Berlin. He had spent his life establishing that the ‘cosmos’ is unified in all its parts.
This episode with the group of icebergs changes the fate of our narrator. Nothing is really the same any more. The rest of the journey is a chaos of images. The more he crosses paths with other behemoths, the more Noble forges new ones to illustrate the encounters: a warship with pointed cannons and a sharp bow, ivory carvings, clouds depicting the faces of poets, philosophers or polar bears. He describes caves, niches, balconies and escarpments. He guesses that the icebergs cast a melancholy gaze on the ship’s passengers. He is saddened by the way some are obviously fragile. Meanwhile, on deck, Church finishes his preparatory oil studies. Then, in his cabin, he pencils a few sketches on the pages of a small notebook and carefully arranges his boxes.
Framing icebergs
Two years after their return, the painter unveils an impressive work to the New York public: The North. The painting is 1.64 m by 2.85 m. It is April 1861, opinion was positive, but not unanimous: too much emptiness, no signs of humans. Church reworked his large canvas. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to show it in Europe. In June 1863, an evening for the launching was organised in London. A number of prominent people attended, including Lady Franklin and Sir Francis Leopold McClintock. Observers in the British capital could see a broken mast, still with its masthead, pointing to a boulder on the right. Church added the detail in the final version. No doubt to evoke the tragic sinking of the Franklin and as a reply to his critics. All around the icebergs there is the same veiled Arctic glow. The painter renamed his work with the title it still bears: The Icebergs.
What reading can we give this painting?
A text printed on a sheet of paper was distributed when it was presented, in 1862, at the Athenaeum in Boston. In it, the artist explains his choice of perspective. He addresses the audience:
The spectator is supposed to be standing on the ice, in a bay of the berg. The several masses are parts of one immense iceberg. Imagine an amphitheatre, upon the lower steps of which you stand, and see the icy foreground at your feet, and gaze upon the surrounding masses, all uniting in one beneath the surface