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CHAPTER 5

‘OUR SOUTHERN HOME’

In 2004, on a visit to Tasmania, I read Matthew Kneale’s book English Passengers. Though there is dark humour and fine description in the story of a mid-nineteenth-century emigrant to Tasmania, it is also a powerful indictment of the rigidity and cruelty of Victorian imperial certainties – the same certainties that motivated Barrow and Ross and Sabine and Minto, and Melville and von Humboldt and Herschel, and all the great men who dominate the life and times of HMS Erebus. These were men of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, stimulated by the spirit of the Enlightenment to search and discover, to push back the boundaries of knowledge, convinced that the more they measured and traced and calculated and recorded, the more beneficial it would be for mankind. But this sense of purpose also contained within it an implicit sense of superiority, which, when misused, fed the dark side of Britain’s increasing self-confidence. And nowhere was the light and shade of Victorian Britain more sharply defined than in the self-governing colony on whose shores HMS Erebus arrived more than three months after leaving Cape Town. Van Diemen’s Land had a population of 43,000; and 14,000 of them were convicts.

On board HMS Erebus as she made her way up Storm Bay, past the Iron Pot Lighthouse and into the shelter of the Derwent estuary, were men who had distinguished themselves on many journeys and in many fields, who had mastered the art of sailing ships through the fiercest waters on the planet, and who carried with them cases – and, indeed, cabins – full of scientific evidence. On land were many thousands of men and women who had been forcibly removed from their home country because they were judged to be born criminals, morally unsalvageable, incapable of rehabilitation. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, embodied this unforgiving attitude and expressed it uncompromisingly in one of his letters: ‘If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict’s child should ever be a free citizen . . . It is the law of God’s Providence which we cannot alter, that the sins of the father are really visited upon the child in the corruption of his breed.’ The recipient of this letter was now the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin.

As Erebus sailed towards Hobart harbour in mid-August 1840, her captain expressed his relief, contrasting ‘the rich and beautiful scenery on both sides of the expansive and placid waters of the Derwent’ with ‘the desolate land and turbulent ocean we had so recently left’. McCormick, too, saw only a pleasing prospect: ‘The approach to Hobart Town is very picturesque.’ Sergeant Cunningham’s reflections, on the other hand, hit a rather different note: ‘This being Van Dieman’s [sic] Land, I could not help thinking . . . how many unfortunate beings has seen it . . . with a full heart and a melancholy boding that they were to terminate their existence in it, outcasts from Society and aliens from their fatherland, separated from wives, parents, friends and from every tie that links man to this vain and sublunary world. I turned from the scene with a thankfull remembrance how much better off I was than some thousands of my fellow men.’

The debate as to whether the place they had landed in should be called Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania was officially settled in Tasmania’s favour fifteen years later, in 1855. But there had been an earlier name: Lutruwita, which was the name by which the Aboriginal inhabitants knew the island, and had done for a thousand years or more. It was now redundant. As the convicts were brought in, the indigenous population was booted out. By the time the Ross expedition arrived, the brutal process of clearing the original inhabitants from their land was almost complete. Those who were left alive were confined to an Aboriginal mission on Flinders Island, off the north coast, where they were taught English ways.

The educated people of Hobart – those familiar with English ways – would have heard of the Antarctic expedition long before it arrived. The local newspapers had been following its preparations with great interest. It would, after all, be one of the boldest and most prestigious undertakings they had witnessed since the colony had been officially established, sixteen years earlier. There had been almost daily speculation about the expedition’s aims – finding the South Magnetic Pole, discovering a new continent, penetrating further south than anyone had been before – and their chances of achieving them. The Hobart Town Courier went into wondrous detail about the state-of-the-art instruments on board the two ships, not least the walking sticks hollowed out so as to carry nets for catching insects. ‘The ferrule at the bottom is removed, and the nets are drawn forth ready for instant use,’ it marvelled.

Now it had all come true. The expedition was here.

Erebus moored up at five in the afternoon of Monday 17 August. Terror was already safely anchored, and Captain Crozier and the officers came aboard to welcome their sister ship, and to bring letters from home that had been awaiting their arrival. Not one to waste a moment, Surgeon McCormick took some of his fellow officers out to celebrate their arrival by going ashore for the last night of a play called Rory O’More at the Theatre Royal. Rory O’More was an Irish Catholic hero, a persistent rebel against the English, who put a price of £1,000 on his head. His head was duly delivered and displayed at Dublin Castle to deter other rebels.

For Joseph Hooker, landfall had brought little cause for celebration. A letter from his father, edged in black, informed him of the death of his elder brother from yellow fever, whilst on missionary work in the West Indies.

Few people could have been happier to see the two embattled vessels safely moored in the Derwent estuary than the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Sir John Franklin was overjoyed at being reunited with his friend and fellow explorer, James Clark Ross. They made a contrasting pair. Franklin, fourteen years older, was short, at 5 feet 6 inches, and famously affable, whereas Ross was tall and dashing and took himself rather seriously. In a movie he could have been played by Errol Flynn, himself a Tasmanian.

‘In 1836,’ writes his biographer, Andrew Lambert, ‘Franklin was fifty, famous and fat.’ And he was in Van Diemen’s Land because there had been nothing better on offer. Advancement in the Royal Navy followed a strict rota system, which ensured that senior positions only became available after those who held them died. Fame and success could not leapfrog anyone into promotion. So Captain Franklin had looked around for other positions concomitant with his talents, his experience and his evangelical sense of mission.

Having been offered, and turned down, the governorship of Antigua, he accepted the more lucrative position of Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, largely because he felt it his duty to put his talents, achievements and wide experience in the service of the great new colonial initiative, and because his forceful second wife, Jane – a vigorous, sociable woman, with considerable networking skills – felt it to be a very useful rung on the social and political ladder, which she was determined to help him climb.

But things had not gone according to plan. Sir John’s request that the flow of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land should be stemmed, if there was to be any chance of achieving some improvement in the lot of the free islanders, was ignored by the Colonial Office, whose response was to increase the numbers. When New South Wales was granted self-government, its share of the transported convicts was diverted southwards. In 1842 alone, 5,663 convicts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land.

To make matters worse, Sir John was no politician, and although popular with most of the islanders, found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to please the Colonial Office by saving money, and the colonists by spending it. In theory, much of the political burden should have been carried by John Montagu, a very capable, shrewd and ambitious public servant who had served in Van Diemen’s Land for some years, but that role was increasingly usurped by Jane, who, with the advantage of having her husband’s ear, proceeded to implement what she thought was right for the colony. This included diverting government funds to her own pet projects, such as a college for boys to train in the Christian faith; convict education; and various art projects. Her interference made a bitter enemy of Montagu and his supporters, who described her as a ‘man in petticoats’. As the geographer Frank Debenham says, it must have been a ‘great strain’ for Sir John and Lady Franklin ‘to govern a community of which one part was tasting the freedom and independence characteristic of a pioneer settlement and the other part was bound and shackled by a penal system of extreme severity’. But making an adversary of John Montagu was a mistake that was to have profound consequences for both Jane and her husband.

Jane Franklin found Hobart short of men of consequence. Sir John was simply missing his own kind. As a letter from Jane to her father makes abundantly clear, the Franklins could hardly wait to throw open the door of Government House for the glamorous Captain Ross and his intrepid officers: ‘The arrival of Captains Ross and Crozier added much to Sir John’s happiness . . . ,’ she wrote. ‘They all feel towards one another as friends and brothers and it is the remark of people here that Sir John appears to them in quite a new light, so bustling and frisky and merry with his new companions.’ Lady Franklin was taken aboard Erebus and couldn’t help noticing that Captain Ross had Negelin’s portrait of her husband hanging in his cabin (it’s one of the best: Franklin is in uniform, smiling jovially, with epaulettes like small waterfalls on each shoulder). Back on dry land, she showed indefatigable interest in all aspects of the expedition, inviting both senior and junior officers to attend the local Science Society, in which she was much involved and where she would quiz them about their work. Of course, given that ladies were present, certain proprieties had to be observed: on one occasion she noted that when ‘some drawings and descriptions of the position of the young in the pouch of some marsupial animals’ were shown, it was necessary that ‘the gentlemen withdrew to the library’ to inspect them.

Not that the ladies of Hobart were exactly prudish. The contemporary Tasmanian historian Alison Alexander describes how the local rumour mill sought to account for the childlessness of their governor and his wife, leading to some forthright gossip during a meal at which Jane and John Franklin were clearly not present. ‘The ladies when they retired . . . were wondering why Sir John had no family. “Dear me,” said one of them . . . “don’t you know! I always heard his members got frostbitten when he went to the North pole”.’

Captain Ross, though top of many guest lists, was not one to fritter time away, and made it clear that his most urgent priority was to get an observatory up and running. The Franklins, keen to oblige, had anticipated this and had already assembled stores and materials, from plans sent out from England. The next morning Ross and Franklin selected a suitable spot. A small quarry-working near Government House had revealed a deep bed of sandstone rock, which Ross judged to be the perfect base for the observatory, as sandstone has no magnetic properties that might interfere with the readings. That very afternoon a party of 200 convicts was set to work to dig the foundations.

Erebus and Terror, meanwhile, were moved upriver to a small, quiet cove away from the main bustle of the harbour and conveniently close to the grounds of Government House. It was later given the name Ross Cove, and it hasn’t changed much.

I’m there in 2017. It’s June, a couple of months before Erebus and Terror would have been in port, and I’m spending several days in Hobart, staying at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, one of a row of low and harmonious nineteenth-century buildings beside the harbour, with stone-dressed walls and low-pitched red roofs. Set back from the water, the façades look attractive in scale and colour, almost Venetian in the low morning sunlight. The remains of chunky painted lettering on the wall read: ‘H Jones and Co Pty Ltd. IXL Jams’. This was once the factory for one of Hobart’s most successful export businesses. The ‘IXL’ trademark was a play on founder Henry Jones’s motto, ‘I excel at everything.’

And the business lived up to the motto. Tinned fruits from Tasmania were sent all over the world, exuberantly described and brightly labelled: Choice Cling Peaches, Sliced in Heavy Syrup; Boomerang Brand, Tasmanian Fancy Apples. It was Britain joining the European Union and abandoning Commonwealth trade preferences that did for H. Jones, and the company no longer exists.

To get to Ross Cove, I walk a half-mile or so by the side of the busy Tasman Highway that links Hobart with the airport. I have to stop and get my camera out to take a shot of some eye-catching street art – two functional junction boxes painted in riotously colourful designs, featuring penguins and seals and albatrosses and long-haired vampy ladies. Antarctic chic. Art is booming in Hobart, stimulated by the huge success of MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, displayed in multi-level caves dramatically excavated out of the cliffs a few miles up the Derwent.

Peeling off the main road, I cross a car park and scramble down towards a stretch of railway line running parallel with the water. My companion, Alison Alexander, fount of all knowledge on the history of Tasmania, and clutching her handbag, beckons me to follow her onto the track. It’s not used that often, she assures me, as she holds back a wire fence for me to squeeze through. A little way down the railway line, we turn off and cut through a small grove of newly planted trees to the waterside. ‘This is Ross Cove,’ Alison tells me. ‘They chose to moor up here because’ – she turns and points up to a flagpole on some turreted rooftops, which I can just see peeking over the trees – ‘it was the closest they could get to Government House. For unloading everything.’ And for getting Ross and Crozier to their dinners, no doubt.