Where in the world was Upernavik? And why might Thoreau have had such a quotation on his mind -- and write it inconspicuously on this draft survey?

The first question was straightforward to answer. A gazetteer told me that Upernavik was a small trading outpost on the west coast of Greenland.

Then I learned that it had been often the last provisioning stop for, and sometimes the salvation of, Arctic whalers and explorers. Though I have not yet located the source of the quotation, it is not unusual to see Upernavik referred to in the  literature of Arctic exploration as Greenland's (and even the Earth's) most northern permanent settlement. For example, an encyclopedia that Thoreau had used noted that "Upernamick [sic][is] the most northern settlement." Encycl. Americana, v. VI, p. 52,1831. And one explorer wrote, "Upernavik is not less the limit of safe navigation than the remotest bound of civilized existence" (Isaac Hayes, Open Polar Sea, New York, 1867).

Why might Thoreau have had Upernavik on his mind? First, a word about the survey—it was icy weather at New Year's time in 1852-53 when Thoreau made repeated surveying trips to the loneliest edge of his Easterbrooks Country.The lot was the 17th-century  Humphrey Hunt Wood and Pasture Land. It was a long, irregular lot running from now-Hutchins Pond to near the Kibbe Place. The area was probably largely unsurveyed, and Thoreau labored over this interesting and meticulous draft survey.

Click here for this draft survey; the Upernavik quotation is inconspicuously scrawled in the extreme lower left corner. (From Marcia Moss, Catalogue of Surveys, Pub. by Thoreau Society. Courtesy of Thoreau Society. Original survey is in CFPL.)

Thus, part of the explanation may be straightforward: Estabrook Country's icy wildness may simply have reminded Thoreau of another far-away icy quest, and, for him, Estabrook was the "globe itself, here named pasture" (X:159, Nov. 3, 1857). Earlier that year, Thoreau had been absorbed by reports of the search for the explorer Sir John Franklin. Franklin had been the latest to undertake the three-hundred-year quest for the Northwest Passage and for the Open Polar Sea. These were the fabled, all-season, open-water routes supposedly linking England across the Canadian Arctic to the riches of the Pacific and even to circumnavigation via the North Pole. But after leaving Upernavik in 1845, Franklin and his men had disappeared.

"Thereafter, a cloud descends upon [the Franklin expedition]. It passes into the heart of the grim solitudes of the Polar World, and men hear of it no more" (Adams, Recent Polar Voyages (1876), p. 90).

During the next fifteen years, no less than forty rescue expeditions from both Britain and America would search beyond this edge of the known world to learn Franklin's fate--and perhaps to claim for themselves the glory of discovery of the Northwest Passage. The newspapers eagerly reported any news. (The Franklin expedition's lingering doom, which probably included cannibalism, did not become known until 1859.)

Allusions to the Arctic and even to Franklin himself are in Thoreau's published writings both before and after 1852. These allusions can be seen, for example, in A Winter Walk, Natural History of Massachusetts, Walden, and the Journal. Though none of these writings mentions Upernavik, Thoreau used the Arctic winter landscape as a metaphor to connect Concord with the world of physical danger and human aspiration. He also saw how the migrations of birds made a swift biological link between Concord's life and Arctic landscapes.

A view of North America from space links both the Humphrey Hunt lot in Easterbrooks Country (west of Cape Cod, which is just visible in the aerial) and Upernavik (in western Greenland). Franklin sailed west across Baffin Bay and disappeared up Lancaster Sound, a presumed gate to the Northwest Passage.

The English explorer and admiral, Sherard Osborn, whose book on the first Franklin search Thoreau had been reading earlier in 1852, vividly stated the case for secular courage as his own searching expedition passed beyond Upernavik:

"Now for the Northwest! we exclaimed,-- its much talked of danger,-- its chapter of horrors! As gallant [explorer] Frobisher says, 'It is still the only thing left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and remarkable.' As it was in Frobisher's day, so it is now, unless Franklin has accomplished it, and lies beset [frozen in the ice] off Cape Jakan-- and why may it not be so?" (Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from An Arctic Journal, New York, 1852, p15)

Thoreau made a metaphorical connection between the North's secular explorers and his own spiritual quest. For example, in the "Conclusion" chapter of Walden, he makes his own explicit and personal connection to the quest for the Northwest Passage :

" 'Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.'

What does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? Is it a North-West Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost?... Be rather the Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice." (p. 320-21)

And in a wonderful journal entry made in 1852, a few months prior to the Hunt survey, he uses the metaphor of places beyond Upernavik to state his life's search—to connect the figurative Bering Straight (off Alaska) and the figurative Lancaster Sound (off Greenland) of thought by traversing the unknown between them and finding the dreamt-of Open Polar Sea, through which mariners (and philosophers!) would sail unimpeded. He writes,

"As I cannot go upon a north west passage then I will find a passage round the actual world where I am. Connect the Bherring Straits & Lancaster Sounds of thought. Winter on Melville Island and make a chart of Bank's Land­ Explore the northwest trending Wellington Inlet­where there is said to be a perpetual open sea­ cutting my way through floes of ice." (4:398, March 28, 1852)

Thoreau recited these evocative place names beyond Upernavik as if they were litany, for each place had been only just discovered by a brave explorer and named after himself, his prince or patron. Naming was an act of significance on many levels; it was not only an act of a discoverer, possessor, or myth creator, it also would bestow a sort of earthly immortality. Thoreau made up his own names for places in the Concord landscape, for, as Channing would later say, "He was compelled to name places for himself, like all fresh explorers" (Channing, 1873, p. 17). In fact, on the draft Hunt survey, Thoreau did name a place. In the middle, he scrawled "Yellow Birch Swamp." And Thoreau wrote in his journal that he had named this mysterious spot of Earth:

"I must call this swamp Yellow Birch Swamp. In the twilight I went through the swamp-- & the Yellow birches sent forth a dull yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster. . . . If there were Druids whose temples were the oak groves-- my temple is the swamp." (Emphasis added. 5:424, Jan. 4, 1853. Click here for photos of Yellow Birch Swamp, a corrected location, and more from journal about it.)

Was it this act of naming that led Thoreau to add the quotation about the last outpost Upernavik on this draft survey?  He could have been reminding himself that surveying in the icy wilds of the desolate Hunt lot was itself an exploration and a quest. In an 1860 letter to H.G.O. Blake, Thoreau makes this quest for the unexplored as central to being human:

"Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. Where is the 'Unexplored land' but in our untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place or his own yard, is 'unexplored land,' You must make tracks into the Unknown. That is what you have your board & clothes for. Let us sing." (Correspondence of HDT, W. Harding and C. Bode, eds., (Westport CT: Greenwood Press) 1974, p. 580, May 20, 1860)

Is there any other explanation that could have led Thoreau to write this quotation about Upernavik on this survey and in such an odd marginal location? (The Upernavik quotation is inconspicuously scrawled in the extreme lower left corner.) One could ask what, for Thoreau, would have been Estabrook's (or Concord's) Upernavik-- i.e., figuratively, its last inhabited spot before the wild? He was still writing Walden, so was this note an author's reminder to himself? Perhaps he thought to link the metaphorical Upernavik to his wintertime house at Walden Pond, from which he ventured forth into a landscape that he would sometimes call Arctic.

And, finally, there may have been a more literal connection to the Walden house. At the time of the survey, the ex-Walden house had been sitting for four years beside the old Estabrook road nearby. After Thoreau left Walden Pond, a local farmer's son had moved Thoreau's former house to the Estabrook country as his own cabin (though it may have been vacated by the time of the Hunt survey). In fact, the relocated Walden house would have been the closest structure to the notation's location, three hundred yards off the lower left edge of the draft Hunt survey. Did he muse, as he left cold Easterbrooks Country at dusk, that his former Walden house had been his personal Upernavik?

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