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 islands on the way. It was not always possible. They only had time to glimpse the shores of the Prince Edward Islands, on which McCormick registered his astonishment at seeing a cove ‘literally enamelled with penguins’, before a shrieking storm had blown them past with no chance of a landing.
The sheer power of the elements surprised even someone as well travelled as Erebus’s captain. At one point Ross experienced ‘the heaviest rain I ever witnessed . . . thunder and the most vivid lightning occurred during this great fall of water, which lasted without intermission for more than ten hours’.
The strength of the ship and the skill of her crew were put to their fiercest test so far as the wind, now blowing at Force 10, kept changing direction, veering so violently that ‘we spent the night in great anxiety, and in momentary expectation that our boats would be washed away by some of the broken waves that fell on board, or that from the frequent shocks the ship sustained . . . we should lose some of the masts’.
It seems astonishing that there should be anyone living in these storm-tossed latitudes, but there were, and Ross had been asked to take provisions to some of them: a group of eleven elephant-seal hunters, stranded on Possession Island in the Crozet archipelago. The wind looked likely to blow Erebus past the island, but with considerable effort Ross managed to turn about and beat up to the west. Unable to get a boat to shore, they anchored a little way off, and six of the sealers came out to meet them. Ross wasn’t impressed. ‘They looked more like Esquimaux than civilized beings . . . Their clothes were literally soaked in oil and smelt most offensive.’ McCormick was less judgemental. He described Mr Hickley, the spokesman for the beleaguered sealers, as ‘their manly-looking leader who was an ideal “Robinson Crusoe” in costume’. To young Hooker, Hickley was rather splendid, ‘like some African Prince, pre-eminently filthy, and withal a most independent gentleman’. They left the sealers with a chest of tea, bags of coffee and a letter from their employer, which, McCormick noted, ‘seemed to disappoint the leader of the party . . . who evidently had been anticipating a ship for their removal, instead of fresh supplies’.
Ross, mindful of his instructions from the Admiralty, continued on to their next, official destination. Once again, magnetic observation was the prime reason for the choice. ‘It is probable that Kerguelen Island will be found well-suited to that purpose,’ the Lords of the Admiralty had laid down. It certainly wasn’t well suited for much else. First discovered by a Frenchman, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec, in 1772, the Kerguelens are definitively remote: according to the opening sentence on one travel website I looked at, they are ‘located 2,051 miles away from any sort of civilization’ (it’s the ‘any sort’ I find so tantalising). They are also covered with glaciers, and far south enough for Ross to have recorded the expedition’s first sighting of Antarctic ice. Not surprisingly, Captain Cook christened Kerguelen the ‘Island of Desolation’.
As Erebus approached this bleak fortress, McCormick’s journal entry for 8 May 1840 tells the sad story of the demise of one of the smallest of her crew, Old Tom, a cock brought out from England with a hen, for the purpose of colonising the island they had now reached – the establishment of new species on remote islands being one of the aims of the mission. ‘Tom . . . died today,’ he wrote, ‘in the very sight of his intended domain; had his body committed to the deep by the captain’s steward – a sailor’s grave.’
Better news came with a cry from the crow’s nest as they were beating up towards Kerguelen’s Arched Rock to make a landing. The sails of HMS Terror had been spotted, the first sight of her for a month. But such was the power of a heavy rolling sea that it took three days for Erebus, after a series of twenty-two tight tacks, to gain the harbour mouth, and a further day before
