light upon disturbance, render the path of the ship through the waters on a dark night surprisingly brilliant’. Their time at Santa Cruz, Tenerife, was similarly unmarked by incident, the highlight arguably being the hoisting on board of ‘one live cow’, as recorded by Cunningham. But a passing remark he makes about the next island they visited shows that these islands were not havens of peace and tranquillity. Cunningham may have been able to buy ‘good wine’ and oranges on St Jago, but his note that its inhabitants ‘are or have been, slaves’ serves as a reminder of how recently this appalling trade had dominated the region. Though the trade in slaves had been illegal in the British Empire since 1807, slavery itself had only been banned in 1833. And at the time Erebus and Terror visited, the Royal Navy was still patrolling the waters off the West African coast to intercept slaving vessels – a role that must often have been as horrible as warfare. Christopher Lloyd describes in his book The Navy and the Slave Trade how one officer, boarding a slave ship in 1821, found her crammed so full below decks that her human cargo was ‘clinging to the gratings to inhale a mouthful of fresh air and fighting each other for a taste of water, showing their parched tongues, and pointing to their reduced stomachs as if overcome by famine’.
As Erebus and Terror approached the Equator, they entered the latitudes between the north-east and south-east trade winds. ‘Violent gusts of wind and torrents of rain alternate with calms and light baffling breezes,’ observed Ross, ‘which, with the suffocating heat of the electrically-charged atmosphere, render this part of the voyage both disagreeable and unhealthy.’ If Ross, in his spacious stern cabin, found it uncomfortable, one can only imagine how much worse it must have been below decks, even with the hatches opened.
On 3 December 1839, Terror crossed the Equator ahead of Erebus. William Cunningham, who had never done this before, was, as a ‘greenhorn’, subjected to the ritual line-crossing ceremony at the hands of his fellow crewmen, dressed as King Neptune and his attendants, and duly recorded the event in his diary:
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 (not excepting Soil [excrement]). The fire engine was playing on the back of my neck the whole time with its utmost force. After being well scraped with a piece of an iron hoop I was tumbled backwards into a sailfull of water . . . and had a good sousing . . . after which I have the pleasure of seeing nearly 30 others go through a similar process.
At midday they spliced the main brace (this being the term for a special ration of rum) and ‘after Dinner turned the hands up to dance and skylark’.
Their first Christmas away from home was celebrated with traditional enthusiasm. After prayers and a sermon from Captain Ross, thirteen of the officers sat down in the gun-room to a dinner of pea soup, roast turkey and ham, parsnips, plum pudding and pumpkin tart. Two days later they had freshly caught dolphin for breakfast, and five days after that the men of Erebus saw out the old decade ‘with all hands on deck, stepping out to the fiddle’. Aboard Terror, on the stroke of midnight, Captain Crozier sent for the bosun to pipe all hands to splice the main brace, ‘and I must say,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘I never saw a body of men turn out so smartly before’. The fiddler struck up ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and, with dancing and conviviality lasting until two in the morning, they welcomed in the 1840s: ‘all finished with three hearty cheers.’
***
The expedition appeared to be going well, but it was also going slowly.
The need for constant comparative observations forced both ships into a meandering, indirect course. They had crossed the Magnetic Equator on 7 December, when Ross had noted with satisfaction that the needle on his Fox dip circle (a device used to measure the angle between the horizon and the earth’s magnetic field) was perfectly horizontal. He had seen it point directly upwards at the North Magnetic Pole and, assuming the expedition was successful, would witness it point straight down when 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
