John Ross grew more insistent as departure date neared and he was positively horrified to learn that the Admiralty had no plans to send a relief mission if Erebus and Terror did not emerge from the ice as expected. In desperation, he offered to mount his own relief expedition if the ships did not appear by February 1847, two seasons after entering Lancaster Sound. It was a measure of his anxiety given that, by 1847, John Ross would be a few months short of 70 years of age. But Franklin, irrepressibly confident and reluctant to even consider failure, once again dismissed his concerns. John Ross’ proposals, he rashly concluded, were ‘absurd’.
Lady Jane Franklin had different concerns about her husband. Franklin was tired and struck down by flu in the days before Erebus and Terror sailed. One afternoon, he fell asleep while she was putting the finishing touches to a silk Union Jack for the voyage. He looked cold and Jane threw the flag over his feet. Franklin felt the touch and leapt up exclaiming: ‘Why there’s a flag thrown over me. Don’t you know that they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!’5
The deathly allusion summed up Crozier’s dark mood. The hustle and bustle of preparation and the heady all-round expectation made little difference to his demeanour and even the warm support of Ross did nothing to ease the depression.
In the three months before Erebus and Terror sailed, he lodged with James and Ann Ross at their splendid house in Eliot Place, Blackheath, London. It was a convivial setting with fine views over Blackheath, where he enjoyed the warm embrace of friendship and the type of comfortable family surroundings he had not known since childhood in Banbridge. It was to be Crozier’s last home.
Final home: the splendid Georgian house of Sir James Clark Ross overlooking Blackheath, London, where Crozier lived for three months prior to his final voyage in search of the North West Passage in 1845.
The weeks before departure brought little relief to Crozier. The Admiralty’s insensitive treatment still rankled, while the affaire du cœur with Sophy Cracroft continued to gnaw at him. Sophy was now the permanent companion of Lady Franklin at the Franklin residence in London’s Mayfair and she and Crozier met frequently on the Thames dockside or at one of the formal receptions thrown for the expedition. Only 24 hours before the ships departed, Crozier stood beside Sophy Cracroft and Lady Franklin on the decks of Erebus as John Franklin read Divine Service.
It is thought that Crozier made one final attempt to persuade Sophy to change her mind and become his wife. In the warm glow of anticipation enveloping the expedition, she might have been tempted. But if she was, she resisted. Sophy Cracroft had not changed her mind about marrying a naval captain. Each day, she witnessed at close quarters the torment and worry of Jane Franklin as her elderly husband prepared to sail away for up to three years. Crozier himself noted that Lady Franklin was in a ‘sad state’ in the days before departure.
Sophy Cracroft was not prepared to endure the same state of affairs. In her journal, she coolly observed that Ross, now retired from the sea, had been ‘improved’ by marriage to Ann Coulman.
Nor had Crozier’s prospects improved very much since his first attempts to marry Sophy. His only source of income was naval pay and his promotion prospects were stifled by the surplus of naval officers. He had few possessions and his savings amounted to little more than £100 (about £5,000 today). Crozier, the itinerant sailor, had no permanent home, having spent the best part of 35 years as a wandering servant of the Royal Navy.
It was left to Lady Franklin, who understood Crozier and Sophy Cracroft better than anyone, to sum up the fractured relationship. Many years later, Sir Leopold McClintock, the explorer, asked Jane Franklin to reveal Sophy’s true feelings for the lovesick Crozier. Lady Franklin paused for a moment and replied: ‘The pity is, Sir Leopold, Sophy liked the man, but not the sailor.’6
chapter sixteen
The North West Passage
Adove flew onto one of the masts as Erebus and Terror were towed out of their berths at Greenhithe and into the Thames shortly after ten-thirty on the morning of 19 May 1845. Some hailed it as a good omen. On the quayside, crowds cheered and waved in a final outpouring of national optimism. The roar of approval from the shore was ‘deafening’, according to one of Erebus’ officers.
Crozier, from the decks of Terror, could pick out the presence of Sophy Cracroft, standing on the quay alongside Lady Franklin and Franklin’s daughter, Eleanor. Franklin energetically waved his handkerchief. Crozier kept his emotions in check.
Crozier was subdued and seemed almost detached from the boisterous occasion. In contrast to everyone else on the Thames that day, he was a forlorn, disconsolate figure. Though surrounded by more than 60 men on the cramped decks of Terror, he was overcome by a feeling of being alone. The men on board Terror were all strangers and he soon discovered he had no natural friends or soulmates such as Ross or Bird. While he professed to liking his junior officers, Crozier wrote home to his sisters: ‘We shall never be the same intimate friends as I was with Robertson.’ (John Robertson, a ship’s surgeon, had been his closest confidante during Terror’s Antarctic voyage.) More pointedly, Crozier confessed to Ross: ‘In truth I am sadly lonely.’1
The canny Jane Franklin had also observed Crozier’s despondency on the eve of departure. Crozier, she remembered afterwards, was ‘so ill and dispirited when he left’.2 In one of the last letters he ever wrote, Crozier explained to a friend, John Henderson: ‘Living alone is the great drawback to me but I know well it cannot be otherwise.’3
Erebus and Terror on the River Thames in May 1845 shortly before sailing for the North West Passage.
Crozier’s depression may also account for an altogether different sensation as the ships prepared to sail. Shortly before leaving London, he had an eerie premonition of disaster. Crozier, usually reserved and cautious about revealing his emotions, let his guard slip in a private conversation with the wife of the Arctic officer, Captain Edward Belcher. According to her recollection, Crozier told Mrs Belcher that he did not expect to return from the Arctic.4
The ships, freshly painted and polished, headed down the Thames Estuary and turned into the North Sea for the short trip to the Orkneys, pulled by tugs and accompanied by the transporter, Barretto Junior, under Lieutenant Edward Griffiths. Prophetically, a sudden storm hit the flotilla off the East Anglian coast and they were forced to seek shelter near the port of Aldeburgh.
Days later, the expedition suffered its first casualties. Erebus and Terror carried ten live bullocks on deck, all destined to be slaughtered for fresh meat as soon as the expedition encountered the ice. But four animals perished on the stormy leg up the east coast of England and were replaced when the ships pulled into Stromness in the Orkneys. At a nearby island, one of Crozier’s seamen on Terror was taken ill and invalided home.
During the brief stay in the Orkneys, the officers dined with local islanders, including the family of John Rae, the Arctic explorer who was making a name for himself with his prodigious feats of overland travel. One visitor to Terror reported that ‘A general feeling of sure success pervaded them all.’
Far less sure footed was Fitzjames on Erebus, who made the mistake of allowing four of his sailors to venture ashore prior to departure. Inevitably, the seamen got drunk and managed to smuggle more liquor on board. Fitzjames had to interrupt his sailing preparations to make a thorough search of the ship, wasting over two hours in the process. On board Terror, the more worldly-wise Crozier had refused to allow his men to go ashore in the hours prior to sailing.
Crozier’s mood again turned sour when he learned that the London shopkeepers, Fortnum and Mason’s, had mistakenly shipped his personal stock of tea and sugar to Fitzjames on Erebus, and he complained that
But by some strange accident they discovered my name sufficiently accurate to send me the bill and I was fool enough to pay it from their declaring that the things were absolutely delivered on board.
The ships, weighed down with food and supplies, crossed the North Atlantic in very rough seas and the
first ice was seen off the coast of Greenland on 25 June. Crozier, writing to a friend, reported a ‘very boisterous’ crossing. On the last day of June, the ships crossed the Arctic Circle for the first time.
The general mood on board was optimistic. Franklin, dispensing easy charm and goodwill, was like a kindly uncle in charge of a family outing. Fitzjames reported ‘an incessant laugh from morning to night’ and Lieutenant James Fairholme, a junior officer on Erebus, said Franklin ‘looked ten years younger’. A cheerful Franklin wrote to Parry:
It would do your heart good to see how zealously the officers and men, in both ships, are working and how amicably we all pull together.5
The jolly, self-confident mood even encouraged Franklin to claim that he was a better leader than Ross, a veteran of eight expeditions. In a letter to his wife, Franklin said:
I think perhaps that I have the tact of keeping officers and men happily together in a greater degree than Ross … who is evidently ambitious and wishes to do everything himself.6
Crozier, however, was not convinced. He ran a tight ship and was a more business-like captain than Franklin. Irving, Terror’s third lieutenant, reported that ‘nothing seems to be left undone’ with Crozier in command. ‘Our Captain reads prayers on Sundays’, Irving wrote; ‘I like my skipper very well.’ Although the tightly packed decks and holds of Terror made life uncomfortable, Crozier told Irving brusquely: ‘We have not shipped for comfort.’
Crozier took a thoroughly practical view of proceedings, and began to see Franklin in a different light. Although the two men had developed a good friendship during their spells in Van Diemen’s Land, this was the first time they had been on the high seas together. Watching Franklin close at hand, Crozier’s opinion of the man began to change.
Hardened by two decades of exploration, Crozier realised that Franklin’s avuncular, easy-going style was more suited to an ambassadorial life in a governor’s mansion than in charge of a demanding expedition on treacherous Arctic seas. Franklin was everyone’s friend, when experience had shown Crozier that tough leadership and firm discipline were vital to the success of an expedition.
Shortly before sailing, Crozier had described Franklin as ‘my old and kind friend’, but he took a different view once the expedition. was underway. On observing Franklin’s casual approach, Crozier commented:
Arctic bound: portraits of Francis Crozier, Sir John Franklin and other members of the North West Passage expedition as depicted by the Illustrated London News six years after the men were last seen.
Look at the state our commander’s ship is in, everything in confusion. He is very decided in his own views but has not good judgement.7
To make matters worse, Franklin insisted on frequently inviting Crozier to dine on board Erebus as the ships headed westwards across the Atlantic, a practice Crozier found tiresome. The constant rowing back and forth to Erebus in the rough seas prompted Crozier to tell Ross:
I cannot bear going on board Erebus. Sir John is very kind and would have me there dining every day if I would go.8
Franklin, however, remained blissfully unaware of Crozier’s moods and misgivings. In a letter to Jane Franklin, he noted that Crozier was ‘cheerful and happy’ and content that the ships were making good progress. Noting that Crozier had not made many trips to come on board Erebus, he explained that this was ‘on account of the weather’.
Crozier had other concerns apart from Franklin. One of his last letters was written to a nephew as Terror travelled up the west coast of Greenland towards the Whalefish Islands and shortly before crossing Baffin Bay. The letter reveals a mixture of emotions, ranging from a lingering sense of pride in doing his duty to a clear anxiety about the dangers ahead. He wrote:
All is getting on as well as I could wish. Officers full of youth and zeal, and indeed, everything is going on most smoothly. The Admiralty were exceedingly kind to us, all our demands were readily granted; if we can only do something worthy of this country which has so munificently fitted us out, I will be only too happy; it will be an ample reward for all my anxieties, and believe me Henry, there will be no lack of them.9
Crozier’s greatest anxiety, based on years of experience, was that Erebus and Terror had sailed too late in the season to make real progress towards the North West Passage in 1845. Crozier clearly regarded the first season as crucial to the success of the mission. In a letter to John Henderson, he wrote:
This season [1845] will have a good deal to do with our future operations, if we can only make a good hit at the first it will be most glorious.10
His fear was a grim repetition of the journey with Parry in 1824 when Hecla and Fury arrived late in the season and were forced to endure a long, dismal winter at Port Bowen in Prince Regent Inlet. A year later, Fury was wrecked and abandoned. Crozier expressed his concerns in a letter to Ross, who, more than anyone, fully understood the significance of the warning:
All things are going on well but I fear we are … sadly late. From what we learn the weather has been very severe, with much easterly wind. What I fear from our being so late is that we shall have no time to look around and judge for ourselves but blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 of it.11
The ice was stubbornly thick in the summer of 1845, a sign that the previous winter had been severe. ‘Bergs are numerous this year’, Crozier wrote home.12
On 4 July, Erebus, Terror and the support vessel, Barretto Junior, assembled at the Danish settlement on Disco Island to begin transferring the extra supplies from the transporter. ‘How full we shall be’, Crozier wrote to Henderson. ‘But I am still in hopes that we shall be able to stuff into her three years provisions.’13
Even with the benefit of exceptionally fine weather, it took six days to shift the boxes of supplies and equipment from Barretto Junior to the holds of Erebus and Terror. The men worked fourteen hours a day in dazzling sunlight and Franklin wrote a last optimistic note to Parry, expressing his hope of making Barrow Strait at the western end of Lancaster Sound in the first season:
I think it must be favourable for the opening of the ice and we all feel happy in the idea that we shall be quite in time to avail ourselves of any openings westward of Barrow Strait.
The men wrote their final letters and handed them over to Lieutenant Griffiths on Barretto Junior. Confidence was so high that families and friends were advised to send their next letters to the port of Petropavlovsk on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Griffiths also took with him three petty officers and a marine, who were invalided home, leaving 129 men on board Erebus and Terror to begin the journey proper.
Griffiths sailed on 12 July, cheerily claiming that ‘better fellows never breathed’. In his official communiqué to the Admiralty in London, he reported that the men of both ships were in excellent health and full of confidence.
In the mail bag carried by Griffiths, Franklin’s official correspondence to the Admiralty formally reported that the previous winter in the Arctic had been severe. But, said Franklin, spring was not later than usual and ‘our prospect is favourable of reaching Lancaster Sound without much obstruction’. Franklin also paid full tribute to Crozier and the expedition’s other officers, writing:
It is unnecessary for me to assure their lordships of the energy and zeal of Captain Crozier, Commander Fitzjames and of the officers and men with whom I have the happiness of being employed on this service.
Crozier, he declared, was an ‘excellent instructor and fellow worker’.
Among the correspondence carried in Griffiths’ mail bag was the last letter written by Francis Crozier. Addressed to James and Ann Ross, it was the dark, brooding missive of a troubled man harbouring major doubts about the dangerous undertaking which lay ahead. He wrote:
James, I wish you were here, I would then have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper course. I must have done with this croaking. I am not growling, mind. Indeed, I never was less disposed to do so. I am, I assure you, beginning to be a bit of a philosopher and hope that before the seas
on is over to have so tutored myself that I will fret for nothing … All goes smoothly but, James dear, I am sadly alone, not a soul have I in either ship than I can go and talk to. No congenial spirit as it were. I am generally busy but it is after all a very hermitlike life. Except to kick up a row with the helmsman or abuse Jopson [the captain’s steward] at times I would scarcely ever hear the sound of my voice … Well my dear friends I know not what else I can say to you – I feel that I am not in the spirits of writing but in truth I am sadly lonely and when I look to the last voyage I can see the cause and therefore no prospect of having a more joyous feeling.14
Erebus and Terror, sitting low in the water under the weight of the extra provisions, sailed on 12 July, soon after the departure of the Barretto Junior. The vessels headed north up Davis Strait into Baffin Bay towards the Greenland port of Upernavik, before turning west across the bay towards the entrance to Lancaster Sound. On 19 July, Captain Straiton of the whaler Eagle sighted a pair of three-masted vessels in the distance off Upernavik. The ships, almost certainly Erebus and Terror, were sailing west in latitude 72° 45′ north, close to the same latitude as the entrance to Lancaster Sound.
Erebus and Terror, as Crozier suggested, may well have sailed late in the season but the ice of Baffin Bay was still too thick to penetrate in late July 1845. The ships were forced to hang around on the edge of the pack waiting for a break up. While they waited, Erebus and Terror were joined by Prince of Wales and Enterprise, two whalers working the area. Captain Robert Martin of the Enterprise reported that on 25 July 1845, Erebus and Terror were both made fast to an iceberg in the eastern reaches of Baffin Bay at 75° 12′ north, 61° 6′ west.
Martin, an experienced sailor in his mid-forties, was the most successful whaling master from the Scottish port of Peterhead. He almost certainly knew the expedition’s two ice-masters, Reid of Erebus and Blanky of Terror, both of whom came from the same whaling fleets.
Captain Francis Crozier Page 16