An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor

by Michael Smith

  Although Crean was a fiercely independent young man, he was still unsure about the reception he might receive at home and did not immediately tell his parents about his new life. He chose not to inform them until after he signed the recruitment papers, which meant there was no chance of persuading him to stay on the farm. It was also an early indication of Crean’s self-confidence and determination. And, if the two youngsters were looking for extra courage, they probably found it in each other’s company.

  But, after deciding to enlist, Crean had another problem. He was penniless and did not even possess a decent set of clothes to wear for the trip to a new life. He promptly borrowed a small sum of money from an unknown benefactor and persuaded someone else to lend him a suit. Tom Crean took off his well-worn working clothes in July 1893, squeezed into his borrowed suit and left the farm, never to return.

  As he strode off, the young man had precious few possessions to carry with him as a reminder of his home and upbringing. But Crean did remember to put around his neck a scapular, a small symbol of his Catholic faith and a token souvenir of his roots. The scapular, which is two pieces of cloth about two and a half by two inches attached to a leather neck cord, contains a special prayer that offers particular spiritual relief to the wearer. As he set off into the unknown for the first time, Crean will have drawn special comfort from its fundamental tenet – that the wearer of the scapular will not suffer eternal fire. It was to remain around his neck for the rest of his life.

  He travelled down to Queenstown (today called Cobh), near Cork on Ireland’s southern coast with James Ashe, another Irish seaman from the merchant navy. Ashe was a close relative of Thomas Ashe from nearby Kinard, who was to become a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and achieve martyrdom in 1917 by dying on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison at the height of the war with the British.

  Tom Crean was formally enlisted in the Royal Navy on 10 July 1893, just ten days before his sixteenth birthday.2 Officially the lowest enlistment age was sixteen and the assumption is that the fifteen-year-old lad either forged his papers or lied about his age before signing up.

  At this formative stage in his life, young Tom was not the tall, imposing figure well known on the polar landscape in later life. According to Ministry of Defence records of the time, the farmer’s son, who had a mop of brown hair, stood only 5 ft 7¾ inches when he signed on the dotted line in July 1893 as Boy 2nd Class, service No 174699.3

  His first appointment was to the boys’ training ship, HMS Impregnable at Devonport, Plymouth in the southwest of England, where he served his initial naval apprenticeship.4

  Life in the navy was tough, particularly for a young man away from home for the first time in his life. Discipline was strict and the regime harsh and unsympathetic. His initiation into naval life was perhaps the first test of the strength of character which was to become a hallmark of his adventurous life.

  He survived his first examination and promotion of sorts came fairly quickly for the young man. Within a year Crean had taken his first step upwards and was promoted to Boy 1st Class. A little later on 28 November 1894 the Boy 1st class was transferred to HMS Devastation, a coastguard vessel based at Devonport.5 Crean, for the first time, was at sea.

  Little is known about Crean’s early career in the Navy. It was, however, punctuated with advancement and demotion and it may not have been an altogether happy time for the youngster as he came to terms with the new life a long way from home. Some reports suggest that at one stage Crean became so disenchanted with the naval routine that he tried to run away. One writer claimed that Crean was so dismayed by the poor food and rough accommodation on board naval ships of the time that he threatened to abscond.6

  The regime in the late Victorian Navy of the time was undoubtedly arduous and unforgiving. While the Royal Navy was traditionally the right arm of the British Empire, by the late Victorian era it had become smugly complacent, inefficient and out of date. It had more in common with Nelson and still lent heavily on rigid discipline and blind obedience. It required sweeping reforms by the feared Admiral Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher to eventually modernise the navy in time for the First World War in 1914.

  But there is a strange inconsistency about a young man, fresh from a poor, undernourished rural community in the Kerry hills complaining about the quality of the food and bedding. It may be that Crean, like others at the time, had other grievances. Or it may well have been a simple case of a young man a long way from his roots who was homesick. In any event, he drew some comfort from the other young Irish sailors around him and decided that he, too, would stick it out.

  On his eighteenth birthday in 1895, after exactly two years service, Crean was promoted to the rank of ‘ordinary seaman’ while serving on HMS Royal Arthur, a flag-ship in the Pacific Fleet. A little less than a year later, he advanced to become Able Seaman Crean on HMS Wild Swan, a small 170-ft versatile utility vessel which also operated in Pacific waters.

  By 1898, Crean was apparently eager to gain new skills and was appointed to the gunnery training ship, HMS Cambridge, at Devonport. Six months later, shortly before Christmas 1898, he moved across to the torpedo school ship of HMS Defiance, also at Devonport. At the major naval port of Chatham, he advanced a little further by securing qualifications for various gun and torpedo duties.7

  Crean was also developing a reputation for reliability and his career record is impressive. His conduct was officially described by the naval hierarchy as ‘very good’ throughout his early years in the service, despite occasional brushes with authority.

  It was around this time – between 1899 and 1900 – that Crean began to rise up and down the slippery pole of naval ranking and he secured the only recorded blemish to his otherwise impressive career record. It may have reflected his discontent, or it may be that after six years ‘below decks’ Crean lacked any sense of purpose and felt he was going nowhere in this Englishman’s navy. Or, more simply, it may have been that, like countless sailors before and since, Crean was a victim of excessive drinking, the traditional curse of the ordinary seaman. Drinking was a regular feature of a sailor’s routine and shore leave was normally peppered with heavy and excessive bouts which easily got out of hand with predictable results. Crean liked a drink and as a gregarious, outgoing character would have been at his ease in the company of other heavy-drinking sailors.

  At the end of September 1899, he was promoted to Petty Officer 2nd Class at the Devonport yard while assigned to Vivid. There followed a brief period on board HMS Northampton, the boy’s training school before Crean made the move which would change his life.

  The momentous move came on 15 February 1900, when PO 2nd Class Crean was assigned to the oddly-named special torpedo vessel, HMS Ringarooma, in Australian waters.8 It was a move which introduced the strapping 22-year-old to a new and very different type of challenge – the rigours of polar exploration with the likes of Scott, Shackleton, Wild, Evans and Lashly.

  2

  A chance meeting

  The year 1901 marked the end of the long Victorian era for Britain. Queen Victoria, who had presided over the country’s most expansive age, died on 22 January after more than 63 years on the throne. It was also the year when Britain, under the leadership of Robert Falcon Scott, would launch the first major attempt to conquer the Earth’s last unexplored continent – Antarctica.

  At the time only a handful of people had visited Antarctica, which is the fifth largest continent with a diameter of 2,800 miles and an area of 5,400,000 square miles. It represents about ten per cent of the world’s land mass and is larger than either America or Europe.

  Antarctica is an island continent, totally isolated from the rest of the world’s land masses and separated from civilisation by the violent Southern Ocean. It is 600 miles to South America and over 1,500 miles to Australia. Over 99 per cent of the land mass is permanently covered in ice and about 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water is locked up in the icecaps. Wind speeds have been recorded at close to 20
0 mph (320 kph) and Antarctica has yielded the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, –129.3 °F (–89.6 °C).

  There are no Eskimos from which to learn the art of survival in Earth’s coldest and most inhospitable environment and there are few indigenous inhabitants, though it is visited by varieties of penguins, seals and whales. There are very few other living things beyond some algae, lichens and mosses, so all food and equipment has to be transported to the continent and carried along on any journey. Antarctica is also a land of extremes. Despite the ice sheet covering, it rarely snows and for much of the year the continent is either plunged into total darkness for 24 hours a day or bathed in full sunlight.

  People down the ages had believed in the existence of Antarctica, or the Southern Continent, for perhaps 2,000 years before its presence was finally established. Long before its discovery, the ‘unknown southern land’ – Terra Australis Incognita – had entered mythology. Greek philosophers claimed that a giant land mass was needed to ‘balance’ the weight of the lands known to exist at the top of the earth. Since the Northern Hemisphere rested beneath Arktos (the Bear), the general belief was that the southern land had to be the opposite – Antarktikos.

  Great sailors like Magellan and Drake flirted with the unknown southern land in the sixteenth century and two intrepid French explorers – Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier and Yves Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec – discovered some neighbouring sub-Antarctic islands in the eighteenth century. But it was Captain James Cook, arguably the greatest explorer of all time, who first crossed the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773, in his vessels, Resolution and Adventure. Cook never actually saw Antarctica – he sailed to within 75 miles of land – and was doubtful about the value of any exploration in such a frigid and hostile environment.

  The earliest people to see Antarctica travelled on the expedition led by the Russian, Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, which on 27 January 1820 recorded the first known sighting. But Bellingshausen was unsure about his sighting and it was not until January 1831, that sealing captain John Biscoe circumnavigated the continent.

  Sir James Clark Ross penetrated the pack ice which surrounds the continent for the first time in 1841 and sailed alongside the frozen land mass in his ships, Erebus and Terror. He gave the names of his two ships to two of Antarctica’s most prominent mountains which stand guard over the entrance to the area that was to be frequented by several British expeditions around Ross Island in the Ross Sea.

  An international expedition, led by the Belgian, Adrian de Gerlache, took the ship Belgica deep into southern waters between 1897 and 1899. His ship became stuck fast in the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea off the Antarctica Peninsula, which extends like an outstretched finger from the continent up towards the tip of South America.

  Reluctantly and with great trepidation, de Gerlache and his crew were the first humans to spend the winter in the Antarctic, where the sun vanishes for four months. The hardship, bitter cold and endless gloomy months of total winter darkness took a heavy toll on the crew. One man died and two others were declared ‘insane’.

  The survivors included a 25-year-old Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, and a 33-year-old American, Frederick Cook. Amundsen, the finest polar explorer of all time, would later complete the first ever navigation of the North West Passage across the frozen top of the North American Continent, and he would reach the South Pole a month before his ill-fated British rival, Captain Scott. Cook, a flawed but undeniably gifted character, would falsely claim until his dying day that he had beaten Robert Peary to become the first man to reach the North Pole.

  The first landing on the Antarctic Continent outside the Antarctic Peninsula is thought to have taken place on 24 January 1895 when an eight-man party from the whaler, Antarctic, landed at Cape Adare. The identity of the first person to make the landfall has never been accurately established because of a series of disputes. But the naturalist, Carsten Borchgrevink, claimed to have leaped out of the rowing boat ahead of others to gain the honour of being first to place his feet on the Continent. Borchgrevink later went on to secure the significant distinction of leading the first expedition to deliberately overwinter in Antarctica.

  Borchgrevink, a Norwegian, landed near the entrance of Robertson Bay at Cape Adare on the Adare Peninsula in 1899 and erected two small prefabricated huts where his ten-man party was the first to spend winter on the Antarctic Continent. One hut, the party’s living quarters, still stands today. However, Borchgrevink’s exploratory deeds were modest and confined to a short trip onto the Ross Ice Shelf, or the Great Ice Barrier.

  The first major attempt to explore Antarctica was conceived some years earlier by a remarkable English naval figure, Sir Clements Markham, who had made a brief trip to the Arctic decades before. Markham, an ex-public-school boy who entered the Navy at thirteen years of age, was on board the Assistance in 1850–51 during one of the many fruitless searches for Sir John Franklin’s party, which had tragically disappeared in search of the North West Passage in 1845 with the loss of all 129 lives.

  It was an episode which shaped Markham’s colourful life and had profound consequences for Britain’s role in polar exploits, first in the Arctic and later in the exploration of the Antarctic Continent. Britain’s memorable part in the ‘Heroic Age of polar exploration’ would have been entirely different without the driving influence of the formidable bewhiskered Victorian patriarch, Markham.

  Markham, a brusque and stubborn man who has been likened to a Victorian Winston Churchill, adopted polar exploration as a personal quest which bordered on obsession. There was a fanatical zeal about the way he manoeuvred, cajoled and expertly used his influence to ensure that Britain should undertake new expeditions south at a time when there was little support elsewhere for the idea. Moreover, Markham ensured that future exploration to the South would be a naval affair, when Britain could once again demonstrate its manhood and superiority to a slightly disbelieving world.

  The Antarctic: the fifth largest continent was largely unexplored at the start of the twentieth century.

  In particular, he was determined that the expedition would use traditional British methods of travelling, which meant man-hauling sledges across the ice, rather than the more suitable and modern use of dogs and skis. Dogs were quicker, hard working and at worst, could be eaten by the other dogs or the explorers themselves to prolong the journey or ensure safe return.

  Markham, however, was typically sentimental towards dogs and implacably opposed to using them as beasts of burden at a time when others – notably the Norwegians – used the animals to great effect. There is little doubt that he greatly influenced Scott’s lukewarm attitude to animals on both his journeys to the South, with the result that British explorers were destined to suffer the dreadful ordeal of man-hauling their food and equipment across the snow. The beasts of burden were the explorers themselves.

  Markham, who loved intrigue, successfully engineered himself into the position as unelected leader of the venture but it took almost two decades to bring the first British expedition to Antarctica into fruition. In his celebrated Personal Narrative of events leading up to the Discovery expedition, he recalled:

  ‘In 1885 I turned my attention to Antarctic exploration at which I had to work for sixteen years before success was achieved.’1

  It was the first tentative step towards the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. It was also the opening chapter of Britain’s participation in the Heroic Age of polar exploration. Tom Crean was eight years of age at the time and Scott, Markham’s protégé, was sixteen.

  Markham plotted and planned his Antarctic adventure with great determination, especially when it came to selecting his own preferred choice as leader of the first expedition. Although probably not his first choice, he had alighted on a young naval officer who was destined to carry his banner into the South – Robert Falcon Scott, or as he has become known, ‘scott of the Antarctic’.

  Markham had been ‘talent spotting’ in the Navy for some
years and finally selected Scott towards the end of the century, helped by a chance meeting near Buckingham Palace in June 1899. Writing in his famous book, The Voyage of the Discovery, Scott remembered:

  ‘Early in June I was spending my short leave in London and chancing one day to walk down Buckingham Palace Road, I espied Sir Clements on the opposite pavement, and naturally crossed, and as naturally turned and accompanied him to his house. That afternoon for the first time I learned that there was such a thing as a prospective Antarctic expedition.’2

  Two days later Scott formally applied for the post as commander of the expedition, though he must have been given some indication from Markham that at the very least he was likely to travel with the expedition. In any event, Scott was not officially appointed until a year later on 30 June 1900 at the age of 32. It was the beginning of the Scott legend.

  Markham, meanwhile, was busily trying to arrange the sizeable sum of £90,000 (equivalent to £8,000,000 at today’s purchasing prices) to pay for the expedition – the largest amount ever raised in Britain for a polar journey. This was a prolonged and frustrating exercise and only after lengthy debate and political manoeuvring was the cash found. Markham’s dream had become a reality.