Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  On occasions, Erebus and Terror came to a standstill, waiting for the moment when a gap would appear between the giant bergs before slipping quickly through the opening. At midday on 9 January, the fog suddenly lifted to show the ships in open, ice-free waters. ‘Not a particle of ice could be seen in any direction’, Ross gleefully reported.

  Antarctica: Erebus and Terror battle through ice-filled seas towards Antarctica during the historic four-year expedition of 1839–43. Crozier was captain of Terror.

  Ross and Crozier, ably assisted by a skilled crew, had achieved one of the greatest feats of navigation in the history of exploration. Taking two small wooden sailing ships through the Antarctic pack ice for the first time was an achievement to rank alongside the outstanding exploits of men like Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook. It was a feat put into full context 70 years later by Roald Amundsen, the finest of all polar explorers, when he described the journey as the ‘boldest voyage known in Antarctic exploration’. Writing in 1912, Amundsen applauded Ross and Crozier:

  With two ponderous craft – regular ‘tubs’ according to our ideas – these men sailed right into the heart of the pack, which all previous polar explorers had regarded as certain death. It is not merely difficult to grasp this; it is simply impossible – to us, who with a motion of the hand can set the screw going and wriggle out of the first difficulty we encounter. These men were heroes – heroes in the highest sense of the word.1

  Erebus and Terror had breached the pack and run into open water of what is now called the Ross Sea at 69° 15′ south, where the weather was mercifully clear. Optimists thought it possible that the ships could now sail freely to the South Magnetic Pole and even the South Pole itself. Barrow’s popular ‘Open Polar Sea’, which had proved so elusive in the Arctic, seemed possible in southern waters.

  The optimism was soon dampened. At 2 a.m. on the morning of 11 January, a yell of ‘Land!’ came from the crow’s nest. The discovery, perversely enough, was a blow to the men of the expedition, who suddenly saw the prospect of sailing directly to the South Magnetic Pole disappear before their eyes.

  Ross, aware that his ambition of being the first to stand at the earth’s two magnetic poles had been dashed, recorded his ‘severe disappointment’ at the ominous sighting of land.

  Map 7: Antarctica

  The men could pick out mountains on the far horizon, even though they were perhaps 100 miles (160 kilometres) distant. By late evening, the ships stood off the majestic Antarctic landscape of imposing white cliffs and soaring black mountains. The new territory was named Victoria Land after the new queen and the first identifiable peak, rising to around 10,000 feet (3,048 metres), was named after the estimable Sabine.

  When a long chain of mountains came into sight, these were immediately named the Admiralty Range, with one peak christened Barrow after the Admiralty’s most potent force. Ross called Cape Ann after his fiancée and diplomatically named Coulman Island after his future father-in-law.

  Crozier evoked his Irish roots by naming one headland Cape Downshire and by calling a nearby peak Mount Robinson in honour of Thomas Romney Robinson, the Astronomer of Armagh Observatory.

  The next step was to claim possession of the frozen land for Britain. Erebus and Terror were brought close to the shoreline, passing Cook’s ‘furthest south’ in the process. A boat was lowered so that Ross and Crozier could undertake the ceremony on the mainland, but a thick band of ice blocked their path and the party instead made for a small island a few miles offshore. Symbolically, it was named Possession Island.

  Crozier and Ross struggled ashore in the face of foul weather and lumpy seas to perform the brief 25-minute ceremony, witnessed only by a handful of freezing seamen and countless thousands of disinterested penguins. A flat site was found, which turned out to be a thickly impacted bed of foul-smelling penguin guano. The scent, one crewman recalled, was ‘all but stifling’.

  The Union flag was hurriedly planted in the most southerly outpost of the Empire and officers, shivering in the sub-zero temperatures, toasted the day with an ‘excellent sherry’.

  On board Erebus and Terror, concerned colleagues hoisted signalling flags entreating the party to return to the ships because of steadily worsening weather. Crozier and Ross hurried back into the boats, arriving on board the ships just moments before a dense blanket of fog descended. Even a brief delay on Possession Island would have made their return extremely hazardous.

  Antarctic volcano: the first sighting, in 1841, of Mount Erebus, the world’s most southerly volcano.

  Erebus and Terror resumed their journey and on 23 January passed the record ‘furthest south’ of 74° 15′ set by James Weddell on the other side of the continent in 1823. Extra grog was dished out to celebrate the milestone.

  By 26 January, with the compass needle behaving abnormally, it was calculated that the South Magnetic Pole was barely 174 miles (278 kilometres) away.

  Another small island was spotted on 27 January and again it was decided to risk a landing, despite the dangerous seas. In heavy swell, two boats were pulled towards shore and Hooker was almost crushed when he fell between the two vessels. The landing was promptly abandoned, but the island, an undistinguished 8-mile (11-kilometre) lump of rock poking out of the water, was named Franklin Island in honour of their friend.

  New land burst onto the horizon the following day and was initially named ‘High Island’ because of the distinctly visible mountains. As Erebus and Terror approached, wispy puffs of smoke laced with red flashes of spitting flames were seen drifting from the top of one large mountain whose slopes were covered in snow. It looked like flames pouring from a monstrous iceberg and Crozier and Ross realised they had discovered a volcano.

  The imposing peak, which was named Mount Erebus, is the world’s most southerly active volcano and rises to a height of 12,450 feet (3,795 metres). Alongside stands a smaller, extinct volcano, a 10,600-foot (3,230-metre) peak that was named Mount Terror.

  It was an overwhelming spectacle that Hooker said surpassed ‘anything I could imagine’. He added: ‘There is a certain awe that steals over us all in considering our own total insignificance and helplessness.’

  The jaw-dropping beauty of the landscape could not, however, obscure the reality that the South Magnetic Pole was slipping from their grasp. The Magnetic Pole lay inland to the west, but the ships were confronted with continuous coastline that drove them inexorably in the wrong direction towards the east. They sailed along the shore of ‘High Island’, which was named Ross Island and 70 years later became the focal point for the heroic age of Antarctic exploration with men like Scott and Shackleton.

  Ross Island was also the place where Ross decided to honour Crozier, his able deputy. A striking headland at the eastern end of the island, a little over 10 miles (16 kilometres) from the foot of Mount Terror, was named Cape Crozier. Ross dedicated the site with great affection, writing:

  [It was named] after my friend and colleague, to whose zeal and cordial co-operation is mainly to be ascribed, under God’s blessing, the happiness as well as success of the expedition: under the circumstances we were placed in, it is impossible for others to fully understand the value of having so tried a friend, of now more than 20 years standing, as commander of the second ship, upon whom the harmony and right feeling between the two vessels so greatly depends.2

  Map 8: Ross Island, Antarctica

  The austere, windswept and rocky cliffs of Cape Crozier are home to the most southerly breeding grounds of the Emperor penguin. It was immortalised 80 years later by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his book, The Worst Journey in the World, about Scott’s tragic Antarctic expedition.

  Cape Crozier is a fearsome place, flayed by brutal winds and unimaginable cold. Temperatures on a journey made by Cherry-Garrard in the winter of 1911, which inspired the book’s title, plunged to a bone-numbing -77.5°F (-61°C). The traumatised explorer said he had never heard or felt winds like those at Cape Crozier. ‘I wondered why it did not carry away th
e earth’, he wrote. ‘No words can express its horror.’3

  As Cape Crozier was left behind, Erebus and Terror immediately ran into another astonishing spectacle. As far as the eye could see was a colossal perpendicular wall of ice nearly 200 feet (61 metres) high. To the south, the land seemed to stretch to the horizon in one flat, featureless plain of ice.

  The discovery, even more startling than the volcanic Mount Erebus, was the Ross Ice Shelf, an immense floating sheet of ice the size of France and up to two-thirds of a mile (1 kilometre) thick. In a warmer climate, the area would be a huge bay. Ross called it the Great Icy Barrier because it was quite literally a barrier to his ships in their quest to sail to the South Magnetic Pole or the South Pole itself. ‘We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the Cliffs of Dover’, he lamented. He described the Barrier as a‘ mighty and wonderful object’ that offered the strong prospect of ‘extensive country to the southward’.

  He was correct in his assumption and the later expeditions of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton crossed the Great Icy Barrier in their quests to reach the South Pole.

  Ross inadvertently sparked a huge controversy in the scientific and geographic communities by naming the majestic feature a barrier. Deep divisions emerged in the years after the discovery as to whether the feature should be called by the more geographically correct title of ice shelf or retain the original name of ‘Barrier’ given it by Ross in 1841. The bitter row lasted for over a century and it was not until the early 1950s that it was officially named the Ross Ice Shelf.4

  Disappointed that hopes of sailing to the South Magnetic Pole had now vanished, Erebus and Terror traced another 250 miles (400 kilometres) along the high ice cliffs of the Barrier. By early February, the ships stood at a latitude just slightly over 78° south, the furthest south yet reached by humans.

  Crozier went across to Erebus for talks with Ross about their options. The cold was intense as the short summer season neared its end. Ice formed across the decks and in the rigging and each breaking wave brought a fresh layer of ice. From the masthead, there was no sign of an end to the Barrier and in the second week of February it was decided to halt the voyage east.

  Erebus and Terror retraced their course along the Barrier and at Ross Island were greeted with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics from the smouldering Mount Erebus. A bay running to the southwest of Ross Island was discovered and named after Lieutenant McMurdo, Crozier’s first lieutenant on Terror.

  After a further consultation, Ross and Crozier calculated that the South Magnetic Pole lay approximately 160 miles (256 kilometres) across the mountainous terrain spread out before them. But the season was closing in, with ice building up all around Ross Island, and Erebus and Terror faced the unhappy prospect of getting trapped.

  As the expedition was not equipped for spending winter in the south, orders were given to withdraw to the warmer waters.

  But the return journey through the pack ice was far more difficult than experienced on the inward trip. The ships ran into very heavy ice and when winds suddenly dropped, they were at the mercy of the dangerous sea swell that drove them hard into the closely packed bergs.

  Terror suffered minor damage and both crews were hugely relieved when, on 8 March, the ships emerged into open seas. It had been a testing voyage of high risks, bitterly cold conditions and the severe disappointment of failing to locate the South Magnetic Pole.

  But morale remained remarkably high throughout the trip and not a single man from either Erebus or Terror had been lost or taken seriously ill since leaving Hobart. In a letter carried across to Erebus, Crozier reported, ‘We are here as happy as droves’. In another memo to Ross from his cabin on Terror, he wrote, ‘all get on famously’.5

  Ross took a detour on the run back to Van Diemen’s Land, turning westwards towards an area where Wilkes had reported seeing an impressive chain of mountains. Much to his amusement, Ross found only open sea and discovered no sea bed when he dropped a line over 600 fathoms (1,100 metres) into the chilly waters. Ross, though, was in no position to mock.

  Exploration of the time was not an exact science and distant images, occasionally seen in hazy light for a few brief moments, were often distorted by refraction.

  Ross, too, was a victim of phantom sightings. While in the Ross Sea only weeks earlier, he had charted a range of peaks beyond the Icy Barrier that he called the Parry Mountains. When Scott’s Discovery expedition first travelled across the Barrier 60 years later, it was clearly established that the Parry Mountains do not exist.

  A month after the encounter with Wilkes’ ‘mountains’, Erebus and Terror returned in triumph to the familiar landscape of Van Diemen’s Land. The ships had been gone for five months, had spent 63 days below the Antarctic Circle and had sailed further south than anyone before them. They had also managed the breathtaking feat of navigating the pack ice for the first time and had discovered vast tracts of new land, a live volcano among the new-found mountain ranges and the unforgettable Barrier. But without locating the South Magnetic Pole, the journey was incomplete.

  chapter twelve

  Dangerous Waters

  Hobart was again in party mood on the return of the ‘Two Captains’ in April 1841. John Franklin sailed his official governor’s barge down the Derwent River to greet Erebus and Terror and before long the whole town was in full swing.

  Crozier also renewed his attempts to court Sophy Cracroft, but was once again rebuffed. Sophy politely tolerated his advances, but offered no encouragement. Crozier’s cause was not helped by the absence of Lady Franklin, his strongest advocate, who was travelling in Australia and New Zealand.

  The ‘Two Captains’ were again the centre of attention as they indulged in another giddy round of social events, though what they probably needed most after a long journey was rest. One glittering occasion seemed to run into another as Hobart took full advantage of the visitors, their reputations further enhanced by the brilliant results of their first foray into Antarctic waters.

  The most ambitious but unhappy effort to salute the men was the staging of a specially commissioned play to commemorate the expedition. Unfortunately, the production – entitled South Polar Expedition or the Discoveries of Captains Ross and Crozier – was held at the Royal Victoria Theatre in the seedy dockside area of town and was shunned by Hobart society. Neither Crozier nor Ross, probably on the advice of Franklin, attended the play.

  The local newspaper sardonically observed that the play was ‘evidently much better written than it was played’. It reported that attempts to impersonate Crozier and Ross ‘cast a damp upon the energies of those who represented the distinguished personages’.1 Robert McCormick, surgeon on Erebus, was a little more forthright, declaring that the drama was ‘rather indifferently got up and not much better acted’.

  Poster advertising The South Polar Expedition or the Discoveries of Captains Ross and Crozier, a play staged in Hobart in 1841.

  The highlight of the second season at Hobart came on 1 June when Ross and Crozier threw a gala ball on board Erebus and Terror to thank the town for its generous hospitality. The elaborate and expensively staged evening was the finest ball in the island’s colonial history and proudly remembered in Hobart for many years as simply the ‘Glorious First of June’.

  Erebus and Terror were lashed together close to Government House and Franklin built a special paddock in the grounds to accommodate the fleet of carriages bringing the 300 guests to the ball.

  Visitors approached the vessels along a makeshift gangway made from a line of boats strung together and decorated with flags and wattles, the floral emblem of the island. A large canvas awning was thrown across the ships, with the upper decks of Erebus fitted out as the magnificent ballroom and the dazzling supper tables assembled around Terror’s upper deck. More than 250 mirrors were arranged on the sides of the ships to reflect the flickering candlelight.

  Crozier and Ross entertained guests on Terror with a champagne reception and a sumptuous
supper of English, French and local dishes. Later, the party transferred to Erebus where revellers danced until dawn to the music of the 51st Regiment orchestra and Hobart’s quadrille band.

  One young female guest said the ball ‘far eclipsed anything else that has taken place on Van Diemen’s Land’. In near breathless prose, she wrote to a friend:

  I had the honour of dancing with both Captain Ross and Captain Crozier. I told Captain Crozier that while I was dancing with him the morning of your birthday was dawning. He said he was very sorry that you were not there dancing too!2

  Grand ball: embossed invitation for a ball hosted by Crozier and Ross aboard Erebus and Terror at Hobart in 1841.

  Crozier also provided a surprise for the evening by speaking a few words of Irish to the gathering. Although he is unlikely to have been a fluent Irish speaker, Crozier responded to a formal toast with the common Irish phrase, céad míle fáilte (100,000 welcomes).3

  Cunningham, the marine sergeant, offered a more pedestrian account of the evening. His diary of the following two days read: ‘2nd Wednesday. Clearing away the wrecks – head bad. 3rd Thursday, ditto’.4

  The most poignant moment, however, passed unnoticed. Crozier, as co-host, spent much of the evening on the decks of Erebus and Terror with the main guest, John Franklin. Only five years later, the very decks that echoed to waltzes and quadrilles would be the setting for great personal tragedy for both men.

  Erebus and Terror left Hobart on 7 July for a swift trip to Sydney, where there was a repeat of events in Van Diemen’s Land. A new observatory was put up on Garden Island and the governor, Sir George Cripps, led the brisk round of dinners, balls and public events for the visitors.