Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  Barrow was the embodiment of the wise old adage that ‘ministers propose but civil servants dispose’. A stroke of Barrow’s pen carried more power than a naval gun battery. His great achievement was to persuade sceptical politicians that exploration would be a worthwhile exercise for the navy, both commercially and scientifically. British authority across the world, he argued, would be further bolstered by gaining footholds in the remaining unexplored regions of the planet. Planting the flag on these blank spots, he postulated, was a solemn national duty.

  His words fell on receptive ears in the euphoric atmosphere of the post-Napoleonic years, when the country believed nothing was beyond the capacity of the all-conquering British Empire. The roots of Britain’s aggressive imperialism of the nineteenth century can be found in the prevailing mood of invincibility that followed the defeat of Napoleon and it was influential men like Barrow who carefully nourished the popular cause of expanding the Empire.

  From 1816 until his retirement in 1845, Barrow coolly dispatched a flurry of expedition ships into the unknown to open up new territories and extend the Empire. He first sent a party into the centre of Africa, but the expedition was a complete disaster, with only a handful of survivors.

  Undeterred, Barrow turned to his real obsession – the Arctic. Despite the apparently logical option of opening up Africa or Asia, he insisted that the focus of exploration had to be on the North West Passage and the North Pole.

  Arctic patriarch, Sir John Barrow, the powerful Second Secretary of the Admiralty and architect of almost 30 years of nineteenth-century polar exploration.

  Barrow’s intervention signalled a significant change in the motivation for finding the passage or reaching the Pole. Attempts to navigate the North West Passage in the sixteenth century had been driven purely by the huge commercial rewards promised by the opening up of lucrative new trade routes to China and India. By contrast, Barrow wanted to launch the nation in search of the North West Passage for the honour of the country. It was national hubris destined to end in disaster.

  At this time, no one had ever stood within 500 miles (800 kilometres) of the North Pole and finding a North West Passage from Europe to Asia across the top of the American continent had defied generations of explorers – mostly British – for nearly 300 years. But Barrow was aware that the Russians were active in the Bering Strait and he won crucial popular support for his plan by declaring that it would be ‘little short of an act of national suicide’ if a foreign navy beat Britain to the passage.

  At Barrow’s behest, the government offered a reward of £20,000 for the first ship to reach the Pacific through Arctic waters – a princely sum worth around £700,000 in today’s terms.

  John Barrow’s judgement, however, did not match his passionate ambition and consuming ego. With an implicit belief in the omnipotence of the Royal Navy, he roundly dismissed the knowledge and experience of Arctic whaling captains or the native Eskimo population as he aggressively framed his plans. Barrow had made only one brief voyage north and it is doubtful he ever saw an iceberg in his life. Typical of Barrow’s philosophy was his firm advocacy of the popular ‘Open Polar Sea’ theory. According to its proponents, the North Pole was surrounded by ice-free and temperate waters and the only challenge for explorers was to navigate the known ice-belt at lower latitudes before sailing unhindered to the top of the world. Once through the pack ice, they argued, it would be plain sailing across the North Pole.

  The ‘Open Polar Sea’ theory was given a boost in 1817 when the highly accomplished whaling captain, William Scoresby, returned to London with reports that 18,000 square miles (28,800 square kilometres) of pack ice between Spitzbergen and Greenland had mysteriously disappeared.

  For Barrow, it was further proof of the ‘Open Polar Sea’. He hurriedly drew up plans to send two naval expeditions north in 1818. One party was to pick a pathway through the pack ice to the North Pole, while a second was ordered to reverse hundreds of years of maritime failure by locating the North West Passage at a stroke.

  The North Pole expedition departed London in April 1818 under the command of David Buchan aboard Dorethea, accompanied by his second-in-command, John Franklin, a 32-year-old veteran of Trafalgar, who took charge of Trent. Unlike vastly experienced merchant seamen such as Scoresby, none of the ships’ officers had ventured into high Arctic waters before. Scoresby’s complaint about the ‘want of experience in the navigation of icy seas’ was contemptuously brushed aside.

  The two ships endured appalling weather in the treacherous seas between the Svalbard archipelago and the east coast of Greenland, and only managed to reach 80° 34' north, near Spitzbergen. Dorethea was leaking badly after a bruising encounter with the ice and, in late August, a disappointed Buchan and Franklin turned for home.

  The voyage to find the North West Passage was equally unsuccessful, but significantly more controversial. Two ships, Isabella and Alexander, were dispatched to Baffin Bay in search of an ice-free passage on the western side of the bay that Barrow hoped would be the gateway to the passage itself and the eventual route to the Pacific.

  In command of the 385-ton Isabella was John Ross, a highly capable but irascible 40-year-old Scot with an array of war wounds to show for his undoubted bravery under fire. Among the 57 men on board Isabella was James Clark Ross, his eighteen-year-old nephew. Lieutenant William Edward Parry, a 27-year-old career officer, was placed in charge of the 252-ton Alexander.

  Isabella and Alexander left Britain with Dorothea and Trent, and the ships separated off Lerwick on 1 May. John Ross took his vessels into the Davis Strait off the west coast of Greenland and entered Baffin Bay. Pushing northwards, the ships battled through thick ice near the entrance to Smith Sound at the top of the bay, where impenetrable pack ice was discovered. Ross immediately abandoned hopes of finding a route to the north.

  Map 3: Canadian Arctic

  Sir Edward Parry, the man who introduced Crozier to Arctic exploration. Crozier travelled on three expeditions with Parry.

  Turning south along the coast of Ellesmere Island, Ross came to the edge of Jones Sound, which threw up another impassable wall of ice and blocked any hopes of venturing westwards. A little further south, the ships came to the mouth of the more-promising Lancaster Sound.

  William Baffin, who discovered the sound in his remarkable voyage of 1616, considered it just another bay and turned away, not realising it was, in fact, the opening of the North West Passage. John Ross made the same mistake two centuries later.

  Though he probed the outer reaches of the channel for a short while in early September, he was reluctant to press further west and instead turned for home. His return was greeted with a storm of controversy. Barrow never forgave Ross’ perceived lack of ambition at not driving deeper into Lancaster Sound and the Scot was never again given command of a Royal Navy ship.

  The baton of leadership in the quest for the Arctic Grail now passed into the capable hands of Parry, a determined and ambitious officer. Over the next few years, he became the dominating force in Britain’s increasingly energetic attempts to discover the North West Passage. When Barrow – undeterred by the failures of 1818 – calmly dispatched another two expeditions to the Arctic in 1819, Parry was put in charge of a fresh attempt to find the North West Passage.

  Meanwhile, Franklin – direct from the disappointment of Trent – was ordered to undertake a mammoth overland voyage to trace the coastal outline at the most northern reaches of the Canadian continent. If possible, the two expeditions were to rendezvous somewhere along the vast and uncharted coastline.

  John Franklin, a portly 33-year-old who first went to sea at the age of twelve, was an unlikely candidate to lead a taxing journey of several thousand miles across barren territory by foot and canoe. He had no experience of trekking or living off the land and was incapable of travelling more than 8 miles (13 kilometres) a day. Seasoned travellers with dogs could move five times as fast in the conditions, but Franklin failed to extend his journeys by learning how
to handle dog teams. More importantly, he was almost totally dependent on either local natives or feckless French-Canadian voyageurs to hunt game for food.

  The Franklin overland expedition became a perfect example of Britain’s heroic failure in the Arctic during the Barrow years. It was poorly equipped and soon demonstrated that naval officers possessed little knowledge of the Arctic environment or the necessary survival skills.

  The expedition was marked by extraordinary courage and endurance, but also by terrible hardship and starvation, murder and execution. It is even possible that some desperate men resorted to cannibalism. Although the expedition managed to cover a remarkable distance of 5,500 miles (8,800 kilometres), much of the territory was already mapped and the cost in human suffering was intolerable.

  Beginning on the western shore of Hudson Bay, Franklin’s party travelled to the mouth of the Coppermine River and explored eastwards along the coast to the appropriately named Point Turnagain. Franklin failed to rendezvous with Parry and only emerged from the ice in 1822 after a three-year ordeal that resulted in the death of eleven of the twenty-man party. Among the dead was a young Irish-born artist, Robert Hood, who was murdered by Michel, an Iroquois Indian in the party. In a brutal example of frontier justice, John Richardson, Franklin’s companion, subsequently executed Michel.

  Game was scarce and starvation gripped the travellers at every stage in the horrific journey. The men were reduced to eating scraps of animal skin or repulsive lichen scraped from rocks, which they called ‘tripes de roche’ (tripe of the rock). Once, they chewed the leather of their own spare shoes and Franklin earned the lasting reputation as ‘the man who ate his boots’. On his return home, he was hailed as a hero and the appalling suffering and wholesale deaths were quietly forgotten.

  Parry, by contrast, enjoyed the greatest advantage that any explorer in the field could possibly desire – a generous slice of good luck. To his credit, he exploited his good fortune and completed one of the greatest of all Arctic voyages.

  He sailed from London in late spring 1819 with provisions for two years and clear orders to penetrate deep into Lancaster Sound, where John Ross had feared to go. He commanded a robust bomb ship, the 375-ton Hecla, which was supported by the 180-ton Griper.

  Parry’s good fortune was that 1819 was an exceptionally easy year for ice and he made remarkable progress, crossing the dangerous waters of Baffin Bay and entering Lancaster Sound in early August. Pushing further west than anyone before, he found considerable new land and caught sight of several new inlets to the south that offered hope of a way through the ice.

  Parry eventually sailed to the end of Lancaster Sound into a broad new expanse of water which he called Viscount Melville Sound. In mid-September, he reached 112° 51' west, his farthest westerly point where he faced a daunting barrier of impassable ice. He called it Cape Providence.

  With the autumnal weather deteriorating fast, Parry hurried back to a bay on the newly discovered Melville Island to establish quarters at a place he named Winter Harbour.

  Parry had mapped around 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) of new territory and was convinced that a passage to the Pacific was achievable when the ice relented the following summer. The prospects, he wrote, were ‘truly exhilarating’.

  Hecla and Griper, however, were not able to escape from the ice of Winter Harbour for ten months. When free, Parry made a fresh attempt to drive westwards and on the distant horizon he discovered Banks Land (now Banks Island). But the ice was as impenetrable as the previous year and with the short navigable season once again closing in, Parry turned for home, finally stepping ashore in October 1820.

  He had penetrated about halfway through the North West Passage and had lifted the veil on more unknown Arctic terrain than anyone before. He was quickly installed as a new national hero, having demonstrated that, with good fortune, it was possible to survive unscathed through the Arctic winter and potentially complete the journey to the Pacific.

  Barrow was invigorated by Parry’s outstanding voyage and did not hesitate to mount another expedition the following year to complete the task. Among those prepared to join his crusade was midshipman Francis Crozier.

  chapter three

  Seizing the Moment

  In the early days of 1821, Francis Crozier was on a downhill slope to nowhere. He was stuck in the dreary routine of Channel peacetime patrol duties and the chances of promotion in the foreseeable future were highly improbable due to the stumbling block of thousands of underemployed naval officers. When his tour of duty on the Dotterel ended, Crozier faced the ignominy of being sidelined on half-pay, a paltry few shillings a day. Entering his mid-twenties and without an obvious alternative career in mind, Crozier had to make a choice; the choice was polar exploration.

  It appears that Crozier, like so many others, was captivated by Parry’s great feats in Lancaster Sound. Parry had somehow made Arctic exploration fashionable and his men were greeted as heroes, fêted by society and rewarded with swift promotion up the navy’s ranks.

  Parry, the first truly heroic figure of nineteenth-century exploration, was a fine example of what polar exploration could achieve for a willing and able naval officer in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. Fresh from his Arctic triumph, Parry’s near-celebrity status brought an audience with King George IV, the freedom of his home city of Bath and an unexpected windfall when an eager publisher paid 1,000 guineas (about £30,000 in today’s terms) for publication of his expedition journals.

  Crozier could hardly fail to notice the distinct similarities between himself and Parry. Both were born into prominent, well-to-do families and both had enlisted in the navy as boys. While the Crozier family had close ties with Ireland’s landed gentry, Parry’s father was an eminent doctor who practiced in the upper echelons of English society. His circle of acquaintances included the great astronomer, Sir William Herschel and Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox inoculation.

  Francis Crozier in his mid-twenties during the years spent exploring the Arctic with Parry. The artist is unknown.

  Parry junior, dynamic and single-minded, was six years older than Crozier and ideally suited to the role of explorer as national hero. He was clean-cut, religiously sound and had learned how to network in the right places from an early age. Soon after returning to London in 1820, he was rubbing shoulders with influential men like Barrow and Sir Joseph Banks, the legendary president of the Royal Society. ‘I already feel that I stand upon higher ground than before’, Parry wrote, as society opened its doors to him.

  In the warm afterglow of the expedition’s return, Crozier took the decisive step of volunteering for Parry’s next voyage to the ice. After the tedium of patrol duties and periods of half-pay, the expedition would give Crozier the opportunity he so craved – the chance to serve the navy. He was a diligent, hard-working young man driven by a clear-cut sense of duty to the Royal Navy. In later life, the woman he loved rejected Crozier’s proposal of marriage on the grounds that he was already married – to the navy.

  Parry clearly liked what he saw when he first encountered Crozier. Parry was fastidious in his choice of officers and often rejected the customary naval practice of handing out postings to friends and the sons of influential men. He preferred to pick men on merit and most of the officers recruited for the 1821 voyage had already been on earlier journeys to the Arctic. While preparing for the trip, Parry explained to his parents:

  I must have the Commander of the second ship and my first Lieut. to be officers in who I place implicit confidence, without which I will not consent either to risk the loss of the little reputation I have gained, or to be cooped up for an indefinite period with people whom I do not like.1

  The mission in 1821, Parry’s second voyage to discover the North West Passage, was to find a completely new route through the ice. Although the first venture in 1819–20 was a great success, the passage west was blocked by impenetrable ice in the Melville Sound area at the end of Lancaster Sound. A fresh tack was requir
ed.

  The likely path to the Bering Strait and the Pacific, he reasoned, lay somewhere further to the south in a parallel and as-yet-undiscovered channel closer to the Canadian mainland. He intended to approach the area from the south by exploring the upper reaches of Hudson Bay, where he confidently expected to find the elusive ice-free passage leading to the west.

  At the Admiralty, Barrow listened carefully but needed little persuasion. Parry’s record in Lancaster Sound made him untouchable and there was also renewed urgency as word reached London that the Russians were again active in the Bering Strait. Nothing was likely to stir Barrow’s blood more than the audacity of foreign intruders stealing British glory.

  Within weeks of Hecla and Griper’s return in the autumn of 1820, Barrow commissioned the new expedition and fully endorsed Parry’s decision to investigate the northern passageways of Hudson Bay. Hecla was overhauled and made ready for the trip, but the sluggish Griper was discarded in favour of Fury, another converted bomb ship of 375 tons and Hecla’s sister ship. Almost all working parts of the two vessels were interchangeable – a sensible innovation allowing men and equipment to be transferred from one to the other if either Hecla or Fury became fatally ensnared in the ice.

  Midshipman Crozier came under Parry’s wing from the very start and was assigned as a junior officer to Fury, Parry’s flagship. Here, Crozier discovered that he was one of the few without any experience of the ice. The most notable figure on board Fury was James Clark Ross, who, at only 21, was making his third trip north. Fury’s officers also included Lieutenants Joseph Nais and Andrew Reid from the 1819–20 expedition, while Hecla’s ranks featured Henry Hoppner from Parry’s last voyage and George Fisher, a newly ordained vicar who had sailed with Buchan in 1818 and who was now enrolled in a dual role of chaplain/astronomer. The only newcomers among the officers were Crozier and the 22-year-old midshipman, Edward Bird. The two debutants to exploration, both quiet and conscientious officers, became firm friends.