Die Nordwestpassage

Millais showed this at the Royal Academy in 1874 with a defiant subtitle: 'It might be done, and England should do it.' The 'it' was the North-West Passage, the sea route over the top of North America that a long line of British expeditions had failed, and often died, trying to find. The old sailor grips the arm of his chair while his daughter reads aloud from a logbook, an Arctic chart spread across the table between them. Millais painted him just as a fresh naval expedition under George Nares was being fitted out for the polar ice in 1875. Behind the sailor hangs a Union flag, and the papers around him are the records of voyages that never got through.