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CHAPTER 4

FAR-OFF SHORES

Erebus was never a graceful ship. Functionally barque-rigged, with square sails on the fore and mainmast and a fore and aft sail on the mizzen, she was not quick, either. With a full wind in her sails, seven to nine knots was about the maximum. But in the expert opinion of her captain’s great-grandson, Rear-Admiral M.J. Ross, she was ‘an excellent seaboat’, which ‘rolled and pitched a great deal, but easily, so that there was little strain on [the] rigging or spars’.

She was soon put to the test. Four days into the journey, while passing close to Start Point, the southern tip of Devon, on 4 October 1839, she ran into thick fog, followed by a gale and heavy rain. The next morning Terror was nowhere to be seen. Less than a week at sea and already the Admiralty’s clear instruction that both ships stay together at all times had fallen foul of reality. This didn’t seem to worry Ross unduly. As Lizard Point, the last sight of the coast of England, disappeared astern, he was in high spirits. ‘It is not easy to describe the joy and light-heartedness we all felt,’ he wrote later, ‘. . . bounding before a favourable breeze over the blue waves of the ocean, fairly embarked in the enterprise we had all so long desired to commence, and freed from the anxious and tedious operations of our protracted but requisite preparation.’

James Clark Ross was a serious and experienced mariner, cautious with emotion. He’d been through all this many times before, but nowhere else does he reveal quite as intensely his great relief at being on the move, away from pettifogging civil servants and pompous ceremonies, with sixty men around him and a job to do. He was heading south for the first time – and a long way south: if all worked out, further south than any other ship had been before. The challenge that lay ahead was formidable, but one that he relished. As he swung Erebus south-south-west, he was indeed master of all he surveyed.

Life on board ship settled into a time-honoured pattern. The day was divided into four-hour watches marked by the ringing of the ship’s bell. Eight bells would be rung at midday, followed by one bell at half-past, two bells at one o’clock, three bells at half-past one, and so on, until eight bells were reached again at four o’clock, when the whole process would begin again. The crew would work four hours on and four hours off, through day and night. The boatswain would stand at the hatches, calling ‘All Hands!’ as the watches changed, and the men would muster on deck before going off to their various stations.

The days began early. Shortly after four in the morning the cook would light the fires in the galley and start to prepare an early pre-breakfast. This would have been some kind of porridge, which would have been downed with ship’s biscuit. The five o’clock watch washed the decks and polished the planks with holystone, whilst others followed up with brooms and buckets, swabbing the decks.

By seven-thirty all hammocks would be stowed, and at eight bells the captain would inspect the work and, if that was approved, the boatswain would pipe for breakfast. (The boatswain’s whistle was a vital part of life on board: it served as the equivalent of a modern PA system, with different cadences conveying different orders.) The main meal would be taken at midday and generally comprised something like hardtack biscuit, salt beef, cheese and soup. A grog ration – a quarter-pint of rum and water for each man – was served with it. At that time, too, if the skies were clear, and with the sun at its highest point above the horizon, measurements would be taken to determine the ship’s latitude. Various other tasks filled the rest of the day, including the checking of stores and equipment, sail-handling and the washing of clothes. In the evening more grog would be served, the fiddles would come out and songs would be sung and jigs danced.

The accommodation on the ship was segregated according to rank, with captain’s, officers’ and warrant officers’ cabins towards the stern, and other ranks further forward. The captain’s cabin ran the entire width of the ship. At the stern end he would have had five lights – or windows – to look out of, each about 3 feet high with quarter-panes doubled up – one frame on the inside, one on the outside. Fanning out from his quarters were the cabins for individual officers: on the starboard side, next to the captain’s bed cabin, was one each for the surgeon and the purser, both about 6 feet by 5 feet 5 inches, with a washbasin in one corner, a table in another and a bed-place with drawers underneath; on the port side were four similar cabins, three occupied by the lieutenants and one by the master. Next to them, running forward, were four single but smaller cabins, accommodating the captain’s steward, the steward’s pantry, the First Mate and the Second Master. They would have had little more than a seat, a cupboard, a scrap of a table and narrow bed-places. Further forward on the starboard side were small individual cabins for the purser’s steward, the gun-room steward and the assistant surgeon (both with bed-places but no washbasins). Next to them, the master gunner, boatswain and carpenter shared a mess room and adjoining communal sleeping quarters, with two bunks and a single bed-space.

Between the rows of cabins was the wardroom, where the officers dined together, served by their own stewards and sometimes joined by the captain. The officers contributed to mess rations out of their own pockets, which ensured that their menu was more varied than that doled out to the rest of the crew. The better-off would have had their own wine and other delicacies. The purser and mates ate separately in their own mess room, also known as the gun-room. A ladderway and main hatch were situated amidships, and beyond them, in the forward third of the ship, was the forecastle, an open area where petty officers, Marines and sailors ate and slept. All except the officers and warrant officers slept in hammocks.

The men would have eaten at tables of four, squeezed either side of the long Sail Bin, where spare sails were stored. They would have used their own seaman’s chests both for seating and for storage of their gear.

Beyond the forecastle was the galley and finally, in the bows, the Sick Room. From the plans of the ship, it seems there were only two water-closets with cisterns. These were located at the stern, flanked by two hen coops, and next to the Colour Boxes, where all the various signal flags were kept in neat compartments. There must have been other toilets, but only the captain’s and officers’ privy is marked.

All in all, there was little room on board and, if you weren’t an officer, almost no privacy at all, but this would have been true of any ship, and indeed of many of the homes that the men came from and which they shared with their often-large families. The key to life at sea was regular activity, scrupulous cleanliness, respect for orders and for the officers who gave them. If that broke down, as it famously did with Captain Bligh on the Bounty, then there was the risk of mutiny. Which is why the detachment of seven Marines on both ships was so important. There were no Marines on the Bounty.

For the most part, however, men on board ship seem to have got on well with one another. A chaplain on HMS Winchester, quoted by Brian Lavery, describes how ‘One peculiar characteristic of society on shipboard is the tone of hilarity, often kept up to a pitch which might elsewhere appear inconvenient and overstrained’, though he adds, ‘It would be, however, a great mistake to conclude, from any apparent levity of disposition, that sailors are a peculiarly thoughtless class. On the contrary, few men are more prone to moods and deep and serious reflection.’ Constant close proximity on board Erebus and Terror inevitably caused some tensions, even among the officers. On Christmas Eve 1839, for example, McCormick, his cabin ‘having become filled to overflowing with the Government collection of specimens of natural history’, got the Second Master to take some of it away and store it in the hold, only to find that First Lieutenant Bird, ‘to whom everything connected with science is a bore . . . ordered it up again, as having no abiding place there’. But such moments of disagreement were the exception rather than the rule.

Ross was the man in charge, but he was still a servant of the Crown, paid by the government and obliged to follow the most thorough set of instructions ever drawn up by the Admiralty. The precise route was carefully prescribed, determined as it was by the programme of scientific observations that lay at the heart of Erebus’s mission. The number-one priority was to visit the locations that would enable measurements of terrestrial magnetism to be taken. After that, there was work to be done making detailed observations of ocean currents, depths of the sea, tides, winds and volcanic activity. Other studies covered such disciplines as meteorology, geology, mineralogy, zoology, vegetable and animal physiology and botany. The one thing the crew were not allowed to do was to engage in the activity for which Erebus had originally been built: ‘In the event of England being involved in hostilities with any other power during your absence, you are clearly to understand that you are not to commit any hostile act whatever; the expedition under your command being fitted out for the sole purpose of scientific discoveries.’

Erebus had been across the Bay of Biscay before, and this time she seems to have avoided the nightmare weather for which it was famous. ‘During our passage across the Bay of Biscay we had no favourable opportunity of determining the height of its waves, as we experienced no violent storm,’ Ross noted, rather regretfully. Terror, on the other hand, was having a less happy ride, having come close to disaster during the storm that separated the two ships off the Devon coast. According to Sergeant Cunningham’s memorandum book, three members of the crew had been pulling in the flying boom – a spar to which extra sail could be attached – when they ‘nearly lost their lives in consequence of the violent manner in which she pitched . . . flying boom men and all completely under water’. It took four days for Terror to catch up with Erebus at their first stop – not a good omen for the voyage ahead.

Nevertheless on 20 October, nearly a month after setting out, the two ships reached their first port of call, the island of Madeira, some 550 miles off the African coast. Here various readings were taken, including the measurement of Madeira’s highest point, Pico Ruivo. A Lieutenant Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition (who, like Ross, was headed for the Antarctic) had recently done his own calculations, and Ross was rather surprised to find that these differed from his own by some 140 feet: ‘much greater than we should expect from the perfect and accurate instruments employed on both occasions’. Later in his voyage Ross would have further reason to question information gathered by Wilkes – and would be rather less polite about the lieutenant.

Erebus stayed in the roads of Funchal for ten days, but her crew were far from idle. Her auxiliary boats were constantly being lowered and raised, ferrying provisions in from the town. One was appropriated by Surgeon McCormick, who proceeded to make several exploratory walks around the island with a local man, Mr Muir.

On 31 October the two ships weighed anchor and made for the Canary Islands. Progress was uneventful, though Ross did record that their trawl nets came up with an entirely new species of animalcula, which, he enthused, ‘constitute the foundation of marine animal subsistence and by their emitting a phosphorescent light upon disturbance, render the path of the ship through the waters on a dark night surprisingly brilliant’. Their time at Santa Cruz, Tenerife, was similarly unmarked by incident, the highlight arguably being the hoisting on board of ‘one live cow’, as recorded by Cunningham. But a passing remark he makes about the next island they visited shows that these islands were not havens of peace and tranquillity. Cunningham may have been able to buy ‘good wine’ and oranges on St Jago, but his note that its inhabitants ‘are or have been, slaves’ serves as a reminder of how recently this appalling trade had dominated the region. Though the trade in slaves had been illegal in the British Empire since 1807, slavery itself had only been banned in 1833. And at the time Erebus and Terror visited, the Royal Navy was still patrolling the waters off the West African coast to intercept slaving vessels – a role that must often have been as horrible as warfare. Christopher Lloyd describes in his book The Navy and the Slave Trade how one officer, boarding a slave ship in 1821, found her crammed so full below decks that her human cargo was ‘clinging to the gratings to inhale a mouthful of fresh air and fighting each other for a taste of water, showing their parched tongues, and pointing to their reduced stomachs as if overcome by famine’.

As Erebus and Terror approached the Equator, they entered the latitudes between the north-east and south-east trade winds. ‘Violent gusts of wind and torrents of rain alternate with calms and light baffling breezes,’ observed Ross, ‘which, with the suffocating heat of the electrically-charged atmosphere, render this part of the voyage both disagreeable and unhealthy.’ If Ross, in his spacious stern cabin, found it uncomfortable, one can only imagine how much worse it must have been below decks, even with the hatches opened.

On 3 December 1839, Terror crossed the Equator ahead of Erebus. William Cunningham, who had never done this before, was, as a ‘greenhorn’, subjected to the ritual line-crossing ceremony at the hands of his fellow crewmen, dressed as King Neptune and his attendants, and duly recorded the event in his diary:

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 (not excepting Soil [excrement]). The fire engine was playing on the back of my neck the whole time with its utmost force. After being well scraped with a piece of an iron hoop I was tumbled backwards into a sailfull of water . . . and had a good sousing . . . after which I have the pleasure of seeing nearly 30 others go through a similar process.

At midday they spliced the main brace (this being the term for a special ration of rum) and ‘after Dinner turned the hands up to dance and skylark’.

Their first Christmas away from home was celebrated with traditional enthusiasm. After prayers and a sermon from Captain Ross, thirteen of the officers sat down in the gun-room to a dinner of pea soup, roast turkey and ham, parsnips, plum pudding and pumpkin tart. Two days later they had freshly caught dolphin for breakfast, and five days after that the men of Erebus saw out the old decade ‘with all hands on deck, stepping out to the fiddle’. Aboard Terror, on the stroke of midnight, Captain Crozier sent for the bosun to pipe all hands to splice the main brace, ‘and I must say,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘I never saw a body of men turn out so smartly before’. The fiddler struck up ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and, with dancing and conviviality lasting until two in the morning, they welcomed in the 1840s: ‘all finished with three hearty cheers.’

***

The expedition appeared to be going well, but it was also going slowly.

The need for constant comparative observations forced both ships into a meandering, indirect course. They had crossed the Magnetic Equator on 7 December, when Ross had noted with satisfaction that the needle on his Fox dip circle (a device used to measure the angle between the horizon and the earth’s magnetic field) was perfectly horizontal. He had seen it point directly upwards at the North Magnetic Pole and, assuming the expedition was successful, would witness it point straight down when they reached the South Magnetic Pole. Now, observations indicated that they were on or around the line of least intensity: the magnetic doldrums. And because Ross was keen to explore this phenomenon, he continued on a zigzag course, constantly criss-crossing the line. Eventually, though, to the relief of the sailors, if not the scientists, they made landfall at the island of St Helena on 31 January 1840.

This was the open prison to which Napoleon had been brought after his defeat at Waterloo. Mindful that he had already escaped from one island, Elba, it had been considered that this speck in the middle of the Atlantic was about as safe a place of confinement as anywhere in the world. And, sure enough, this was where he had died, less than twenty years earlier.

McCormick, ever the one for excursions, secured a horse and trotted up the mountain to see where Napoleon had spent his last days. The great French emperor had been reduced to living at incongruous addresses with names like ‘The Briars’, before finally settling in the rather grander Longwood House. McCormick, to his evident distress, found Longwood rundown and abandoned. ‘Napoleon’s billiard room is now filled with bearded wheat,’ he sadly recorded in his journal. In what had been Napoleon’s sitting room he found a threshing machine. He continued on through the dilapidated house, displaying awe and a certain sense of regret. ‘This apartment opens into the bedroom, under the second window of which the great Napoleon’s head rested when he took his last breath on earth.’ One can almost sense his voice falling to a whisper. The next day he visited Napoleon’s tomb, around which ducks were ‘irreverently waddling’.

For Joseph Hooker, meanwhile, Erebus was proving a good home. ‘I am very happy and comfortable here,’ he wrote to his father. ‘Not very idle.’ Because they shared a similar interest in the sciences, Hooker got on well with Ross. The captain had given him space in his cabin for his plants, and ‘one of the tables under the stern window is wholly mine’. A letter to his sisters offers an intimate glimpse of their relationship. ‘Almost every day I draw, sometimes all day long and till two or three in the morning, the Captain directing me. He sits at one side of the table, writing and figuring at night, and I, on the other, drawing.’ Ross had ordered nets to be hung overboard to collect sea creatures – another plus for Hooker. ‘McCormick pays no attention to them, so they are therefore brought at once to me.’ Hooker’s one regret was that the expedition was progressing so slowly. Perhaps not surprisingly, he didn’t blame Ross’s obsession with following magnetic lines for this. Instead he criticised the Erebus’s sister ship: ‘The Terror has been a sad drawback to us, having every now and then to shorten sail for her [to allow her to catch up].’

Terror certainly seems to have been the more relaxed and less cerebral of the two ships at this time. In his diary, Cunningham notes the high point of the day: ‘Killed a Bullock in the afternoon and the offal which was throwed overboard attracted a Shark which we caught about 10 PM with a hook and a bait of the Bullock’s tripe. He made great resistance on being hauled inboard. He was of the blue specie and measured 9 feet 5 inches.’ The next day he noted, ‘Dissected Mr Jack Shark . . . and every man on board had a splendid Blow out [feast] of his carcase; his flesh was white as milk and not the least rank.’ Next day the weather was ‘extremely fine going free . . . Eat the last of the Shark for supper.’ By 26 February they had slowed down yet again, but Cunningham seemed unconcerned. ‘The latter part of the day becalmed,’ he wrote. ‘Felt particularly cheerful – can’t account for it.’

There was great excitement aboard Erebus on 6 March, when, hove-to for one of their routine sea-depth measurements, the weighted line dropped a full 16,000 feet, the greatest depth recorded on the journey thus far. As they drew closer to the Cape, Ross’s journal records frequent sightings of albatross, one of the largest of all sea-birds, with up to 10-foot wingspans and capable of speeds of 50 miles an hour. The settled weather conditions began to change. On 11 March the fog was so dense that Terror had to fire one of her cannons to ascertain the position of Erebus. She fired back, but later, in a very heavy swell, which Cunningham thought ‘the heaviest since we have been at sea’, the two ships were separated once again. Terror was not the laggard this time. She arrived at Simonstown on the Cape of Good Hope a full twenty-four hours before Erebus.

McCormick was on deck at dawn on Friday the 13th and described his excitement at seeing Table Mountain as only a geologist could. ‘At 5.40 a.m. I saw Table Mountain on the port bow . . . The horizontal stratification of the white silicious sandstone forming the summit of the hills above their granite base is seen to great advantage from the sea.’ Fit that on a postcard.

Simonstown naval base, originally built by the Dutch, but taken over by the British in the 1790s, lay on the western shore of Simon’s Bay, a few miles south of Cape Town. As soon as they had settled in the bay, Ross began organising the construction of a magnetic observatory, whilst McCormick went off to climb the horizontal stratification of white siliceous sandstone and visit the Constantia vineyards. Joseph Hooker wrote to his father of the relationship between the two surgeons. ‘McCormick and I are exceedingly good friends and no jealousy exists . . . He takes no interest but in bird shooting and rock collecting. I am nolens volens [willingly or unwillingly] the Naturalist for which I enjoy no other advantage than the Captain’s cabin, and I think myself amply repaid.’

Marine Sergeant Cunningham was meanwhile having trouble with a perennial naval problem: deserters. Able seamen Coleston and Wallace had absconded, before being found and brought back by a constable (the two men turned out to be serial deserters, jumping ship again in Hobart a few months later). Despite the rigours of the voyage, very few men jumped ship in the four years they were away. This could have been because they were well looked after and comparatively well paid. But then desertion rates generally reflected the agreeableness of the location. In 1825 Captain Beechey in HMS Blossom recorded fourteen of the crew deserting at Rio de Janeiro. There would certainly have been few incentives to jump ship in Antarctica.

Cunningham did get some time off, however. On the last day of March he went ashore to enjoy himself. ‘Beer . . . was served out at the rate on one quart [two pints] per “biped” which was said to disorder some of the people’s attics.’ Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.

On 6 April 1840, after a three-week stay, the expedition left Simonstown. Not a moment too soon, if Cunningham’s diary is anything to go by. Three days after the beer and the shore leave, three ‘very large’ bullocks had been brought aboard. One of them had run amok, goring a Mr Evans in the thigh. That same evening, perhaps not coincidentally, Cunningham reported ‘a very troublesome first Watch on account of several of the Boat’s crew getting Drunk’. Time to go.

They headed out of the harbour towards the open sea, passing HMS Melville, the flagship of Admiral Elliot, commander-in-chief of the Simonstown Station, whose crew climbed the rigging to give them three cheers as they sailed by. Nature wasn’t as friendly. A west wind came on so hard that Terror was left behind and had to be towed out of the harbour. By the time she reached open ocean, she’d lost sight of Erebus. Despite firing rockets and burning blue lights all night, she received no response from her sister ship.

The hostile conditions were familiar to mariners off the South African coast. The Indian and Atlantic Ocean currents meet here, above a 200-mile extension of the continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, creating what Ross described as ‘a harassing jobble of a sea. Winds blowing from almost every point of the compass.’ To avoid it, he took Erebus southwards, leaving behind two of their precious sea thermometers, which had been torn off their mooring lines. Ahead of them lay a long haul east to Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was still officially known: more than 6,000 miles across some of the stormiest seas in the world, already known then, by their latitude, as the Roaring Forties.

Fierce, persistent westerlies blew relentlessly across the Southern Ocean, with no land masses to break them. The combination of strong following winds and massive swells was a mixed blessing. It enabled the Cutty Sark to cut the time between London and Sydney to less than eighty days, but could prove treacherous, too. For Ross, the challenges were rather different. His scientific and surveying agenda meant that rather than race ahead of the wind, he had to keep turning against it to investigate islands on the way. It was not always possible. They only had time to glimpse the shores of the Prince Edward Islands, on which McCormick registered his astonishment at seeing a cove ‘literally enamelled with penguins’, before a shrieking storm had blown them past with no chance of a landing.

The sheer power of the elements surprised even someone as well travelled as Erebus’s captain. At one point Ross experienced ‘the heaviest rain I ever witnessed . . . thunder and the most vivid lightning occurred during this great fall of water, which lasted without intermission for more than ten hours’.

The strength of the ship and the skill of her crew were put to their fiercest test so far as the wind, now blowing at Force 10, kept changing direction, veering so violently that ‘we spent the night in great anxiety, and in momentary expectation that our boats would be washed away by some of the broken waves that fell on board, or that from the frequent shocks the ship sustained . . . we should lose some of the masts’.

It seems astonishing that there should be anyone living in these storm-tossed latitudes, but there were, and Ross had been asked to take provisions to some of them: a group of eleven elephant-seal hunters, stranded on Possession Island in the Crozet archipelago. The wind looked likely to blow Erebus past the island, but with considerable effort Ross managed to turn about and beat up to the west. Unable to get a boat to shore, they anchored a little way off, and six of the sealers came out to meet them. Ross wasn’t impressed. ‘They looked more like Esquimaux than civilized beings . . . Their clothes were literally soaked in oil and smelt most offensive.’ McCormick was less judgemental. He described Mr Hickley, the spokesman for the beleaguered sealers, as ‘their manly-looking leader who was an ideal “Robinson Crusoe” in costume’. To young Hooker, Hickley was rather splendid, ‘like some African Prince, pre-eminently filthy, and withal a most independent gentleman’. They left the sealers with a chest of tea, bags of coffee and a letter from their employer, which, McCormick noted, ‘seemed to disappoint the leader of the party . . . who evidently had been anticipating a ship for their removal, instead of fresh supplies’.

Ross, mindful of his instructions from the Admiralty, continued on to their next, official destination. Once again, magnetic observation was the prime reason for the choice. ‘It is probable that Kerguelen Island will be found well-suited to that purpose,’ the Lords of the Admiralty had laid down. It certainly wasn’t well suited for much else. First discovered by a Frenchman, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec, in 1772, the Kerguelens are definitively remote: according to the opening sentence on one travel website I looked at, they are ‘located 2,051 miles away from any sort of civilization’ (it’s the ‘any sort’ I find so tantalising). They are also covered with glaciers, and far south enough for Ross to have recorded the expedition’s first sighting of Antarctic ice. Not surprisingly, Captain Cook christened Kerguelen the ‘Island of Desolation’.

As Erebus approached this bleak fortress, McCormick’s journal entry for 8 May 1840 tells the sad story of the demise of one of the smallest of her crew, Old Tom, a cock brought out from England with a hen, for the purpose of colonising the island they had now reached – the establishment of new species on remote islands being one of the aims of the mission. ‘Tom . . . died today,’ he wrote, ‘in the very sight of his intended domain; had his body committed to the deep by the captain’s steward – a sailor’s grave.’

Better news came with a cry from the crow’s nest as they were beating up towards Kerguelen’s Arched Rock to make a landing. The sails of HMS Terror had been spotted, the first sight of her for a month. But such was the power of a heavy rolling sea that it took three days for Erebus, after a series of twenty-two tight tacks, to gain the harbour mouth, and a further day before Terror joined her. It then took another two days for both vessels to warp their way to the head of the harbour, where they were able to drop anchor and get boats ashore with building materials for an observatory.

Certain days had been decreed by the international community as simultaneous magnetic-measurement days, or term days. Ross was scrupulous in making sure that wherever he was, he had instruments ready to record the magnetic activity in that place at the same time as others elsewhere on the globe were noting their findings. This required secure solid housings for the measuring equipment. Two observatories, one for magnetic and the other for astronomical observations, were therefore set up on the beach in Christmas Harbour in time for the term days of 29 and 30 May. There was much excitement when the results were coordinated later. Activity detected on Kerguelen was found to be remarkably similar to that observed and measured in Toronto, around the same latitude, but at the other end of the earth.

Joseph Hooker was excited by the challenges of Kerguelen Island for rather different reasons. Captain Cook’s expedition had identified only eighteen plant species, but Hooker found at least thirty in one day. Even when he couldn’t get out, he turned the constant buffeting of the gales to his advantage. ‘Could I but tell you the delight with which I spent the days when I was kept on board by foul winds . . . In spite of the rolling of the ship I have made drawings for you all,’ he wrote home. The great excitement was finding the wonder-vegetable Pringlea antiscorbutica, a cabbage that grew on Kerguelen Island and which had been identified by Captain Cook’s botanist, Mr Anderson, as a miracle food for sailors. With a horseradish-tasting root and leaves that resembled mustard and cress, it had such powerful anti-scorbutic properties that it had been served for 130 days on Cook’s expedition, during which time no sickness had been recorded. Ross’s expedition put the wonder-cabbage to use straight away, and to general approval. Cunningham was one of those who registered enjoyment. ‘Like[d] the taste of the wild cabbage much.’

On 24 May 1840, they celebrated the twenty-first birthday of Queen Victoria with the firing of a royal salute, servings of plum pudding, preserved meat and a double allowance of rum at night. The very next day they were forcibly reminded of just how far away they were from an English summer, as falling snow was whipped into a ferocious blizzard. As darkness fell, Cunningham wrote of ‘a complete hurricane’ blowing. ‘I never heard it blow so hard as it has done this night.’

Surgeon McCormick shared Hooker’s enthusiasm for Kerguelen Island, but more from a geological perspective. ‘This, and Spitzbergen in the opposite hemisphere constitute, I think, the most striking and picturesque lands I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit,’ he noted enthusiastically in his journal. And this despite the fact that ‘neither the Arctic nor Antarctic isles have tree or shrub . . . to enliven them’. What excited McCormick was not what was to be found now on the black basalt rocks of this lonely island, but what had been there thousands of years before. ‘Whole forests . . . of fossilized wood lie entombed here beneath vast lava streams,’ he marvelled, uncovering beneath the debris a fossilised tree trunk with a girth of 7 feet. He was exercised by the whole question of how to explain this phenomenon. Back in England, he had been fascinated to find corals and other forms of tropical life embedded in the limestone of north Devon. Now he was equally intrigued to discover forests of coniferous trees entombed on the now-treeless island of Kerguelen. ‘I have wondered how they could ever have existed there.’ It was another seventy years before Alfred Wegener made the audacious suggestion that the continents themselves might have moved over time, and another fifty years after that before the theory of plate tectonics was finally proven.

So far as the wildlife of the island was concerned, McCormick seems to have regarded it principally as a form of target practice. It’s impossible to turn a page of his extensive journals without marvelling, or perhaps despairing, at his appetite for admiring God’s creatures, then shooting them. On 15 May he identifies the chioni, or sheathbill, a ‘singular and beautiful bird . . . so fearless and confiding, [it] seems peculiar to the island to which its presence gives a charm and animation, especially to a lover of the feathered race like myself’. This is followed next day by the succinct entry, ‘I shot my first chioni.’ A week later, accompanying Captain Ross and an exploring party, he ‘shot two and a half brace of teal and tern and returned . . . at five p.m.’ The day after that, ‘I shot a gigantic petrel . . . and a young black-backed gull flying overhead.’ On the 30th, ‘I went on shore about noon, shot a black-backed gull from the dinghy, and a shag at the landing place.’ And he wasn’t finished for the day. On his way back to the ship, after calling on Captain Ross at the observatory, he ‘shot two chionis, two gigantic petrel, two shags, and a teal flying round the point’.

McCormick liked a challenge, but in the course of one onshore expedition his adventurous spirit nearly lost him his life. Having been on a mineralogical foray and having packed his haversack with ‘some of the finest specimens of quartz crystals . . . weighing in all some fifty pounds’, he found himself, as night fell, cut off by torrential waterfalls. He abandoned the haversack, and eventually made his way to the bottom of a cliff before realising that he wouldn’t be able to get to the ship from there. ‘The darkness of the night,’ he recalled a little later, ‘only relieved by the fitful glare from the white, foaming spray the torrents sent upwards, the terrific gusts of wind, accompanied by a deluge of rain, combined together with black, overhanging, frowning precipices, to form a scene of the wildest description.’ When he did finally make his way back to the ship, he was fed tea with, perhaps appropriately, some stewed chionis on the side, which ‘our thoughtful, kind-hearted boat’s crew had caught in my absence’.

Activity was the key to survival on any closely packed ship, but particularly in these wild and inhospitable places, where it must have been only too easy to lose any sense of purpose. Captain Ross always made sure there was work to do, building and operating the observatories. Of course from a personal point of view, the scientific imperative of the expedition – whether it was in natural history, zoology, botany or geology – was clearly something that motivated and excited him as much as it did the likes of McCormick and Hooker.

To know how the ordinary seaman responded, we have only Sergeant Cunningham’s diaries to go by. They convey a pretty miserable portrait of men doing their best in dreadful conditions. Gales blow on forty-five of the sixty-eight days they spend in the Kerguelens. Wind, rain and snow rake the harbour as they struggle to get equipment ashore and back. The nearest Sergeant Cunningham comes even to recording contentment is a day on which he shoots and cooks several shag. These, he notes, prove ‘capital eating’. Otherwise his diary entry for Sunday 19 July can stand for most of the others: ‘high and bitter cold: Divine service in the forenoon. I may put this down as another of those miserable Sundays a man spends in a ship of this description.’

At least it was to be his last Sunday in the Kerguelen Islands, for the next morning, 20 July, after days of being blown back by the winds, Erebus and Terror finally extricated themselves from what Ross described as ‘this most dreary and disagreeable harbour’. Joseph Hooker tried, rather unconvincingly, to look on the bright side. ‘I was sorry at leaving Christmas Harbour: by finding food for the mind one may grow attached to the most wretched spots on the globe.’ Not one for the Tourist Board.

Today, the Kerguelen Islands are part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, and can only be reached by a ship from the island of Réunion, which sails four times a year. The sole year-round occupants are scientists. Plus ça change.

Christmas Harbour might have been dreary and disagreeable for the crew of Terror and Erebus, but at least it had provided some shelter. Now back in the open ocean, they were once again exposed to the full force of the Roaring Forties. A series of deep depressions rolled in day after day and, with icebergs looming on the horizon and fifteen hours of darkness through which to navigate, enormous pressure was put on the master and quartermaster to hold them on course.

In the driving rain and the unremitting turbulence, it was not long before Terror once again disappeared from sight. The disparities between the two ships still rankled with Ross. He rather testily records having to keep Erebus under moderate sail whilst he searched for her older sister ship, ‘to our great inconvenience, the ship rolling heavily in consequence of not having sufficient sail to steady her’. Eventually he gave up and Erebus carried on alone.

Ironically, it was on one of the few fine days that the worst happened.

The crew were busy mopping up and men were in the rigging spreading the sails out to dry, when the boatswain, Mr Roberts, was struck by a swinging staysail sheet and, as an eyewitness remembered, ‘whirled overboard’. A lifebuoy and various oars were immediately flung out to him, but the ship was making six knots at the time and he slipped quickly astern. Two cutters were lowered into the sea, but as they’d had to be tightly lashed down against the storms, precious time was lost in launching them. The whole tragedy was witnessed by Surgeon McCormick, who was walking the quarterdeck at the time. ‘The last I saw of him was as he rose on the top of a wave, where a gigantic petrel or two were whirling over his head and might have struck him with their powerful wings or no less powerful beak, for he disappeared all at once between two seas.’

One of the rescue cutters was hit by a cross-wave and four of her crew were thrown into the water. It is unlikely any of them could swim, there being a superstition among sailors that learning to swim was bad luck – an admission that things could go wrong. The rescue attempt could therefore have led to a multiple drowning, had it not been for the sharp reactions of Mr Oakley, the Mate on Erebus, and Mr Abernethy, the gunner, in the other, returning boat. They immediately pushed back from the ship and managed to pluck all four men out of the rolling sea, ‘completely benumbed and stupefied by the cold’. The now-overloaded cutter ran alongside the ship for some time, taking on more and more water before it was finally plucked aboard.

Roberts’s cap was recovered, but that was all. The boatswain is so central to the life of a ship that his demise must have been a shock to everyone. His piping and shout of ‘All Hands!’ would have been as common a sound as the ship’s bell. The expedition had sustained its first loss of life, just short of the first anniversary of its launch.

On 12 August they caught a glimpse of a cloud-shrouded coast line. Charts and sextant readings told them they were off the south-westerly point of New Holland (what is now Western Australia). This must have raised hopes that the worst was over, but the most destructive storm of all was still to come. The very next day it struck with more fury than any they had yet experienced. The ship was engulfed and the wind blew with such demonic intensity that the main topsail was ripped to shreds and the staysail wrenched off, leaving only the bare pole from which it once hung. ‘One vast, swelling green mountain of a sea came rolling up astern,’ McCormick recalled, ‘threatening to engulf us, sweeping over the starboard quarter-boat, in upon the quarter-deck which it deluged, drenching me to the skin, as I clung to the mizzen-mast catching hold of some gear to avoid being washed overboard.’ His graphic account continues with a memorable description of his skipper, roped in place on the deck, defying the elements, evoking Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick: ‘Captain Ross maintained his position on the weather quarter by having three turns of the mizzen topsail halyards round him for support.’ The heavy seas persisted, and although the wind abated, the hatches had to remain battened down the whole of the next day, ‘with lighted candles in the gunroom’ to dispel the gloom below decks.

On the night of 16 August, under a bright full moon, Ross records, with what can only have been almighty relief, ‘we saw the land of Tasmania ahead of us’.

Hobart in 1840, home to a mixture of free settlers and convicts. Erebus’s arrival in August of that year caused huge excitement locally.