in 1836 and 1837. The other, currently riding on the River Medway at Chatham, had never been further than the warm waters of the Mediterranean. But she was slightly bigger and more recently built than Terror, and she became the unanimous choice to be the flagship. After nine years of premature retirement, and nearly fourteen years after she had been cheered down the slipway at Pembroke, HMS Erebus was set to become one of the most famous ships in history. On 8 April 1839, James Clark Ross was appointed her captain.
Within two weeks of the expedition being confirmed, Erebus was put into dry dock at Chatham to have the coppering on her hull, which had been in place since her Mediterranean patrol duty, removed and replaced. The traditional trappings of a warship were dismantled to give her cleaner, more functional, more weather-resistant lines. Three levels on the top deck were reduced to one, with the removal of the raised quarterdeck and forecastle, giving a single flush deck. This would provide extra storage space for the nine auxiliary boats that Erebus was to carry. These ranged from 30-foot-long whale-boats to a 28-foot-long pinnace, two cutters and a 12-foot gig, intended essentially to serve as the captain’s private taxi. More space was created by dispensing with most of Erebus’s weaponry. Her twelve guns were reduced to two and the redundant gun-ports filled in.
Her transformation from warship to ice-ship was supervised by a Mr Rice at Chatham Dockyard. So thorough was it, and so impressed was James Clark Ross, that he included Rice’s memorandum of work on Erebus in his published account of the expedition. Which is how we know that her hull was strengthened with 6-inch-thick oak planking, increasing to 8 inches at the gunwale, to make a 3-foot-wide girdle around the ship; and that the deck was reinforced with 3-inch-thick planks laid fore and aft, and with additional planks laid diagonally on top. ‘Fearnaught, dipped in hot tallow’ was laid between the two surfaces (fearnaught was a thick felt, installed as insulation). Lower down the hull, the doubling narrowed to 3-inch-thick English elm. The remainder of the ship’s bottom, down to the keel, was doubled with 3-inch Canadian elm. Extra-thick copper was used to cover the bow from water-line to keel. Anything projecting from the stern was removed, including the overhanging quarter galleries. The ornately patterned carving on her bow, which was a feature of all warships, however humble, was stripped away. Decoration was sacrificed to utility and durability.
During the summer of 1839, as the sawyers and ropers, sailmakers, carpenters and smithies worked away at Chatham, James Ross was busy picking his officers. His unsurprising choice for his second-in-command and captain of the Terror was the Ulsterman, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, with whom he had sailed so often on bruising Arctic expeditions that it was said Ross was one of the very few people allowed to call Crozier ‘Frank’.
Crozier, three years Ross’s senior, was one of thirteen children from Banbridge in County Down, a few miles south of Belfast. His birthplace, a handsome Georgian townhouse built in 1796, still stands. His father had made money in the Irish linen industry, and Francis would have had a comfortable, strongly religious upbringing (in time his father changed his allegiance from Presbyterian to the Protestant Church of Ireland, moving from radicalism to the establishment). One of Francis’s brothers became a vicar and the other two went into the law. But because his father was keen to get one of his sons into uniform and was prepared to pull some strings at the Admiralty, Francis himself was taken into the Royal Navy on 12 June 1810, at the age of thirteen.
Over the years he impressed all who worked with him. No less a figure than John Barrow endorsed him warmly: ‘A most zealous young officer, who, by his talents, attention and energy, has succeeded in working himself up to the top of the service.’ That Crozier never quite reached the top is a mystery. Something in his personality seems to have held him back: a lack of sophistication, perhaps, a lack of confidence ashore, an awareness of his limited formal education. His biographer, Michael Smith, describes him as ‘Rock solid and reliable’, but goes on to say, ‘Crozier was born to be a number two.’
Edward Joseph Bird, thirty-seven, was chosen as First Lieutenant of Erebus. He too had sailed with Ross, latterly as second-in-command on HMS Endeavour on one of Parry’s expeditions. Bird was described by Sir Clements Markham, a Victorian geographer and explorer and for many years President of the Royal Geographical Society, as ‘an excellent seaman, unostentatious and retiring’. He was bearded, with prematurely receding hair brushed forward and a marked resemblance in build and general chubbiness to John Franklin. Ross trusted him implicitly.
In June, Crozier wrote to Ross in some frustration, concerned that no First had yet been chosen to accompany him on Terror. He seemed not to want to take the decision himself. ‘I myself know not one of any standing who would suit us, however there must be plenty,’ he wrote, adding, somewhat enigmatically, ‘we do not want a philosopher’. At that time the words ‘philosopher’ and ‘scientist’ were often indistinguishable, so it’s not clear whether Crozier was merely indicating a preference for a naval man or signalling discomfort with intellectuals. Eventually Archibald McMurdo, a capable Scot, was chosen to be Crozier’s First Lieutenant. He knew Terror, having been Third Lieutenant on her when she narrowly avoided destruction in the ice on Back’s expedition of 1836. Charles Tucker was chosen as master of Erebus. He would be the man in charge of navigation.
Others on board with Arctic experience were Alexander Smith, First Mate, and Thomas Hallett, purser, both of whom had served with Ross and Crozier on Cove. Thomas Abernethy, who was appointed gunner, was a reassuring presence all round. Though his artillery duties were largely honorific, he was a big, powerfully built man who had been one of Ross’s closest and most trusted companions on many Arctic forays. Indeed, he had been at his side when he reached the North Magnetic Pole.
Thankfully for future historians and researchers, two appointments on Erebus went to men who recorded her adventures in minute detail: Robert McCormick and Joseph Dalton Hooker. McCormick, who had been on the Beagle with Charles Darwin, was the ship’s surgeon and naturalist, a combination that may seem strange today, but was understandable in this pre-pharmaceutical age, when doctors made their own medicine and plants were the main ingredient – in fact, the Apothecaries Act of 1815 had made the study of botany a compulsory part of medical education. He was, as they say, a character, and quite full of himself. On the Beagle McCormick had become increasingly irritated by the freedom that Captain Fitzroy accorded Darwin, who, despite having no official naval status, was often allowed ashore to naturalise whilst McCormick had to stay on board. In the end McCormick got himself invalided off the expedition, to no one’s great disappointment. The irritation had clearly been mutual. ‘He chose to make himself disagreeable to the Captain,’ tutted Darwin, adding, ‘. . . he was a philosopher of rather an antient date’.
McCormick was certainly well read in natural history, geology and ornithology and had at some point impressed – or perhaps pestered – Ross enough to have been assured of a post. So here he was, settling himself and his books, his instruments and his specimen cases onto HMS Erebus. Opinionated as he may have been, his diary offers a precious source of information about her four years in the Antarctic.
Joseph Dalton Hooker was the son of William Jackson Hooker of Norwich, who, through the influence of the ubiquitous Sir Joseph Banks, had been appointed to the Chair of Botany at Glasgow University. William realised from very early on that his son had a precocious talent. At the age of six he had correctly identified a moss growing on a Glasgow wall as Bryum argenteum. By the time he was thirteen he was an obsessive botanist, able to recite long lists of Latin names.
William Hooker, through his wide range of contacts, had heard of the proposed Antarctic expedition and, sensing the potential for a budding naturalist to make his name, used all his influence to get an assignment for his son. This was, after all – for reasons both scientific and commercial – a golden age for botany. As Jim Endersby, Hooker’s biographer, writes, ‘Much of the wealth of Britain’s empire rested on plants’ – from timber and hemp for the ships, to indigo, spices, tea, cotton and opium that they carried. Understanding how, where and why things grew where they
