Post: #1

Some incredible stories of survival are well known, and other less so. Still others have been covered up entirely by the silt of time. I came across one such story in a long out-of-print volume of nautical lore, and was surprised that it had remained so obscure. The experience of Bruce Gordon, who spent years trapped on ice floes in the unremitting hostility of the far north, is an achievement of survival that perhaps exceeds that of his tropical counterpart, Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk, readers may recall, was the real-life inspiration behind Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe.

Bruce Gordon has been forgotten. He deserves to be better known.

In 1757 a young Scotsman named Bruce Gordon signed aboard the whaler Anne Forbes for a cruise from Aberdeen, Scotland into the rich whaling grounds of the North Atlantic.  The waters around Iceland and Greenland were at that time choked with ice floes descending from the polar seas; and experienced mariners knew that navigating these waters could be extremely dangerous. In the span of a few hours, a ship could find itself surrounded completely, and from there carried off with the drifting ice; or it might be crushed by shifting ice masses.

The captain, Emmet Hughes, was neither prudent nor sober, preferring the whiskey bottle to the sound advice of his first mate, who cautioned him repeatedly that sailing too far north was risking disaster. Early successes in capturing whales spurred Hughes on to greater and greater follies of navigation, and he plunged ahead, oblivious to the dangers around him.

What the mate feared eventually happened. The Ann Forbes was caught in a current and swept into a treacherous expanse of ice. A fog descended over them, and immense pieces of ice began to press against the ship’s hull. The crew lost control of the ship, and it was smashed between two colliding icebergs. Gordon, who happened to be on lookout in one of the ship’s masts, was thrown onto one of the huge sheets of ice surrounding the ship.

The ship vanished beneath the shifting ice floes, taking all hands with her. Gordon alone survived, but he had nothing with him except a pocket Bible. His only hope for survival would be to reach the ship and try to live off its provisions until he could be rescued.

He eventually found the ship, which had overturned; its undamaged keel was elevated from the surface of a large ice floe, frozen firmly in place. But how to get inside the hull, and to the provisions and shelter inside? He scavenged an old boat hook and harpoon from the debris around the wreck and bored his way into the ship. Making his way to the captain’s cabin, he located salt biscuits and a cask of spirits; then, overcome with exhaustion and the desperation of his situation, he drank himself into a stupor. He awoke, bleary-eyed, to the sound of what he believed were human noises. But these were not the sounds of men.

Gordon peered out of the hole he had made in the ship’s hull and was immediately seized with terror. The ship was surrounded by huge polar bears, apparently attracted by the scent of the whale blubber stored in the hull. They were also eating some of the corpses of his shipmates, and Gordon was even able to identify one or two by the clothing strewn about the ice. He tried to scare them off by making various noises, but this seemed only to attract them to him that much more. To secure himself, he lashed forks and knives to an iron grate, so that they were projecting outward, and sealed the hull entrance he had made.

He now began to assess the dimensions of his situation. He nearly gave himself over to despair. He was alone, with no one to assist him, and he had no idea how he would get himself out of his situation. Why could I not have died like the others, he asked himself. For several nights, he remained in an alcoholic fog, the casks of rum providing little relief.

Finally, he pulled himself together and formed a plan of action. If he could get into the ship’s forecastle and hold, where there was coal and other provisions, he believed he could spend the winter on the ice. But where was he? While he was drifting constantly, he assumed himself to be somewhere between Greenland and the North Cape.

Many days of scavenging in the freezing cold yielded up clothing, an old musket, tools, coal, gunpowder, linens, large quantities of rum and brandy, and food. Gordon eventually learned how to make fire and carry the smoke out of the hull with a makeshift flue. One night, during a blizzard, a polar bear forced its way into the cabin; Gordon could hear it munching greedily on his biscuits. He flew at the animal with a torch and large carving knife; and the terrified brute lodged itself helplessly in the entrance from which it had entered. Gordon stabbed it repeatedly, and it fell down dead, its blood spilling all over the frozen cabin floor.

Gordon skinned the beast, sliced away its meat, and preserved its hide as a rug.  It was a large female, and had recently been nursing. That night, another sound came at his door. It was a small, starving female polar bear cub, attracted by the scent of its mother; Gordon took pity on it and brought it into his cabin, where it immediately identified the hide of its mother.

He nursed the wretched animal back to life with bits of whale blubber, glad finally to have a living companion, however insensate and brutish. He named her Nancy. The animal soon took to following Gordon everywhere, imitating him and answering to her name, showing a degree of affection for him quite uncommon for her man-eating species.

As she grew larger, he taught Nancy to fish for him. She even protected him from roving bands of polar bears. On one occasion, she nearly died in combat with other bears while she and Gordon were hiking among the ice floes. Gordon knew that he was drifting aimlessly on the ice, and that at some point he would have to venture out into the sea to try to make for land. But without any training in navigation, he doubted his ability to accomplish this. On several occasions, Gordon and Nancy did encounter remote parties of native seal hunters, but Nancy’s roars always made them believe Gordon to be just an apparition. No man could be “friends” with a polar bear, they were certain.

After various adventures, Gordon’s ice floe drifted to the northern coast of Greenland, and he fell in with a small tribe of natives. Most of them were women. There were thirty-one women and only ten men; the rest had perished through the rigors of hunting and fishing. He and Nancy made a bizarre appearance, but Gordon was able to offer the natives something useful by sharing the spoils of the Anne Forbes wreck with them. One night, Nancy simply vanished; he never saw her again.

He knew he would never return to civilization unless he took the bold step of launching upon the open sea. His chance came unexpectedly one day. Spotting a large vessel on the horizon, he decided to risk the open water, setting off in a sealskin canoe and paddling furiously. He paddled until he nearly collapsed. He finally caught up with the ship—the Briel of Amsterdam—and was taken aboard.

The crew were shocked at the appearance of this sunburnt, bearded foreigner, dressed in sealskins and weeping with joy. From the ship’s captain, he was horrified to find out that he had been away from Scotland for just over seven years. Gordon eventually made his way back home, and there found that his story was initially greeted with skepticism and hostility.

Like Marco Polo, who endured years of taunts from his fellow Italians with the epithet “Marco Millions,” Gordon discovered that he was now a stranger in his own country.  Eventually, as knowledge of the polar waters and its topography grew, the details of his account came to be confirmed. His resilience, honesty, and endurance eventually won over his countrymen, just as these same qualities had allowed him to triumph over the shifting snows and ice of the Arctic Circle.  He eventually rose to high standing in his community, a figure respected by all. His crucible of suffering had been his redemption.

Read More: The Fears Of Being A World Traveler

Posted on Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:00:16 +0000 at http://www.returnofkings.com/45643/adrif...uce-gordon
Comments: http://www.returnofkings.com/45643/adrif...n#comments

Post: #2

I doubt that this account is true. The nearest thing I could find to a historical account was a novella written by James Hoggs, which is clearly fictional. A modern edition can be read here:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/arts...Gordon.pdf

From the editor's notes of the above:

Quote:Hogg mentions an older account of the polar regions in his letter to William Blackwood of 5 January 1828 (in NLS MS 4021, f. 271), John Harris’s
Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca: or a compleat Collection of Voyages and Travels, consisting of above four hundred of the most authentick writers. This was first published in London in two volumes in 1705, and later in a revised version with additions by Dr. John
Campbell in 1744-1748. According to his letter Hogg had used several incidents from this in writing an earlier article of ‘polar curiosities’. A different source of inspiration, firmly echoed in the very title of Hogg’s tale, is of course Daniel Defoe’s classic account of the experiences of a shipwrecked mariner, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. There is much to be said elsewhere about Hogg’s
sources for this tale, transformed as they are by his distinctive sense of the fantastic and vivid imagination into ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’

I also find it highly unlikely that such a tale of daring could languish in such extraordinary oblivion - there do not seem to be any contemporary accounts. And this in a time when Robinson Crusoe-style stories were extremely popular. The only other sources I could find for this account are children's books, which are obviously based on the James Hogg version.

I'd appreciate it if the book from which Quintus Curtius' account is drawn could be disclosed, as I'm curious as to what the truth of this matter is.

Post: #3

My source for this story is the book "Sea Disasters and Inland Catastrophes", by Edward Rowe Snow. Snow devotes a whole chapter to the Bruce Gordon story. He claimed to have researched this story extensively in Scotland and was certain of its truth. The book also has illustrations, and I'll try to post some of them here. I have no reason to believe the author would have "made this all up."
Snow is a reputable author, who produced a large number of historical books about the days of sail and exploration.

Post: #4

I tried to upload a couple photos I took of the 19th century engraving illustrations from Edward Rowe Snow's book. The book itself can be bought on Amazon if you're interested. The photo files are too big to upload here but I can forward them to you by email if you're really interested.

The author, Snow, spends a whole chapter of his book (chapter title is "The Polar Crusoe") on Bruce Gordon. He says he researched it thoroughly.

Post: #5

I just found another book that was written about the Bruce Gordon story of Arctic survival. It is entitled "The Upside Down Ship" by Don L. Wulfsson, published in 1986.

Here is the link:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12120..._Down_Ship

I have never seen this book, never read it, and did not use it as a source for my article. (I only used Edward R. Snow's book, cited in previous posts).

I only mention it to try to convince Thomas the Rhymer that the story is not apocryphal.

Post: #6

Thomas:

As often happens in history, truth is stranger than fiction.

In case you're interested, here are photos I took today of some illustrations from E.R. Snow's Sea Disasters And Inland Catastrophes (1980 edition). They accompany the author's chapter on Bruce Gordon's story.

They appear to be reproductions of lithographs from an earlier text.

Post: #7

Here is another photo.

Post: #8

Unfortunately my library does not have a copy of the Edward R Snow book.

I will summarise my findings as of now:

- Between 1757 and 1837 there does not seem to be any record of this adventure or the Anne Forbes

- In 1837 'The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon' by James Hogg was published after his death in a collection entitled 'The Brownie of Bodsbeck, and Other Tales.' The story is clearly a homage to Robinson Crusoe and is clearly meant as a work of fiction, with several prepublication drafts with differing details.

You can read the original published story on Google books:
http://books.google.co.za/books?id=bLMLA...on&f=false

- Between 1837 and 1980 there is no independent record of this story

- In 1980, Edward R Snow published an exceedingly similar narrative in his book 'Sea disasters and inland catastrophes.' However, the name was changed to Bruce Gordon.
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/disasters-inland...0396079083

- in 1986, a children's book called The Upside Down ship was published, which is clearly based on the Edward R Snow version of events with a hero called Bruce Gordon.
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Upside-Down-Sh...0807583464

- in 1989, a children's book called The Ice Hermit was published with a hero called Allan Gordon, so it appears to based on the James Hogg version of the story.
Amazon link:
http://books.google.co.za/books/about/Th...edir_esc=y

In other words, there is no independent source that I can find of this story between 1837 and 1980. Since the only source of this narrative is a work of fiction, it appears for now that Snow knowingly or unknowingly adapted a fictional story as actual history.

As I said, I unfortunately do not have access to Quintus' source, nor do the images turn on google search. In order to figure out what's going on, I'd appreciate it if Quintus could look at his source and answer the following questions:
- Does Edward R Snow give a source for this story in his book?
- Is there a name given for the illustrator of the images?

If I can at least get a source, or even just the illustrator, then we could figure out if there is some common source that was used by both Hoggs and Snow that would explain the similarities of their stories.

Post: #9

Snow's book doesn't have any citations, unfortunately. It's just narrative. I assume those lithographs were taken from some earlier book or source.

I'd like to know what's in that other book I listed here, "The Upside Down Ship" by Wulfsson. It might be worth buying. Unlike Snow's book, it looks like a book written specifically about the Gordon story.

Post: #10

Thomas:

I've done some more looking into the geneaology of this story.

1. Regrettably, Edward Snow does not cite any sources in his book. The illustrations also do not have any illustrator named. They do have the look of a 19th century British magazine serialized illustration, though. My guess is that Snow used them from some earlier source.

2. In the chapter of Snow's book (the chapter is titled "The Polar Crusoe") that deals with Gordon, Snow begins with a story of how he first learned about the Gordon story when he was in Aberdeen, Scotland during the Second World War. He said he came across the story in a nautical bookshop there. He also says that he conducted research on the story and was convinced it was true.

3. Wikipedia actually has an entry for "Allan Gordon". Here it is:


Allan Gordon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For those of a similar name, see Alan Gordon (disambiguation).

Allan Gordon (born c. 1740-?) of Aberdeen, Scotland, was the sole survivor of the Anne Forbes, a whaling ship that disappeared without a trace in 1757.

Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Sole survivor
3 In fiction and modern-day media
4 Notes
5 References
6 Further reading
Early life[edit]

The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon by James Hogg reportedly preserved the autobiographical accounts of Allan Gordon to schoolmaster John Duff. According to the accounts, Allan was the son of Adam Gordon, a farm worker. Allan was born in "a small cottage three miles above" Huntly, Scotland.[1] Adam Gordon taught his son to read but not write. He then arranged for his son an apprenticeship to a tailor of Huntly, starting c. 1751.

The tailor was reportedly a "little crooked wretch"[1] who repeatedly took out his anger on his apprentice in the form of physical and psychological abuse. After nearly a year of maltreatment, Allan refused to take another beating. Subsequent arguments amongst the pair escalated into physical fighting and, on one particular day of violence, Allan left his employer unconscious on the ground. On that same day the 12-year-old Allan left Huntly for Aberdeen.

Allan first found employment as a cabin boy and later as a sailor, which remained his occupation for the following five years. By this time Allan had reportedly become attached to the "nautical life" and enjoyed visiting new cities with every voyage.[1] He joined the crew of the Anne Forbes for the first time in 1757. John Hughes, captain of the Anne Forbes, was described by Allan as a "drunken rash headlong fool" of an Englishman.[1]

Sole survivor[edit]

Allan was only 17 years old when the Anne Forbes hit an iceberg in the Arctic fog somewhere off the coast of Greenland. According to the amazing story Allan told when he returned to Aberdeen in 1764, he was thrown from his lookout point onto the iceberg by the force of the collision.

The Anne Forbes, soon after apparently sinking, resurfaced (presumably due to air trapped in the holds of the ship) and was eventually forced onto an underwater ledge of the iceberg where it quickly froze in place. Allan lived for some time in the imprisoned ship before finally escaping. This is remarkably similar to the events that transpired in September of 1854 when noted explorer Captain Elisha Kane's ship, the USS Advance, sank in the Arctic seas.

In fiction and modern-day media[edit]
Allan Gordon is the main character of Arthur J. Roth's book The Iceberg Hermit.

The Adventures of Allan Gordon is the name of a song by The Fall of Troy. On their 'Live At The Paradox' EP (back when they were called The Thirty Years' War) Guitarist Thomas Erak made reference to 'The Iceberg Hermit' before playing the song.

Notes[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b c d http://www.english.stir.ac.uk/centres/Al...Gordon.pdf
References[edit]
Hogg, James (1987), "The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon", in Hughes, Gillian, Altrive Chapbooks 2, Stirling: The James Hogg Society, pp. 1–57, retrieved 14 June 2010
Further reading[edit]
Roth, Arthur J. (1974). The Iceberg Hermit. New York, NY: Scholastic. ISBN 0-590-44112-4


4. According to Wikipedia, the Hogg account was an attempt to transcribe the polar survival experience of Allan Gordon. Hogg was claiming to preserve an "oral history" given to him by someone else. So, according to Wikipedia, the story was not intended to be fictional. It apparently was a sincere attempt to preserve a piece of oral history in an entertaining way. In those days, this type of thing did happen. I feel confident that if someone could actually go to Scotland and check nautical records, they would find that such a ship named "Anne Forbes" really did exist. In those rude days before mass media, it is possible that something like this could happen.

5. Snow himself is a reputable author and wrote a large number of stories dealing with travel and nautical themes. I have to assume that he would have been able know a true story from an untrue one. His book was published in 1980 and no one, as far as I know, has ever questioned it. I don't find it so strange that there is not a huge amount of literary documentation on this story. There are a great many strange historical stories that have never found a voice. It is not uncommon.

6. What I don't understand is why Snow used the name "Bruce Gordon" rather than "Allan Gordon". Maybe he went by two names? I don't know.

Post: #11

The narrative of Bruce Gordon is clearly fiction, and is adapted from the fictional tale of Allan Gordon. Quintus Curtius has been duped.

- The existence of lithographs do not prove that the story is true, even fairy tales can be illustrated.

- The Upside Down Ship is a children's book which clearly uses the Snow version of events. I'm not going to chase after a children's book for verifiable historical information.

- The story is rather extraordinary and therefore requires extraordinary evidence, of which there is none.

- Snow was in his eighties when his volume was published, his old age could possibly have hampered his critical thinking. It is also possible he came across an early draft copy of the Hogg's manuscript and accidentally thought that it was in face a true story.

- A poorly written wikipedia entry does not prove the existence of the story. I've read the wikipedia entry. It cites James Hogg's fictional story as history. Someone possibly started as a joke or else they misinterpreted the story as being true.

- That the James Hogg narrative is fictional is clear from the existance of multiple draft versions of the manuscript which are in the national Scottish library. They differ in details, especially in the opening, suggesting a person composing a work, not loyally transcribing someone else's story

- The James Hogg narrative is clearly a homage to Robinson Crusoe - the opening paragraphs are very similar, the story follows a similar arc (lone survivor lives off a shipwreck, tames a local savage into a loyal sidekick, is trapped for years, encounters native tribes, is finally saved)

- The events and most of the names between the Allan Gordon narrative are pretty much the same as the Bruce Gordon narrative, so this isn't a case of fiction accidentally emulating history; it is more like a word for word rip-off. Since Snow's account is published after Hogg's story, it's clear who ripped off who.

- The events themselves are suspicious. How did Gordon maintain his body temperature when in a drunken stupor, without a heat source? How did Gordon not develop scurvy over the years of his isolation? How the hell did a polar bear cub survive off whale fat, when it needs mother's milk for adequate nutrition?

In summary, Quintus is helping to perpetuate a myth. The burden of proof is on Quintus to prove this story is true, or else to withdraw it in the face of rather overwhelming evidence that this story is fictional.

Post: #12

Actually, Thomas, the burden is on you to prove that the account is a hoax. You are the proponent of the theory that the story is false. Thus, the burden of the production of such evidence is on you. Your suspicions do not constitute evidence.

It looks like what we have here is a story that is pretty thin, but nevertheless based on fact. If you are claiming that Snow and myself have been "duped", then you need to provide conclusive evidence of this. Your suspicions, although reasonable, do not constitute the evidence needed to demonstrate the story's falsity.

It is true that the story is quite thinly documented. But many true-life accounts from that era are too. That doesn't prove anything one way or another.

Consider:

1. You are claiming that Hogg's work is "clearly" fictional. Clear to whom? Just because you believe it to be fictional, does not make it so. Snow apparently thought it was based on fact. Wikipedia considers it based on fact. This writer, Hogg, was a respected Scottish writer. According to the Wikipedia entry, Hogg was preserving an oral account. I know you think this is not true, but Snow apparently believed so, and Wikipedia believes so. So, there is a difference of opinion on this.

2. You try to discredit Snow by claiming he was "80 years old" at the time of the writing of his book and may have been senile. Again, this is not a solid argument. Further investigation shows that Snow had actually published his account of Gordon's adventures as early as 1959. It looks like he published the Gordon story in an earlier book, also. See this newspaper release from the Toledo Blade from 1959:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=13...387,778723

3. If the story is a hoax, why is there no record of anyone refuting it for 200 years? Why did no one try to refute Snow from 1959 until the present? Why did no one attack Snow in 1959? In 1980? You have not addressed these questions.

4. You have questioned why Gordon didn't come down with vitamin deficiency diseases during his time in the Arctic. But it's clear from the account that he did have the help of native Greenlanders. He actually lived in one of their communities for a time. So, it is absolutely believable.

5. You have questioned the veracity of a polar bear following Gordon around. All I can say to this is that even the most ferocious animals can be somewhat "agreeable" when trained from a young age. Lion tamers, zookeepers, and animal trainers all can verify this. There are documented stories of lions being raised in captivity and then being released into the wild, and then recognizing their old human comrades.

6. As the Wikipedia entry states, there is a modern analogue to the Gordon story. Apparently, in the 1850s there was another seaman who endured a similar fate when his boat was caught in the ice. This is the Elisha Kane story from 1854, cited above. So, the fact pattern is plausible.

So, the bottom line is that until I see something more solid than just suspicions, we cannot say that the story is a hoax. What sort of proof would refute the story? If there was no record anywhere of a ship in Scottish insurance or nautical registries named "Anne Forbes"...that might be something.

Bottom line: all I've seen so far is just your suspicions and innuendo. That's just not enough.

Post: #13

(10-17-2014 01:44 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  In summary, Quintus is helping to perpetuate a myth. The burden of proof is on Quintus to prove this story is true, or else to withdraw it in the face of rather overwhelming evidence that this story is fictional.

Hey concern troll, u mad?

Post: #14

Consider the following:

From an editor of James Hogg's writings, she notes that there are multiple versions of the opening:

Quote:Hogg originally wrote after this ‘having been sent to me as a curiosity by the Earl of Fife to whom I have to express my grateful acknowledgement’, and then changed the latter part of this to ‘the late ingenious Duchess of Gordon in a quarto vol. among many other curious relics copied for her Grace by a clever amanuensis. I expressed my acknowledgements to her long ago and now thus publicly acknowledge it once again’. This is also deleted: Hogg’s clear uncertainty about the supposed method of transmission to adopt for his tale, and the fact that Blackie and Son’s corrector of the press seems to have made his longer deletions at the proof stage rather than on the manuscript, makes it probable that Hogg himself scored out this passage.

If James Hogg was loyally taking down a true story, why is he so intent on making different versions of it?

(source: http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/arts...Gordon.pdf )

Secondly, the work is clearly treated as fiction by scholars of James Hogg's work who belong to the James Hogg society. Here is an in depth analysis of his work, looking at the themes and inspirations for this fictional story:

Quote:In some ways the final text in this group, James Hogg’s novella The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon, appears most conventional from the modern point of view (although, as a plot summary will suggest, it is conventional only in terms of its nineteenth-century polar aesthetic). There is a wide range of sources for this story, including Robinson Crusoe and Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa, and Hogg’s Arctic influences include accounts of the Ross and Parry expeditions and William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions. The latter three texts contribute to and draw on the polar sublime as, of course, does the Rime of the Ancient Mariner which Hogg’s narrator quotes several times.

The Surpassing Adventures is concerned with the interaction between a culturally specific consciousness and the spatial unknown. Allan Gordon continues to reiterate that he is “bred a tailor” and from Fife, and to explain his actions and reactions by reference to these circumstances, while he lives on a wreck off Greenland with a polar bear as his partner and provider. It is explicit that identity is culturally constituted and that a culturally-constituted identity exists in irreconcilable apposition to strange and sublime Arctic landscape. Egede’s obvious influence on this text lies in ways of imagining the lost Norse Greenlanders, with whom Hogg’s hero lives for a season. Hogg echoes Egede’s interest in domestication, but his version is a self-conscious response to the epistemological threat posed by Arctic strangeness.

The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon is such a rare text that a plot summary may be useful. It is a first person narrative “as taken down by John Duff schoolmaster” after the narrator’s return from Greenland. Allan Gordon tells of his apprenticeship to a brutal tailor whom he eventually assaults. After this he runs away to sea and relates that “In 1757 I entered on board the Anne Forbes for the Greenland whale fishery”. The drunken captain makes for Spitzbergen and then follows the fish north until the ship’s magnetic instruments fail and he tells the crew they are at the North Pole. They disbelieve him “for in fact there was no pole or pillar of any kind to be seen,” but they are alarmed by “nothing but a calm open sea and the sun beating on us all the four-and-twenty hours.". The circling sun makes navigation impossible and the mate remarks in alarm that “this place is like the new Jerusalem there is no night here and no star to be seen and glad would I be to be out of it”. When they do leave, the ship is crushed by the ice and Allan Gordon is the sole survivor. He lives in the wreck on rum and brandy until polar bears begin to harass him. He kills a female bear and its cub appears in his room, hungry. Allan befriends the cub, naming it Nancy, and they live together happily until the wreck drifts and they find signs of human habitation. Allan and Nancy track down these people, the last forty-one Norse Greenlanders and the only survivors of repeated raids by cohorts of malevolent polar bears. They join the colony, which has taken to polygamy and a corrupt form of Christianity based on fear of and enmity towards bears. Allan takes several wives, of whom Nancy is jealous, and when the other bears make their final raid on the community Nancy saves Allan and takes him to the shore, from which he is able to reach Iceland.

The bears clearly personify the physical and epistemological threat posed by the Arctic, and in this context Allan’s relationship with Nancy encodes a response to this threat. (The word “Arctic” derives, after all, from the Greek Arktos, bear.) Penny Fielding has written of this story that “arctic explorers felt themselves to be confronting a space that was peculiarly liable to resist discourse” and that contemporary polar explorers “describe arctic travel as the colonisation of the unknown by a newly scientific mode of exploration”. Hogg’s account of Arctic landscape certainly supports a reading in these terms. This is a beautiful place with a strange destructive agency where the ice itself has designs: “after struggling on for four and twenty hours longer we perceived another field of ice before us which likewise seemed approaching us for the floating ice was crushing up before it and rolling over it”. The lack of punctuation and run of present participles emphasise the sense of movement and disorientation here, setting the scene for Allan’s relationship with the ice. As winter comes to an end he fears the breaking up of the ice because,

I never knew aught about the seasons nor troubled myself calculating about them which I knew would be to no purpose for suppose the winter is all one night yet the fact is that there is no night at all in those arctic regions, at least on the white blazon of ice where I was. There is no pitch dark winter night such as I have often seen in Strathbogie . . . . There was often a white frost fogg brooding over the ice through which I could not see objects at any distance still it was quite light where I stood.

The comparison with the properly regulated days and nights of home shows how strange and unnerving are the polar light levels. This is a place without time and thus, without navigation, almost without space. There is no real point in going anywhere because there is no way of knowing where you are or where you are going.

However, Allan Gordon offers at least two forms of resistance to this “space that was particularly liable to resist discourse.” The first is simply that of pleasure. Nancy’s ability and constant readiness to catch fish protect him from the fear of starvation that rightly haunted most polar travellers, and her company provides insulation from the horror of a direct and sustained encounter with the destructive unknown. So provided, Allan describes drifting on an iceberg as “reposing at my ease or walking in awful sublimity on the top of a lofty mountain moving on with irresistible power and splendour”. Even while lost and covered in frost with “no other guide save to look behind me at my track and see that I kept always on a straight line,” he can note that “The Aurora Borealis made it nearly as bright as day and the scene was truly beautiful the silvery rime that qavered in the atmosphere being all spangled with pale rainbows much more beautiful than a lunar one” . Unlike the authors of many of his sources, Allan can afford not to take the Arctic personally because Nancy’s protection means that he is not immediately threatened by it, and this distance affords space for aesthetic pleasure. His relationship with Nancy is also the basis of the domesticity which – as in Robinson Crusoe – forms a counter-discourse to the themes of disorientation and subjection. Nancy strives constantly to please Allan and eagerly obeys commands; “When she found that she had done any thing that drew forth my approbation she never forgot that again”. After the first winter, during which “her sagacious looks proved an agreeable conversation to me” the couple achieve a form of direct communication and the sexual dimension of the relationship is explicit: “Yes she lay in my bosom and though certainly a most uncourtly mate she being the only one I had I loved her sincerely I might almost say intensely”. They make “A pretty couple . . . . walking arm in arm” and later Allan must wait for Nancy to hibernate before he can embark on his polygamous “amours” with the Norse women. When spring comes, the bear is “kind and affectionate as ever” but when she finds that she has been displaced in Allan’s bed, “her unhappiness was extreme” . “Her moans by night disturbed the whole community” and “There was moreover a gleam of jealousy in her eye toward some of the women which frightened me”. Despite recognising that “I could not leave my wife and my other supposed beautiful inamorata to sleep with a huge white she bear,” “yet I had resolved to do it rather than drive her to desperation”. He dallies and Nancy disappears, returning only to rescue him when the other bears massacre the remnants of the Norse community.

This may be the first but is not the last fantasy about human/polar bear couples in Arctic writing. It bears obvious relation to Crusoe’s relationship with Man Friday and to some extent can be read in a similar way as the triumph of homo economicus over the native representative of strange space, an act of intellectual colonisation by domestication. Crusoe has animals as well as Man Friday in his “little family.” But there is something more masochistic at work – or at play – here. Nancy is still a bear. We are constantly reminded, usually in the context of their caresses or bed-sharing, that Nancy is overwhelmingly bigger and stronger than Allan and can easily hurt him by accident, and in some ways their nights together can thus be seen as prefiguring the eventual deaths of the young Norse women, raped and then “prostrated and devoured” by the ravening polar bears. What Allan achieves in his relationship with Nancy, and what Hogg achieves in his writing of the Arctic, is the arresting ability to live with strangeness, happily to set up home on an iceberg drifting unsteadily at the ends of the earth with a beloved creature that could easily kill him and against which he has no defence. Hogg’s Norse Greenlanders die, essentially, of polarisation, fearing and at last consumed by the frozen shapes that kill, while Allan can cohabit with the sublime, albeit at some (pleasurably paid) cost to his masculinity. He inherits from Egede, and perhaps, at the last, resolves, the dilemma of writing on ice. The fantastic nature of the resolution may seem to reinstate the idea of Arctic resistance to culture, while the masochism of sleeping with a polar bear may approach that of Burkean terror. But domesticity mediates between ice and culture; there is neither terror nor masochism when Allan sits down to a fish supper with Arktos. Hogg reconciles the dichotomy between fantastic cold and fantastic abundance. In poetic terms (and in poetic terms only), he answers Egede.

source: http://www.erudit.org/revue/RON/2007/v/n...816ar.html

Another breakdown of the sources of inspiration for this work. Note that at no point was this story inspired by a 'true story' of a guy named Gordon.

Quote:In the composition of this tale Hogg made use of the great contemporary interest in polar exploration, which indeed he most probably shared. His ‘The p and the q; or, The Adventures of Jock M’Pherson’ for example (edited by Robin W. MacLachlan in Altrive Chapbooks, No. 2 of September 1985, pp. 25-29) mentions the topic in a jesting way, and refers to the contemporary accounts of Sir John Barrow, Sir William Edward Parry and Sir John Franklin. Between January 1818 and October 1822 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine contains no less than eleven articles relating to the pole, and as at this time Hogg received the magazine regularly from its publisher he would be well informed about the latest discoveries. Hogg mentions an older account of the polar regions in his letter to William Blackwood of 5 January 1828 (in NLS MS 4021, f. 271), John Harris’s Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca: or a compleat Collection of Voyages and Travels, consisting of above four hundred of the most authentick writers. This was first published in London in two volumes in 1705, and later in a revised version with additions by Dr. John Campbell in 1744-1748. According to his letter Hogg had used several incidents from
this in writing an earlier article of ‘polar curiosities’. A different source of inspiration, firmly echoed in the very title of Hogg’s tale, is of course Daniel Defoe’s classic account of the experiences of a shipwrecked mariner, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. There is much to be said elsewhere about Hogg’s sources for this tale, transformed as they are by his distinctive sense of the fantastic and vivid imagination into ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’.

We're talking about scholars of Hogg's work who have access to his draft manuscripts and letters, and no one seriously thinks this story is real, it's clearly a work of fiction by a writer with a great imagination.

Edit: I found another scholarly analysis which also claims the account is fictional:

Quote: The fictional Allan Gordon tells how he alone survived the wreck of a whaling ship – rather like the man Briton Riviere would later depict in The Last of the Crew, exhibitedat the Royal Academy in 1883 (now Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow).46 Gordon spends years alone – or at least without other humans – in the Arctic, tempted to cannibalise his dead companions, but saved from this crime by breaking into the ship’s stores. He is threatened by invading polar bears, which do fight over and devour the dead sailors: ‘There were two bears within twelve yards of me, rugging and riving at the body of my late captain, which I knew to be his from the shreds and patches of his clothes that were strewed about’. Standing on their hind legs, ‘they appeared very like naked human creatures’, naked women to be precise, ‘with long brutal heads’. He feels like a murderer when he shoots one female bear, and adopts her orphaned female cub, which becomes his companion. ‘We had slept in the same bed ever since we met’, ‘she lay in my bosom … I loved her sincerely, I might almost say intensely’, and he grooms her, making her ‘as clean as a bride’. Later the bear’s possessive jealousy prevents him from establishing a relationship with an Inuit woman. This strange union does not prevent Nancy from remaining a killer, ‘an indiscriminate destroyer’, in encounters with other humans.She is an emanation of the Arctic itself, which Hogg’s fictional hero tries to describe. Like Church and Noble, Allan Gordon felt he was in ‘the benign and awful presence’ of the deity, ‘in that sublime tabernacle of the ocean … the grandest temple of worship that the world contained’, although every moment fearing annihilation by the ice.Yet what kind of deity might inhabit these terrifying regions, where innocent human life was constantly threatened by natural catastrophe or by the attacks of the bears? Surely not a benign or solicitous one. At the same time, the sexual passion between man and bear makes it impossible to situate man on a moral or spiritual level above that of the brutes.

source: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publicat...olar-bears

Edit: Here I found a massive textual breakdown exploring the themes of Hogg's work. No mention is made of it being true, indeed it is assumed to be fictional: http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/arts...elding.pdf

Post: #15

This is wonderful. I rarely witness a respectful clash of intellects on a topic that interests me.

To you both: