The British author Ian McGuire’s novel The North Water, is a historical fiction situated in the late 1850s and telling of British whalers in the Arctic Ocean, its main story being set in and around Baffin Bay, the stretch of sea and ice between the east coast of Canada and the west coast of Greenland. This chapter discusses McGuire’s contemporary novel against the historical background of British exploration of the Arctic Ocean. It discusses McGuire’s realist narrative and its literary images with the help of visual poetics, and analyzes McGuire’s text as a reflection on the complex relationship between human language and non-human nature.