The sheer power of the elements surprised even someone as well travelled as Erebus’s captain. At one point Ross experienced ‘the heaviest rain I ever witnessed . . . thunder and the most vivid lightning occurred during this great fall of water, which lasted without intermission for more than ten hours’.
The strength of the ship and the skill of her crew were put to their fiercest test so far as the wind, now blowing at Force 10, kept changing direction, veering so violently that ‘we spent the night in great anxiety, and in momentary expectation that our boats would be washed away by some of the broken waves that fell on board, or that from the frequent shocks the ship sustained . . . we should lose some of the masts’.
It seems astonishing that there should be anyone living in these storm-tossed latitudes, but there were, and Ross had been asked to take provisions to some of them: a group of eleven elephant-seal hunters, stranded on Possession Island in the Crozet archipelago. The wind looked likely to blow Erebus past the island, but with considerable effort Ross managed to turn about and beat up to the west. Unable to get a boat to shore, they anchored a little way off, and six of the sealers came out to meet them. Ross wasn’t impressed. ‘They looked more like Esquimaux than civilized beings . . . Their clothes were literally soaked in oil and smelt most offensive.’ McCormick was less judgemental. He described Mr Hickley, the spokesman for the beleaguered sealers, as ‘their manly-looking leader who was an ideal “Robinson Crusoe” in costume’. To young Hooker, Hickley was rather splendid, ‘like some African Prince, pre-eminently filthy, and withal a most independent gentleman’. They left the sealers with a chest of tea, bags of coffee and a letter from their employer, which, McCormick noted, ‘seemed to disappoint the leader of the party . . . who evidently had been anticipating a ship for their removal, instead of fresh supplies’.
Ross, mindful of his instructions from the Admiralty, continued on to their next, official destination. Once again, magnetic observation was the prime reason for the choice. ‘It is probable that Kerguelen Island will be found well-suited to that purpose,’ the Lords of the Admiralty had laid down. It certainly wasn’t well suited for much else. First discovered by a Frenchman, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec, in 1772, the Kerguelens are definitively remote: according to the opening sentence on one travel website I looked at, they are ‘located 2,051 miles away from any sort of civilization’ (it’s the ‘any sort’ I find so tantalising). They are also covered with glaciers, and far south enough for Ross to have recorded the expedition’s first sighting of Antarctic ice. Not surprisingly, Captain Cook christened Kerguelen the ‘Island of Desolation’.
As Erebus approached this bleak fortress, McCormick’s journal entry for 8 May 1840 tells the sad story of the demise of one of the smallest of her crew, Old Tom, a cock brought out from England with a hen, for the purpose of colonising the island they had now reached – the establishment of new species on remote islands being one of the aims of the mission. ‘Tom . . . died today,’ he wrote, ‘in the very sight of his intended domain; had his body committed to the deep by the captain’s steward – a sailor’s grave.’
Better news came with a cry from the crow’s nest as they were beating up towards Kerguelen’s Arched Rock to make a landing. The sails of HMS Terror had been spotted, the first sight of her for a month. But such was the power of a heavy rolling sea that it took three days for Erebus, after a series of twenty-two tight tacks, to gain the harbour mouth, and a further day before Terror joined her. It then took another two days for both vessels to warp their way to the head of the harbour, where they were able to drop anchor and get boats ashore with building materials for an observatory.
Certain days had been decreed by the international community as simultaneous magnetic-measurement days, or term days. Ross was scrupulous in making sure that wherever he was, he had instruments ready to record the magnetic activity in that place at the same time as others elsewhere on the globe were noting their findings. This required secure solid housings for the measuring equipment. Two observatories, one for magnetic and the other for astronomical observations, were therefore set up on the beach in Christmas Harbour in time for the term days of 29 and 30 May. There was much excitement when the results were coordinated later. Activity detected on Kerguelen was found to be remarkably similar to that observed and measured in Toronto, around the same latitude, but at the other end of the earth.
Joseph Hooker was excited by the challenges of Kerguelen Island for rather different reasons. Captain Cook’s expedition had identified only eighteen plant species, but Hooker found at least thirty in one day. Even when he couldn’t get out, he turned the constant buffeting of the gales to his advantage. ‘Could I but tell you the delight with which I spent the days when I was kept on board by foul winds . . . In spite of the rolling of the ship I have made drawings for you all,’ he wrote home. The great excitement was finding the wonder-vegetable Pringlea antiscorbutica, a cabbage that grew on Kerguelen Island and which had been identified by Captain Cook’s botanist, Mr Anderson, as a miracle food for sailors. With a horseradish-tasting root and leaves that resembled mustard and cress, it had such powerful anti-scorbutic properties that it had been served for 130 days on Cook’s expedition, during which time no sickness had been recorded. Ross’s expedition put the wonder-cabbage to use straight away, and to general approval. Cunningham was one of those who registered enjoyment. ‘Like[d] the taste of the wild cabbage much.’
On 24 May 1840, they celebrated the twenty-first birthday of Queen Victoria with the firing of a royal salute, servings of plum pudding, preserved meat and a double allowance of rum at night. The very next day they were forcibly reminded of just how far away they were from an English summer, as falling snow was whipped into a ferocious blizzard. As darkness fell, Cunningham wrote of ‘a complete hurricane’ blowing. ‘I never heard it blow so hard as it has done this night.’
Surgeon McCormick shared Hooker’s enthusiasm for Kerguelen Island, but more from a geological perspective. ‘This, and Spitzbergen in the opposite hemisphere constitute, I think, the most striking and picturesque lands I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit,’ he noted enthusiastically in his journal. And this despite the fact that ‘neither the Arctic nor Antarctic isles have tree or shrub . . . to enliven them’. What excited McCormick was not what was to be found now on the black basalt rocks of this lonely island, but what had been there thousands of years before. ‘Whole forests . . . of fossilized wood lie entombed here beneath vast lava streams,’ he marvelled, uncovering beneath the debris a fossilised tree trunk with a girth of 7 feet. He was exercised by the whole question of how to explain this phenomenon. Back in England, he had been fascinated to find corals and other forms of tropical life embedded in the limestone of north Devon. Now he was equally intrigued to discover forests of coniferous trees entombed on the now-treeless island of Kerguelen. ‘I have wondered how they could ever have existed there.’ It was another seventy years before Alfred Wegener made the audacious suggestion that the continents themselves might have moved over time, and another fifty years after that before the theory of plate tectonics was finally proven.
So far as the wildlife of the island was concerned, McCormick seems to have regarded it principally as a form of target practice. It’s impossible to turn a page of his extensive journals without marvelling, or perhaps despairing, at his appetite for admiring God’s creatures, then shooting them. On 15 May he identifies the chioni, or sheathbill, a ‘singular and beautiful bird . . . so fearless and confiding, [it] seems peculiar to the island to which its presence gives a charm and animation, especially to a lover of the feathered race like myself’. This is followed next day by the succinct entry, ‘I shot my first chioni.’ A week later, accompanying Captain Ross and an exploring party, he ‘shot two and a half brace of teal and tern and returned . . . at five p.m.’ The day after that, ‘I shot a gigantic petrel . . . and a young black-backed gull flying overhead.’ On the 30th, ‘I went on shore about noon, shot a black-backed gull from the dinghy, and a shag at the landing place.’ And he wasn’t finished for the day. On his way back to the ship, after calling on Captain Ross at the observatory, he ‘shot two chionis, two gigantic petrel, two shags, and a teal flying round the point’.
McCormick liked a challenge,