Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  The plan was to sail as far south as possible on the meridian 55° west towards the Antarctic Peninsula in the hope of meeting Louis Philippe’s Land at the northern tip of the peninsula, first discovered five years earlier by D’Urville. If ice blocked their path, the alternative was to sail into the nearby seas found in 1823 by the Scottish sealing captain, James Weddell.

  Ross, at least, maintained an air of determination that either took no account of the unrest or was a resolute display of authority. In a dispatch to the Admiralty from the Falklands, he boldly announced:

  I have not the smallest shadow of anxiety about our next season’s operations, experience has made us so familiar with our work, now in that quarter that we can regard it with as much tranquillity as we should approaching the English Channel.1

  Erebus and Terror again headed south and the first icebergs were sighted on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was celebrated close to Clarence Island by dining on a ‘fine fat ox’ which Governor Moody had generously donated to each ship. Towards late afternoon, the main pack came into view and Joinville Island, which lies at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, was seen in the distance a few days later.

  To the south of Joinville, the ships found a host of unknown islands and rocky capes. The weather was blissfully fine and Crozier and Ross went ashore to a place called Cockburn Island to claim formal possession of the area for the Crown. A flurry of other namings took place in the area, including James Ross Island, Snow Hill Island and Paulet Island. An inlet was named Erebus and Terror Gulf.

  Further southerly progress, however, was blocked by an imposing line of unbroken ice. After consulting Crozier, Ross decided to head southeast, into the pack, in the hope of finding a passage towards the continent. But the pack, which had been penetrated so successfully into the Ross Sea, was crammed more tightly on this side of the continent.

  Ice soon closed around the ships and by mid-January, Erebus and Terror were firmly beset in the northern reaches of King George IV Sea (later renamed the Weddell Sea).

  The Weddell Sea is a graveyard for ships. Among the vessels subsequently lost in the same seas was Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, which was crushed by the ice and sunk in 1915. Hooker described the sea as ‘repellent’. It is a vast basin of mostly impenetrable ice surrounded on three sides by land where strong currents from the east drive the constantly mobile ice in a clockwise direction and pile it up against the 1,200-mile-long (2,000 kilometres) Antarctic Peninsula. From this area, the Antarctic pack swells to its thickest, extending at times to over 1,800 miles (2,880 kilometres) wide.

  Erebus and Terror attempted to penetrate the icy waters for another two weeks, often taking a severe battering from large hunks of floating ice and frequent violent storms. By the end of January, the outline of Paulet Island could still be seen on the horizon, confirming that the ships had made barely any progress. They were not freed from the ice until 4 February, far too late in the season to contemplate seeking a new passage to the south. Erebus and Terror came to a halt at around 65° south, with Crozier and Ross bemoaning the fact that, in 1823, Weddell had found open seas a good ten degrees further south at 74° south. Even at 74°, Weddell had seen open water to the south, but he sensibly decided to turn back because of the lateness of the season.

  Crozier and Ross rightly concluded that 1823 must have been a freak year. The ice in 1843, however, was unrelenting and their luck was out. In a different year, it is probable that the well-equipped and well-led Erebus and Terror might have made an historic journey, beating Weddell’s ‘furthest south’ and may even have discovered what is today called the Caird Coast,Coats Land and the Filchner Ice Shelf on the Antarctic mainland.

  Erebus and Terror had entered the Weddell Sea further east than Weddell, where the waters are invariably more negotiable. It was down the eastern channels that the famous twentieth-century voyages of Ernest Shackleton and Vivian Fuchs were made. It was also along this corridor that Britain established a permanent scientific Antarctic base at Halley Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf and where 140 years after the voyage of Crozier and Ross, scientists first measured the alarming depletion of the ozone layer over the Antarctic continent.

  For Crozier, Ross and the crews of Erebus and Terror, the 1843 journey was a major disappointment. Hooker described it as ‘the worst season of the three, one of constant gales, fogs and snow storms’. Calling it a ‘signal failure’, he added that Ross ‘will not allow this’.

  Strangely, there was an uncomfortable parallel with Parry’s three attempts to find the North West Passage two decades earlier. Ross and Crozier’s finest season in the Antarctic was 1840–41, their first. But each successive year was less accomplished than its predecessor and the final season was a sorry postscript to the expedition. Parry suffered the same fate. His first expedition of 1819–20 into Lancaster Sound was a great triumph, the second a disappointment and the third a dismal failure.

  Erebus and Terror retreated to warmer waters. Heading east, the ships ran alongside the pack and criss-crossed the Antarctic Circle. A few days later, Erebus and Terror ran into the pack again and on 5 March a thick line of ice extended across their path from east to west with no sign of a break.

  Tentative moves were made to re-enter the pack and the ships covered another 27 miles (43 kilometres) before coming to a grinding halt in front of an impenetrable wall of unbroken ice. Erebus and Terror stopped at 71° 30′ south, the furthest south the ice would permit that season. A little more than 50 miles (80 kilometres) across the horizon – unknown to Crozier and Ross – was the coastline of Dronning Maud Land, an area that would remain undiscovered for another 90 years.

  A weary Ross signalled to Crozier that the great endeavour was at an end. The ships withdrew from the ice, crossing the Antarctic Circle for the last time in the second week of March.

  The ships turned north towards Simon’s Bay at the Cape of Good Hope, hoping for better luck and easier travelling. But the ships immediately ran into another fierce north-easterly gale, which left them reeling from its force and in danger of being smashed into the pack ice.

  The expedition was shaken by the ferocity of the storm and the biting cold. Seas froze as waves broke over the decks and the sails were soon armour plated with ice. Men stayed on deck throughout the night on constant alert for stray icebergs. A brief lull followed before the storm once again erupted with full fury as though the Antarctic was bidding a typically brutal farewell.

  The violence of the storm rattled even the hardened men of Erebus and Terror. Nothing experienced on the long voyage seemed to compare with those final days in the Southern Ocean, even for men who had endured three voyages through the worst seas on earth.

  Crozier and Ross, despite their vast experience of the southern seas, were visibly traumatised by the ordeal. Crozier’s hair, once dark, was now distinctly grey.

  Crozier emerged as a giant during these final demanding days in the Antarctic. His dedication, cool professionalism and outstanding seamanship were unsurpassed. Lesser men might have buckled under the strain. Danger had always been at hand, particularly as the ships battled against the treacherous pack of the Weddell Sea. Hooker reported:

  They were nights of grog and hot coffee, for the orders to splice the main brace were many and imperative, if the crew were to be kept up to the strain on their nerves and muscles.2

  Crozier’s commitment was awe inspiring. He did not sleep in his bed for weeks during the skirmish with the icy seas, remaining on deck for hours at a time and only snatching a few hours rest by sitting in a chair in his cabin. Ross had little doubt about the value of Crozier or of how much Crozier had relied on his solid Christian faith to get through the traumatic journey. Ross noted:

  His firm and unwavering confidence in that almighty power … when no other power could save enabled him at all times to meet with calmness and firmness every impending danger.3

  Ross was full of admiration for Crozier’s seafaring skills and ‘noble conduct’ througho
ut.

  Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon Captain Crozier and his officers for the seamanlike manner in which the Terror was conducted throughout these severe gales.4

  Crozier, too, had cemented his respect and admiration for Ross during the voyage. A contemporary observer said ‘Ross and Crozier were like brothers, so attached by their mutual tastes and dangers shared together’.5

  Onlookers at Simon’s Bay noticed something else that was peculiar about Crozier and Ross. Mrs Bagot, the daughter of the Cape’s admiral, Percy Jocelyn, spotted that Crozier and Ross’ hands trembled. She wrote:

  Their hands shook so much they could hardly hold a glass or a cup … Sir James Ross told me when he took me to dinner one day: ‘You see how our hands shake? One night in the Antarctic did this for both of us.’6

  There was another curiosity. Crozier told Mrs Bagot that doctors on Erebus or Terror had never needed to break into their medicine chests during the voyage. Only once, when a man had hurt his hand, was any surgery required. But during their stay at Simon’s Bay, a number of men fell ill. According to Mrs Bagot, ‘They all felt the heat intensely, though it was the Cape winter’.7

  Nevertheless, only three men from Erebus were to die during the voyage and just two of Terror’s officers were invalided home, a remarkably low casualty rate for the time. A century earlier, more than a thousand men died on the four-year round-the-world voyage of Commodore George Anson and Cook, arguably the finest seafarer, lost 34 men on his first expedition of 1768–71.

  Erebus and Terror spent almost a month in the pleasant environment of Simon’s Bay, quietly refitting the ships, resting and looking forward to the return voyage home. But there was consternation on board as a rumour spread about more instruments being shipped from London to allow the expedition continue for another year. It proved a false alarm and the ships left the Cape on 30 April for the final leg of their mammoth journey.

  The shores of England were sighted on 2 September and Erebus and Terror anchored off the Kent port of Folkestone at midnight on 4 September. The last great journey of discovery to rely solely on sail came to a formal end on 23 September 1843, almost four years to the day since the ships had sailed south. It would be another 31 years before Challenger in 1874 would become the first steampowered vessel to make the journey.

  During the absence of Erebus and Terror, ether was used for the first time in a hospital operation, the Penny Post was introduced and Napoleon’s remains were taken from the outpost of St Helena to Paris.

  The voyage was the nineteenth century’s most outstanding feat of navigation and paved the way for most of the great voyages of twentieth-century Antarctic exploration. Ross and Crozier, relying entirely on their exceptional seamanship, had opened the door to Antarctica for the acclaimed explorers that followed in their wake, notably Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Mawson and Fuchs. It was a comprehensive triumph of navigation, surveying and scientific endeavour.

  Under the exceptional command of Ross and Crozier, Erebus and Terror had navigated the southern pack ice in the Ross Sea area for the first time and located thousands of miles of new Antarctic seas and coastline.

  The major discoveries included the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, the Ross Ice Shelf, McMurdo Sound and Mount Erebus. They even caught a brief sighting of a comet.

  The South Magnetic Pole, the primary objective of the expedition, was located but never reached. In his kit, Ross still had the neatly folded Union flag that he had flown at the North Magnetic Pole in 1831. The South Magnetic Pole was finally reached in 1909 by Edgeworth David, Alistair Mackay and Douglas Mawson from Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, though it was located some 230 miles (370 kilometres) north of where the Erebus and Terror expected to find it.

  The huge amount of magnetic and astronomical data accumulated by Crozier and Ross required years of painstaking scientific examination before the results were published. The expedition’s extensive mapping and charting of the ocean depths, the studies of marine biology, and collection of botanical specimens were all crucial in lifting the veil from the last undiscovered continent.

  Crozier and Ross were lauded as the finest scientific navigators of the age and several of the expedition’s leading officers – among them Bird, McMurdo and Sibbald – were promoted. Hooker, just 21 when he sailed, went on to become one of the great naturalists of the Victorian age and lived long enough to advise Captain Scott before he sailed to the Antarctic in 1901.

  Crozier’s silver watch (front and back) given to Sergeant William Cunningham of Terror in 1843 as a mark of esteem following the Antarctic expedition.

  Crozier and Ross were also among the first recipients of a curious new naval custom which applied to anyone who had sailed through both the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. By tradition, such travellers can drink with both feet on the table.

  The expedition, however, never quite caught the public imagination or generated the enthusiastic acclaim at the Admiralty it so richly deserved. The suspicion that the seafarers of Erebus and Terror were forgotten men was at least partly true. Four years away from home was too long out of the public gaze and the official reports and scientific results were not released for years. To compound this state of affairs, Ross struggled to publish his account of the voyage and when it finally emerged four years after Erebus and Terror docked, it was a dry and pedestrian tome.

  Unfortunately, no one thought to persuade Crozier to write his version of the momentous events. Writing a book would have been the perfect way to rest and recuperate from the rigours of the voyage and if successful might have provided Crozier with the recognition and public profile he lacked. It may also have stopped him going to sea again.

  Crozier was quick to salute the role played by the lower ranks. Shortly after returning home, he generously gave the silver watch he had worn for fifteen years to William Cunningham, the marine sergeant from Belfast who had served so well on Terror. The watch was engraved:

  Presented by Captain F.R.M. Crozier, R.N. to Sergt W K Cunningham R.N. as mark of esteem.8

  Less than four weeks after the Antarctic expedition was formally wound up, Ross married his 26-year-old fiancée, Ann Coulman, and retired from exploration at the age of 43. He was knighted the following year.

  Crozier was best man at the wedding. Although 47 years of age, Crozier did not have the luxury of opting for peaceful retirement. Nor did he seem any closer to finding a wife.

  chapter fourteen

  ‘I Am Not Equal to the Hardship’

  Crozier was drained by the four-year voyage to the Antarctic. His stamina had been sapped by the huge physical demands of the journey and while his energy would recover given a suitable period of convalescence, the psychological wounds would take longer to heal. Once more without a ship and again on half pay, he found it difficult to adjust. As a middle-aged junior captain and with so many experienced officers to compete with, eventual promotion to the rank of admiral was unlikely, despite his fine record.

  Unsure about his future in the navy and still moping over Sophy Cracroft, the steadfast man who had served so nobly descended into a deep depression. In his torment, Crozier may well have contemplated leaving the navy.

  Another arduous voyage as he approached his fifties was far from enticing. Despite his monumental efforts in the Arctic and Antarctic, he had never won the kind of acclaim and recognition afforded Ross and Parry. He could not bask in the glory of his adventures as Ross had done, nor settle for a comfortable desk job like Parry. He knew nothing else and after years of dedicated service, his only source of income was the navy’s half pay for redundant officers.

  The disparity in fortunes between Ross and Crozier was now stark. Ross picked up a knighthood and an honorary degree from Oxford University, and settled contentedly into his country estate in Buckinghamshire to write his book about the voyage and dispense wisdom on polar affairs to the grateful lords at the Admiralty.

  In contrast, Crozier scratched around for a ship and a means of earning a living. He rem
ained a peripheral figure at the Admiralty, the power base of the English military establishment, where, perhaps, his Irish pedigree was regarded as an impediment by the stuffy civil servants and admirals whose own positions owed so much to the British class system.

  Crozier was a reluctant public figure who, with even a modest slice of Parry’s ambition and a share of Ross’ magnetism, would have been recognised among the finest explorers of the age, and would have survived middle age free from niggling worries about money. In the event, it was left to Ross to do what the modest Crozier could never do for himself. He wrote of him:

  Captain Crozier was of an amiable and cheerful disposition and his unbending integrity and truthfulness won the affection and respect of those he commanded, as well as the admiration and firm friendship of all those officers under whom he served.1

  The pity is that Ross’ warm and sincere words of praise for his old friend were written after Crozier’s death.

  The other cause of Crozier’s emotional turmoil was the unfulfilled relationship with Sophy Cracroft. Despite the earlier rejection of his marriage proposal, Crozier had not given up hope of her changing her mind. Indeed, there was renewed urgency in his pursuit since marriage might be a catalyst for a new life away from the navy. In addition, Sophy, now 28 years old, was reaching an age when a woman might consider settling down and raising a family.

  Matters came to a head in June 1844 when Sophy unexpectedly returned to England with Sir John and Lady Franklin. The Franklins had been forced out of Van Diemen’s Land by political manoeuvring at the Colonial Office and Franklin, by perverse fortune, found himself in much the same position as Crozier.

  Crozier eagerly seized the opportunity to pursue Sophy Cracroft – perhaps too eagerly. The pair met many times during the summer of 1844, with Crozier becoming increasingly insistent. But Sophy resisted his attentions and once again turned down his proposal. Sophy had not changed her mind about Crozier. She refused to budge, emphasising once again that she had no intention of becoming a captain’s wife.