The Northern Route: Arctic Infrastructural Promise and its Temporality

In the mid-1800’s, a global effort to ensure connectivity through cable telegraphy had commenced, but Europe and Northern America were not yet connected. The first catastrophic attempt in 1858 raised doubts as to whether it was even technically achievable to draw a submarine telegraph cable across the vast Atlantic ocean. In this setting, an alternative plan, The Northern Route, was proposed: London and New York would be connected through a cable across the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. In this paper, I follow this never realized plan to connect Western trade capitals via Arctic territories, and show how widely varied actors were mobilized by the promises of The Northern Route: government officials from Denmark, Britain and US, maps, entrepreneurs, ships, arctic explorers and the British Royal Geographical Society. I argue that a central lens through which to understand the historical development - or dismissal - of Arctic infrastructures is that of ’cryo-history’ (Sörlin, 2015). Narratives of ice differed widely between communities, and the negotiation of such epistemologies of ice in the Arctic played a key role in enabling or disabling infrastructural development. Finally, I ask what we can learn from the case study of The Northern Route? What do past arctic infrastructures, and especially their dead ends, tell us about the temporality of the hopes and fears attached to such infrastructures?