Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  This lack of fresh game raised the most serious concern for Crozier’s leadership. Although he did not fully appreciate it, fresh meat offered the only hope of the party escaping the fatal grasp of scurvy. A few drops of lemon juice, which provided a little antiscorbutic, merely delayed the inevitable. While the men probably had enough food in their bellies from the daily rations of salt beef or tinned vegetables, the diet lacked any vitamin C. At the very moment Crozier assumed command in 1847, scurvy was beginning to take a fatal hold.

  Exploratory parties leaving the ship for the short trip to King William Island also discovered there were no Eskimos on the west of the island and probably attributed their absence to the shortage of game. In fact, Eskimos were to be found at the southern end of the island along the shores of Simpson Strait, where wildlife was more abundant. But it is highly unlikely that Crozier’s men made contact with Eskimo parties in 1847 and were therefore alone in the wilderness – alone to contemplate their fate.

  The Eskimos have a word for the depression that often afflicts humans during the perpetually dark months of winter in the polar regions: perlerorneq. It means to feel ‘the weight of life’ – a sentiment with a special resonance for Crozier and his beleaguered men.

  It was now two years since the expedition had departed British shores. Few in the country felt any cause for concern and the majority felt it was simply a matter of time before word of a triumphant mission reached London.

  ‘I do not think there is the smallest reason of apprehension or anxiety for the safety and success of the expedition’, James Ross wrote from his study in March 1847. Ross’ upbeat tone typified the general feeling towards the expedition in Britain during the early months of 1847.

  The main voices of dissent were those of Sir John Ross and Dr Richard King, both of whom had expressed serious reservations about the whole enterprise from the beginning. But neither man had the ear of the establishment.

  John Ross did not share the optimism of his nephew James. He had pledged to send rescue ships to the Arctic if Erebus and Terror had not reappeared by February 1847 and by March, with still no word of Franklin and his men, he was demanding that the Admiralty send a relief expedition without delay to reach the Arctic before the 1847 navigable season came to an end. The men, he warned, were facing the dire prospect of a third winter in the ice unless they were rescued that summer.

  John Ross was so concerned that he volunteered to come out of retirement and personally lead the rescue, despite being only a few months short of his seventieth birthday. However, the pleas of John Ross fell on deaf ears. The Admiralty took little notice, preferring the more politically acceptable advice of men like Barrow, Parry and James Ross.

  Even further removed from the seat of power was Dr King, a man the polar establishment regarded as an irritant. But King would not be silenced. In 1847, two years after Franklin and Crozier sailed, he insisted that the expedition had come to grief on the western shores of Somerset Island – the waters of Peel Sound where Erebus and Terror had sailed in 1846. His solution was to send a rapid relief force up Back’s Great Fish River, which would bring the rescuers to an area around King William Island and the west coast of Boothia Peninsula where, he insisted, the ships were trapped. King also warned ministers that, without relief, the expedition faced a potentially serious outbreak of scurvy.

  Map 10: The actual route of Erebus and Terror, 1845-48.

  The Admiralty consulted its Arctic experts over King’s assertion. Parry dismissed King as a self-publicist and warned that ‘it would be scarcely safe to follow his views’ on where to send relief. The official view on the expedition within government was reflected in a civil-service memo sent from the Colonial Office in June 1847, the month Crozier took command:

  The Admiralty and those persons who are qualified to form an opinion on the matter, do not entertain at present… any apprehension concerning the fate of Franklin and his party.1

  James Ross was undoubtedly best placed to judge the expedition’s state of affairs. He knew more about the ice than anyone else alive and was familiar with the mindset of Crozier and Franklin. But his judgement on this occasion was sadly mistaken. He stuck with his bold assumption that there was no need to worry, despite the absence of any word from the Arctic. He rejected the concerns of people like King and his uncle John, explaining:

  Captain Crozier was staying with me at Blackheath nearly all the time the expedition was fitting out, and with Sir John Franklin I was in almost daily and unreserved communication respecting the details of the expedition, and neither of them made the least allusion to any such arrangements or expectations beyond mentioning it as an absurdity what Sir John Ross proposed to Sir John Franklin.2

  Ross’ blasé comments echoed the general sentiments of the Admiralty as well as those of the Arctic Council, a special group of the navy’s most senior men who masterminded Arctic affairs.

  The Arctic Council, which included men like Ross, Parry, Bird, Richardson and Back, was the best informed and most experienced centre of excellence the country could muster and was unanimous in advising against mounting a relief expedition in 1847.

  The Arctic Council also advised against a rescue when submissions came from within the naval establishment. The most ambitious scheme was submitted by Captain Frederick Beechey, who urged a two-pronged relief expedition. One party, he suggested, should follow Erebus and Terror’s proposed route through Lancaster Sound to Barrow Strait and another would approach from the south by way of Back’s Great Fish River towards the King William Island area. His plan, which bore a striking resemblance to King’s proposal, was never implemented.

  Unknown to all concerned, some measure of relief was tantalisingly close at hand in the spring of 1847. John Rae, the Scot, made a remarkable overland journey in 1846–47 that brought him within striking distance of the doomed Erebus and Terror. But at no time did he realise their peril.

  Rae, the most accomplished overland traveller of the age, trekked well over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) to the east side of Boothia Peninsula, mapping hundreds of miles of new territory and living almost entirely off the land. In mid-April 1847, Rae stood at Lord Mayor’s Bay on the east coast of Boothia. On the other side of Boothia, less than 200 miles (320 kilometres) from Rae, Erebus and Terror were motionless in the ice.

  But Rae had no idea the expedition was in Victoria Strait, still less that it was in trouble. Nor would he have been capable of replenishing the food supplies of over 100 men with fresh game on the barren west side of King William Island. At best, Rae could only have alerted the Admiralty to the expedition’s plight.

  On board Terror, Crozier must have watched in silent horror as the summer of 1847 came and went without the two ships being released. A third winter in the ice was inevitable. Little had changed in the outlook. The two vessels, locked firmly in the ice, had drifted a few miles to the south with the slow-moving current. As the autumn hours of daylight grew shorter, Erebus and Terror stood about 15 miles (24 kilometres) off the north-west coast of King William Island.

  Crozier prepared his men for the ordeal of yet another winter. Although the food position was not yet critical, it was finely balanced. Supplies were scheduled to run out in the summer of 1848, precisely the moment when Erebus and Terror anticipated release from the ice.

  The winter of 1847–48 was the critical moment for the expedition. It was an appalling nightmare of bitterly cold isolation, growing illness and a mounting casualty rate. The silence was broken only by the battering winds and grinding noises made by the ice. It was an eerie sound that Leopold McClintock once described as like ‘trains of heavy wagons with ungreased axles slowly labouring along’. Jammed in the ice and with little to do but contemplate their fate, the expedition suffered a long drawn out execution.

  The weather was especially severe, with very low temperatures and ferocious winds. Rae reported temperatures down to a paralysing -47°F (-44°C) in January 1847 while camped nearby at Lord Mayor’s Bay. The Eskimo
s gave a vivid account of conditions many years later when they told the American explorer Hall that ‘there was no summer between two winters’ in this period.

  The biting cold provided the backdrop to growing sickness and death on board Erebus and Terror during the winter of 1847–48. Although no medical records were ever found, it is reasonable to assume that, by this stage, the party was struck down by rampant scurvy.

  The condition usually develops in humans after three months or so without an adequate intake of vitamin C, which comes from the antiscorbutic value of eating fresh meat, vegetables or fruit. Vitamin C cannot be stored by the body for long periods. Although the onset of scurvy varies from person to person, the condition is usually fatal after a period of six months or more.

  All that stood between Crozier’s party and the inevitable onset of scurvy were the small doses of lemon juice or occasional slices of fresh game. Unfortunately, the vitamin-C level in lemons declines with age and severe cold also reduces the effectiveness of lemon as an antiscorbutic.

  Some analysts have claimed that the party was also weakened by lead poisoning caused by the crude lead solder used on the tins of meat and vegetables which is thought to have leaked into the contents. Any exposure to high levels of lead would have accelerated the decline in health, with symptoms ranging from fatigue to irrational behaviour. A post-mortem on the three men buried on Beechey Island in 1846 – carried out 140 years after their deaths – showed abnormally high levels of lead in their systems, but the results were inconclusive.

  Scurvy was the probable cause of the rapid decline in the party’s condition during the awful winter of 1847–48. Towards the end of winter, the decline was being measured in the numbers of dead and seriously ill. By April 1848, only eleven months after Lieutenant Graham Gore had left his cheerful ‘All well’ note on King William Island, one in five of the expedition was dead. The 24 fatalities – nine officers and fifteen seamen – were already the highest number of deaths ever experienced on a British polar expedition.

  A third of the officers who sailed from London were dead – among them Lieutenant Gore. Most if not all the surviving 105 men were also badly affected by scurvy. They would have displayed the tell-tale signs of blackened gums, loose teeth, bleeding, diarrhoea, severe tiredness and breathlessness.

  The mounting toll presented Crozier with the gravest crisis of his life. As winter slowly passed, he had ample time to consider the two realistic options for survival: remain on Erebus and Terror and hope the ice relented in the summer, or take the desperate step of abandoning the ships for a perilous march across the ice.

  Neither choice offered much hope, but with food stocks declining and summer escape by no means certain, a decision simply had to be made. It is likely that the ice forced Crozier’s hand. It must have been apparent to Crozier that Erebus and Terror would never be freed from the ice. Perhaps they were lying on the beam ends, waiting to be crushed by the inescapable pressure of the ice slowly grinding the vessels against the shores of King William Island and Boothia.

  Hoping that the summer thaw of July or August would free the ships was dangerous if, by then, the men were too ill or too hungry to march should the ice not relinquish its grip. Where once it was possible to measure provisions in terms of years, the party could now calculate their rations in a matter of weeks and days. By the spring of 1848, scurvy had probably reached epidemic proportions and another winter in the ice was unthinkable.

  On 22 April 1848, Crozier took the momentous decision to abandon Erebus and Terror and set out to walk to freedom with over 100 men. Leaving the ships in late April, though a desperate gamble, showed that Crozier was thinking sensibly. From experience, he understood that the best times for travel in the Arctic are the weeks of late spring, when the ice is still firm underfoot and before the warmer weather of mid-summer breaks up the floes and creates soft and slushy conditions laced with dangerous lanes of open water.

  It was these treacherous conditions that Crozier had witnessed first hand in 1827 as Parry and Ross made their exhausting attempt to reach the North Pole. They had made their journey in July and August, the warmest but more dangerous time to travel over the Arctic ice. Crozier evidently did not want to make the same mistake.

  Anxiety about the missing men crept up very slowly on the naval establishment in London. In November 1847, as Crozier faced the 24-hour-a-day darkness of another Arctic winter and a rising tide of death, the penny dropped. Finally shaken from complacency, the Admiralty and the Arctic Council suddenly burst into action. Hurried plans were made to send three separate expeditions in 1848 to search for Erebus and Terror.

  Two ships under Ross would be sent to Lancaster Sound, two others would go to the Bering Strait and an overland party under Richardson and Rae was ordered to probe the Mackenzie River area. At the same time, huge rewards were offered to anyone finding the lost ships. An incentive of £10,000 was offered to whoever could locate Erebus and Terror in the Arctic labyrinth and the princely sum of £20,000 would be awarded to the man who rescued the party. In today’s terms, £20,000 is worth close to £1,000,000.

  The Plover, the first ship sent in search of Erebus and Terror, left England in early January 1848 on a mammoth journey around Cape Horn to approach the Arctic from the Bering Strait. Some hoped they would discover that the missing ships had completed the passage and were already celebrating in the Pacific.

  Captain T.E.L. Moore, Plover’s captain, carried personal letters to Crozier from members of his family and a slightly apologetic note from Ross, who evidently felt pangs of guilt about not embarking on the search a year earlier. In a letter addressed to ‘My Dear Frank’, he told Crozier: ‘The Admiralty have behaved throughout with admirable liberality and I am sure will leave nothing undone that ought to be done.’3

  An advertisement for the government’s offer of £20,000 reward to whoever found the missing expedition. In today’s money, this is worth around £1,000,000.

  The sentiment was echoed by Ann Ross, who also wrote to Crozier, saying: ‘It will be a satisfaction to think that the government has not been dilatory on this occasion in arranging a very complete system of communication with you.’4

  The Admiralty initiative sparked another furious row with the increasingly strident Dr King. He dismissed the seaborne searches and insisted the overland trek of Richardson and Rae was being conducted too far to the west to find any traces of the men. He again demanded that relief be sent up Back’s Great Fish River to the area around King William Island and Boothia. To King, the Admiralty plans for relief relied too heavily on Ross’ mission to Lancaster Sound, which he called ‘a single throw in the face of almost certain failure’. In an impassioned plea to the Colonial Office at the end of 1847, King wrote: ‘It is a hard thing that 126 men should perish when the means to save them are in your Lordship’s power.’5

  The Admiralty, acting on the advice of Ross and others, ignored King’s proposals and continued preparations with its own plans for a three-pronged attempt to find the explorers.

  By any standards, the Admiralty was cutting things fine. The expedition’s provisions were scheduled to run out at precisely the moment Ross was expected to arrive in the area. The overland trek of Richardson and Rae and the approach from the Bering Strait were unlikely to reach their goals in the summer of 1848. Dr King’s warning of ‘a single throw’ at relief was accurate.

  But while King agitated, the general public seemed blissfully unconcerned. At around the time that Ross, Richardson and Back left Britain in early 1848, The Times was proclaiming: ‘We do not ourselves feel any unnecessary anxiety as to the fate of the ships.’

  chapter nineteen

  Breakout

  The long, slow death march of the 105 survivors from Erebus and Terror began on 22 April 1848 – Easter Saturday. Some may have linked the feast of Christ’s resurrection with their own ambitions.

  The party took to the sea ice and travelled about 15 miles (24 kilometres) across the broken ground to the
shores of King William Island. At its head, Crozier must have realised that the chances of all 105 surviving were already very slim.

  The north-west coast of King William Island was a desperately bleak and austere starting point for a mission of survival. The men came ashore near Victory Point, the spot first reached by Ross in 1830. Leopold McClintock, who visited the site a decade after Crozier, wrote of it:

  Nothing can exceed the gloom and desolation of the western coast of King William Island. [It] is for the most part extremely barren and its surface dotted over with innumerable ponds and lakes.1

  Thousands of miles away in England, the main relief expeditions were finally underway. Rae and the 60-year-old Richardson left Liverpool on 25 March, while Ross and Bird sailed on 12 May, less than three weeks after Crozier abandoned Erebus and Terror.

  James Ross, so sanguine about events only a few months earlier, had come out of retirement to search for his friends, thereby breaking his promise to his wife. He took command of the 450-ton Enterprise, while Captain Bird – Crozier’s old colleague from their first Arctic expedition – took the 400-ton Investigator. Also on board Enterprise was John Robertson, the surgeon who had struck up a close friendship with Crozier during the Antarctic voyage on Terror.

  The voyage was a complete failure. Enterprise and Investigator arrived in Arctic waters too late in the season and by September 1848 were halted by the ice on the edge of the Barrow Strait. The party was frozen in for eleven months at Port Leopold on the northern coast of Somerset Island, hundreds of miles to the north of where Crozier’s party was fighting for its life.

  During the winter, foxes were trapped alive and fitted with copper collars carrying details of the relief expedition before being released into the wild in the faint hope that the men of Erebus and Terror might capture the animals. The futility of depending on foxes to find men lost in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Arctic wilderness summed up the hopelessness of Crozier’s party.