where they were able to drop anchor and get boats ashore with building materials for an observatory.
Certain days had been decreed by the international community as simultaneous magnetic-measurement days, or term days. Ross was scrupulous in making sure that wherever he was, he had instruments ready to record the magnetic activity in that place at the same time as others elsewhere on the globe were noting their findings. This required secure solid housings for the measuring equipment. Two observatories, one for magnetic and the other for astronomical observations, were therefore set up on the beach in Christmas Harbour in time for the term days of 29 and 30 May. There was much excitement when the results were coordinated later. Activity detected on Kerguelen was found to be remarkably similar to that observed and measured in Toronto, around the same latitude, but at the other end of the earth.
Joseph Hooker was excited by the challenges of Kerguelen Island for rather different reasons. Captain Cook’s expedition had identified only eighteen plant species, but Hooker found at least thirty in one day. Even when he couldn’t get out, he turned the constant buffeting of the gales to his advantage. ‘Could I but tell you the delight with which I spent the days when I was kept on board by foul winds . . . In spite of the rolling of the ship I have made drawings for you all,’ he wrote home. The great excitement was finding the wonder-vegetable Pringlea antiscorbutica, a cabbage that grew on Kerguelen Island and which had been identified by Captain Cook’s botanist, Mr Anderson, as a miracle food for sailors. With a horseradish-tasting root and leaves that resembled mustard and cress, it had such powerful anti-scorbutic properties that it had been served for 130 days on Cook’s expedition, during which time no sickness had been recorded. Ross’s expedition put the wonder-cabbage to use straight away, and to general approval. Cunningham was one of those who registered enjoyment. ‘Like[d] the taste of the wild cabbage much.’
On 24 May 1840, they celebrated the twenty-first birthday of Queen Victoria with the firing of a royal salute, servings of plum pudding, preserved meat and a double allowance of rum at night. The very next day they were forcibly reminded of just how far away they were from an English summer, as falling snow was whipped into a ferocious blizzard. As darkness fell, Cunningham wrote of ‘a complete hurricane’ blowing. ‘I never heard it blow so hard as it has done this night.’
Surgeon McCormick shared Hooker’s enthusiasm for Kerguelen Island, but more from a geological perspective. ‘This, and Spitzbergen in the opposite hemisphere constitute, I think, the most striking and picturesque lands I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit,’ he noted enthusiastically in his journal. And this despite the fact that ‘neither the Arctic nor Antarctic isles have tree or shrub . . . to enliven them’. What excited McCormick was not what was to be found now on the black basalt rocks of this lonely island, but what had been there thousands of years before. ‘Whole forests . . . of fossilized wood lie entombed here beneath vast lava streams,’ he marvelled, uncovering beneath the debris a fossilised tree trunk with a girth of 7 feet. He was exercised by the whole question of how to explain this phenomenon. Back in England, he had been fascinated to find corals and other forms of tropical life embedded in the limestone of north Devon. Now he was equally intrigued to discover forests of coniferous trees entombed on the now-treeless island of Kerguelen. ‘I have wondered how they could ever have existed there.’ It was another seventy years before Alfred Wegener made the audacious suggestion that the continents themselves might have moved over time, and another fifty years after that before the theory of plate tectonics was finally proven.
So far as the wildlife of the island was concerned, McCormick seems to have regarded it principally as a form of target practice. It’s impossible to turn a page of his extensive journals without marvelling, or perhaps despairing, at his appetite for admiring God’s creatures, then shooting them. On 15 May he identifies the chioni, or sheathbill, a ‘singular and beautiful bird . . . so fearless and confiding, [it] seems peculiar to the island to which its presence gives a charm and animation, especially to a lover of the feathered race like myself’. This is followed next day by the succinct entry, ‘I shot my first chioni.’ A week later, accompanying Captain Ross and an exploring party, he ‘shot two and a half brace of teal and tern and returned . . . at five p.m.’ The day after that, ‘I shot a gigantic petrel . . . and a young black-backed gull flying overhead.’ On the 30th, ‘I went on shore about noon, shot a black-backed gull from the dinghy, and a shag at the landing place.’ And he wasn’t finished for the day. On his way back to the ship, after calling on Captain Ross at the observatory, he ‘shot two chionis, two gigantic petrel, two shags, and a teal flying round the point’.
McCormick liked a challenge, but in the course of one onshore expedition his adventurous spirit nearly lost him his life. Having 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
