Courier went into wondrous detail about the state-of-the-art instruments on board the two ships, not least the walking sticks hollowed out so as to carry nets for catching insects. ‘The ferrule at the bottom is removed, and the nets are drawn forth ready for instant use,’ it marvelled.
Now it had all come true. The expedition was here.
Erebus moored up at five in the afternoon of Monday 17 August. Terror was already safely anchored, and Captain Crozier and the officers came aboard to welcome their sister ship, and to bring letters from home that had been awaiting their arrival. Not one to waste a moment, Surgeon McCormick took some of his fellow officers out to celebrate their arrival by going ashore for the last night of a play called Rory O’More at the Theatre Royal. Rory O’More was an Irish Catholic hero, a persistent rebel against the English, who put a price of £1,000 on his head. His head was duly delivered and displayed at Dublin Castle to deter other rebels.
For Joseph Hooker, landfall had brought little cause for celebration. A letter from his father, edged in black, informed him of the death of his elder brother from yellow fever, whilst on missionary work in the West Indies.
Few people could have been happier to see the two embattled vessels safely moored in the Derwent estuary than the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Sir John Franklin was overjoyed at being reunited with his friend and fellow explorer, James Clark Ross. They made a contrasting pair. Franklin, fourteen years older, was short, at 5 feet 6 inches, and famously affable, whereas Ross was tall and dashing and took himself rather seriously. In a movie he could have been played by Errol Flynn, himself a Tasmanian.
‘In 1836,’ writes his biographer, Andrew Lambert, ‘Franklin was fifty, famous and fat.’ And he was in Van Diemen’s Land because there had been nothing better on offer. Advancement in the Royal Navy followed a strict rota system, which ensured that senior positions only became available after those who held them died. Fame and success could not leapfrog anyone into promotion. So Captain Franklin had looked around for other positions concomitant with his talents, his experience and his evangelical sense of mission.
Having been offered, and turned down, the governorship of Antigua, he accepted the more lucrative position of Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, largely because he felt it his duty to put his talents, achievements and wide experience in the service of the great new colonial initiative, and because his forceful second wife, Jane – a vigorous, sociable woman, with considerable networking skills – felt it to be a very useful rung on the social and political ladder, which she was determined to help him climb.
But things had not gone according to plan. Sir John’s request that the flow of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land should be stemmed, if there was to be any chance of achieving some improvement in the lot of the free islanders, was ignored by the Colonial Office, whose response was to increase the numbers. When New South Wales was granted self-government, its share of the transported convicts was diverted southwards. In 1842 alone, 5,663 convicts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land.
To make matters worse, Sir John was no politician, and although popular with most of the islanders, found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to please the Colonial Office by saving money, and the colonists by spending it. In theory, much of the political burden should have been carried by John Montagu, a very capable, shrewd and ambitious public servant who had served in Van Diemen’s Land for some years, but that role was increasingly usurped by Jane, who, with the advantage of having her husband’s ear, proceeded to implement what she thought was right for the colony. This included diverting government funds to her own pet projects, such as a college for boys to train in the Christian faith; convict education; and various art projects. Her interference made a bitter enemy of Montagu and his supporters, who described her as a ‘man in petticoats’. As the geographer Frank Debenham says, it must have been a ‘great strain’ for Sir John and Lady Franklin ‘to govern a community of which one part was tasting the freedom and independence characteristic of a pioneer settlement and the other part was bound and shackled by a penal system of extreme severity’. But making an adversary of John Montagu was a mistake that was to have profound consequences for both Jane and her husband.
Jane Franklin found Hobart short of men of consequence. Sir John was simply missing his own kind. As a letter from Jane to her father makes abundantly clear, the Franklins could hardly wait to throw open the door of Government House for the glamorous Captain Ross and his intrepid officers: ‘The arrival of Captains Ross and Crozier added much to Sir John’s happiness . . . ,’ she wrote. ‘They all feel towards one another as friends and brothers and it is the remark of people here that Sir John appears to them in quite a new light, so bustling and frisky and merry with his new companions.’ Lady Franklin was taken aboard Erebus and couldn’t help noticing that Captain Ross had Negelin’s portrait of her husband hanging in his cabin (it’s one of the best: Franklin is in uniform, smiling jovially, with epaulettes like small waterfalls on each shoulder). Back on dry land, she showed indefatigable interest in all aspects of the expedition, inviting both senior and junior officers to attend the local Science Society, in which she was much involved and where she would quiz them about their work. Of course, given that ladies were present, certain proprieties had to be observed: on one occasion she noted that when ‘some drawings and descriptions of the position of the young in the pouch of some marsupial animals’ were shown, it was necessary that ‘the gentlemen withdrew to the library’ to inspect them.
Not that the ladies of Hobart were exactly prudish. The contemporary Tasmanian historian Alison Alexander describes how the local rumour mill sought to account for the childlessness of their governor and his wife, leading to some forthright gossip during a meal at which Jane and John Franklin were clearly not present. ‘The ladies when they retired . . . were wondering why Sir John had no family. “Dear me,” said one of them . . . “don’t you know! I always heard his members got frostbitten when he went to the North pole”.’
Captain Ross, though top of many guest lists, was not one to fritter time away, and made it clear that his most urgent priority was to get an observatory up and running. The Franklins, keen to oblige, had anticipated this and had already assembled stores and materials, from plans sent out from England. The next morning Ross and Franklin selected a suitable spot. A small quarry-working near Government House had revealed a deep bed of sandstone rock, which Ross judged to be the perfect base for the observatory, as sandstone has no magnetic properties that might interfere with the readings. That very afternoon a party of 200 convicts was set to work to dig the foundations.
Erebus and Terror, meanwhile, were moved upriver to a small, quiet cove away from the main bustle of the harbour and conveniently close to the grounds of Government House. It was later given the name Ross Cove, and it hasn’t changed much.
I’m there in 2017. It’s June, a couple of months before Erebus and Terror would have been in port, and I’m spending several days in Hobart, staying at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, one of a row of low and harmonious nineteenth-century buildings beside the harbour, with stone-dressed walls and low-pitched red roofs. Set back from the water, the façades look attractive in scale and colour, almost Venetian in the low morning sunlight. The remains of chunky painted lettering on the wall read: ‘H Jones and Co Pty Ltd. IXL Jams’. This was once the factory for one of Hobart’s most successful export businesses. The ‘IXL’ trademark was a play on founder Henry Jones’s motto, ‘I excel at everything.’
And the business lived up to the motto. Tinned fruits from Tasmania were sent all over the world, exuberantly described and brightly labelled: Choice Cling Peaches, Sliced in Heavy Syrup; Boomerang Brand, Tasmanian Fancy Apples. It was Britain joining the European Union and abandoning Commonwealth trade preferences that did for H. Jones, and the company no longer exists.
To get to Ross Cove, I walk a half-mile or so by the side of the busy Tasman Highway that links Hobart with the airport. I have to stop and get my camera out to take a shot of some
