Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Ross calculated that they had one year’s supply of food in their hold. Unless the Inuit returned with supplies of fresh meat, and unless 1832 was warmer than 1831 – neither of which seemed likely – they were doomed. He therefore decided to abandon ship and drag three boats overland to Fury Beach, where they could replenish their supplies and where, come summer, conditions allowing, they would be able to sail for the whaling grounds of Baffin Bay. He put his plan into effect that April, stripping the Victory and Kreusenstern of anything that might be useful and sending sledge parties to lay a trail of depots in the direction of Fury Beach. The last group left on 29 May.

  By 1 July, after a semi-mutiny that Ross quelled in forceful and peremptory fashion, they were safely at Fury Beach. The amount of food they had been able to carry from the Victory had been of necessity limited, and by mid-June they had passed the last of their caches. Reduced to what they could carry, they had cut their rations again and again, and when they reached Fury Beach they were on the point of starvation. Parry’s piles of provisions loomed as bounteously as they had in 1829; against Ross’s orders, the men gorged themselves and suffered accordingly. When their stomachs recovered they used a set of the Fury’s discarded sails to erect a temporary shelter, Somerset House, in which they waited for the summer to come. The ice broke on 31 July, and they sailed joyfully to salvation.

  They went only eight miles before the shifting floes drove them ashore. They lingered in the hope that the ice would clear, but the winter seemed to come even earlier this year than the last. Leaving the boats where they were, they retreated overland to Somerset House. ‘There could be no recourse for us,’ Ross wrote, ‘but another winter, another year, I should say, on Fury Beach; if indeed it should be the fortune of any one to survive after another such year as the three last.’ They barricaded Somerset House with blocks of snow, fired their two portable stoves, and entered their fourth winter’s confinement. In the early months they shot the odd fox, but this prevented for only a short while the encroachment of scurvy. Soon, they were all experiencing the telltale lassitude and joint pains. The carpenter died on 16 February. Meanwhile it snowed and snowed, until only the top of Somerset House was visible. Ross made them build a raised floor for the tent, had them dig an enclosure in the snow, and ordered them to exercise in it. Raging and cursing at their entrapment and at his own deteriorating health, he did everything to keep them busy. ‘Better was it,’ he wrote, ‘that they should work themselves into utter weariness, that they should so hunger as to think only of their stomachs, fall asleep and dream of nothing but a better dinner, as they awoke to hope and labour for it.’

  Ross had sailed north in 1829 to prove his worth and to show that his methodology was superior to the Admiralty’s. He had failed in the last but succeeded beyond all expectation in the first: he was now in his fourth Arctic winter – not for 70 years would his record be beaten – and had kept his company more or less intact into the bargain. What was more, he had done it with minimal help from the Admiralty and on a shoestring budget. Recalling the popularity of Parry’s and Franklin’s journals, he fired a caustic volley at his predecessors: ‘Let him who reads to condemn what is so meagre, have some compassion on the writer who had nothing better than this meagreness, this repetition, this reiteration of the ever-resembling, every day dullness to record, and what was infinitely worse, to endure. I might have seen more, it has been said: it may be; but I saw only ice and snow, cloud and drift and storm. Still, I might have seen what I did not; seen as a painter, and felt like a poet; and then like the painter and poet have written. That also may be, but let painter and poet come hither and try; try how far cold and hunger, misery and depression, aid those faculties which seem always best developed under the comforts of life... Our “faecundi calices” were cold snow water; and though, according to Persius, it is hunger that which makes poets write as it makes parrots speak, I suspect that neither poet nor parrot would have gained much under a “fox” diet, and that an insufficient one, in the blessed regions of Boothia Felix.’

  In the spring of 1833, while the snow was still firm around Somerset House, Ross ordered his men to lay a string of food caches along the coast. On 8 July they began the trek to the abandoned boats. This time there could be no turning back: they had eaten the last of the Fury’s salted meat a week before. The carpenter having died, they could only hope that the boats were still in one piece. Luckily, they were; but the sea was still frozen. They waited for weeks, their supplies diminishing, until at 4.00 a.m. on 14 August the ice opened. They fled up Prince Regent Inlet and east to Baffin Bay. When the wind failed they took to their oars, rowing for now 12 and now 20 hours at a stretch. On 25 August, while camped at the mouth of Navy Board Inlet on the southern coast of Lancaster Sound, they were aroused by the look-out’s cry that he had seen a sail. They lit smoke signals with wet gunpowder, and when that failed they rowed out to sea. But the ship sailed away, leaving them bobbing on the waves. Six hours later, at 10.00 a.m., they saw another sail and once again rowed towards it. This time they were spotted. By strange coincidence their rescuer was the Isabella, the same ship that Ross had commanded in 1818. When he said as much to the crew they laughed uneasily: no, that could not be, for Captain Ross was long since dead in the North-West Passage. Ross assured them that he wasn’t.

  That night the survivors were bewildered. ‘All, everything, too, was to be done at once; it was washing, dressing, shaving, eating, all intermingled, it was the materials of each jumbled together.’ The transition was physically overwhelming: when Ross was offered a bed he found the mattress too soft after months on the ice and took instead to a chair.

  On Ross’s return he was knighted, granted an audience with the king, given the keys to cities across Britain, and awarded countless gold medals. He became the man of the moment, his journal sold in thousands, and panoramas of the voyage were projected on the rotunda at Leicester Square. His nephew was merely promoted from lieutenant to commander – a less than satisfactory reward for a man who had done the lion’s share of the discovery. But James Clark Ross would soon vindicate himself.

  CHARTING THE ANTARCTIC

  James Clark Ross (1839–43)

  Since Antarctica had been circumnavigated, first by James Cook in 1773 and then by Thaddeus Bellingshausen in 1820, naval and scientific circles had shown little interest in the bottom of the world. A number of fantasists insisted there was a continent inside all that ice, conjecturing variously that it contained a portal to the inside of the globe, was home to a race of undiscovered humans, and was the site of either Atlantis or the Garden of Eden. But the general view, as propounded by Cook, held that there was nothing down there and that, even if there was, it was too difficult to reach and not worth finding anyway. During the 1820s and 1830s, however, as whalers and sealers explored the region in search of new and profitable killing grounds, it became clear that there was land and that it could be reached. In 1820 the American John Davis landed on the Antarctic Peninsula; and in 1830–2 a captain from the British firm of Enderby Brothers sighted a portion of the continent that would later be called Enderby Land. As these and other reports came in, European and American governments took a renewed interest in Antarctica. In 1837 Captain Jules Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville sailed south with orders to find the South Pole. He came nowhere near the Pole, but he did very creditably nonetheless, becoming the first man to land on the main continent and naming the territory Adélie Land after his wife. In 1838 a US expedition under Lieutenant Charles Wilkes charted 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline – or said it did; the findings were later proved false – that duly entered the charts as Wilkes Land. Then, not wanting to be left behind, Britain launched its own expedition in 1839. The man chosen to lead it was Commander James Clark Ross.

  James Ross was, in 1838, the Admiralty’s most experienced polar officer. Of the last 20 years he had spent 17 in the Arctic and had overwintered for six; he had reached, with Parry, the furthest north over the Arctic pack; and
he had discovered the North Magnetic Pole. He had received little kudos for his trouble, never having been the leader of an expedition; but now he seemed the obvious choice, not just because of long service but because, as the discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole, he was considered a magnetist of distinction. This was an important qualification, for the first British Antarctic Expedition of the 19th century was to be a scientific one. This did not mean that it was driven any less by a desire for national prestige than its Arctic predecessors, just that unlike them it did have a genuinely worthwhile purpose. In 1838 it had been proposed that Europe’s leading maritime powers should take simultaneous readings across the world with the aim of creating a geomagnetic map of the globe. Ross’s expedition was part of that project, and so he was instructed to erect and maintain observatories throughout the known lands of the southern hemisphere. After that, however, Antarctica – and particularly the South Magnetic Pole – was his to conquer and claim for Great Britain.

  Ross and his second-in command, Lieutenant Francis Crozier, an Irishman who had sailed on all of Parry’s voyages and who was almost as experienced as Ross himself, were given two bomb-ships, Erebus and Terror, for their journey into the ice. Designed for coastal mortar bombardments, bomb-ships were ideal for the conditions he expected to meet. They didn’t sail particularly well, but they were strong and had a shallow draught, and their capacious holds, once used to store ammunition, had ample space for the supplies he intended to take. Once the two ships had undergone the by now standard process of reinforcement – double-planking the hulls, insulating the decks, copper-sheathing the keels and prows, fitting triple-strength canvas – the food and equipment was loaded. It was the best outfitted expedition in British history, thanks to Ross’s insistence that everything be done to keep the crews both healthy and comfortable. Ice-saws, portable forges and piles of good winter clothing came aboard, as did a phenomenal amount of food, comprising not just the everyday salt beef and preserved meat, but a comprehensive array of anti-scorbutics – 2,618 pints of vegetable soup, 2,398 pounds of pickled cabbage, 10,782 pounds of carrots, plus a small flock of sheep.

  Ross and Crozier left London in the autumn of 1839, and by 31 January were building their first observatory on the island of St Helena. They repeated the process at Cape Town on 17 March and again at Kerguelen Island on 15 May, where the winds were sometimes so strong that the men had to lie flat lest they be blown into the sea. On 16 August they reached the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land – modern Tasmania – where they received a warm welcome from its governor, none other than the veteran explorer Sir John Franklin. After three months’ recuperation, during which Franklin had his convicts build an observatory for them, they sailed down the 180th meridian. Crossing the Antarctic Circle on New Year’s Day 1841, they headed into the unknown. Everyone was excited, particularly Crozier’s surgeon-cum-naturalist, Robert McCormick, who predicted they would enter ‘a region of our globe as fresh and new as at creation’s first dawn’.

  It was understood that the Antarctic pack would be hard, and that the weather would be bad. To their delight, gales were few, and the ice, after skilful, repetitive ramming, broke before them. On 9 January they broke through the pack and floated in a new world. Within Antarctica’s protective ring of ice the sea was calm, the air hazy and the weather, as McCormick wrote, was like ‘the finest May day in England’. The rumours of an undiscovered Arcadia seemed suddenly plausible as they sailed beneath a sky of indigo, in their little wooden ships, towards a white horizon. They knew that the white was caused by the sun’s reflection off a large body of ice – it was known as ice sky, or ice blink, as opposed to water sky, which was black – but Ross and Crozier had both seen ice blink before and were not worried. Two days later they sighted land ‘of so extensive a coastline and attaining such altitude as to justify the appellation of a Great new Southern Continent’, wrote McCormick. It was 100 miles distant, but they soon met its outlying islands, one of which, Possession Island, they claimed as the first territorial conquest made in the name of Queen Victoria. Further south than any human had travelled before, they named and claimed with abandon. On 29 January they saw a mountain, 12,400 feet high, above whose peak hung a cloud of snow. As they approached, they realized that the snow was in fact smoke and that it was split by jets of flame. Amidst a realm of snow and ice they had discovered a live volcano.

  Christening it Mount Erebus after Ross’s command ship (a dormant neighbour of 10,900 feet was named Mount Terror), they sailed east to be greeted by yet another wonder: a cliff of ice, 300 feet high, that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was the Ross Ice Shelf, the largest of its kind in the world, and a phenomenon the like of which neither Ross nor Crozier had seen in the whole of their polar careers. As Ross said: ‘It was... an obstruction of such a character as to leave no doubt upon my mind as to our future proceedings, for we might as well sail through the cliffs of Dover as penetrate such a mass ... It would be impossible to conceive a more solid-looking mass of ice; not the smallest appearance of any rent or fissure could we discover throughout its whole extent, and the intensely bright sky beyond it but too plainly indicated the great distance to which it reached to the southward.’ Two weeks and 250 miles later they had still not reached its end – although at one point it sank to a height of 50 feet, allowing Ross a glimpse from his mast of ‘an immense plain of frosted silver’ – and with the austral summer coming to an end they dared not risk being trapped. On 9 February they turned for Tasmania.

  The journey out was considerably harder than the one in, but, after a close shave with a flotilla of bergs, they escaped the pack on 8 March and were on their way. Ross took a short detour to investigate Wilkes’s coordinates and found, to his satisfaction, that Wilkes Land was in fact a stretch of ocean so deep that their 600-fathom sounding line did not touch bottom. On the morning of 10 April 1841 they were in Tasmania’s Derwent River, where Franklin rowed out to greet them in his governor’s barge. They were welcomed with bands and parties and galas; every member of Hobart’s tiny ‘society’ came out to cheer their accomplishments; they would have been given the freedom of the city had such a thing not been incongruous in a penal colony. They deserved it all, for theirs had been a remarkable voyage. They had penetrated the pack; they had discovered new land and new and astounding ice features; they had not reached the South Magnetic Pole, but their compasses had shown it was nearby; and (a matter of national rather than scientific pride) they had debunked America’s claim to have sighted the continent. Furthermore, they were not going to sit on their laurels: Ross intended to complete his survey. He lingered awhile in Hobart to erect a new observatory alongside the old, and then dashed to Sydney in New South Wales to take magnetic readings on Garden Island. Scientific obligations completed, he and Crozier left Hobart on 5 August 1841, their holds replete with three years’ fresh provisions.

  Approaching Antarctica via the 146th meridian, they were in the pack by Christmas and celebrated New Year by mooring the two ships against a floe on which they constructed an ice ballroom, complete with dance-floor, a bar, two thrones for the captains, and a statue of the Venus de Medici. Their festivities, however, were premature. The pack was obdurate this season: it froze around them; then, on 19 January 1842, it gave them hell. A storm broke, of such fury that it ripped the pack to shreds. ‘Our ships were involved in an ocean of rolling fragments of ice,’ Ross wrote, ‘hard as floating rocks of granite, which were dashed against them by the waves with so much violence that their masts quivered as if they would fall at any given moment and the destruction of the ships seemed inevitable ... Each of us could only secure a hold, waiting the issue with resignation to the will of Him who alone could bring us through such extreme danger.’ For 28 hours they were knocked to and fro. Their hawsers snapped, their sails blew away and the Erebus lost its copper sheathing. Both ships lost their rudders. Crozier had to flood the Terror’s hold to extinguish a fire. And by the end of it they were still surrounded by mile after
mile of wave-tossed ice. Seeking refuge behind a row of bergs so enormous as to protect them from the wind, they made repairs and emerged from the pack on 2 February. Twenty days later they met the Ross Ice Shelf, which they followed eastwards for two days until it veered north to reconnect with the pack.

  It had been a hard voyage and, after his recent experiences, Ross was in no mood to battle round the continent. He ordered his ships north to the nearest refuge – the Falkland Islands. By 7.00 on the evening of 24 February they were free of the pack and sailing towards Cape Horn. In the small hours of 13 March, however, the Antarctic came after them. Out of the darkness a berg materialized in front of the Erebus. Ross turned to avoid it, and in doing so ran directly before the Terror. The two ships collided with a crash that woke everybody aboard. According to Ross, ‘The concussion when she struck us was such as to throw almost every one off his feet; our bowsprit, foretopmast, and other smaller spars, were carried away.’ McCormick wrote: ‘So sudden was the collision that there was scant time for dressing, and an officer might have been seen clinging to the capstan in his nightshirt only.’ For a while the two ships broached to in a horrible entanglement, the Terror rising so high with each wave that it threatened to fall on the Erebus.

  When they cut themselves free the Erebus was helpless, its deck buried under a mass of spars and fallen sails. Normally, the crew would have been able to repair the damage, but these were not normal circumstances. The berg that Ross had swerved to avoid was the forerunner of a chain of similar behemoths that wallowed towards them, separated by only a few yards. Unable to sail out of danger, Ross turned his rudder so that the Erebus began, slowly, to rotate. The procedure, known as a sternboard, was difficult at the best of times, but was even more so now, for when the Erebus turned full circle its prow had to enter a gap between one of the bergs. There was no second chance: the ship had to go through on its first attempt. They made the gap, but then came the dreaded passage to the other side. While the ice-master shouted directions, Ross stood on deck, arms folded, awaiting the outcome. ‘His whole bearing,’ McCormick wrote, ‘whilst lacking nothing in firmness, yet betrayed both in the expression of his countenance and attitude, the all-but despair with which he anxiously watched the result of this last and only expedient left to us in the awful position we were placed in ... But for the howling of the winds, and the turmoil of the roaring waters, the falling of a pin might have been heard on the Erebus’s deck.’