the globe, which would report simultaneously. James Clark Ross had discovered the North Magnetic Pole and established its variation from true north. Now, the logical next step was to turn attention to those parts of the earth that remained largely unexplored, in particular the remote southern hemisphere.
Up until now, Antarctic exploration had never been taken very seriously. Much of what was known about the southern lands came from Captain Cook, who in the 1770s had twice crossed the Antarctic Circle – and he had not been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. It was a realm, he wrote, of ‘thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous’. For the most part, the region had been left to individual whalers and seal-hunters.
Nevertheless, such descriptions as came back fed a growing popular fascination. For the Romantics, the Antarctic represented the mystery of the unknown and the untamed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, for example, which was published in 1798, depicts a cursed ship drifting helplessly into the Southern Ocean:
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
In Coleridge’s poem the voyage ends in abject disaster. The hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), finds the Southern Ocean a place of all kinds of danger and depravity, from shipwreck to cannibalism. A place of infernal cold and darkness. A place where souls in torment are driven to destruction. The sort of place the Greeks had a word for: Erebus.
As artists and poets were busy frightening themselves and the public, the scientists – as scientists do – were going in the other direction, the direction of learning and logic, of exploration and explication. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the existence or non-existence of a Southern Continent was another mystery to unravel. Now the demands of science and a newly aroused sense of human potential were coming together to begin the unravelling.
There were other motives, too. The eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel pressed the case for the practicalities of a southern expedition at a meeting in Birmingham, laying on something more than mere science. ‘Great physical theories,’ he argued, ‘with their trains of practical consequences, are pre-eminently national objects, whether for glory or utility.’ With this chauvinistic nudge, Herschel’s committee produced a memorial of resolution, which was presented to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
Over the winter the arguments went one way and the other, but on 11 March 1839, Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, finally informed Herschel that permission had been granted for an Antarctic expedition. It was to be a prestigious enterprise. It therefore demanded a leader of the first rank. Fortunately, among those most pre-eminently qualified to lead it were two notable polar explorers: James Clark Ross and John Franklin. One was the man who had turned down a knighthood. The other was The Man Who Ate His Boots.
Ross’s recent career had been covered in glory. Franklin’s, too, had been successful, if a little more muted. In 1825, three years after his first Arctic voyage, he had launched a second overland expedition. During the winter months he had absorbed himself in painstakingly thorough scientific observations. When conditions improved, he had led his men on an exploration of 400 miles of unsurveyed coastline, west of the Mackenzie River. And at the end of the season, having learned from previous experience, Franklin had decided not to risk his men by pushing further, but had returned to London.
Knighted in 1829, and with his reputation as a navigator and expedition leader much enhanced, Franklin was then commissioned in August 1830 to take charge of HMS Rainbow, a 28-gun, 500-ton sloop, with orders to proceed to the Mediterranean. What followed was a safe, solid and successful tour of duty in many of the seas from which Erebus had recently returned. Rainbow had a 175-strong crew and was a much bigger, more impressive ship than any he had commanded before. Franklin, the most affable and sociable of men, was seen as an accessible and humane captain. Life on board was so congenial that the ship acquired nicknames like ‘Franklin’s Paradise’ and ‘The Celestial Rainbow’.
Franklin’s social skills also helped nurture Britain’s relationship with the newly independent Greek state and ease local factional disputes, at a time when the Russians, previously an ally of Britain and France, were supporting an unpopular provisional government, and the allies were looking to install their own man as the new king of the country. After a prolonged search the British and French head-hunted an eighteen-year-old Bavarian prince called Otto, the son of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and by all accounts a bit of a drip. He did, however, award Franklin the Order of the Redeemer, for his help.
Franklin enjoyed everything he saw of Ancient Greece during his tour of duty, but was profoundly unimpressed by the new Greece, which he regarded as corrupt and leaderless. Having done his best to adjudicate on various local disputes, he must have been relieved to get back home to Portsmouth at the end of 1833, just in time for Christmas. Virtue had its reward, though: in appreciation of his efforts, the new king, William IV, decorated him with Knight Commander of the Guelphic Order of Hanover.
Franklin’s private life during these years had been marked by tragedy. In 1823 he had married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, and they had had a daughter (also called Eleanor), but just five days after he sailed on his second Arctic expedition, his wife had died from tuberculosis. By all accounts a remarkable, much-admired woman, she had known that she wouldn’t survive, but had insisted that her husband should press ahead with his plans. Four years later, on 4 November 1828, he had married again. Jane Griffin, the daughter of a lawyer, was quick, clever and energetic, and had been a close friend of Eleanor’s. Franklin’s biographer, Andrew Lambert, speculating as to what she saw in the portly explorer, concluded: ‘a romantic hero, a cultural icon, and it was perhaps this image that she married.’ And it was protecting and elevating his image that was to preoccupy the rest of Jane’s life.
Back from the Mediterranean, Franklin was respected, happy in his new marriage – but at a loose end. There was no new posting to go to, and for the next three years he was effectively unemployed. It must have been a deeply frustrating time for him. Then, in 1836, a new opportunity arose, in the form of the lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land. It was, admittedly, something of a poisoned chalice. The previous governor, George Arthur, had brought in social reforms that had upset many of the small community there, and left it unhappy and divided. But for Franklin and his ambitious wife, the offer must have come as something of a godsend. After several years of enforced idleness, here at last was a new opportunity for him to display his talents. He accepted with alacrity, and the couple set sail later that year, arriving in Hobart in January 1837.
What Franklin wasn’t to know was that just over a year later the Admiralty would be looking for an experienced polar explorer to lead an expedition to the Antarctic. Had he been aware, would he have accepted the post in Van Diemen’s Land? As it was, his absence from England at the critical moment effectively ruled him out as a candidate. The Admiralty had no hesitation in offering the job to James Clark Ross, whose Arctic experience and discovery of the North Magnetic Pole embodied the navigational and scientific qualifications they were after. And he was available.
***
Having secured Ross’s services, the Lords of the Admiralty looked around to find ships worthy of this ambitious venture. Bomb vessels had been the Royal Navy’s craft of choice for extreme exploration as long ago as 1773, when two bomb ships, Racehorse and Carcass (the name for an incendiary shell), had been converted for an expedition to the North Pole. They had reached the Barents Sea before being turned back by the ice. By now, there were only two bomb ships left as realistic candidates for Antarctic duty. One was HMS Terror,
