a botanist aboard the expedition.
As it turned out, the only official position open to Hooker was that of assistant surgeon, and to this end Joseph rapidly qualified as a doctor. But it was clear where his true interests lay. ‘No future botanist will probably ever visit the countries whither I am going and that is a great attraction,’ he wrote to his father. On 18 May 1839, six weeks before his twenty-second birthday, Joseph Hooker received the news that his appointment as second surgeon on HMS Erebus had been confirmed. He would be the youngest man on board.
Throughout the expedition, like his immediate superior McCormick, Hooker kept copious journals, probably encouraged by the example of Charles Darwin. (He told his father that he slept with a set of proofs of The Voyage of the Beagle under his pillow.) As was the practice on publicly financed expeditions, all diaries and notebooks kept on board were seen as the property of the Admiralty and had to be surrendered at the end of the voyage. And, as M.J. Ross, biographer and great-grandson of Sir James, points out, there were no professional scientists on this expedition: all the officers and crew were members of the Royal Navy and were therefore subject to these restrictions. Letters home, however, were exempt from examination, making young Hooker’s copious correspondence with his family all the more valuable. It offers an informality and openness that no official report could contain.
After receiving his commission, Hooker was ordered to report to Chatham Dockyard where, as he records in his journal, ‘I spent nearly four tedious months . . . waiting until the ships should be fully ready and equipped’. He was quartered, or ‘hulked’ as they called it, on an old frigate called HMS Tartar. It was common then to use retired warships as temporary accommodation. Some, like Turner’s famous ‘Fighting Temeraire’, were used as prison ships and had a reputation for being indescribably filthy.
A number of other crew members were similarly hulked on the Tartar, including Sergeant William Cunningham, who was in charge of a squad of Marines, consisting of a corporal and five privates, allotted to HMS Terror. A similar detachment would have been aboard Erebus. The Royal Marines’ role was rather like that of a police force. They were charged with maintaining order and discipline on board, searching for and returning deserters, carrying out punishments, collecting and despatching mail, rationing out spirits, securing the ships when in port, and providing a guard for visiting dignitaries. In addition to all these duties, Sergeant Cunningham kept a daily diary, or memorandum book, throughout the voyage. From his initial entry, we know that he and his men arrived on the Medway on 15 June 1839 and were immediately put to work fitting out the ships.
By the beginning of September, Erebus was fully crewed up, with twelve officers, eighteen petty officers, twenty-six able seamen and seven Marines, making up a complement of sixty-three. About half the personnel were First Entry men – who had never before served in the Royal Navy, but in many cases had seagoing experience on whalers. Provisions and equipment were also brought on board, including warm clothing of the best quality. Last to be loaded was food for the voyage, including 15,000 lb of beef and 2,618 pints of vegetable soup.
On 2 September, Erebus and Terror were inspected by the Earl of Minto, First Lord, and three senior Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Final instructions were received from the Admiralty on the 16th, and three days later Erebus and Terror moved downriver to Gillingham Reach, where compasses were adjusted and last provisions taken on board. Ross’s mother and father had come down from Scotland to see him off and they stayed on board as the ship continued down the Thames. Unfortunately, they had only reached Sheerness when they ran aground in low water and had to be towed the next morning to Margate by the steamship Hecate. Here they remained waiting for the westerly winds to abate, and for one of the anchors to be replaced – Ross fulminating, justifiably, but hardly succinctly, against ‘the gross negligence of those whose duty it was to ascertain the soundness of that, on which, under different circumstances, the ship, and lives of all on board, might have . . . depended’. It was not an auspicious start.
For the people of Margate, the presence of this great expedition so fortuitously becalmed on their doorstep was quite an attraction. They came out in numbers to gaze at the ships, and some were invited aboard. No one can have been more warmly welcomed than the naval pay clerks who arrived on the 25th to issue three months’ pay in advance. The rest of the crew’s wages were to be passed directly to their families until their safe return.
On the last day of September 1839 the wind swung round to the east and they could at last head down into the English Channel, dropping their pilot at Deal and continuing south-west, in what McCormick described as ‘boisterous weather’. It would be almost four years to the day before any of them saw the English coast again.
Sailors who had never previously crossed the Equator were traditionally subjected to a line-crossing ceremony. William Cunningham, aboard Terror, vividly described his own experience on 3 December 1839: ‘I was sat down on the Barber’s chair, and underwent the process of shaving by being lathered with a paint brush – and lather composed of all manner of Nuisance that could be collected in a Ship.’
CHAPTER 4
FAR-OFF SHORES
Erebus was never a graceful ship. Functionally barque-rigged, with square sails on the fore and mainmast and a fore and aft sail on the mizzen, she was not quick, either. With a full wind in her sails, seven to nine knots was about the maximum. But in the expert opinion of her captain’s great-grandson, Rear-Admiral M.J. Ross, she was ‘an excellent seaboat’, which ‘rolled and pitched a great deal, but easily, so that there was little strain on [the] rigging or spars’.
She was soon put to the test. Four days into the journey, while passing close to Start Point, the southern tip of Devon, on 4 October 1839, she ran into thick fog, followed by a gale and heavy rain. The next morning Terror was nowhere to be seen. Less than a week at sea and already the Admiralty’s clear instruction that both ships stay together at all times had fallen foul of reality. This didn’t seem to worry Ross unduly. As Lizard Point, the last sight of the coast of England, disappeared astern, he was in high spirits. ‘It is not easy to describe the joy and light-heartedness we all felt,’ he wrote later, ‘. . . bounding before a favourable breeze over the blue waves of the ocean, fairly embarked in the enterprise we had all so long desired to commence, and freed from the anxious and tedious operations of our protracted but requisite preparation.’
James Clark Ross was a serious and experienced mariner, cautious with emotion. He’d been through all this many times before, but nowhere else does he reveal quite as intensely his great relief at being on the move, away from pettifogging civil servants and pompous ceremonies, with sixty men around him and a job to do. He was heading south for the first time – and a long way south: if all worked out, further south than any other ship had been before. The challenge that lay ahead was formidable, but one that he relished. As he swung Erebus south-south-west, he was indeed master of all he surveyed.
Life on board ship settled into a time-honoured pattern. The day was divided into four-hour watches marked by the ringing of the ship’s bell. Eight bells would be rung at midday, followed by one bell at half-past, two bells at one o’clock, three bells at half-past one, and so on, until eight bells were reached again at four o’clock, when the whole process would begin again. The crew would work four hours on and four hours off, through day and night. The boatswain would stand at the hatches, calling ‘All Hands!’ as the watches changed, and the men would muster on deck before going off to their various stations.
The days began early. Shortly after four in the morning the cook would light the fires in the galley and start
