Captain Francis Crozier

by Michael Smith

  Captain Leopold McClintock and Lieutenant Henry Hobson leave Fox on 2 April 1859 in search of the lost expedition.

  By the spring of 1859, McClintock was ready to dispatch sledging parties in three directions for fresh evidence of the men from Erebus and Terror. Captain Allen Young, who had paid the generous sum of £500 (£20,000 today) to join the expedition, took his team northwest to Prince of Wales Island, while McClintock set off to explore the east side of King William Island and the mouth of the Great Fish River.

  The task of examining the western shore of King William Island, the most promising area in the search for clues, fell to Lieutenant William Hobson, Fox’s second officer, who was provisioned for 84 days. A robust man of 28 year of age, Hobson had been to the Arctic in 1853–54. Sophy Cracroft said he possessed the ‘merriest face in the world’.

  The parties set off on 2 April 1859 and McClintock soon met natives with a fascinating story to tell. According to the Eskimos, two ships had been seen off the coast of King William Island. One had sunk, but the other had been forced ashore and still lay broken on a beach. The men were seen dragging their boats towards a ‘large river’. One old woman said the men fell down and died as they walked along. A year later, their bodies were found.

  McClintock bought relics from the Eskimos, including a knife and a telescope case. A little later, he bought pieces of silver plate bearing the initials of Crozier and Franklin.

  McClintock moved south to the mouth of the Great Fish River, picking up scraps of information and noticing that the Eskimos had fashioned lumps of wood into tent poles and kayak paddles. Above the tree line, wood is more valuable than gold and the strips of timber had clearly been plundered from the wreck of either Erebus or Terror. But the men’s journals and papers, which might have yielded precious clues, were worthless to the Eskimo and had been scattered to the winds. There were few other clues in the area.

  After skirting around the rugged Montreal Island in the estuary of the Great Fish River, McClintock began the return trip to Fox. Moving slowly along Simpson Strait, the party reached Cape Herschel on the southern shores of King William Island. In their path lay a skeleton, the bones bleached a ghostly white. McClintock said it An assortment of relics recovered from the 1845 expedition looked as though the man had fallen asleep. Alongside the remains were a clothes brush and comb.

  An assortment of relics recovered from the 1845 expedition.

  Crozier’s spoons: the spoons, engraved with Crozier’s initials, were retrieved from the Arctic and placed in the National Maritime Museum, London.

  A few miles beyond Cape Herschel, McClintock made a startling discovery – a small cairn built by Lieutenant Hobson, who had stood on the spot only six days earlier. Inside was a brief note from Hobson with the news everyone had been seeking for over a decade.

  Hobson’s note told of how his party had struck lucky exactly a month after leaving the ship. On 2 May, he had reached Cape Felix at the most northerly point of King William Island, where he found a cairn. Frustratingly, it had been looted and was empty. But all around was evidence that the men from Erebus and Terror had passed through the area: collapsed tents, discarded clothes and rusting tools. Hobson continued his search and found another empty cairn nearby. Days later, a third was uncovered, which contained an empty document canister and a broken pickaxe.

  Moving a few miles further down the coast Hobson discovered on 6 May the remains of another camp at Victory Point on the north-west coast of King William Island. The headland was first discovered by James Ross in 1830 and now contained vital clues to the fate of the expedition.

  The site was littered with debris left behind by the desperate men from Erebus and Terror, who had discarded some superfluous gear and possessions before embarking on the march south to the Great Fish River, just as the Eskimos had said.

  Among the flotsam and jetsam of the expedition, Hobson also found a cairn. Hobson’s party dismantled the cairn of stones with a series of hefty blows from pickaxes. Inside, they found a metal container and a standard navy form supplied to all expedition ships. In the margins was a handwritten message, penned in 1847 before disaster struck the expedition:

  28 May 1847

  HM ships ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ wintered in the ice in Lat

  70° 5′N Long 98° 23′W

  Having wintered in 1846–47 at Beechey Island in Lat 74°

  43′ 28′ N Long 91° 39′ 15′W after having ascended

  Wellington Channel to Lat 77° and returned to the West

  side of Cornwallis Island

  Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition.

  All well.

  Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships

  on Monday 24th May 1847.

  Gm Gore, Lieut.

  Chas. F. Des Voeux, Mate

  Hobson decided to hurry back to Fox with his news. But only a few miles further south, he found another cairn. Inside was a container with a note – another standard navy form. The message was the same as the first. But around the margins of the note was significant new information written a year later which revealed Franklin’s death, the abandonment of the ships and the march towards the Great Fish River. The wording in the margin, which was the last word of the expedition ever to be found, said:

  25th April 1848 HM Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted

  on 22nd April 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset

  since 12th Septr 1846. The officers & crew consisting of

  105 souls – under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier

  landed here – in Lat 69° 37′ 42″ Long 98° 41′.

  This paper was found by Lt Irving under the cairn

  supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831,

  4 miles to the northward – where it had been deposited

  by the late Commander Gore in June 1847. Sir James

  Ross’ pillar has not however been found and the paper

  has been transferred to this position which is that in which

  Sir J Ross’ pillar was erected.

  Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847 and the total

  loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9

  officers and 15 men.

  FRM Crozier James Fitzjames,

  Captain and Senior offr Captain HMS ‘Erebus’

  And start on tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River7

  The record of the expedition found by Hobson on King William Island. The document, signed by Crozier, reported the abandonment of Erebus and Terror and the trek to the Great Fish River. Crozier’s signature is top right, upside down.

  ‘So sad a tale was never told in fewer words’, McClintock wrote. The document, stained by rust from the tin canister, was, he said, a ‘sad and touching relic of our lost friends’.

  McClintock resumed his search on the coastline of King William Island. He came across a large boat, first discovered by Hobson, that contained two skeletons, a large amount of clothing and two loaded shotguns. More cutlery was found, including some inscribed with Crozier’s initials. Strangely, the boat was pointed in the direction of Point Victory, as though the men were retracing the steps away from the Great Fish River.

  Towards the end of May, McClintock reached the most westerly point of King William Island, which looks over the heavily iced-up waters of Victoria Strait that had claimed Erebus and Terror. He named it Cape Crozier, the second promontory in the world’s coldest regions to be named after the man from Banbridge.

  Fox was freed from Bellot Strait in August 1859 after a taxing two-year expedition that cost three lives and left many men, including Hobson, seriously incapacitated with scurvy. Fox reached Portsmouth in late September with news of the expedition’s discoveries and losses – fourteen years and four months since Erebus and Terror, so full of hope and optimism, had left London.

  chapter twenty-three

  A Fitting Memorial

  The Fox expedition made Franklin a national hero and earned McC
lintock a knighthood, promotion to the rank of admiral and a £1,500 (£65,000 today) reward from Parliament. While he was in the Arctic, McClintock’s sister, Emily Anna McClintock, married George Crozier, the nephew of Francis Crozier.

  Jane Franklin achieved near sainthood status and was fêted by the public as the ‘weak and helpless woman’ who did privately what the mighty Royal Navy, with limitless resources, had failed to achieve. She became the first woman to receive the Founder’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

  The Victorian fondness for noble sacrifice was given full rein with the disaster. It also became a common assumption that Franklin had discovered the North West Passage, the man who ‘forged the last link with his life’.

  A statue in London’s Waterloo Place, erected in 1866, proudly acclaims Franklin and his companions for having ‘sacrificed their lives in completing the discovery of the North West Passage’. On the opposite side of the street stands a statue to Captain Scott, the leader of another disastrous polar expedition.

  In fact, Franklin never saw the final passageway and it is not clear whether Gore and Des Voeux – who travelled to the south of King William Island in 1847 – ever managed to reach Simpson Strait. Even if Gore and Des Voeux did reach the channel, Franklin was almost certainly dead when they returned to the ships with news of the sighting. Franklin’s only true discovery on the 1845 expedition was the fatal knowledge that Simpson Strait could not be navigated by way of the ice-laden waters of Victoria Strait.

  It was Rae who found the crucial route to Simpson Strait, the open channel that passes on the east side of King William Island and is now called Rae Strait. McClure made the first crossing by ship and foot, but Roald Amundsen was the first man to sail through the North West Passage.

  It was Francis Crozier who, in reaching Simpson Strait in 1848, truly forged the last link in the North West Passage with his life.

  Memorials to the lost expedition sprang up all over the country, the grandest being reserved for Westminster Abbey. Designed by Lady Franklin, it was embellished with full Victorian flourish in words composed by Tennyson, the Poet Laureate and Franklin’s nephew. The epitaph reads:

  Not here: The white North hath thy bones and thou,

  Heroic Sailor Soul,

  Art passing on thy happier voyage now

  Toward no earthly pole

  But Jane Franklin did not live quite long enough to see the memorial in place. She died on 18 July 1875 at the age of 83, less than two weeks before the unveiling ceremony by Sir George Back. Her funeral to Kensal Green Cemetery was a stately affair, with McClintock among the pall-bearers and Sophy Cracroft in full mourning. Crozier’s nephew, Reverend Charles Crozier, was one of those in attendance.

  James Clark Ross had died more than a decade earlier, in 1862, doubtless aware that his misguided reports of Peel Sound being non-negotiable had contributed to the searchers spending almost ten years in the wrong area.

  Sophy Cracroft ended her life as she he led it, sacrificing herself to the Franklins. She remained a dedicated but enigmatic figure. No photographs or images of her have survived.

  After Jane Franklin’s death, Sophy threw herself into the monumental task of collating her aunt’s voluminous correspondence and papers – almost 2,000 letters and 200 journals – written in Jane’s small, tightly packed and barely decipherable scrawl. Sophy went blind before finishing the work and died on 20 June 1892, aged 77. Sophy Cracroft, the ‘sad flirt’, never married.

  At the height of the search for Erebus and Terror in the 1850s, one of the fleet of ships sent in search of the expedition carried a letter from Sophy Cracroft to her uncle, John Franklin. She added a brief message to Crozier that, just possibly, hints at a slight change of feelings towards him. On the bottom of the letter, she scribbled the words: ‘Pray remember me very kindly to Captain Crozier’.1 The letter was returned unopened.

  Francis Crozier’s memory is perpetuated from pole to pole. There are fine memorials in his home town of Banbridge, County Down, and at all ends of the earth where he made his reputation as one of the finest explorers of the age. Truly it can be said that the fame of Crozier spreads from pole to pole.

  Two impressive memorials to Crozier can be found in the centre of Banbridge: an imposing statue directly opposite Avonmore House where Crozier was born and a commemorative plaque in the nearby parish church.

  The most striking memorial is the 7-foot-6-inch (2-metre) statue of Crozier in the centre of Church Square which stands on a substantial plinth and pedestal. It is a measure of the respect and affection for Crozier that the people of Banbridge raised £700 (approximately £30,000 today) to erect the memorial, which was unveiled in 1862. The statue, which shows a dignified Crozier wearing his captain’s uniform, was carved by the Dublin-born sculptor, Joseph Robinson Kirk who had recently completed a statue of the third Marquis of Downshire. It was Kirk’s better-known father, Thomas, who carved the unfortunate Nelson’s Pillar in the centre of Dublin Street which was subsequently destroyed by a bomb blast in 1966.

  The 17-foot (5-metre) pedestal and plinth was designed by the eminent architect, William J. Barre, from Newry, County Armagh, who secured the commission in an open competition. Barre, who also designed Belfast’s Ulster Hall, produced an elaborate Gothic edifice featuring Erebus and Terror in the ice and four oddly sized polar bears on guard at each corner. Originally, it was planned to fill the niches with scenes from Crozier’s career, but the idea was abandoned because the proposers ran out of money.

  However, Barre did manage to display Crozier’s name on three sides of the structure and inscribe two moving inscriptions. On the north side can be found the words:

  To perpetuate the remembrance of talent, enterprise and worth as combined in the character and evidenced in the life of Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier R.N., F.R.S. this monument has been erected by his friends who, as they valued him in life, regret him in death. He was second in command with Captain Sir John Franklin R.N., F.R.S. and Captain of H.M. Ship Terror in the polar expedition which left England on 22 May 1845.

  On the south side, the inscription continues:

  Altho’ there remained no survivors of the expedition, enough has been ascertained to shew that to it is justly due the honour of the discovery of the long sought North West Passage, and that Captain Crozier, having survived his chief, perished with the remainder of the party after he had bravely led them to the coast of America; he was born at Banbridge September 1796, but the place or time of his death no man knoweth unto this day.

  Appropriately enough, an explorer from a later age was instrumental in raising funds when the monument needed urgent restoration work in the late 1930s. Louis Bernacchi, who had distinguished himself on two ground-breaking Antarctic expeditions, responded to pleas for help from the Crozier family.

  Bernacchi, a member of Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross venture in 1898–1900 and Scott’s Discovery expedition in 1901–04, sat on the Council of the Royal Geographical Society at the time and persuaded the organisation to contribute £5 towards the £100 bill for repairs, although the largest share of the bill was met by members of the Crozier family.

  The simple marble tablet in the parish church was also carved by Joseph Kirk and shows Terror locked in the ice. The plaque was put up by the Crozier family with an inscription that reads:

  Far from this spot in some unknown but not unhonoured resting place lies all that was mortal of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, Captain R.N., 5th son of the late George Crozier, Esq. He was born September 1796; entered the Royal Navy, June 1810 and served with distinction in several exploring voyages under Sir E. Parry and with Sir J. C. Ross in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. He left England, May 1845, in command of H.M.S. Terror, with Sir John Franklin with H.M.S. Erebus in the expedition for the discovery of the N West passage.

  From the heroic service neither he nor any of his brave companions ever returned. His unbending integrity and truthfulness, combined with extreme amiability, won the est
eem and love of all who knew him. The faith which influenced his life is now a source of truest consolation to his sorrowing friends.

  Lasting memorials were also left in the territories visited by Crozier during almost three decades of exploration in the polar regions. His name has been attached to no less than eight points on the map, including three different Cape Croziers at both ends of the world.

  The most famous Cape Crozier lies at the eastern side of Ross Island in the Antarctic. Another Cape Crozier can be found at the far western end of King William Island in the Arctic, near the spot where Erebus and Terror were abandoned in 1848. A third Cape Crozier is located at the western entrance of the Bay of Mercy on Banks Island, where McClure’s Investigator was abandoned prior to his journey over the ice to complete the first traverse of the North West Passage.

  A Crozier Channel lies to the north of Banks Island between Eglington Island and Prince Patrick Island and there is a Crozier Bay on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island Crozier Strait runs between the islands of Cornwallis and Bathhurst, and the Crozier River was named by Parry near Fury and Hecla Strait. Overlooking Treurenberg Bay in Spitzbergen is Crozier Point, where Crozier remained in charge of Hecla during Parry’s abortive attempt to reach the North Pole in 1827.

  Perhaps the most significant memorial to Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier lies approximately 239,000 miles (382,400 kilometres) from Banbridge, on the surface of the moon.

  Crozier’s name has been given to a large crater that lies on the eastern face of the moon’s near side, in the lunar sea of Mare Fecunditatis. The crater, about 14 miles (22 kilometres) wide, can be located at latitude 13° 5′ south, longitude 50° 8′ east. The significance lies in the company that Crozier is keeping a quarter of a million miles from where he performed so nobly.

  Francis Crozier failed to receive full recognition for his outstanding abilities and achievements while he was alive. Even after his death, the remarkable record of six polar expeditions and almost 40 years of dedicated service to the navy was shamefully undervalued by his blinkered superiors at the Admiralty, and cruelly overlooked by history. Alone among the illustrious Arctic and Antarctic seamen of the age – Parry, Franklin, Back, Richardson and John and James Ross – Crozier was not awarded a knighthood for his prodigious efforts.