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A Subject of

WONDER

“THE DISCOVERY OF a north-west passage to India and China has always been considered as an object peculiarly British.” With these words, John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, announced that, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was to embark on a great age of polar discovery. For in the nineteenth century, the greatest epoch of geographic exploration ever known, a primary British aim was to establish the existence of a Northwest Passage (the successful navigation from the Atlantic to the Pacific around America’s northern extremity); another was to reach the North Pole. In a little over five decades, from 1818 to 1876, dozens of Royal Navy ships would reach the polar sea. In the process, the Arctic archipelago, that vast labyrinth of land and ice that lies to the north of America, was made almost entirely known.

In most respects, this age of marine exploration was a triumph of geographic and scientific advancement. Yet, despite an enormous investment of resources and manpower, the Royal Navy failed to achieve the two goals set for it by Parliament. When the last official British Arctic expedition returned in 1876 to newspaper headlines proclaiming “The Polar Failure,” no ship had succeeded in navigating the Northwest Passage and no one had yet reached the North Pole. Those prizes were left for others. It was not until 1905 that Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, would complete the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage; in 1909, the North Pole was claimed by Robert Peary, an American.

Is it possible that the forensic investigation of human remains from that era, specifically the Franklin expedition disaster of 1845–48, would provide some insight into this larger failure? Certainly the terrible fate of Sir John Franklin’s expedition marked the nadir of Arctic exploration: a disappearance of two ships with all 129 of their men, which preyed strongly upon the British mind. Alongside the Franklin disaster, though, were numerous more routine exploration failures that, whilst lacking the sheer melancholic grandeur of the Franklin disaster, were just as frightful and inexorable. For one word appears time and again in their expedition narratives, a word that represents none of the usual suspects: neither ice traps nor perpetual darkness, marauding polar bears nor the minus 50˚F (-46˚C) cold—but simply, “debility.”

“Debility” plagued Arctic expeditions of the 19th century.

In his 1836–37 voyage of discovery, for instance, Captain George Back complained of the “languor,” “incoherency” and “debility” suffered by his crew. In 1848–49, Sir James Clark Ross similarly reported that many of his men were made “useless from lameness and debility.” Five years later, in 1854, Captain George Henry Richards also wrote of a “general debility” afflicting his crew; four years after that, in 1859, all members of Captain Leopold M’Clintock’s expedition aboard the Fox were struck down by “debility.”

It is an endless catalogue strung together by one simple word.

AT THE OUTSET, the Admiralty’s John Barrow believed that the Northwest Passage was easily navigable and predicted this would be achieved in a matter of months. There was simply no conception of the impediment an ocean of ice would pose to Britain’s exploration ambitions. Those hopes would first be set back in 1818, when Captain John Ross sailed into Lancaster Sound—the true entrance of the passage—only to adjudge it a bay, then compounded his blunder by naming the “bay” in Barrow’s honour. Then in 1819, Barrow dispatched twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant William Edward Parry with two ships, the Hecla and Griper, and a youthful crew to do that which, in Barrow’s words, “Ross, from misapprehension, indifference or incapacity, had failed to do.”

The polar regions, as perceived by Victorian England.

Parry entered Lancaster Sound and, with a stiff wind behind him, bore westward. A vast, unexplored channel lay open before the two ships. The masts were crowded with officers and men the entire day. Parry, every bit the Regency gentleman, sought to conceal his own excitement, but did remark upon the “almost breathless anxiety… now visible in every countenance.” The Hecla and Griper blew past the precipitous cliffs and stratified buttresses of Devon Island to the north and, to the south, passed a series of channels to which Parry assigned names: Navy Board Inlet, Admiralty Inlet and Prince Regent Inlet. He saved for Barrow a particular distinction: naming the channel that lay due west after him. Thus, Lancaster Sound gave way to Barrow Strait.

Parry had blind luck on his side. His ships pushed rapidly west, cruising through a channel normally closed fast by ice, even in summer. When ice did finally obstruct his progress, he opted to overwinter at Melville Island, a rugged outcrop of 1,200-foot (370-metre) cliffs that he named for Viscount Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Parry fully expected the ice to clear from the remainder of the passage the following summer. In fact, he had unknowingly breached the dominion of ice, a possibility that dawned on him during the depths of the polar winter, when the temperature outside plunged to minus 55˚F (-48˚C). He realized that he had taken an incalculable risk and secretly began to craft an escape, titled “Plan of a Journey from the North coast of America towards Fort Chipewyan, should such a measure be found necessary as a last resource.” He doubtless realized it would have been an exercise in futility. The nearest white men, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, were more than 700 miles (1,130 km) away across some of the bleakest, coldest terrain on earth.

Parry, however, did just about everything right in the circumstances. It was 1 October, and he “immediately and imperiously” set about securing the ships and stores for the onset of the polar winter, a responsibility that had, he wrote accurately if immodestly, “for the first time devolved on any officer in his majesty’s navy, and might, indeed, be considered of rare occurrence in the whole history of navigation.” Most particularly, Parry determinedly set about defending against scurvy. He sent out hunting parties and enforced a ruling that “every animal killed was to be considered as public property; and, as such, to be regularly issued like any other kind of provision, without the slightest distinction between the messes of the officers and those of the ships’ companies.” In addition, Parry diligently seized upon two dietary reforms that had only recently been introduced by the Royal Navy: The lime juice—prepared from fresh fruit—he carried onboard was dispensed daily in the presence of an officer to ensure that the bitter concoction was consumed by reluctant sea-hands; also distributed were the stores of “embalmed provisions”—tinned meats, vegetables and soup. So new was the technology that no one had yet invented the can opener; the cans had to be cleaved open with an axe. (The Royal Navy had begun conducting trials with tinned foods in 1813.)

Parry had yet another plan: to keep his men so thoroughly occupied that they had no time to consider their predicament. Their days were filled with activities, but Parry’s most useful tool for staving off monotony was a barrel organ for singalongs and bimonthly polar melodramas put on by officers in petticoats. His second officer even produced a newspaper called the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, filled with bad puns and abominable poesy, but which had the “happy effect of… diverting the mind from the gloomy prospect which would sometimes obtrude itself on the stoutest heart.”

Despite Parry’s best efforts, however, the living conditions the men were forced to endure were appalling. On 3 November, the sun disappeared below the horizon and did not return until 84 days later, just before noon on 3 February 1820, when a crewman spotted it from the Hecla’s maintop. By then, the temperature inside the ships was so cold that the theatrical performances could not be enjoyed by anyone, but most particularly by the cast of female impersonators. Large patches of skin were left behind any time the men touched a metal surface. Wrote Parry: “We found it necessary, therefore, to use great caution handling our sextants and other instruments, particularly the eye-pieces of telescopes.” The lime juice froze and shattered its glass containers. Even the mercury froze in the thermometers.

Rations, at least, were better than the more experienced hands were used to, as “a pound of Donkin’s preserved [tinned] meat, together with one pint of vegetable or concentrated soup, per man” replaced salt beef weekly. Yet despite this measure and the daily allotment of lime juice, the first case of scurvy was reported on 1 January 1820. Parry tried to conceal it from the crew, and set about curing the victim by starting a tiny garden of mustard and cress on the warm galley pipes of the Hecla. The measure worked. Nine days later, the man boasted that he was fit enough to “run a race.”

Soon, however, illness gained a firmer hold: a quarter of the ninety-four-strong crew fell ill, half of them from scurvy—though even as the symptoms appeared, the worst of the crew’s hardships were behind them. By May, ptarmigan were seen, and soon a brace or two were bagged daily for the sick. It was, wrote Parry, “of the utmost importance, under our present circumstances, that every ounce of game which we might thus procure should be served in lieu of other meat.” During the expedition’s twelve months on Melville Island, the men would consume 3 musk oxen, 24 caribou, 68 hares, 53 geese, 59 ducks, 144 ptarmigans—totalling 3,766 pounds (1,710 kg) of fresh meat. To cap it off, when the snow melted, Parry noticed that sorrel grew in abundance around the harbour, and the men were sent out every afternoon to collect it: “Of the good effects produced upon our health by the unlimited use of fresh vegetable substances, thus bountifully supplied by the hand of Nature, even where least to be expected, little doubt can be entertained, as it is well known to be a never-failing specific for scorbutic affections.” In the end, Parry lost just one man to scurvy during his seventeen-month voyage. Relative to what might have been expected in such circumstances, the achievement was, wrote Parry, “a subject of wonder.”

Parry’s expedition had become the first to overwinter in the Arctic archipelago. He also came closer to completing the Northwest Passage than any other person would come for the next three decades. He was tempted to push on to the Pacific. But, facing an impermeable barrier of multiyear ice, with depleted stores and the very real risk of being forced to spend a second winter in the region, he relented.

The expedition had encountered no Inuit during its long winter at Melville Island, but on its homeward journey, the crew finally met some natives on Baffin Island; one of those meetings would be laden with irony. One of the Inuit elders was, Parry noted, “extremely inquisitive” and observed gravely as a tin of preserved meat was opened for dinner: “The old man was sitting on the rock, attentively watching the operation, which was performed with an axe struck by a mallet.” When the tin had been opened, the man “begged very hard for the mallet which had performed so useful an office, without expressing the least wish to partake of the meat, even when he saw us eating it with good appetites.” Parry, however, insisted the man try some: “[He] did not seem at all to relish it, but ate a small quantity, from an evident desire not to offend us.”

Unfortunately, the elder’s distaste for tinned foods was not shared by British authorities. After Parry’s return, expedition surgeon John Edwards praised such supplies as “acquisitions of the highest value.” C.I. Beverley, the assistant surgeon on Parry’s expedition, also produced a glowing endorsement of the expedition’s tinned provisions, ascribing to them both the preservation of the general health of the officers and crew and the eventual recovery of one man who had been “attacked by the scurvy.” This assessment ended with a statement that encouraged ever-greater reliance on tinned goods: “I have every reason to believe that the anti-scorbutic quality of the vegetable is not injured in its preparation.” Yet this notion—that tinned foods retained powerful antiscorbutic properties—was entirely anecdotal. The comparative immunity enjoyed by Parry’s men might, with hindsight, have been more accurately attributed to other factors, not the least of which was the amount of game shot and wild sorrel collected. Unfortunately, no mention of these measures was made. The British were enamoured of technology, and, after Parry’s successful overwintering in the Arctic, the antiscorbutic benefits of tinned foods became accepted wisdom in the Royal Navy, a premise that would go untested and unchallenged for much of the next century. Indeed, starting with William Edward Parry’s voyage of 1819–20, British Arctic expeditions used tinned foods first as a supplement, then, by the time of George Back’s 1836–37 voyage, as a critical component of their food stores.

STILL, NOT EVERY SHIP captain shared the navy’s enthusiasm for tinned provisions. In fact, the privately financed 1829–33 expedition of Captain John Ross was a feat of physical endurance and survival precisely because Ross sought to avoid reliance on preserved foods.

Following his 1818 maritime blunder, when Barrow rained such derision upon him that he never again received a Royal Navy command, Ross had been forced into semi-retirement at half-pay. He watched from the sidelines as his rival, Parry, undertook two further polar expeditions (in 1821–23 and 1824–25), at the end of which, Barrow conceded that knowledge about the Northwest Passage was “precisely where it was at the conclusion of his [Parry’s] first voyage.” Parry had even managed to lose one of His Majesty’s ships, the Fury, which was nipped by an iceberg in Prince Regent Inlet. Ross seized on the opening. He raised a private expedition and found a wealthy gin merchant, Felix Booth, to underwrite a voyage to complete the Northwest Passage aboard the Victory, a second-hand steamer that Ross refitted with state-of-the-art technology and manned with 23 officers and men.

It appeared at first that Ross would succeed. In Greenland, he received reports that it was an unusually warm summer. On 6 August 1829, the expedition entered Lancaster Sound, the site of his 1818 humiliation. Believing Prince Regent Inlet would eventually reveal an opening to the west, Ross tacked south, calculating correctly that the land mass, which had been named Somerset by Parry, was an island. He pressed further into these waters than any European before him, but missed Bellot Strait, the only opening to the west, and with time concluded that the western shore of Prince Regent Inlet was not an island but a peninsula, which he named Boothia, for his sponsor. By then it was too late to continue. With conditions deteriorating, the expedition established winter quarters at a place Ross called Felix Harbour. From here, the expedition embarked on the first of four winters in the Arctic, a harrowing saga that is remarkable—in equal measure—for the courage and endurance needed to survive it.

The following summer, the ice freed the Victory, allowing 3 miles (5 km) of hope before it closed in again and held the ship fast, trapping it for a second winter. In 1830, Ross’s young nephew, Commander James Clark Ross, led a sledge journey far to the west. He named the farthest place he reached Victory Point, and the adjoining territory was claimed in the name of King William IV. Unaware that he had crossed an ice-covered strait on his journey, Ross named the territory King William Land. In fact, it was King William Island. James Ross also noted an accumulation of pack-ice off the northwest coast, the “heaviest masses that I had ever seen in such a situation.” His sledge journey was a remarkable achievement in itself. The pièce de résistance, however, was his subsequent discovery of the North Magnetic Pole, which “Nature,” he wrote, “had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers.” With that, the expedition became a triumph. “Nothing now remained for us but to return home and be happy for the rest of our days,” the younger Ross wrote. But by the summer of 1831, the Victory had been allowed only another 4 miles (6.5 km) of passage before the impenetrable ice barrier returned.

“To us,” John Ross declared, “the sight of ice was a plague, a vexation, a torment, an evil, a matter of despair.” The depth of this despondency is further revealed in his journal, where he confided: “I confess that the chances are now much against our being ever heard of.” He was faced with a critical decision: risk sitting out the following spring in the hope that by summer the ice would finally give way and the Victory would be freed, which seemed unlikely, or abandon the Victory and undertake a 300-mile (480-km) overland trek north while snow remained on the ground, allowing for sledge travel. Ross elected for the latter. His destination would be Fury Beach on Somerset Island, where there was a store of provisions left by Parry on an earlier expedition and the greater likelihood of open water. From there, Ross believed he could use the ship’s small boats to make a dash for Baffin Bay, to rendezvous with the summer whaling fleet.

Sledges were fashioned to haul the small boats loaded with provisions, and the captain ordered advance parties to establish a string of caches en route. Then, on 29 May 1832, the expedition abandoned the Victory and, in sub-zero temperatures and on two-thirds rations, headed north. But off Fury Beach, where open water had been expected, the ice had also failed to clear and the men were forced to endure a fourth winter in the Arctic. They barricaded themselves in a house of wood and snow they hurriedly constructed. It was little better than an igloo, yet Ross gave it a pompous name—Somerset House—and enforced rigid delineations of rank. It was a snow house divided. On one side, ordinary seamen were crammed together in their rank furs, muttering obscenities; the structure’s other half was segregated quarters for the officers, where John Ross continued to be waited upon hand and foot like the country squire he aspired to be. Ross grimly speculated whether “it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.” But he maintained a stiff upper lip, and not only because of the cold.

To make matters worse, the men’s provisions were inadequate. Ross ordered half-rations, but by now, these consisted mainly of preserved meat and tinned turnip and carrot soup from the stores left by Parry. The crew’s only fresh meat came from the few Arctic foxes, and fewer hares, they could snare, with roast fox served on Sundays. The expedition surgeon made note of the deteriorating conditions: “we had scarcely any animal food… The development of severe scurvy at once served to heighten our misery, and to show how poor a defence a [tinned] vegetable regimen is… ” It was, he wrote, “during our stay at the Fury’s stores that the worst form of the disease appeared.” The ship’s carpenter died of the illness in February 1833. John Ross was also suffering the effects of the dread disease: ancient wounds long-healed began to open as scar tissue dissolved. The captain wondered whether, “I might not be ultimately able to surmount all the present circumstances.”

Yet survive he did, and, in late summer, a lane of open water appeared into which, on 15 August 1833, the men launched their boats with a fine westerly breeze. Having “almost forgotten what it was to float at freedom on the seas,” they made 72 miles (116 km) on 17 August alone. Propelled by the wind when it blew, they rowed on amongst the icebergs when it dropped—once for a stretch of twenty hours without rest. After nine days heading east, they finally spotted a sail in the distance. The men desperately rowed towards the vessel, but after several hours a wind came up and the ship moved off to the southeast. Soon another sail was sighted, but that ship too sailed on. Wrote John Ross: “it was the most anxious moment that we had yet experienced, to find that we were near to no less than two ships, either of which would have put an end to all our fears and all our toils, and that we should probably reach neither.” But an hour later the wind dropped, and they again began to close on one of the ships. Finally, they saw it lower a boat that rowed over to meet them. Stunned, the mate in command assured Ross that he couldn’t be who he said he was, as Ross was known to have died two years earlier. That conclusion, Ross replied, had been “premature.” They were unshaven, filthy, “dressed in the rags of wild beasts,” gaunt and starved to the bone. But they were definitely alive.

That John Ross is not celebrated today as one of the epic heroes of polar exploration is remarkable. Perhaps his all-too human failings militated against such a reputation, for John Ross was the antithesis of what one might expect in a hero: corpulent, irritable and overly solicitous of class. In contrast to Parry, who did his best to provide for the comfort of his men, Ross held in contempt the entire notion of the importance of creature comforts in maintaining morale. While still aboard the Victory, for instance, Ross had reduced the heat each winter to lessen the effects of condensation. He then responded to complaints from the freezing crew by bragging loudly about his unusual capacity for generating body heat. No one ever got close enough to him to notice. There was something improbable, even absurd, about John Ross. And he paid a terrible price for his haughtiness when a disgruntled underling later helped publish an unofficial account of the expedition: a remarkable rant called The Last Voyage of Capt. John Ross—vilifying Ross’s character and mocking his physical attributes. More damaging still was the book’s inventory of his alleged shortcomings as a leader, culminating in a declaration that while “the men were conscious that they owed him obedience; they were not equally convinced that they owed him their respect and esteem.”

Such criticisms aside, the expedition’s return was a triumph of human ingenuity and survival. Its success was due to one simple measure: Ross’s emulation of the Inuit, the Earth’s hardiest survivors, who eke out a living on the margins of the habitable world and yet who do so without any trace of scurvy. The Inuit treat the contents of a caribou’s stomach and the testicles of the musk-ox as delicacies, for example, food sources that have since been proven to be powerful antiscorbutics. And whilst unwilling to consume these igloo specialities, John Ross had his men eat a diet of fresh meat and salmon, concluding that “the large use of oils and fats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries.” Where possible, therefore, he replaced supplies such as salt beef and tinned foods with fresh meat, resulting in a “very salutary change of diet to our crew.” By doing so, Ross also solved the mystery of Arctic survival. Through contact with the locals, he correctly surmised that their diet of fresh meat had antiscorbutic properties, observing that “the natives cannot subsist without it, becoming diseased and dying under a more meager diet.” As he wrote in his log, “The first salmon of the summer were a medicine which all the drugs in the ship could not replace.” The Inuit had saved John Ross’s hide and those of his crew, and he knew it, though his praise was tempered by characteristic pomposity. They were, he said, “among the most worthy of all the rude tribes yet known to our voyagers, in whatever part of the world.” It was only in his fourth winter, after he had lost contact with the Inuit and moved north to Somerset Island, where game was scarce and the expedition became dependent upon tinned foods, that scurvy had made a run at the expedition.

UNFORTUNATELY, Captain George Back, on his 1836–37 Arctic expedition, failed to learn from Ross’s example. A veteran of three expeditions across the barren lands of northern Canada, two of them under the command of John Franklin, R.N., George Back was by turns ambitious, conceited and utterly charming. An inveterate womanizer, dandy and accomplished watercolourist, Back was a knowingly Byronic figure who dabbled in poetry and possessed a certain élan, having spent five years as a prisoner of war in Revolutionary France.

Back sailed for the Arctic on 14 June 1836, with orders to travel to Repulse Bay, beyond the northwestern reaches of Hudson Bay, then to send sledge parties across the isthmus of the Melville Peninsula (an arm of the American continent) to explore its western coast. The expedition was an appalling failure. Back’s ship, the Terror, like the Victory, was caught in the Arctic’s thrall of relentless ice. At one point it was hurled 40 feet (12 metres) up a cliff face, only to be mauled by an iceberg. Wrote Back: “To guard against the worst I ordered the provisions and preserved meats, together with various other necessaries, to be got up from below and stowed on deck, so as to be ready at a moment to be thrown on the large floe alongside.” Men slept in their clothes, ready to abandon ship at a moment’s notice. On some nights, the ice could be heard gently caressing the hull, on others it wailed and pounded against the ship’s sides. At one point the ice reached up alongside to form a cradle, then, after holding the ship tight in the air, the floe let go its grasp and the vessel plunged into the sea. Back was astonished to glimpse in those moments a mould of the ship “stamped as perfectly as in a die in the walls of ice on either side.” Next, a huge square mass of ice of many tons collapsed, throwing up a wave 30 feet (9 metres) high that rolled over the stricken Terror. George Back:

It was indeed an awful crisis rendered more frightful from the mistiness of the night and the dimness of the moon. The poor ship cracked and trembled violently and no one could say that the next minute would not be her last, and, indeed, his own too, for with her our means of safety would probably perish.

Compounding the desperate situation, there had been a sudden, serious and—to the expedition’s captain and medical officer—inexplicable onset of illness aboard the Terror within a fortnight of the last live domestic animal being slaughtered on board. Six months into the expedition, Back complained in his journal on 26 December that the crew had been inflicted by “perverseness,” “sluggishness” and “listlessness.”

As his men began complaining of debility, Back concluded they were suffering from scurvy. Yet he made no serious attempt to secure fresh meat. Instead, he increased the provision of tinned meat, soup and vegetables, as well as lime juice and other alleged anti-scorbutics. But on 13 January 1837, one of the men died. As well, ten of the ship’s crew of sixty—both officers and men—were now sick, complaining of “languor” and “shooting pains or twitches betokening weakness” in the ankles and knees. One, named Donaldson, “evinced a disposition to incoherency.” Another was suddenly “seized with syncope,” or dizziness. The provision of canned meat and “anti-scorbutics of every kind” failed to help. While Back had suffered through horrific privations before—scurvy and starvation amongst them—during previous overland expeditions, he was unnerved by the disease eating away at the Terror’s crew: “Who could help feeling that his hour also might shortly come?” He felt utterly helpless, that the situation was “beyond our comprehension or control.” At one point, he wondered if the cause might not in fact have been an illness carried aboard by one of the crew, at another he mused about the influence of the dank, hothouse atmosphere inside the ship and the freezing dry cold without.

Donaldson, the man who had shown signs of incoherency and who remained in a “drowsy stupor,” died on 5 February. On 26 April, he was followed by a Royal Marine named Alexander Young who, before dying, had requested that he be autopsied. The ship’s surgeon found Young’s liver enlarged, water in the region of the heart and the quality of his blood “poor.” When Back demanded in an official letter to the surgeon, Dr. Donovan, “his opinion of the probable consequences if the ship were detained another winter in these regions,” Donovan’s answer was that “it would be fatal to many of the officers and men.” And so, when the Terror was finally released by the ice after ten months, Back ordered the ship, badly leaking, to make for home. With a hull bound round with chain cables to seal the cracks caused by the ice and “in a sinking condition,” the Terror somehow limped across the Atlantic. Even then, in July, Back watched in impotent fury as the disease continued to spread: “The whole affair, indeed, was inexplicable to the medical officers as we had the advantage of the best provisions.” As the Terror made towards Ireland, the “apprehension of sickness had induced most of the men to go without food.” Back himself remained an invalid for six months after the dreadful voyage.

The Back expedition was an enormous setback for the Admiralty. Still, there was no attempt by British authorities to examine the causes of the illness amongst Back’s crew. Even if there had been, the probable cause—the expedition’s heavy reliance on tinned foods and the absence of fresh meat—would almost certainly have eluded suspicion. Indeed, four years after Back’s return there was a push within the Royal Navy to replace all livestock on expeditions with tinned food. Wrote Captain Basil Hall:

Meat thus preserved eats nothing, nor drinks—it is not apt to die—does not tumble overboard or get its legs broken or its flesh worked off its bones by tumbling about the ship in bad weather—it takes no care in the keeping—it is always ready, may be eaten hot or cold, and this enables you to toss into a boat as many days’ cooked provisions as you require.

In 1844, Second Secretary to the Admiralty John Barrow argued for one final attempt to complete the Northwest Passage. Barrow wanted to finish what he had started a quarter-century before, fearing that England, having “opened the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold.” Glossing over Back’s setback, Barrow, in his bid for funding, opted to focus instead on a gloriously successful trio of Antarctic cruises undertaken by John Ross’s nephew, James Clark Ross, from 1839–43:

There can be no objection with regard to any apprehension of the loss of ships or men. The two ships that recently were employed among the ice of the Antarctic sea after three voyages returned to England in such good order as to be ready to be made available for employment on the proposed North-West expedition; and with regard to the crews, it is remarkable that neither sickness nor death occurred in most of the voyages made into the Arctic regions, North or South.

As far as Barrow was concerned, he had the right ships, the Erebus and Terror, and he had the right commander in Ross.

James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition had charted some 500 miles (805 km) of the southern continent’s coastline, discovered the Antarctic ice shelf and sighted a smoking volcano, which Ross named Mount Erebus after his ship (a nearby crater was named Mount Terror after the smaller of the two vessels). When he returned to England in the autumn of 1843, Ross had earned himself the title of the world’s leading polar discoverer. The expert in ornithology and the science of terrestrial magnetism was knighted and presented with the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He cut quite a dash in Victorian society, and was once said to be “the handsomest man in the Royal Navy,” no small compliment given the preening to which the officer class was prone.

The Erebus and Terror were not nearly so handsome. Royal Navy bomb vessels designed for shore bombardment, they were sturdily built to withstand the recoil of their 3-ton (3.1-tonne) mortars. But the Terror, in particular, had an interesting history. Built in 1813, a ship of that name was engaged the following year in the Battle of Baltimore, which saw British ships of war firing bombs, rockets and cannons at Fort McHenry. The 25-hour barrage failed to dislodge the Americans and gave rise to the U.S. National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, with its reference to “the rockets’ red glare.” The Terror later saw service in the Mediterranean before it was sailed into Hudson Bay under the command of George Back. After its narrow escape from the Arctic, the Terror, together with the Erebus, was reinforced for protection against the ice for Ross’s Antarctic voyages.

Further reinforcements were made for the planned Northwest Passage expedition, set to embark in May 1845, including covering the ships’ bows with sheet iron. Other changes were made to assist the expedition as it made its way through Arctic waters. The ships were fitted with a tubular boiler and steam-forming apparatus, which conveyed hot water in pipes under the decks to warm the men’s berths and all other parts of the vessels. Desalinators were built into the galley stoves. In a revolutionary step, entire steam locomotives with specially adapted screw propellers were also installed, for emergency use. A 25-horsepower locomotive from the London and Greenwich Railway was bought for the Erebus, stripped of its front wheels and installed in the ship’s hold. The engine of the Terror, at 20 horsepower, was placed in the after-hold.

On 12 May 1845, the Times reported:

The Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty have, in every respect, provided most liberally for the comforts of the officers and men of an expedition which may, with the facilities of the screw-propeller, and other advantages of modern science, be attended with great results.

It was, in short, the most technologically advanced and best-equipped exploration team ever. However, it was not to be commanded by James Clark Ross, who declined due to a promise he had made his wife—to never again undertake a polar expedition—and a rumoured problem with the drink. Instead, the honour fell to an aging navy veteran, Sir John Franklin.