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By Root 1169 0

see how willing even the most enlightened Victorians were to entertain the idea of some hierarchy of races. Mid-century Britain was transfixed, for example, by the return from the Arctic of the explorer John Rae in 1854. He had set out to discover what had become of the expedition led by Sir John Franklin which had attempted to establish whether a north-west passage to China might exist through the ice floes of northern Canada. Nine years had passed since Franklin – a decent, reliable, if overweight man of fifty-nine – and his carefully chosen crew had set sail. Common sense decreed that all 129 of them must be dead. But, chivvied along by Franklin’s widow, expedition after expedition set forth to discover their fate. Rae returned to England with relics from Franklin’s expedition which he had acquired from Inuits he had met in the Arctic. In a dispatch to the Admiralty he related how the Inuit had described bodies and graves, from which Dr Rae concluded beyond doubt that the expedition had all perished. The imagined spectacle of a hand-picked Royal Navy team freezing to death in pursuit of knowledge, commerce and the spread of civilization was a noble tableau in the great imperial tradition. But the day after his arrival in London, Rae’s report for the Admiralty was published in The Times and, in a single subversive sentence, questioned the entire ‘civilizing’ purpose of the empire. ‘From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles,’ he wrote, ‘it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource – cannibalism – as a means of prolonging existence.’ The suggestion that British explorers might have engaged in a practice from which the empire was liberating the inhabitants of lands it colonized was simply too shocking to be believed.

Charles Dickens, for example, found the accusation intolerable, and argued that it could not possibly be true. There was the question of the reliability of hearsay evidence in a foreign language to start with. There was the example of other Englishmen enduring extreme hunger without eating one another – Captain Bligh, for example, cast adrift by the mutineers on the Bounty. And could the corpses not have been disfigured by bears or wolves? But the most telling argument he advanced in his tuppenny magazine, Household Words, was that it was simply against the natural order of things. Without a shred of evidence he asserted that it was much more likely that the sailors had been attacked and killed by ‘Esquimaux’. Experience showed that ‘savages’ were all very well, and perfectly deferential when the white man was strong. But the moment he appeared weak or vulnerable, ‘the savage has changed and sprung upon him’. British explorers would never resort to cannibalism. But ‘we believe’, he wrote, ‘every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man – lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying – has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature’. This was the antithesis of the idea of the ‘noble savage’, for nobility was the product of civilization. ‘The better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more gigantically improbable the “last resource” [cannibalism] becomes.’ The myth of the twenty-first century is of a Brotherhood of Man. The myth of the imperial age was of a sort of league table of humanity, with the Europeans permanently at the top.

And then along came Darwin. At first glance, a theory about the common origins of humanity might be expected to undermine a belief in European superiority. Instead, the imperial mentality found comfort in the revolutionary doctrine of evolution. The anxiety which racked the Church on discovering that, in Darwin’s resonant sentence, ‘Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin’ did not shake the conviction of superiority very much. Indeed, in The Descent of Man, Darwin