qualified to lead it were two notable polar explorers: James Clark Ross and John Franklin. One was the man who had turned down a knighthood. The other was The Man Who Ate His Boots.
Ross’s recent career had been covered in glory. Franklin’s, too, had been successful, if a little more muted. In 1825, three years after his first Arctic voyage, he had launched a second overland expedition. During the winter months he had absorbed himself in painstakingly thorough scientific observations. When conditions improved, he had led his men on an exploration of 400 miles of unsurveyed coastline, west of the Mackenzie River. And at the end of the season, having learned from previous experience, Franklin had decided not to risk his men by pushing further, but had returned to London.
Knighted in 1829, and with his reputation as a navigator and expedition leader much enhanced, Franklin was then commissioned in August 1830 to take charge of HMS Rainbow, a 28-gun, 500-ton sloop, with orders to proceed to the Mediterranean. What followed was a safe, solid and successful tour of duty in many of the seas from which Erebus had recently returned. Rainbow had a 175-strong crew and was a much bigger, more impressive ship than any he had commanded before. Franklin, the most affable and sociable of men, was seen as an accessible and humane captain. Life on board was so congenial that the ship acquired nicknames like ‘Franklin’s Paradise’ and ‘The Celestial Rainbow’.
Franklin’s social skills also helped nurture Britain’s relationship with the newly independent Greek state and ease local factional disputes, at a time when the Russians, previously an ally of Britain and France, were supporting an unpopular provisional government, and the allies were looking to install their own man as the new king of the country. After a prolonged search the British and French head-hunted an eighteen-year-old Bavarian prince called Otto, the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and by all accounts a bit of a drip. He did, however, award Franklin the Order of the Redeemer, for his help.
Franklin enjoyed everything he saw of Ancient Greece during his tour of duty, but was profoundly unimpressed by the new Greece, which he regarded as corrupt and leaderless. Having done his best to adjudicate on various local disputes, he must have been relieved to get back home to Portsmouth at the end of 1833, just in time for Christmas. Virtue had its reward, though: in appreciation of his efforts, the new king, William IV, decorated him with Knight Commander of the Guelphic Order of Hanover.
Franklin’s private life during these years had been marked by tragedy. In 1823 he had married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, and they had had a daughter (also called Eleanor), but just five days after he sailed on his second Arctic expedition, his wife had died from tuberculosis. By all accounts a remarkable, much-admired woman, she had known that she wouldn’t survive, but had insisted that her husband should press ahead with his plans. Four years later, on 4 November 1828, he had married again. Jane Griffin, the daughter of a lawyer, was quick, clever and energetic, and had been a close friend of Eleanor’s. Franklin’s biographer, Andrew Lambert, speculating as to what she saw in the portly explorer, concluded: ‘a romantic hero, a cultural icon, and it was perhaps this image that she married.’ And it was protecting and elevating his image that was to preoccupy the rest of Jane’s life.
Back from the Mediterranean, Franklin was respected, happy in his new marriage – but at a loose end. There was no new posting to go to, and for the next three years he was effectively unemployed. It must have been a deeply frustrating time for him. Then, in 1836, a new opportunity arose, in the form of the lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land. It was, admittedly, something of a poisoned chalice. The previous governor, George Arthur, had brought in social reforms that had upset many of the small community there, and left it unhappy and divided. But for Franklin and his ambitious wife, the offer must have come as something of a godsend. After several years of enforced idleness, here at last was a new opportunity for him to display his talents. He accepted with alacrity, and the couple set sail later that year, arriving in Hobart in January 1837.
What Franklin wasn’t to know was that just over a year later the Admiralty would be looking for an experienced polar explorer to lead an expedition to the Antarctic. Had he been aware, would he have accepted the post in Van Diemen’s Land? As it was, his absence from England at the critical moment effectively ruled him out as a candidate. The Admiralty had no hesitation in offering the job to James Clark Ross, whose Arctic experience and discovery of the North Magnetic Pole embodied the navigational and scientific qualifications they were after. And he was available.
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Having secured Ross’s services, the Lords of the Admiralty looked around to find ships worthy of this ambitious venture. Bomb vessels had been the Royal Navy’s craft of choice for extreme exploration as long ago as 1773, when two bomb ships, Racehorse and Carcass (the name for an incendiary shell), had been converted for an expedition to the North Pole. They had reached the Barents Sea before being turned back by the ice. By now, there were only two bomb ships left as realistic candidates for Antarctic duty. One was HMS Terror, strengthened and rebuilt after a ten-month battering in the ice on George Back’s Arctic expedition in 1836 and 1837. The other, currently riding on the River Medway at Chatham, had never been further than the warm waters of the Mediterranean. But she was slightly bigger and more recently built than Terror, and she became the unanimous choice to be the flagship. After nine years of premature retirement, and nearly fourteen years after she had been cheered down the slipway at Pembroke, HMS Erebus was set to become one of the most famous ships in history. On 8 April 1839, James Clark Ross was appointed her captain.
Within two weeks of the expedition being confirmed, Erebus was put into dry dock at Chatham to have the coppering on her hull, which had been in place since her Mediterranean patrol duty, removed and replaced. The traditional trappings of a warship were dismantled to give her cleaner, more functional, more weather-resistant lines. Three levels on the top deck were reduced to one, with the removal of the raised quarterdeck and forecastle, giving a single flush deck. This would provide extra storage space for the nine auxiliary boats that Erebus was to carry. These ranged from 30-foot-long whale-boats to a 28-foot-long pinnace, two cutters and a 12-foot gig, intended essentially to serve as the captain’s private taxi. More space was created by dispensing with most of Erebus’s weaponry. Her twelve guns were reduced to two and the redundant gun-ports filled in.
Her transformation from warship to ice-ship was supervised by a Mr Rice at Chatham Dockyard. So thorough was it, and so impressed was James Clark Ross, that he included Rice’s memorandum of work on Erebus in his published account of the expedition. Which is how we know that her hull was strengthened with 6-inch-thick oak planking, increasing to 8 inches at the gunwale, to make a 3-foot-wide girdle around the ship; and that the deck was reinforced with 3-inch-thick planks laid fore and aft, and with additional planks laid diagonally on top. ‘Fearnaught, dipped in hot tallow’ was laid between the two surfaces (fearnaught was a thick felt, installed as insulation). Lower down the hull, the doubling narrowed to 3-inch-thick English elm. The remainder of the ship’s bottom, down to the keel, was doubled with 3-inch Canadian elm. Extra-thick copper was used to cover the bow from water-line to keel. Anything projecting from the stern was removed, including the overhanging quarter galleries. The ornately patterned carving on her bow, which was a feature of all warships, however humble, was stripped away. Decoration was sacrificed to utility and durability.
During the summer of 1839, as the sawyers and ropers, sailmakers, carpenters and smithies worked away at Chatham, James Ross was busy picking his officers. His unsurprising choice for his second-in-command and captain of the Terror was the Ulsterman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, with whom he had sailed so often on bruising Arctic expeditions that it was said Ross was one of the very few people allowed to call Crozier ‘Frank’.
Crozier, three years Ross’s senior, was one of thirteen children from Banbridge in County Down, a few miles south of Belfast. His birthplace, a handsome Georgian townhouse built in 1796, still stands. His father had made money in the Irish linen industry, and Francis would have had a comfortable, strongly religious upbringing (in time his father changed his allegiance from Presbyterian to the Protestant Church of Ireland, moving from radicalism to the establishment). One of Francis’s brothers became a vicar and the other two went into the law. But because his father was keen to get one of his sons into uniform and was prepared