6 - The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon

Summary

The chapter examines one of the most intriguing fiction stories about Greenland’s ‘lost colony’: the Scottish author James Hogg’s The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1837). The analysis shows that Hogg’s novella is loosely based on The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Using this template, Hogg’s story gives narrative form to the colonial anxieties about isolation and succumbing to nature. The story starts out as a romance only later to turn into an account of gritty hardships that ends in final tragedy. Offering an alternative explanation of how the European colonists vanished from Greenland, the settlers (whom the protagonist finds and joins) are eventually overcome and devoured by polar bears. In the last section of the chapter, it is argued that Hogg uses the ‘lost colony’ narrative as a mirror for communities in remote parts of Scotland. This exemplifies how the image of the settlers of Greenland were used in fiction to raise present concerns. Hogg’s novella is the first of many nineteenth-century stories imagining an encounter with the vanished settlers. Such storylines story will be further examined in the chapters that follow.