Mapping “the voyage North Pole-wards” and Imperial Rhetoric in R.M. Ballantyne’s The Giant of the North and William Gordon Stables’s Wild Adventures Round the Pole

This comparative analysis of R.M. Ballantyne's The Giant of the North and William Gordon Stables's Wild Adventures Round the Pole will demonstrate that, in the late 19th century, British polar adventure narratives elude conventional maps, and as the characters explore uncharted regions of the Arctic, the fictional texts themselves become literary maps leading to an imperial North Pole. This article examines the limits of Western cartography of the Arctic, which reveals several layers of cartographic uncertainty in the narratives. It then focuses on how the characters develop alternative and more dynamic mapping strategies reflecting the ever-changing icescape. Finally, this study shows that the success of the dash to the North Pole reveals the ambivalent colonial overtones of juvenile adventure fiction. This section includes an analysis of the illustrative map featured in Ballantyne's The Giant of the North and focuses on the