was worse than anyone could have expected. Had it not been for their close contact with the local Inuit, and the adoption of a diet that was rich in oil and fats, they would surely have perished. Indeed, it was to be nearly two years before the Rosses and their companions, ‘dressed in the rags of wild beasts . . . and starved to the very bones’, were miraculously rescued by a whaling ship. This turned out to be the Isabella from Hull, the ship that John Ross had commanded fifteen years earlier. The captain of the Isabella could scarcely believe what he saw. He had assumed that uncle and nephew had both been dead for two years. So many had despaired of ever seeing them again that there was national astonishment when they sailed into Stromness in the Orkney Islands on 12 October 1833. When they arrived in London a week later, their reception was nothing less than triumphal. Their remarkable fortitude in surviving four years in the ice, their scientific achievements and their skills as explorers were all praised and celebrated. This near-disaster, far from deterring future expeditions, ensured that the Arctic would remain a potent target for the Admiralty’s ambitions and, years later, would profoundly change the course of many lives.
John Ross, now rehabilitated, was awarded a knighthood. His moment of triumph was, however, marred by an unpleasant falling-out with his nephew over who should receive credit for the discovery of the North Magnetic Pole. James claimed sole recognition, for pinpointing its position. His uncle insisted that if he had known his nephew was intending to go for the Pole, he would have accompanied him. To official eyes, it was James who was the coming man. Alongside his prickly and impulsive uncle, he appeared dependable and decisive – a safe pair of hands. At the end of 1833 he was promoted to post captain and given the task of conducting the first-ever survey into the terrestrial magnetism of the British Isles.
He had barely begun the work when word came of twelve whaling ships and 600 men trapped in the ice in the Davis Strait, between Greenland and Baffin Island. The Admiralty agreed to a rescue mission and, predictably, turned to James Clark Ross to lead it. He chose a ship called Cove, built in Whitby, and picked Francis Crozier as his First Lieutenant.
As Ross and Crozier made their way north from Hull to Stromness and into the North Atlantic, the Admiralty looked around for suitable back-up vessels, should extra effort be required. Of the two bomb ships that had been converted for Arctic travel on Parry’s expeditions, one, HMS Fury, had been dashed against the rocks on Somerset Island, and the other, Hecla, had been sold a few years earlier. That left HMS Terror, one of the Vesuvius Class, built in 1813, with plenty of active service behind her; and the as-yet-untried and untested Erebus. On 1 February 1836 a skeleton crew was despatched to Portsmouth to dust Erebus down and haul her round to Chatham to await the call. Cove, meanwhile, ran into ferociously bad weather, one gale battering her so severely that it was generally reckoned it was only James Ross’s cool, calm captaincy that saved the ship from going under. After returning to Stromness for repairs, Ross, Crozier and the Cove set out again for the Davis Strait. By the time they reached Greenland they learned that all but one of the whalers had been freed from the ice.
Despite this, the rescue efforts were seen as heroic. Francis Crozier was promoted to commander (confusingly, the rank below captain) and James Ross was offered a knighthood. Much to the dismay of his many supporters, he turned it down, apparently because he felt the title of Sir James Ross would mean that he might be mistaken for his pugnacious and recently ennobled uncle.
‘The handsomest man in the navy’ – according to Jane Griffin, the future wife of John Franklin – was, however, rather less successful in his private life. In between his many journeys, Ross had met and fallen in love with Anne Coulman, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a successful Yorkshire landowner. Ross had done the decent thing and written to her father, expressing his feelings for Anne and hoping that he might visit her at the family home. Coulman had written back indignantly, firmly shutting the door on the liaison and expressing his shock that Ross should harbour such feelings ‘for a mere schoolgirl’. His opposition was multi-pronged. ‘Your age [Ross was thirty-four] compared with my daughter’s, your profession and the very uncertain and hazardous views you have before you, all forbid our giving any countenance to the connection.’
Anne, however, was as much in love with James as he was with her. For the next few years they continued to meet secretly. Coulman’s stubborn opposition to their relationship drove Ross to write to Anne in angry frustration: ‘I could not have believed it possible that worldly emotions could have had so powerful an influence as to destroy the most endearing affections of the heart, and cause a father to treat his child with such unfeeling hardness and severity.’ Fortunately, one of James Ross’s great qualities was his determination. Once he had set his mind on something, he was not easily deflected. He continued to keep in contact with Anne, and she with him. Their perseverance was eventually rewarded.
HMS Terror was soon in action on another mission, leaving the Medway in June 1836 as the flagship of George Back’s latest ambitious expedition to extend his survey of the north-west Arctic. By September she was beset in the moving ice and was severely knocked about throughout the winter. She eventually broke free of the ice-pack and, still encased in a floe, drifted into the Hudson Strait. With her hull damaged and secured with a chain, Terror just about made it to the Irish coast, where she unceremoniously ran aground.
Before disaster struck, George Back had some kind words for Terror that could have been applied to all the bomb ships: ‘Deep and lumbered as she was, and though at every plunge the bowsprit dipped into the water, she yet pitched so easily as scarcely to strain a rope-yarn.’ His description of her in fine weather made the frog sound like a prince: ‘The royals and all the studding-sails were for the first time set, and the gallant ship in the full pride of her expanded plumage floated majestically through the rippling water.’
Erebus had no such chance to impress. Though she had come tantalisingly close to seeing some action, in the end she had merely exchanged one dockyard for another. De-rigged at Chatham and back In Ordinary again, she was becoming the ‘nearly ship’ of the British Navy.
Throughout the early nineteenth century, the Antarctic remained terra incognita. James Weddell’s 1822–4 voyage in search of the South Pole – depicted here in his 1825 memoir – penetrated further south than any previous ship, but failed to sight land.
CHAPTER 3
MAGNETIC SOUTH
When the recently formed British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Newcastle in the summer of 1838, terrestrial magnetism was high on the agenda. Now, it was felt, was the time to seize the moment – to claim the prize. Once the earth’s magnetic field was understood and codified, compasses and chronometers could be set with absolute precision, and navigation would no longer be an erratic process dependent on clear skies and guesswork. The result would be a nineteenth-century equivalent of GPS.
One of those pushing hardest for such research was Edward Sabine, a Royal Artillery officer who had sailed with Ross and Parry to the Arctic. For the last ten years, as Scientific Advisor to the Admiralty, he had argued vigorously that Britain should use her naval superiority to gather valuable information on the earth’s magnetic field. But he also agreed with the influential Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian nobleman who had made the first studies in geomagnetism on a celebrated voyage to South America in 1802, that only if countries worked together could the world be reduced to a set of clear, empirical, scientific principles.
The theory that linked geomagnetism and navigation had already been developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss, an astronomer at Göttingen University. To make progress towards putting these ideas into practice, Sabine and
