Erebus. Michael Palin
they reached the South Magnetic Pole. Now, observations indicated that they were on or around the line of least intensity: the magnetic doldrums. And because Ross was keen to explore this phenomenon, he continued on a zigzag course, constantly criss-crossing the line. Eventually, though, to the relief of the sailors, if not the scientists, they made landfall at the island of St Helena on 31 January 1840.
This was the open prison to which Napoleon had been brought after his defeat at Waterloo. Mindful that he had already escaped from one island, Elba, it had been considered that this speck in the middle of the Atlantic was about as safe a place of confinement as anywhere in the world. And, sure enough, this was where he had died, less than twenty years earlier.
McCormick, ever the one for excursions, secured a horse and trotted up the mountain to see where Napoleon had spent his last days. The great French emperor had been reduced to living at incongruous addresses with names like ‘The Briars’, before finally settling in the rather grander Longwood House. McCormick, to his evident distress, found Longwood rundown and abandoned. ‘Napoleon’s billiard room is now filled with bearded wheat,’ he sadly recorded in his journal. In what had been Napoleon’s sitting room he found a threshing machine. He continued on through the dilapidated house, displaying awe and a certain sense of regret. ‘This apartment opens into the bedroom, under the second window of which the great Napoleon’s head rested when he took his last breath on earth.’ One can almost sense his voice falling to a whisper. The next day he visited Napoleon’s tomb, around which ducks were ‘irreverently waddling’.
For Joseph Hooker, meanwhile, Erebus was proving a good home. ‘I am very happy and comfortable here,’ he wrote to his father. ‘Not very idle.’ Because they shared a similar interest in the sciences, Hooker got on well with Ross. The captain had given him space in his cabin for his plants, and ‘one of the tables under the stern window is wholly mine’. A letter to his sisters offers an intimate glimpse of their relationship. ‘Almost every day I draw, sometimes all day long and till two or three in the morning, the Captain directing me. He sits at one side of the table, writing and figuring at night, and I, on the other, drawing.’ Ross had ordered nets to be hung overboard to collect sea creatures – another plus for Hooker. ‘McCormick pays no attention to them, so they are therefore brought at once to me.’ Hooker’s one regret was that the expedition was progressing so slowly. Perhaps not surprisingly, he didn’t blame Ross’s obsession with following magnetic lines for this. Instead he criticised the Erebus’s sister ship: ‘The Terror has been a sad drawback to us, having every now and then to shorten sail for her [to allow her to catch up].’
Terror certainly seems to have been the more relaxed and less cerebral of the two ships at this time. In his diary, Cunningham notes the high point of the day: ‘Killed a Bullock in the afternoon and the offal which was throwed overboard attracted a Shark which we caught about 10 PM with a hook and a bait of the Bullock’s tripe. He made great resistance on being hauled inboard. He was of the blue specie and measured 9 feet 5 inches.’ The next day he noted, ‘Dissected Mr Jack Shark . . . and every man on board had a splendid Blow out [feast] of his carcase; his flesh was white as milk and not the least rank.’ Next day the weather was ‘extremely fine going free . . . Eat the last of the Shark for supper.’ By 26 February they had slowed down yet again, but Cunningham seemed unconcerned. ‘The latter part of the day becalmed,’ he wrote. ‘Felt particularly cheerful – can’t account for it.’
There was great excitement aboard Erebus on 6 March, when, hove-to for one of their routine sea-depth measurements, the weighted line dropped a full 16,000 feet, the greatest depth recorded on the journey thus far. As they drew closer to the Cape, Ross’s journal records frequent sightings of albatross, one of the largest of all sea-birds, with up to 10-foot wingspans and capable of speeds of 50 miles an hour. The settled weather conditions began to change. On 11 March the fog was so dense that Terror had to fire one of her cannons to ascertain the position of Erebus. She fired back, but later, in a very heavy swell, which Cunningham thought ‘the heaviest since we have been at sea’, the two ships were separated once again. Terror was not the laggard this time. She arrived at Simonstown on the Cape of Good Hope a full twenty-four hours before Erebus.
McCormick was on deck at dawn on Friday the 13th and described his excitement at seeing Table Mountain as only a geologist could. ‘At 5.40 a.m. I saw Table Mountain on the port bow . . . The horizontal stratification of the white silicious sandstone forming the summit of the hills above their granite base is seen to great advantage from the sea.’ Fit that on a postcard.
Simonstown naval base, originally built by the Dutch, but taken over by the British in the 1790s, lay on the western shore of Simon’s Bay, a few miles south of Cape Town. As soon as they had settled in the bay, Ross began organising the construction of a magnetic observatory, whilst McCormick went off to climb the horizontal stratification of white siliceous sandstone and visit the Constantia vineyards. Joseph Hooker wrote to his father of the relationship between the two surgeons. ‘McCormick and I are exceedingly good friends and no jealousy exists . . . He takes no interest but in bird shooting and rock collecting. I am nolens volens [willingly or unwillingly] the Naturalist for which I enjoy no other advantage than the Captain’s cabin, and I think myself amply repaid.’
Marine Sergeant Cunningham was meanwhile having trouble with a perennial naval problem: deserters. Able seamen Coleston and Wallace had absconded, before being found and brought back by a constable (the two men turned out to be serial deserters, jumping ship again in Hobart a few months later). Despite the rigours of the voyage, very few men jumped ship in the four years they were away. This could have been because they were well looked after and comparatively well paid. But then desertion rates generally reflected the agreeableness of the location. In 1825 Captain Beechey in HMS Blossom recorded fourteen of the crew deserting at Rio de Janeiro. There would certainly have been few incentives to jump ship in Antarctica.
Cunningham did get some time off, however. On the last day of March he went ashore to enjoy himself. ‘Beer . . . was served out at the rate on one quart [two pints] per “biped” which was said to disorder some of the people’s attics.’ Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.
On 6 April 1840, after a three-week stay, the expedition left Simonstown. Not a moment too soon, if Cunningham’s diary is anything to go by. Three days after the beer and the shore leave, three ‘very large’ bullocks had been brought aboard. One of them had run amok, goring a Mr Evans in the thigh. That same evening, perhaps not coincidentally, Cunningham reported ‘a very troublesome first Watch on account of several of the Boat’s crew getting Drunk’. Time to go.
They headed out of the harbour towards the open sea, passing HMS Melville, the flagship of Admiral Elliot, commander-in-chief of the Simonstown Station, whose crew climbed the rigging to give them three cheers as they sailed by. Nature wasn’t as friendly. A west wind came on so hard that Terror was left behind and had to be towed out of the harbour. By the time she reached open ocean, she’d lost sight of Erebus. Despite firing rockets and burning blue lights all night, she received no response from her sister ship.
The hostile conditions were familiar to mariners off the South African coast. The Indian and Atlantic Ocean currents meet here, above a 200-mile extension of the continental shelf known as the Agulhas Bank, creating what Ross described as ‘a harassing jobble of a sea. Winds blowing from almost every point of the compass.’ To avoid it, he took Erebus southwards, leaving behind two of their precious sea thermometers, which had been torn off their mooring lines. Ahead of them lay a long haul east to Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was still officially known: more than 6,000 miles across some of the stormiest seas in the world, already known then, by their latitude, as the Roaring Forties.
Fierce, persistent westerlies blew relentlessly across the Southern Ocean, with no land masses to break them. The combination of strong following winds and massive swells was a mixed blessing. It enabled the Cutty Sark to cut the time between London and Sydney to less than eighty days, but could prove treacherous, too. For Ross, the challenges were rather different. His scientific and surveying agenda meant that rather than race ahead of the wind, he had to keep turning against it to investigate