Читать книгу Erebus - Michael Palin - Страница 12

CHAPTER 3

MAGNETIC SOUTH

When the recently formed British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Newcastle in the summer of 1838, terrestrial magnetism was high on the agenda. Now, it was felt, was the time to seize the moment – to claim the prize. Once the earth’s magnetic field was understood and codified, compasses and chronometers could be set with absolute precision, and navigation would no longer be an erratic process dependent on clear skies and guesswork. The result would be a nineteenth-century equivalent of GPS.

One of those pushing hardest for such research was Edward Sabine, a Royal Artillery officer who had sailed with Ross and Parry to the Arctic. For the last ten years, as Scientific Advisor to the Admiralty, he had argued vigorously that Britain should use her naval superiority to gather valuable information on the earth’s magnetic field. But he also agreed with the influential Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian nobleman who had made the first studies in geomagnetism on a celebrated voyage to South America in 1802, that only if countries worked together could the world be reduced to a set of clear, empirical, scientific principles.

The theory that linked geomagnetism and navigation had already been developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss, an astronomer at Göttingen University. To make progress towards putting these ideas into practice, Sabine and others argued for a network of observation stations to be set up across the globe, which would report simultaneously. James Clark Ross had discovered the North Magnetic Pole and established its variation from true north. Now, the logical next step was to turn attention to those parts of the earth that remained largely unexplored, in particular the remote southern hemisphere.

Up until now, Antarctic exploration had never been taken very seriously. Much of what was known about the southern lands came from Captain Cook, who in the 1770s had twice crossed the Antarctic Circle – and he had not been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. It was a realm, he wrote, of ‘thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous’. For the most part, the region had been left to individual whalers and seal-hunters.

Nevertheless, such descriptions as came back fed a growing popular fascination. For the Romantics, the Antarctic represented the mystery of the unknown and the untamed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, for example, which was published in 1798, depicts a cursed ship drifting helplessly into the Southern Ocean:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

In Coleridge’s poem the voyage ends in abject disaster. The hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), finds the Southern Ocean a place of all kinds of danger and depravity, from shipwreck to cannibalism. A place of infernal cold and darkness. A place where souls in torment are driven to destruction. The sort of place the Greeks had a word for: Erebus.

As artists and poets were busy frightening themselves and the public, the scientists – as scientists do – were going in the other direction, the direction of learning and logic, of exploration and explication. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the existence or non-existence of a Southern Continent was another mystery to unravel. Now the demands of science and a newly aroused sense of human potential were coming together to begin the unravelling.

There were other motives, too. The eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel pressed the case for the practicalities of a southern expedition at a meeting in Birmingham, laying on something more than mere science. ‘Great physical theories,’ he argued, ‘with their trains of practical consequences, are pre-eminently national objects, whether for glory or utility.’ With this chauvinistic nudge, Herschel’s committee produced a memorial of resolution, which was presented to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

Over the winter the arguments went one way and the other, but on 11 March 1839, Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, finally informed Herschel that permission had been granted for an Antarctic expedition. It was to be a prestigious enterprise. It therefore demanded a leader of the first rank. Fortunately, among those most pre-eminently qualified to lead it were two notable polar explorers: James Clark Ross and John Franklin. One was the man who had turned down a knighthood. The other was The Man Who Ate His Boots.

Ross’s recent career had been covered in glory. Franklin’s, too, had been successful, if a little more muted. In 1825, three years after his first Arctic voyage, he had launched a second overland expedition. During the winter months he had absorbed himself in painstakingly thorough scientific observations. When conditions improved, he had led his men on an exploration of 400 miles of unsurveyed coastline, west of the Mackenzie River. And at the end of the season, having learned from previous experience, Franklin had decided not to risk his men by pushing further, but had returned to London.

Knighted in 1829, and with his reputation as a navigator and expedition leader much enhanced, Franklin was then commissioned in August 1830 to take charge of HMS Rainbow, a 28-gun, 500-ton sloop, with orders to proceed to the Mediterranean. What followed was a safe, solid and successful tour of duty in many of the seas from which Erebus had recently returned. Rainbow had a 175-strong crew and was a much bigger, more impressive ship than any he had commanded before. Franklin, the most affable and sociable of men, was seen as an accessible and humane captain. Life on board was so congenial that the ship acquired nicknames like ‘Franklin’s Paradise’ and ‘The Celestial Rainbow’.

Franklin’s social skills also helped nurture Britain’s relationship with the newly independent Greek state and ease local factional disputes, at a time when the Russians, previously an ally of Britain and France, were supporting an unpopular provisional government, and the allies were looking to install their own man as the new king of the country. After a prolonged search the British and French head-hunted an eighteen-year-old Bavarian prince called Otto, the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and by all accounts a bit of a drip. He did, however, award Franklin the Order of the Redeemer, for his help.

Franklin enjoyed everything he saw of Ancient Greece during his tour of duty, but was profoundly unimpressed by the new Greece, which he regarded as corrupt and leaderless. Having done his best to adjudicate on various local disputes, he must have been relieved to get back home to Portsmouth at the end of 1833, just in time for Christmas. Virtue had its reward, though: in appreciation of his efforts, the new king, William IV, decorated him with Knight Commander of the Guelphic Order of Hanover.

Franklin’s private life during these years had been marked by tragedy. In 1823 he had married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, and they had had a daughter (also called Eleanor), but just five days after he sailed on his second Arctic expedition, his wife had died from tuberculosis. By all accounts a remarkable, much-admired woman, she had known that she wouldn’t survive, but had insisted that her husband should press ahead with his plans. Four years later, on 4 November 1828, he had married again. Jane Griffin, the daughter of a lawyer, was quick, clever and energetic, and had been a close friend of Eleanor’s. Franklin’s biographer, Andrew Lambert, speculating as to what she saw in the portly explorer, concluded: ‘a romantic hero, a cultural icon, and it was perhaps this image that she married.’ And it was protecting and elevating his image that was to preoccupy the rest of Jane’s life.

Back from the Mediterranean, Franklin was respected, happy in his new marriage – but at a loose end. There was no new posting to go to, and for the next three years he was effectively unemployed. It must have been a deeply frustrating time for him. Then, in 1836, a new opportunity arose, in the form of the lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land. It was, admittedly, something of a poisoned chalice. The previous governor, George Arthur, had brought in social reforms that had upset many of the small community there, and left it unhappy and divided. But for Franklin and his ambitious wife, the offer must have come as something of a godsend. After several years of enforced idleness, here at last was a new opportunity for him to display his talents. He accepted with alacrity, and the couple set sail later that year, arriving in Hobart in January 1837.

What Franklin wasn’t to know was that just over a year later the Admiralty would be looking for an experienced polar explorer to lead an expedition to the Antarctic. Had he been aware, would he have accepted the post in Van Diemen’s Land? As it was, his absence from England at the critical moment effectively ruled him out as a candidate. The Admiralty had no hesitation in offering the job to James Clark Ross, whose Arctic experience and discovery of the North Magnetic Pole embodied the navigational and scientific qualifications they were after. And he was available.

***

Having secured Ross’s services, the Lords of the Admiralty looked around to find ships worthy of this ambitious venture. Bomb vessels had been the Royal Navy’s craft of choice for extreme exploration as long ago as 1773, when two bomb ships, Racehorse and Carcass (the name for an incendiary shell), had been converted for an expedition to the North Pole. They had reached the Barents Sea before being turned back by the ice. By now, there were only two bomb ships left as realistic candidates for Antarctic duty. One was HMS Terror, strengthened and rebuilt after a ten-month battering in the ice on George Back’s Arctic expedition in 1836 and 1837. The other, currently riding on the River Medway at Chatham, had never been further than the warm waters of the Mediterranean. But she was slightly bigger and more recently built than Terror, and she became the unanimous choice to be the flagship. After nine years of premature retirement, and nearly fourteen years after she had been cheered down the slipway at Pembroke, HMS Erebus was set to become one of the most famous ships in history. On 8 April 1839, James Clark Ross was appointed her captain.

Within two weeks of the expedition being confirmed, Erebus was put into dry dock at Chatham to have the coppering on her hull, which had been in place since her Mediterranean patrol duty, removed and replaced. The traditional trappings of a warship were dismantled to give her cleaner, more functional, more weather-resistant lines. Three levels on the top deck were reduced to one, with the removal of the raised quarterdeck and forecastle, giving a single flush deck. This would provide extra storage space for the nine auxiliary boats that Erebus was to carry. These ranged from 30-foot-long whale-boats to a 28-foot-long pinnace, two cutters and a 12-foot gig, intended essentially to serve as the captain’s private taxi. More space was created by dispensing with most of Erebus’s weaponry. Her twelve guns were reduced to two and the redundant gun-ports filled in.

Her transformation from warship to ice-ship was supervised by a Mr Rice at Chatham Dockyard. So thorough was it, and so impressed was James Clark Ross, that he included Rice’s memorandum of work on Erebus in his published account of the expedition. Which is how we know that her hull was strengthened with 6-inch-thick oak planking, increasing to 8 inches at the gunwale, to make a 3-foot-wide girdle around the ship; and that the deck was reinforced with 3-inch-thick planks laid fore and aft, and with additional planks laid diagonally on top. ‘Fearnaught, dipped in hot tallow’ was laid between the two surfaces (fearnaught was a thick felt, installed as insulation). Lower down the hull, the doubling narrowed to 3-inch-thick English elm. The remainder of the ship’s bottom, down to the keel, was doubled with 3-inch Canadian elm. Extra-thick copper was used to cover the bow from water-line to keel. Anything projecting from the stern was removed, including the overhanging quarter galleries. The ornately patterned carving on her bow, which was a feature of all warships, however humble, was stripped away. Decoration was sacrificed to utility and durability.

During the summer of 1839, as the sawyers and ropers, sailmakers, carpenters and smithies worked away at Chatham, James Ross was busy picking his officers. His unsurprising choice for his second-in-command and captain of the Terror was the Ulsterman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, with whom he had sailed so often on bruising Arctic expeditions that it was said Ross was one of the very few people allowed to call Crozier ‘Frank’.

Crozier, three years Ross’s senior, was one of thirteen children from Banbridge in County Down, a few miles south of Belfast. His birthplace, a handsome Georgian townhouse built in 1796, still stands. His father had made money in the Irish linen industry, and Francis would have had a comfortable, strongly religious upbringing (in time his father changed his allegiance from Presbyterian to the Protestant Church of Ireland, moving from radicalism to the establishment). One of Francis’s brothers became a vicar and the other two went into the law. But because his father was keen to get one of his sons into uniform and was prepared to pull some strings at the Admiralty, Francis himself was taken into the Royal Navy on 12 June 1810, at the age of thirteen.

Over the years he impressed all who worked with him. No less a figure than John Barrow endorsed him warmly: ‘A most zealous young officer, who, by his talents, attention and energy, has succeeded in working himself up to the top of the service.’ That Crozier never quite reached the top is a mystery. Something in his personality seems to have held him back: a lack of sophistication, perhaps, a lack of confidence ashore, an awareness of his limited formal education. His biographer, Michael Smith, describes him as ‘Rock solid and reliable’, but goes on to say, ‘Crozier was born to be a number two.’

Edward Joseph Bird, thirty-seven, was chosen as First Lieutenant of Erebus. He too had sailed with Ross, latterly as second-in-command on HMS Endeavour on one of Parry’s expeditions. Bird was described by Sir Clements Markham, a Victorian geographer and explorer and for many years President of the Royal Geographical Society, as ‘an excellent seaman, unostentatious and retiring’. He was bearded, with prematurely receding hair brushed forward and a marked resemblance in build and general chubbiness to John Franklin. Ross trusted him implicitly.

In June, Crozier wrote to Ross in some frustration, concerned that no First had yet been chosen to accompany him on Terror. He seemed not to want to take the decision himself. ‘I myself know not one of any standing who would suit us, however there must be plenty,’ he wrote, adding, somewhat enigmatically, ‘we do not want a philosopher’. At that time the words ‘philosopher’ and ‘scientist’ were often indistinguishable, so it’s not clear whether Crozier was merely indicating a preference for a naval man or signalling discomfort with intellectuals. Eventually Archibald McMurdo, a capable Scot, was chosen to be Crozier’s First Lieutenant. He knew Terror, having been Third Lieutenant on her when she narrowly avoided destruction in the ice on Back’s expedition of 1836. Charles Tucker was chosen as master of Erebus. He would be the man in charge of navigation.

Others on board with Arctic experience were Alexander Smith, First Mate, and Thomas Hallett, purser, both of whom had served with Ross and Crozier on Cove. Thomas Abernethy, who was appointed gunner, was a reassuring presence all round. Though his artillery duties were largely honorific, he was a big, powerfully built man who had been one of Ross’s closest and most trusted companions on many Arctic forays. Indeed, he had been at his side when he reached the North Magnetic Pole.

Thankfully for future historians and researchers, two appointments on Erebus went to men who recorded her adventures in minute detail: Robert McCormick and Joseph Dalton Hooker. McCormick, who had been on the Beagle with Charles Darwin, was the ship’s surgeon and naturalist, a combination that may seem strange today, but was understandable in this pre-pharmaceutical age, when doctors made their own medicine and plants were the main ingredient – in fact, the Apothecaries Act of 1815 had made the study of botany a compulsory part of medical education. He was, as they say, a character, and quite full of himself. On the Beagle McCormick had become increasingly irritated by the freedom that Captain Fitzroy accorded Darwin, who, despite having no official naval status, was often allowed ashore to naturalise whilst McCormick had to stay on board. In the end McCormick got himself invalided off the expedition, to no one’s great disappointment. The irritation had clearly been mutual. ‘He chose to make himself disagreeable to the Captain,’ tutted Darwin, adding, ‘. . . he was a philosopher of rather an antient date’.

McCormick was certainly well read in natural history, geology and ornithology and had at some point impressed – or perhaps pestered – Ross enough to have been assured of a post. So here he was, settling himself and his books, his instruments and his specimen cases onto HMS Erebus. Opinionated as he may have been, his diary offers a precious source of information about her four years in the Antarctic.

Joseph Dalton Hooker was the son of William Jackson Hooker of Norwich, who, through the influence of the ubiquitous Sir Joseph Banks, had been appointed to the Chair of Botany at Glasgow University. William realised from very early on that his son had a precocious talent. At the age of six he had correctly identified a moss growing on a Glasgow wall as Bryum argenteum. By the time he was thirteen he was an obsessive botanist, able to recite long lists of Latin names.

William Hooker, through his wide range of contacts, had heard of the proposed Antarctic expedition and, sensing the potential for a budding naturalist to make his name, used all his influence to get an assignment for his son. This was, after all – for reasons both scientific and commercial – a golden age for botany. As Jim Endersby, Hooker’s biographer, writes, ‘Much of the wealth of Britain’s empire rested on plants’ – from timber and hemp for the ships, to indigo, spices, tea, cotton and opium that they carried. Understanding how, where and why things grew where they did was of immeasurable benefit to the government. It made sense, therefore, to have a botanist aboard the expedition.

As it turned out, the only official position open to Hooker was that of assistant surgeon, and to this end Joseph rapidly qualified as a doctor. But it was clear where his true interests lay. ‘No future botanist will probably ever visit the countries whither I am going and that is a great attraction,’ he wrote to his father. On 18 May 1839, six weeks before his twenty-second birthday, Joseph Hooker received the news that his appointment as second surgeon on HMS Erebus had been confirmed. He would be the youngest man on board.

Throughout the expedition, like his immediate superior McCormick, Hooker kept copious journals, probably encouraged by the example of Charles Darwin. (He told his father that he slept with a set of proofs of The Voyage of the Beagle under his pillow.) As was the practice on publicly financed expeditions, all diaries and notebooks kept on board were seen as the property of the Admiralty and had to be surrendered at the end of the voyage. And, as M.J. Ross, biographer and great-grandson of Sir James, points out, there were no professional scientists on this expedition: all the officers and crew were members of the Royal Navy and were therefore subject to these restrictions. Letters home, however, were exempt from examination, making young Hooker’s copious correspondence with his family all the more valuable. It offers an informality and openness that no official report could contain.

After receiving his commission, Hooker was ordered to report to Chatham Dockyard where, as he records in his journal, ‘I spent nearly four tedious months . . . waiting until the ships should be fully ready and equipped’. He was quartered, or ‘hulked’ as they called it, on an old frigate called HMS Tartar. It was common then to use retired warships as temporary accommodation. Some, like Turner’s famous ‘Fighting Temeraire’, were used as prison ships and had a reputation for being indescribably filthy.

A number of other crew members were similarly hulked on the Tartar, including Sergeant William Cunningham, who was in charge of a squad of Marines, consisting of a corporal and five privates, allotted to HMS Terror. A similar detachment would have been aboard Erebus. The Royal Marines’ role was rather like that of a police force. They were charged with maintaining order and discipline on board, searching for and returning deserters, carrying out punishments, collecting and despatching mail, rationing out spirits, securing the ships when in port, and providing a guard for visiting dignitaries. In addition to all these duties, Sergeant Cunningham kept a daily diary, or memorandum book, throughout the voyage. From his initial entry, we know that he and his men arrived on the Medway on 15 June 1839 and were immediately put to work fitting out the ships.

By the beginning of September, Erebus was fully crewed up, with twelve officers, eighteen petty officers, twenty-six able seamen and seven Marines, making up a complement of sixty-three. About half the personnel were First Entry men – who had never before served in the Royal Navy, but in many cases had seagoing experience on whalers. Provisions and equipment were also brought on board, including warm clothing of the best quality. Last to be loaded was food for the voyage, including 15,000 lb of beef and 2,618 pints of vegetable soup.

On 2 September, Erebus and Terror were inspected by the Earl of Minto, First Lord, and three senior Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Final instructions were received from the Admiralty on the 16th, and three days later Erebus and Terror moved downriver to Gillingham Reach, where compasses were adjusted and last provisions taken on board. Ross’s mother and father had come down from Scotland to see him off and they stayed on board as the ship continued down the Thames. Unfortunately, they had only reached Sheerness when they ran aground in low water and had to be towed the next morning to Margate by the steamship Hecate. Here they remained waiting for the westerly winds to abate, and for one of the anchors to be replaced – Ross fulminating, justifiably, but hardly succinctly, against ‘the gross negligence of those whose duty it was to ascertain the soundness of that, on which, under different circumstances, the ship, and lives of all on board, might have . . . depended’. It was not an auspicious start.

For the people of Margate, the presence of this great expedition so fortuitously becalmed on their doorstep was quite an attraction. They came out in numbers to gaze at the ships, and some were invited aboard. No one can have been more warmly welcomed than the naval pay clerks who arrived on the 25th to issue three months’ pay in advance. The rest of the crew’s wages were to be passed directly to their families until their safe return.

On the last day of September 1839 the wind swung round to the east and they could at last head down into the English Channel, dropping their pilot at Deal and continuing south-west, in what McCormick described as ‘boisterous weather’. It would be almost four years to the day before any of them saw the English coast again.

Sailors who had never previously crossed the Equator were traditionally subjected to a line-crossing ceremony. William Cunningham, aboard Terror, vividly described his own experience on 3 December 1839: ‘I was sat down on the Barber’s chair, and underwent the process of shaving by being lathered with a paint brush – and lather composed of all manner of Nuisance that could be collected in a Ship.’