On board HMS Erebus as she made her way up Storm Bay, past the Iron Pot Lighthouse and into the shelter of the Derwent estuary, were men who had distinguished themselves on many journeys and in many fields, who had mastered the art of sailing ships through the fiercest waters on the planet, and who carried with them cases – and, indeed, cabins – full of scientific evidence. On land were many thousands of men and women who had been forcibly removed from their home country because they were judged to be born criminals, morally unsalvageable, incapable of rehabilitation. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, embodied this unforgiving attitude and expressed it uncompromisingly in one of his letters: ‘If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict’s child should ever be a free citizen . . . It is the law of God’s Providence which we cannot alter, that the sins of the father are really visited upon the child in the corruption of his breed.’ The recipient of this letter was now the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin.
As Erebus sailed towards Hobart harbour in mid-August 1840, her captain expressed his relief, contrasting ‘the rich and beautiful scenery on both sides of the expansive and placid waters of the Derwent’ with ‘the desolate land and turbulent ocean we had so recently left’. McCormick, too, saw only a pleasing prospect: ‘The approach to Hobart Town is very picturesque.’ Sergeant Cunningham’s reflections, on the other hand, hit a rather different note: ‘This being Van Dieman’s [sic] Land, I could not help thinking . . . how many unfortunate beings has seen it . . . with a full heart and a melancholy boding that they were to terminate their existence in it, outcasts from Society and aliens from their fatherland, separated from wives, parents, friends and from every tie that links man to this vain and sublunary world. I turned from the scene with a thankfull remembrance how much better off I was than some thousands of my fellow men.’
The debate as to whether the place they had landed in should be called Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania was officially settled in Tasmania’s favour fifteen years later, in 1855. But there had been an earlier name: Lutruwita, which was the name by which the Aboriginal inhabitants knew the island, and had done for a thousand years or more. It was now redundant. As the convicts were brought in, the indigenous population was booted out. By the time the Ross expedition arrived, the brutal process of clearing the original inhabitants from their land was almost complete. Those who were left alive were confined to an Aboriginal mission on Flinders Island, off the north coast, where they were taught English ways.
The educated people of Hobart – those familiar with English ways – would have heard of the Antarctic expedition long before it arrived. The local newspapers had been following its preparations with great interest. It would, after all, be one of the boldest and most prestigious undertakings they had witnessed since the colony had been officially established, sixteen years earlier. There had been almost daily speculation about the expedition’s aims – finding the South Magnetic Pole, discovering a new continent, penetrating further south than anyone had been before – and their chances of achieving them. The Hobart Town Courier went into wondrous detail about the state-of-the-art instruments on board the two ships, not least the walking sticks hollowed out so as to carry nets for catching insects. ‘The ferrule at the bottom is removed, and the nets are drawn forth ready for instant use,’ it marvelled.
Now it had all come true. The expedition was here.
Erebus moored up at five in the afternoon of Monday 17 August. Terror was already safely anchored, and Captain Crozier and the officers came aboard to welcome their sister ship, and to bring letters from home that had been awaiting their arrival. Not one to waste a moment, Surgeon McCormick took some of his fellow officers out to celebrate their arrival by going ashore for the last night of a play called Rory O’More at the Theatre Royal. Rory O’More was an Irish Catholic hero, a persistent rebel against the English, who put a price of £1,000 on his head. His head was duly delivered and displayed at Dublin Castle to deter other rebels.
For Joseph Hooker, landfall had brought little cause for celebration. A letter from his father, edged in black, informed him of the death of his elder brother from yellow fever, whilst on missionary work in the West Indies.
Few people could have been happier to see the two embattled vessels safely moored in the Derwent estuary than the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Sir John Franklin was overjoyed at being reunited with his friend and fellow explorer, James Clark Ross. They made a contrasting pair. Franklin, fourteen years older, was short, at 5 feet 6 inches, and famously affable, whereas Ross was tall and dashing and took himself rather seriously. In a movie he could have been played by Errol Flynn, himself a Tasmanian.
‘In 1836,’ writes his biographer, Andrew Lambert, ‘Franklin was fifty, famous and fat.’ And he was in Van Diemen’s Land because there had been nothing better on offer. Advancement in the Royal Navy followed a strict rota system, which ensured that senior positions only became available after those who held them died. Fame and success could not leapfrog anyone into promotion. So Captain Franklin had looked around for other positions concomitant with his talents, his experience and his evangelical sense of mission.
Having been offered, and turned down, the governorship of Antigua, he accepted the more lucrative position of Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, largely because he felt it his duty to put his talents, achievements and wide experience in the service of the great new colonial initiative, and because his forceful second wife, Jane – a vigorous, sociable woman, with considerable networking skills – felt it to be a very useful rung on the social and political ladder, which she was determined to help him climb.
But things had not gone according to plan. Sir John’s request that the flow of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land should be stemmed, if there was to be any chance of achieving some improvement in the lot of the free islanders, was ignored by the Colonial Office, whose response was to increase the numbers. When New South Wales was granted self-government, its share of the transported convicts was diverted southwards. In 1842 alone, 5,663 convicts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land.
To make matters worse, Sir John was no politician, and although popular with most of the islanders, found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to please the Colonial Office by saving money, and the colonists by spending it. In theory, much of the political burden should have been carried by John Montagu, a very capable, shrewd and ambitious public servant who had served in Van Diemen’s Land for some years, but that role was increasingly usurped by Jane, who, with the advantage of having her husband’s ear, proceeded to implement what she thought was right for the colony. This included diverting government funds to her own pet projects, such as a college for boys to train in the Christian faith; convict education; and various art projects. Her interference made a bitter enemy of Montagu and his supporters, who described her as a ‘man in petticoats’. As the geographer Frank Debenham says, it must have been a ‘great strain’ for Sir John and Lady Franklin ‘to govern a community of which one part was tasting the freedom and independence characteristic of a pioneer settlement and the other part was bound and shackled by a penal system of extreme severity’. But making an adversary of John Montagu was a mistake that was to have profound consequences for both Jane and her husband.
Jane Franklin found Hobart short of men of consequence. Sir John was simply missing his own kind. As a letter from Jane to her father makes abundantly clear, the Franklins could hardly wait to throw open the door of Government House for the glamorous Captain Ross and his intrepid officers: ‘The arrival of Captains Ross and Crozier added much to Sir John’s happiness . . . ,’ she wrote. ‘They all feel towards one another as friends and brothers and it is the remark of people here that Sir John appears to them in quite a new light, so bustling and frisky and merry with his new companions.’ Lady Franklin was taken aboard Erebus and couldn’t help noticing that Captain Ross had Negelin’s portrait of her husband hanging in his cabin (it’s one of the best: Franklin is in uniform, smiling jovially, with epaulettes like small waterfalls on each shoulder). Back on dry land, she showed indefatigable interest in all aspects of the expedition, inviting both senior and junior officers to attend the local Science Society, in which she was much