Ross was given command of HMS Isabella and proceeded to use a little nepotism to bring on board his eighteen-year-old nephew, James Ross. Inspired and encouraged by his uncle’s example, James had joined the Navy at the age of eleven, and had served an apprenticeship under his uncle in the Baltic and the White Sea, off northern Russia. He joined Isabella as a midshipman, traditionally the first step to becoming a commissioned officer.
James was tall and well built, and his education in the Navy had served him well. He had learned a lot about the latest scientific advances, especially in the field of navigation and geomagnetism. The ability to understand and harness the earth’s magnetic forces was one of the great prizes of science in the early nineteenth century, and one in which James Clark Ross (he added the ‘Clark’ later, to distinguish himself from his uncle) was to become intimately involved.
In charge of HMS Trent, one of the ships entrusted with reaching the North Pole, was another career sailor, thirty-two-year-old John Franklin. Like John Ross, he had seen action during the Napoleonic Wars, being thrown in at the deep end aboard HMS Polyphemus at the Battle of Copenhagen when he was only fifteen, before being taken on as a midshipman with Matthew Flinders as he mapped much of the coast of Australia (or New Holland, as it was then). Young Franklin learned a lot from Flinders, who had himself learned a great deal from Captain Cook. Before he was twenty, Franklin had gained further battle experience as a signals officer on HMS Bellerophon at the Battle of Trafalgar. He was a lieutenant by the time he was twenty-two. When the strikingly handsome James Ross first encountered the round-faced, chubby, prematurely balding John Franklin at Lerwick in the Shetlands in May 1818, as Isabella and Trent prepared to set out for the Arctic, he must have regarded him as something of a hero. He can have had no idea that their paths would cross again in the future, or that they would be the two men to become most closely associated with the dramatic career of HMS Erebus.
Like many of the senior naval men of the time, Franklin was a well-educated polymath with a particular interest in magnetic science. This was his first Arctic commission and he took it seriously. Andrew Lambert, his biographer, assesses his state of mind at the time: ‘He might not have a university pedigree, or the status of a Fellow of The Royal Society, but he had been round the world, made observations and fought the king’s enemies. He was somebody, and if this venture paid off he could expect to be promoted.’ Unfortunately, the voyage, which he had hoped would eventually reach the far east of Russia, never got past the storm-driven icebergs around Spitsbergen, and John Franklin was back in England within six months.
The John Ross expedition to the Northwest Passage was initially more successful. Having reached 76°N and safely crossed Baffin Bay, Isabella and her companion Alexander found themselves at the head of an inlet on the north-western side of the bay. This was the mouth of Lancaster Sound, later to become known as the entrance to the Northwest Passage. But it was also the place where Ross made a serious error that was to prove a lasting blot on his reputation. When looking west down the inlet, he came to the conclusion that there was no way through, because there appeared to be high mountains ahead. In fact they were thick clouds. So convinced was he, however, that not only did he fail to bring his officers up on deck to confirm what he thought he’d seen (they were below, playing cards), but he even gave the imaginary range a name, Croker’s Mountains, after the First Secretary to the Admiralty. It was a bizarre episode. Ross, on his own initiative, then ordered the ship to turn and head for home, though not without adding insult to injury by naming an imaginary gulf Barrow’s Bay. When the error was revealed, Barrow was furious and never trusted John Ross again.
But the lure of the Northwest Passage remained strong and Barrow’s largesse next fell upon William Edward Parry, captain of the Ross expedition’s second ship, Alexander, who was duly invited to lead a fresh attempt. At thirty, Edward Parry, as he was usually known, was of a younger intake than John Ross or John Franklin, though he had been with the Navy for more than half his life, having joined when he was thirteen. James Clark Ross was once again engaged as midshipman. One of his fellow officers on the Alexander was a well-regarded Northern Irishman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. He and James Ross were to become lifelong friends and, like Ross, Francis Crozier would go on to play a major role in the destiny of Erebus and that of her sister ship, Terror.
Parry’s expedition took two ships, Hecla and Griper, on what proved to be one of the most fruitful of all Arctic voyages. Not only did they pass through Lancaster Sound, removing Croker’s Mountains from the map, but they also penetrated deep into the Northwest Passage. They took the unprecedented step of overwintering on a bleak and previously unknown island far to the west, which they named, after their sponsor, Melville Island. Fortunately, they were well prepared. Each man was issued with a wolfskin blanket at night and great care was taken with the supplies, which included Burkitt’s essence of malt and hops, and lemon juice, vinegar, sauerkraut and pickles to stave off scurvy. By the time Parry and his ships arrived back in the Thames estuary in November 1820, they had penetrated hundreds of miles of previously unknown land.
Meanwhile John Franklin, despite his underwhelming achievement on the North Pole expedition, had been offered another chance by Barrow. Along with George Back and Dr John Richardson, he was given command of a land expedition to map the north-flowing Coppermine River to its mouth in the Arctic Sea. It was wild and difficult country, and as Franklin’s working life had so far been spent at sea, he was not perhaps the ideal man for such demanding terrestrial exploration. Moreover he was encumbered by the heavy equipment that was needed to fulfil the scientific obligations of the mission.
In the event, much new land was mapped, along the river’s course and along the Arctic coast, but Franklin left his return too late and his men were caught in vicious weather conditions as winter approached. Their food ran out and they were reduced to eating berries and lichens wherever they could find them. Franklin recalled later that one day ‘the whole party ate the remains of their old shoes [moccasins of untanned leather] to strengthen their stomachs for the fatigue of the day’s journey’. The dreadful conditions produced bitter divisions. Ten of the accompanying Canadian voyageurs (fur traders who also acted as scouts and porters) died on the march home, and one of those who survived, Michel Terohaute, was believed to have done so by cannibalism. He then shot an English member of the expedition, Midshipman Robert Hood, before being shot in turn by Dr John Richardson, second-in-command of the party.
The disorganised chaos at the end of the expedition was seen by some at the time as the result of Franklin’s obstinacy and unwillingness to listen to the voyageurs or the local Inuit. More recently, the editor of a 1995 edition of Franklin’s journals summed him up as ‘a solid representative of imperial culture, not only in its many positive aspects, but in its less generous dimensions as well’. But when he arrived back home a year later and told his side of their fight for survival, his book became a bestseller and, far from being criticised for jeopardising himself and his men, John Franklin quickly became a popular hero: The Man Who Ate His Boots.
Barrow’s multi-pronged attack on the Northwest Passage had brought results and, even when unsuccessful, had so firmly gripped the public imagination that men like Parry and Franklin and James Clark Ross were becoming shining lights in a new firmament – a world in which heroes fought the elements, not the enemy.
In 1824, as Erebus was being carved into shape in a quiet corner of south-west Wales, two of her fellow bomb ships, Hecla and Fury, were once more to go into action against the ice. Impressed by their sturdy design and reinforced hulls, Edward Parry, the explorer of the moment, chose them to spearhead yet another assault on the Northwest Passage.
This new journey represented a step