Erebus. Michael Palin
been on a mineralogical foray and having packed his haversack with ‘some of the finest specimens of quartz crystals . . . weighing in all some fifty pounds’, he found himself, as night fell, cut off by torrential waterfalls. He abandoned the haversack, and eventually made his way to the bottom of a cliff before realising that he wouldn’t be able to get to the ship from there. ‘The darkness of the night,’ he recalled a little later, ‘only relieved by the fitful glare from the white, foaming spray the torrents sent upwards, the terrific gusts of wind, accompanied by a deluge of rain, combined together with black, overhanging, frowning precipices, to form a scene of the wildest description.’ When he did finally make his way back to the ship, he was fed tea with, perhaps appropriately, some stewed chionis on the side, which ‘our thoughtful, kind-hearted boat’s crew had caught in my absence’.
Activity was the key to survival on any closely packed ship, but particularly in these wild and inhospitable places, where it must have been only too easy to lose any sense of purpose. Captain Ross always made sure there was work to do, building and operating the observatories. Of course from a personal point of view, the scientific imperative of the expedition – whether it was in natural history, zoology, botany or geology – was clearly something that motivated and excited him as much as it did the likes of McCormick and Hooker.
To know how the ordinary seaman responded, we have only Sergeant Cunningham’s diaries to go by. They convey a pretty miserable portrait of men doing their best in dreadful conditions. Gales blow on forty-five of the sixty-eight days they spend in the Kerguelens. Wind, rain and snow rake the harbour as they struggle to get equipment ashore and back. The nearest Sergeant Cunningham comes even to recording contentment is a day on which he shoots and cooks several shag. These, he notes, prove ‘capital eating’. Otherwise his diary entry for Sunday 19 July can stand for most of the others: ‘high and bitter cold: Divine service in the forenoon. I may put this down as another of those miserable Sundays a man spends in a ship of this description.’
At least it was to be his last Sunday in the Kerguelen Islands, for the next morning, 20 July, after days of being blown back by the winds, Erebus and Terror finally extricated themselves from what Ross described as ‘this most dreary and disagreeable harbour’. Joseph Hooker tried, rather unconvincingly, to look on the bright side. ‘I was sorry at leaving Christmas Harbour: by finding food for the mind one may grow attached to the most wretched spots on the globe.’ Not one for the Tourist Board.
Today, the Kerguelen Islands are part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, and can only be reached by a ship from the island of Réunion, which sails four times a year. The sole year-round occupants are scientists. Plus ça change.
Christmas Harbour might have been dreary and disagreeable for the crew of Terror and Erebus, but at least it had provided some shelter. Now back in the open ocean, they were once again exposed to the full force of the Roaring Forties. A series of deep depressions rolled in day after day and, with icebergs looming on the horizon and fifteen hours of darkness through which to navigate, enormous pressure was put on the master and quartermaster to hold them on course.
In the driving rain and the unremitting turbulence, it was not long before Terror once again disappeared from sight. The disparities between the two ships still rankled with Ross. He rather testily records having to keep Erebus under moderate sail whilst he searched for her older sister ship, ‘to our great inconvenience, the ship rolling heavily in consequence of not having sufficient sail to steady her’. Eventually he gave up and Erebus carried on alone.
Ironically, it was on one of the few fine days that the worst happened.
The crew were busy mopping up and men were in the rigging spreading the sails out to dry, when the boatswain, Mr Roberts, was struck by a swinging staysail sheet and, as an eyewitness remembered, ‘whirled overboard’. A lifebuoy and various oars were immediately flung out to him, but the ship was making six knots at the time and he slipped quickly astern. Two cutters were lowered into the sea, but as they’d had to be tightly lashed down against the storms, precious time was lost in launching them. The whole tragedy was witnessed by Surgeon McCormick, who was walking the quarterdeck at the time. ‘The last I saw of him was as he rose on the top of a wave, where a gigantic petrel or two were whirling over his head and might have struck him with their powerful wings or no less powerful beak, for he disappeared all at once between two seas.’
One of the rescue cutters was hit by a cross-wave and four of her crew were thrown into the water. It is unlikely any of them could swim, there being a superstition among sailors that learning to swim was bad luck – an admission that things could go wrong. The rescue attempt could therefore have led to a multiple drowning, had it not been for the sharp reactions of Mr Oakley, the Mate on Erebus, and Mr Abernethy, the gunner, in the other, returning boat. They immediately pushed back from the ship and managed to pluck all four men out of the rolling sea, ‘completely benumbed and stupefied by the cold’. The now-overloaded cutter ran alongside the ship for some time, taking on more and more water before it was finally plucked aboard.
Roberts’s cap was recovered, but that was all. The boatswain is so central to the life of a ship that his demise must have been a shock to everyone. His piping and shout of ‘All Hands!’ would have been as common a sound as the ship’s bell. The expedition had sustained its first loss of life, just short of the first anniversary of its launch.
On 12 August they caught a glimpse of a cloud-shrouded coast line. Charts and sextant readings told them they were off the south-westerly point of New Holland (what is now Western Australia). This must have raised hopes that the worst was over, but the most destructive storm of all was still to come. The very next day it struck with more fury than any they had yet experienced. The ship was engulfed and the wind blew with such demonic intensity that the main topsail was ripped to shreds and the staysail wrenched off, leaving only the bare pole from which it once hung. ‘One vast, swelling green mountain of a sea came rolling up astern,’ McCormick recalled, ‘threatening to engulf us, sweeping over the starboard quarter-boat, in upon the quarter-deck which it deluged, drenching me to the skin, as I clung to the mizzen-mast catching hold of some gear to avoid being washed overboard.’ His graphic account continues with a memorable description of his skipper, roped in place on the deck, defying the elements, evoking Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick: ‘Captain Ross maintained his position on the weather quarter by having three turns of the mizzen topsail halyards round him for support.’ The heavy seas persisted, and although the wind abated, the hatches had to remain battened down the whole of the next day, ‘with lighted candles in the gunroom’ to dispel the gloom below decks.
On the night of 16 August, under a bright full moon, Ross records, with what can only have been almighty relief, ‘we saw the land of Tasmania ahead of us’.
Hobart in 1840, home to a mixture of free settlers and convicts. Erebus’s arrival in August of that year caused huge excitement locally.
CHAPTER 5
‘OUR SOUTHERN HOME’
In 2004, on a visit to Tasmania, I read Matthew Kneale’s book English Passengers. Though there is dark humour and fine description in the story of a mid-nineteenth-century emigrant to Tasmania, it is also a powerful indictment of the rigidity and cruelty of Victorian imperial certainties – the same certainties that motivated Barrow and Ross and Sabine and Minto, and Melville and von Humboldt and Herschel, and all the great men who dominate the life and times of HMS Erebus. These were men of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, stimulated by the spirit of the Enlightenment to search and discover, to push back the boundaries of knowledge, convinced that the more they measured and traced and calculated and recorded, the more beneficial it would be for mankind. But this sense of purpose also contained within it an implicit sense of superiority, which, when misused, fed the dark side of Britain’s increasing self-confidence. And nowhere was the light and shade of Victorian Britain more sharply defined than in the self-governing colony