An Unsung Hero E-Book

Michael Smith

• Herausgeber: The Collins Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The story of the remarkable Tom Crean who ran away to sea aged 15 and played a memorable role in Antarctic exploration. He spent more time in the unexplored Antarctic than Scott or Shackleton, and outlived both. Among the last to see Scott alive, Crean was in the search party that found the frozen body. An unforgettable story of triumph over unparalleled hardship and deprivation.

Leseprobe

AN UNSUNG HEROTOM CREAN – ANTARCTIC SURVIVOR

Michael Smith

The Collins Press

Notes

Temperatures used in this book, unless otherwise stated, are in Fahrenheit, the measurement used at the time. In many cases approximate conversion to the now widely used Celsius scale has been added in parenthesis. (To convert F to C deduct 32, multiply by 5 and divide by 9.) But, as guidance, the following useful examples may be helpful to those unfamiliar with Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit Celsius98.4°36.9° (body temperature)32°0° (water freezes)0°–18°–10°–23°–20°–29°–30°–34½°–40°–40°–50°–45½°

In line with the measurements used at the time, many of the distances are measured as geographical or nautical miles, which is 1/60th of a degree of latitude, or equal to 2,026 yards (1.85 kilometres). Others are stated as statute miles, which are equal to 1,760 yards (1.6 km). One yard (3 ft) is 91 centimetres. Some approximate conversions are provided.

Weights are given in the avoirdupois scale and approximate conversions are given in kilogrammes. One pound (1lb) equals 0.453 kg and one ton is 2,240 lb (1,016 kg).

Money is stated in the contemporary values and conversion to modern equivalents is based on information supplied by the Bank of England. This gives an approximate indication of the sums of money required in December 2007 to purchase the same goods as in Crean’s time. Thus it would require £84 in 2007 to buy £1 of items in 1877, the year of Tom Crean’s birth.

Preface

The Dingle Peninsula, Kerry, is one of Ireland’s most beautiful spots, its rich mixture of rolling hills and rugged coastline jutting out into the Atlantic; nature at its best. Visitors today come from all over the world to admire the dramatic scenery.

About midway along the Peninsula, in a modest uncomplicated setting, sits the small village of Anascaul (Abhainn an Scáil). It is said that Ireland’s last wolf was killed in the overlooking hills. But visitors passing through the main street of Anascaul are alerted by one of the last buildings they glimpse as they travel west towards the better-known town of Dingle and the Atlantic breakers. This is a small pub with a highly unusual name: the South Pole Inn – situated alongside a quietly flowing river and a charming stone bridge, nowhere on earth seems farther from the South Pole.

But it is impossible to arrive or leave Anascaul without catching sight of the little building and wonder how a public house in a rural village surrounded by endless green fields on the Dingle Peninsula came to be called the ‘south Pole Inn’.

The answer, for those who linger, can be found in a small slate-grey plaque above the pub doorway. It reads:

Tom Crean Antarctic Explorer 1877–1938

The South Pole Inn was the home of Thomas Crean, a local man who rose from the obscurity of a typical farming community in Kerry to become one of the greatest characters in the history of polar exploration at the turn of the century – the Heroic Age of polar exploration.

Few men made a greater contribution to the annals of Antarctic exploration than Tom Crean and few were more highly respected by his celebrated fellow explorers than the unassuming Kerryman. However, for too many years, Crean’s contribution to the Heroic Age has been greatly underestimated, if not ignored.

The Heroic Age of polar exploration in Antarctica, which covers the first two decades of the twentieth century, produced some of history’s most astonishing stories and some remarkable characters. Even today, almost 100 years after the event, people are still captivated by the tales of Scott or Shackleton, particularly the heroism and tragedies, the bravery and fortitude and the outstanding human sagas of achievement and failure which seem barely credible in modern times.

However, it would be wholly wrong to assume that all the great deeds and achievements of the Heroic Age in Antarctica were the sole preserve of Scott and Shackleton. The expeditions of the age were made up by equally important figures, not always from the officer or scientific ranks, who were vital to the success of these enterprises. But their valuable contribution has so far been mostly overlooked or at best unceremoniously lumped together with the deeds of others. Lesser known, perhaps, but no less important and certainly no less outstanding. Such a man is Thomas Crean.

Crean was a prodigious traveller who sailed on three of the four momentous expeditions of Britain’s Heroic Age and at that time rightly won the highest possible recognition for his outstanding achievements. He was a colourful, popular character who was one of very few men to serve both Scott and Shackleton with equal distinction.

Crean was a simple, straightforward man with extraordinary depths of courage and self-belief who repeatedly performed the most incredible deeds in the world’s most inhospitable, physically and mentally demanding climate. He was a serial hero.

Crean travelled further than most of the explorers traditionally associated with the Heroic Age and few left their mark as indelibly as the Irishman did. Appropriately enough, his name is perpetuated forever on the Antarctic Continent where he achieved his fame. ‘Mount Crean’, which extends to a height of 8,360 ft (2,550 m), stands at about 77° 53′ S 159° 30′ E in Victoria Land, Antarctica. The near 4-mile (6-km) ‘Crean Glacier’ runs down to the head of Antarctic Bay – 37° 01′ W 54° 08′ S – on the island of South Georgia, where the Irishman was to perform so nobly.

Tom Crean is not the only one whose adventures have been overlooked by Polar historians. History has also been unkind to men like Edgar Evans, William Lashly and Frank Wild, colleagues and friends of Crean in the South. It was men like these who provided the backbone for the great expeditions which lifted the veil from the Antarctic Continent, often at a terrible price. While these men were effectively second-class citizens at a time when the British class system was so prevalent, the Heroic Age would be incomplete without their contribution.

To be fair, it has not been easy for historians to chronicle the tale of Tom Crean, a semi-literate man who, unlike so many explorers of the age, did not keep a diary or maintain a prolific flow of correspondence with friends and family. Only a small amount of Crean’s correspondence has survived and so, in order to piece together his life and times, we have to rely on the words and memories of his contemporaries. Fortunately, since he was a prominent figure of the Heroic Age, there are ample records of his exploits in the published and unpublished accounts of the three expeditions on which he excelled. It is no surprise, however, that much of the coverage so far has been inconsistent.

But with the combination of Crean’s own writings, the works of his contemporaries and the invaluable recollections of his surviving family, for the first time an authoritative and accurate account of the life of a remarkable man can be constructed.

His contemporaries had few doubts about his special qualities. Frank Debenham, who served alongside Crean on Scott’s fateful last expedition and later became the first director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, remembered the Irishman with special affection. He once wrote:

‘Tom Crean was in his way, unique; he was like something out of Kipling or Masefield, typical of his country and a credit to all his three expeditions. One has only to close one’s eyes for a moment to summon up his clean-cut features and his grin as he greeted one in the morning with: “Well fare ye, sorr”.’

Since those momentous days, Tom Crean had sadly become a somewhat neglected figure, an unsung and largely unknown figure whose outstanding stories and achievements remained a closed book to modern generations. But, more than most, he deserves to have his story told.

All generations are hungry for heroes and Tom Crean is a hero for any generation.

1 A farmer’s lad

Thomas Crean was born on 20 July 1877 at Gurtuchrane, a remote farming area a short distance to the west of the village of Anascaul on the Dingle Peninsula, in Ireland’s County Kerry. The area is, even today, a quiet unassuming mixture of houses and farms surrounded by rolling green hills.

The contrast with the hostile, frozen Antarctic Continent where Crean would carve a remarkable career could hardly be more stark. By odd coincidence, Crean would later share his birthday with Edmund Hillary, the first conqueror of Mount Everest, renowned Antarctic traveller and one of the great adventurers of the twentieth century.

The Dingle Peninsula is rich in tradition, its origins easily traced back to the earliest European civilisations. It became a centre of Early Christian activity and despite conquest by both the Anglo-Normans and English, the area survived centuries of political and religious repression and persecution. The people were tough, resolute survivors and it is little surprise that Kerry was one of the areas which fought hardest to preserve the Irish language. To this day, the Dingle Peninsula is a Fíor-Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking region.

By the late nineteenth century, it was in common use along the Peninsula and Crean’s parents were part of the last generation of Kerry people who spoke Irish as a first language. As a young man, Crean was brought up speaking both Irish and English.

He was a member of a typically large Irish rural family which, like so many of the time, struggled against grinding poverty and the persistent fear of crop failure and famine. The name Crean is fairly common in the Kerry region and is thought to be derived from Curran. In Irish his name is written as Tomás ó Croidheáin or Ó Cuirín.

His parents, Patrick Crean and Catherine Courtney, were farmers at Gurtuchrane who produced ten children during the 1860s and 1870s. Hardship was a way of life, with few if any luxuries and little prospect of any escape from the unrelenting battle to make ends meet and keep stomachs filled.

At the time of Crean’s birth, Ireland itself was still recovering from the devastating effects of the Great Famine three decades earlier when between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people perished – one in eight of the total population at the time – after the disastrous failure of the potato crop. It was to have a searing effect on Ireland’s soul, encouraging the mass emigration of perhaps two million people in the years immediately afterwards and greatly reinforcing the belief that Ireland should be master of its own affairs.

But by the end of the 1870s, famine once again threatened Ireland and inevitably reawakened in many fears of a repeat of the appalling horrors. The year of Crean’s birth, 1877, was miserably wet in Ireland, which set off an unfortunate chain of events that led to a deterioration in the potato crop in the following years. At the same time, the collapse of grain prices meant many farmers were caught in a catastrophic poverty trap and were unable to afford the often exorbitant rents imposed by the hated absentee landlords. For many farmers, especially in the west of Ireland, the terror of famine was now matched by the fear that they might be evicted from their land and homes. These people would have known precisely what another Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, meant 30 years later when he wrote that poverty was the greatest of evils and worst of crimes.

It was against this background of impending famine, dwindling income and a growing family, that Patrick and Catherine Crean struggled to provide a life for Tom and his five brothers and four sisters; an environment which inevitably helped shape and prepare the youngster for the hardships and privations which he would face during his lengthy spells in the Antarctic.

Tom was given a very basic education at the nearby Brackluin School, Anascaul – the local Catholic school – and like most youngsters of the age, probably left as quickly as possible. It was not uncommon for children to leave school at the age of twelve, although the majority stayed on until they were fourteen. Either way, the youngsters were given only a rudimentary education which provided them with little more than the ability to read and write. The need to help on the farm and bring in some meagre amounts of money to the family was overwhelming.

It is likely that events down the hill in the nearby village of Anascaul provided young Tom with his first taste for travel and adventure.

The village sits at the junction of a main road through the Dingle Peninsula and the Anascaul River, which flows down from the surrounding hills. It is a natural meeting place for travellers.

For centuries Anascaul had been the site of regular local fairs. In his book, The Dingle Peninsula, local author, Steve MacDonogh, said that for many centuries the Anascaul fairs were a ‘vital focus’ for the area. He recalled that the Anglo-Normans, who had established many commercial fairs across Ireland, settled around the Anascaul area in significant numbers. Tralee, one of Kerry’s main towns, is known to have been established by the Anglo-Normans in the thirteenth century. Nearby villages, Ballynahunt and Flemingstown, are also said to be associated with the early Anglo-Norman presence.

Young Tom Crean grew up in this poor, rural community and must have drawn some relief from these regular fairs which punctuated the otherwise dreary routine. Anascaul played host to fourteen separate fairs a year, attracting a rich variety of locals and outsiders. The biggest occasions were the twice-yearly horse fairs in May and October, one of the oldest events in Ireland’s long tradition of horse-trading and which attracted people from all corners of the land.

But the most regular event at Anascaul was the monthly fair, which cobbled together an unlikely mixture of commerce and trade and fun and entertainment. The entertainment, said MacDonogh, was not mere frills on a mainly commercial occasion but, in true Gaelic spirit, was essential to the proceedings. MacDonogh described a typical scene:

‘The wheel of fortune, stalls selling humbugs, women in their best dresses and hats, men whose clothes echoed time spent in foreign parts, the three-card trickster, ballad singers, fiddlers, match-makers, peddlers and beggars – all combined to make a colourful social gathering as well as an occasion for business.’1

It was in the pubs and on the street corners that stories were told and in typical loquacious Irish fashion events were relived and the imagination of a young farmer’s son was allowed to run wild. Against a harsh impoverished background of farm life, the tales of faraway places would have sounded all the more attractive to an inquisitive young man. The urge to travel must have been all too powerful.

Several of Tom’s brothers emigrated from Kerry around this period and MacDonogh also notes that for some time there had been a tradition of Anascaul’s sons moving away to serve in the British navy.

Tom’s elder brother Martin found work across the Atlantic on the burgeoning Canadian Pacific Railway. Michael went to sea and was lost with his ship. Cornelius, who was six years older than Tom, grew up to become a policeman in the Royal Irish Constabulary and was later murdered during ‘The Troubles’. Tom’s sister, Catherine, also married a policeman. Two other brothers, Hugh and Daniel, remained behind to maintain the family tradition on the land. When their father Patrick died, Hugh and Daniel split the family farm in two and remained at Gurtuchrane for the rest of their lives.

Growing up on the farm in the 1880s and 1890s was a huge challenge. It needed a strong sense of survival to co-exist in a home environment where the ten Crean children scrapped for supremacy and their parents’ attention. Patrick Crean struggled to make ends meet and had little time to provide anything approaching today’s level of parental guidance.

It was a severe upbringing which inevitably left the young Crean with a strong streak of independence. It was this independence which prompted the youngster to flee the family nest at the earliest opportunity.

It was customary at the time for the British navy to send its recruiting officers out to Irish villages to find new able-bodied men for the service. The navy was always on the lookout for fresh blood and the offer to swap the uncompromising life on the land for the apparent romance of the sea was a permanent feature of life in the area. Many young Irishmen were easily persuaded to sign up. At the time, the British navy boasted the world’s most powerful fleet and its prestige was second to none. To young men like Tom Crean, the opportunity to escape from the bleak hardship of daily life must have been irresistible. The alternative of maintaining the unrelenting struggle was easily dismissed, and it is no surprise that Tom Crean left home when he did.

The background to his departure is far from clear, although it appears that Tom had a major row with his father when he inadvertently allowed some cattle to stray into the potato field and devour the precious crop. In the heat of the moment, Tom swore he would run away to sea.

Crean, still a fresh-faced fifteen years old, set off for Minard Inlet, a few miles southwest from Anascaul where there was a Royal Navy station. Crean and another local lad called Kennedy approached the recruiting officer and, suitably impressed by his patter, blithely agreed to join Queen Victoria’s mighty Navy.

Although Crean was a fiercely independent young man, he was still unsure about the reception he might receive at home and did not immediately tell his parents about his new life. He chose not to inform them until after he signed the recruitment papers, which meant there was no chance of persuading him to stay on the farm. It was also an early indication of Crean’s self-confidence and determination. And, if the two youngsters were looking for extra courage, they probably found it in each other’s company.

But, after deciding to enlist, Crean had another problem. He was penniless and did not even possess a decent set of clothes to wear for the trip to a new life. He promptly borrowed a small sum of money from an unknown benefactor and persuaded someone else to lend him a suit. Tom Crean took off his well-worn working clothes in July 1893, squeezed into his borrowed suit and left the farm, never to return.

As he strode off, the young man had precious few possessions to carry with him as a reminder of his home and upbringing. But Crean did remember to put around his neck a scapular, a small symbol of his Catholic faith and a token souvenir of his roots. The scapular, which is two pieces of cloth about two and a half by two inches attached to a leather neck cord, contains a special prayer that offers particular spiritual relief to the wearer. As he set off into the unknown for the first time, Crean will have drawn special comfort from its fundamental tenet – that the wearer of the scapular will not suffer eternal fire. It was to remain around his neck for the rest of his life.

He travelled down to Queenstown (today called Cobh), near Cork on Ireland’s southern coast with James Ashe, another Irish seaman from the merchant navy. Ashe was a close relative of Thomas Ashe from nearby Kinard, who was to become a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and achieve martyrdom in 1917 by dying on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison at the height of the war with the British.

Tom Crean was formally enlisted in the Royal Navy on 10 July 1893, just ten days before his sixteenth birthday.2 Officially the lowest enlistment age was sixteen and the assumption is that the fifteen-year-old lad either forged his papers or lied about his age before signing up.

At this formative stage in his life, young Tom was not the tall, imposing figure well known on the polar landscape in later life. According to Ministry of Defence records of the time, the farmer’s son, who had a mop of brown hair, stood only 5 ft 7¾ inches when he signed on the dotted line in July 1893 as Boy 2nd Class, service No 174699.3

His first appointment was to the boys’ training ship, HMS Impregnable at Devonport, Plymouth in the southwest of England, where he served his initial naval apprenticeship.4

Life in the navy was tough, particularly for a young man away from home for the first time in his life. Discipline was strict and the regime harsh and unsympathetic. His initiation into naval life was perhaps the first test of the strength of character which was to become a hallmark of his adventurous life.

He survived his first examination and promotion of sorts came fairly quickly for the young man. Within a year Crean had taken his first step upwards and was promoted to Boy 1st Class. A little later on 28 November 1894 the Boy 1st class was transferred to HMS Devastation, a coastguard vessel based at Devonport.5 Crean, for the first time, was at sea.

Little is known about Crean’s early career in the Navy. It was, however, punctuated with advancement and demotion and it may not have been an altogether happy time for the youngster as he came to terms with the new life a long way from home. Some reports suggest that at one stage Crean became so disenchanted with the naval routine that he tried to run away. One writer claimed that Crean was so dismayed by the poor food and rough accommodation on board naval ships of the time that he threatened to abscond.6

The regime in the late Victorian Navy of the time was undoubtedly arduous and unforgiving. While the Royal Navy was traditionally the right arm of the British Empire, by the late Victorian era it had become smugly complacent, inefficient and out of date. It had more in common with Nelson and still lent heavily on rigid discipline and blind obedience. It required sweeping reforms by the feared Admiral Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher to eventually modernise the navy in time for the First World War in 1914.

But there is a strange inconsistency about a young man, fresh from a poor, undernourished rural community in the Kerry hills complaining about the quality of the food and bedding. It may be that Crean, like others at the time, had other grievances. Or it may well have been a simple case of a young man a long way from his roots who was homesick. In any event, he drew some comfort from the other young Irish sailors around him and decided that he, too, would stick it out.

On his eighteenth birthday in 1895, after exactly two years service, Crean was promoted to the rank of ‘ordinary seaman’ while serving on HMS Royal Arthur, a flag-ship in the Pacific Fleet. A little less than a year later, he advanced to become Able Seaman Crean on HMS Wild Swan, a small 170-ft versatile utility vessel which also operated in Pacific waters.

By 1898, Crean was apparently eager to gain new skills and was appointed to the gunnery training ship, HMS Cambridge, at Devonport. Six months later, shortly before Christmas 1898, he moved across to the torpedo school ship of HMS Defiance, also at Devonport. At the major naval port of Chatham, he advanced a little further by securing qualifications for various gun and torpedo duties.7

Crean was also developing a reputation for reliability and his career record is impressive. His conduct was officially described by the naval hierarchy as ‘very good’ throughout his early years in the service, despite occasional brushes with authority.

It was around this time – between 1899 and 1900 – that Crean began to rise up and down the slippery pole of naval ranking and he secured the only recorded blemish to his otherwise impressive career record. It may have reflected his discontent, or it may be that after six years ‘below decks’ Crean lacked any sense of purpose and felt he was going nowhere in this Englishman’s navy. Or, more simply, it may have been that, like countless sailors before and since, Crean was a victim of excessive drinking, the traditional curse of the ordinary seaman. Drinking was a regular feature of a sailor’s routine and shore leave was normally peppered with heavy and excessive bouts which easily got out of hand with predictable results. Crean liked a drink and as a gregarious, outgoing character would have been at his ease in the company of other heavy-drinking sailors.

At the end of September 1899, he was promoted to Petty Officer 2nd Class at the Devonport yard while assigned to Vivid. There followed a brief period on board HMS Northampton, the boy’s training school before Crean made the move which would change his life.

The momentous move came on 15 February 1900, when PO 2nd Class Crean was assigned to the oddly-named special torpedo vessel, HMS Ringarooma, in Australian waters.8 It was a move which introduced the strapping 22-year-old to a new and very different type of challenge – the rigours of polar exploration with the likes of Scott, Shackleton, Wild, Evans and Lashly.

2 A chance meeting

The year 1901 marked the end of the long Victorian era for Britain. Queen Victoria, who had presided over the country’s most expansive age, died on 22 January after more than 63 years on the throne. It was also the year when Britain, under the leadership of Robert Falcon Scott, would launch the first major attempt to conquer the Earth’s last unexplored continent – Antarctica.

At the time only a handful of people had visited Antarctica, which is the fifth largest continent with a diameter of 2,800 miles and an area of 5,400,000 square miles. It represents about ten per cent of the world’s land mass and is larger than either America or Europe.

Antarctica is an island continent, totally isolated from the rest of the world’s land masses and separated from civilisation by the violent Southern Ocean. It is 600 miles to South America and over 1,500 miles to Australia. Over 99 per cent of the land mass is permanently covered in ice and about 90 per cent of the world’s fresh water is locked up in the icecaps. Wind speeds have been recorded at close to 200 mph (320 kph) and Antarctica has yielded the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, –129.3 °F (–89.6 °C).

There are no Eskimos from which to learn the art of survival in Earth’s coldest and most inhospitable environment and there are few indigenous inhabitants, though it is visited by varieties of penguins, seals and whales. There are very few other living things beyond some algae, lichens and mosses, so all food and equipment has to be transported to the continent and carried along on any journey. Antarctica is also a land of extremes. Despite the ice sheet covering, it rarely snows and for much of the year the continent is either plunged into total darkness for 24 hours a day or bathed in full sunlight.

People down the ages had believed in the existence of Antarctica, or the Southern Continent, for perhaps 2,000 years before its presence was finally established. Long before its discovery, the ‘unknown southern land’ – Terra Australis Incognita – had entered mythology. Greek philosophers claimed that a giant land mass was needed to ‘balance’ the weight of the lands known to exist at the top of the earth. Since the Northern Hemisphere rested beneath Arktos (the Bear), the general belief was that the southern land had to be the opposite – Antarktikos.

Great sailors like Magellan and Drake flirted with the unknown southern land in the sixteenth century and two intrepid French explorers – Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier and Yves Joseph de Kerguelen-Tremarec – discovered some neighbouring sub-Antarctic islands in the eighteenth century. But it was Captain James Cook, arguably the greatest explorer of all time, who first crossed the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773, in his vessels, Resolution and Adventure. Cook never actually saw Antarctica – he sailed to within 75 miles of land – and was doubtful about the value of any exploration in such a frigid and hostile environment.

The earliest people to see Antarctica travelled on the expedition led by the Russian, Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, which on 27 January 1820 recorded the first known sighting. But Bellingshausen was unsure about his sighting and it was not until January 1831, that sealing captain John Biscoe circumnavigated the continent.

Sir James Clark Ross penetrated the pack ice which surrounds the continent for the first time in 1841 and sailed alongside the frozen land mass in his ships, Erebus and Terror. He gave the names of his two ships to two of Antarctica’s most prominent mountains which stand guard over the entrance to the area that was to be frequented by several British expeditions around Ross Island in the Ross Sea.

An international expedition, led by the Belgian, Adrian de Gerlache, took the ship Belgica deep into southern waters between 1897 and 1899. His ship became stuck fast in the ice in the Bellingshausen Sea off the Antarctica Peninsula, which extends like an outstretched finger from the continent up towards the tip of South America.

Reluctantly and with great trepidation, de Gerlache and his crew were the first humans to spend the winter in the Antarctic, where the sun vanishes for four months. The hardship, bitter cold and endless gloomy months of total winter darkness took a heavy toll on the crew. One man died and two others were declared ‘insane’.

The survivors included a 25-year-old Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, and a 33-year-old American, Frederick Cook. Amundsen, the finest polar explorer of all time, would later complete the first ever navigation of the North West Passage across the frozen top of the North American Continent, and he would reach the South Pole a month before his ill-fated British rival, Captain Scott. Cook, a flawed but undeniably gifted character, would falsely claim until his dying day that he had beaten Robert Peary to become the first man to reach the North Pole.

The first landing on the Antarctic Continent outside the Antarctic Peninsula is thought to have taken place on 24 January 1895 when an eight-man party from the whaler, Antarctic, landed at Cape Adare. The identity of the first person to make the landfall has never been accurately established because of a series of disputes. But the naturalist, Carsten Borchgrevink, claimed to have leaped out of the rowing boat ahead of others to gain the honour of being first to place his feet on the Continent. Borchgrevink later went on to secure the significant distinction of leading the first expedition to deliberately overwinter in Antarctica.

Borchgrevink, a Norwegian, landed near the entrance of Robertson Bay at Cape Adare on the Adare Peninsula in 1899 and erected two small prefabricated huts where his ten-man party was the first to spend winter on the Antarctic Continent. One hut, the party’s living quarters, still stands today. However, Borchgrevink’s exploratory deeds were modest and confined to a short trip onto the Ross Ice Shelf, or the Great Ice Barrier.

The first major attempt to explore Antarctica was conceived some years earlier by a remarkable English naval figure, Sir Clements Markham, who had made a brief trip to the Arctic decades before. Markham, an ex-public-school boy who entered the Navy at thirteen years of age, was on board the Assistance in 1850–51 during one of the many fruitless searches for Sir John Franklin’s party, which had tragically disappeared in search of the North West Passage in 1845 with the loss of all 129 lives.

It was an episode which shaped Markham’s colourful life and had profound consequences for Britain’s role in polar exploits, first in the Arctic and later in the exploration of the Antarctic Continent. Britain’s memorable part in the ‘Heroic Age of polar exploration’ would have been entirely different without the driving influence of the formidable bewhiskered Victorian patriarch, Markham.

Markham, a brusque and stubborn man who has been likened to a Victorian Winston Churchill, adopted polar exploration as a personal quest which bordered on obsession. There was a fanatical zeal about the way he manoeuvred, cajoled and expertly used his influence to ensure that Britain should undertake new expeditions south at a time when there was little support elsewhere for the idea. Moreover, Markham ensured that future exploration to the South would be a naval affair, when Britain could once again demonstrate its manhood and superiority to a slightly disbelieving world.

The Antarctic: the fifth largest continent was largely unexplored at the start of the twentieth century.

In particular, he was determined that the expedition would use traditional British methods of travelling, which meant man-hauling sledges across the ice, rather than the more suitable and modern use of dogs and skis. Dogs were quicker, hard working and at worst, could be eaten by the other dogs or the explorers themselves to prolong the journey or ensure safe return.

Markham, however, was typically sentimental towards dogs and implacably opposed to using them as beasts of burden at a time when others – notably the Norwegians – used the animals to great effect. There is little doubt that he greatly influenced Scott’s lukewarm attitude to animals on both his journeys to the South, with the result that British explorers were destined to suffer the dreadful ordeal of man-hauling their food and equipment across the snow. The beasts of burden were the explorers themselves.

Markham, who loved intrigue, successfully engineered himself into the position as unelected leader of the venture but it took almost two decades to bring the first British expedition to Antarctica into fruition. In his celebrated Personal Narrative of events leading up to the Discovery expedition, he recalled:

‘In 1885 I turned my attention to Antarctic exploration at which I had to work for sixteen years before success was achieved.’1

It was the first tentative step towards the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04. It was also the opening chapter of Britain’s participation in the Heroic Age of polar exploration. Tom Crean was eight years of age at the time and Scott, Markham’s protégé, was sixteen.

Markham plotted and planned his Antarctic adventure with great determination, especially when it came to selecting his own preferred choice as leader of the first expedition. Although probably not his first choice, he had alighted on a young naval officer who was destined to carry his banner into the South – Robert Falcon Scott, or as he has become known, ‘scott of the Antarctic’.

Markham had been ‘talent spotting’ in the Navy for some years and finally selected Scott towards the end of the century, helped by a chance meeting near Buckingham Palace in June 1899. Writing in his famous book, The Voyage of the Discovery, Scott remembered:

‘Early in June I was spending my short leave in London and chancing one day to walk down Buckingham Palace Road, I espied Sir Clements on the opposite pavement, and naturally crossed, and as naturally turned and accompanied him to his house. That afternoon for the first time I learned that there was such a thing as a prospective Antarctic expedition.’2

Two days later Scott formally applied for the post as commander of the expedition, though he must have been given some indication from Markham that at the very least he was likely to travel with the expedition. In any event, Scott was not officially appointed until a year later on 30 June 1900 at the age of 32. It was the beginning of the Scott legend.

Markham, meanwhile, was busily trying to arrange the sizeable sum of £90,000 (equivalent to £8,000,000 at today’s purchasing prices) to pay for the expedition – the largest amount ever raised in Britain for a polar journey. This was a prolonged and frustrating exercise and only after lengthy debate and political manoeuvring was the cash found. Markham’s dream had become a reality.

The British National Antarctic Expedition was under way, complete with a new, purpose-built ship, the 172-ft long Discovery which boasted a steel-plated bow and 26-inch thick sides to combat the ice. It was to be a mixture of exploration and scientific research, although this, too, caused considerable friction between the sponsors, the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society. Although there was some dispute over the expedition’s priorities, Markham’s will prevailed. Markham was unequivocal and insisted that the great object of the expedition was the ‘exploration of the interior of Antarctic land’.

Crucially, it was Markham who decided that Scott should explore the Ross Sea area which had been discovered 60 years earlier by Sir James Clark Ross and was to become forever associated with Britain’s polar exploration exploits during the Heroic Age.

Markham schemed and plotted at every turn, imposing his influence right down to the smallest details of the expedition. He even designed individual 3-ft long, swallow-tailed flags or pennants which would be carried by the sledging parties on their journeys across the ice into the unknown.

With most squabbles now settled, Discovery left London on 31 July 1901 for the short trip to the Isle of Wight to participate on the fringe of Cowes Week and receive a royal farewell. The country was still coming to terms with the loss of Queen Victoria after her long reign and the new, but uncrowned monarch, Edward VII and his wife Queen Alexandra, came on board Discovery on 5 August to bid the expedition a royal farewell. Scott was impressed and recalled:

‘This visit was quite informal, but will be ever memorable from the kindly, gracious interest shown in the minutest details of our equipment, and the frank expression of good wishes for our plans and welfare. But although we longed to get away from our country as quietly as possible, we could not but feel gratified that His Majesty should have shown such personal sympathy with our enterprise …’3

Discovery, the fulfilment of Markham’s obsessive ambition and the opening chapters of both Britain’s Heroic Age and the Scott legend, sailed slowly away from the Isle of Wight at noon on 6 August 1901. She would not return home for almost three years.

On the other side of the world, Tom Crean was in the middle of a period of almost two years on board HMS Ringarooma, the P-class special torpedo vessel of 6,400 tons which formed part of the Royal Navy’s Australia–New Zealand squadron. Ringarooma, with the unlikely sounding name, was to be the unexpected launching pad for his remarkable Antarctic career.

The odd name for a ship in the Royal Navy arose from a special arrangement struck between Britain and Australia in the late Victorian age. Under the Imperial Defence Act of 1887, the Australians agreed to pay for the building of five warships for the Navy on condition that they were deployed in the seas around Australia and New Zealand. Ringarooma, built in 1890, was crewed by Royal Navy personnel, but the Australians were given the right to choose their own names for all five ships.

Crean had joined Ringarooma on 15 February 1900 but before long had suffered an unfortunate brush with naval authority. On 18 December he was summarily demoted from PO to Able Seaman for an unknown misdemeanour, a rank he would retain for exactly twelve months.4

By November 1901, Scott’s expedition was in open water heading for New Zealand, the last staging post of civilisation before setting off into the unexplored region. Unknown to either of them, Able Seaman Tom Crean would be waiting for Discovery.

Some confusion has surrounded the circumstances of Crean’s introduction to the polar landscape. Almost every mention of Crean in books, magazines and newspapers over the years has linked his arrival on the Antarctic scene with the untimely and widely reported death of another seaman, Charles Bonner, at Lyttelton, New Zealand, where Discovery was being resupplied before departing for the South at Christmas 1901. However, Crean’s elevation from the obscurity of the naval mess deck to a high-profile place on the Discovery expedition had nothing to do with the death of Bonner. Crean was already on board Discovery when Bonner died, having signed up with the expedition two weeks earlier. His arrival on the Antarctic scene was due to an entirely different act of fate which has received very little attention over the years.

Crean’s contact with the expedition arose because Ringarooma and another man-of-war in the New Zealand squadron, HMS Lizard, had been instructed by the Admiralty to lend every possible assistance to Scott in New Zealand before the party set out on the journey into the unknown. Ringarooma’s log reported its first sighting of Discovery off New Zealand at 4.45 a.m. on Friday, 29 November,5 and doubtless Crean would have been as eager as his messmates to catch sight of the historic vessel as it headed for one of the greatest journeys of the age.

The Discovery expedition to one of the world’s last unconquered spots had aroused huge interest in the English-speaking world. It was regarded by many as something of a virility symbol for Britain at a time when the Victorian age had finally drawn to a close and the Empire was under severe strain in places like South Africa and Ireland.

A little later that day, Discovery arrived at Lyttelton Harbour, just to the south of Christchurch and Ringarooma’s Captain Rich wasted little time carrying out Admiralty orders to help the explorers. He immediately provided Scott with some extra manpower to assist with his preparations for the journey. This included extensive overhauling and refitting to Discovery’s rigging and a trip into dry dock to trace a persistent leak which had badly damaged some provisions since leaving London.

The Ringarooma log records that the first working party was despatched to Discovery on 3 December 1901.6 It seems probable that Crean was a member of that and other teams of men who were sent across the harbour to the Discovery over the following two and a half weeks while the ship was docked at Lyttelton. From 3 December to 20 December, the ship’s log details an almost unbroken daily routine of crew members leaving the ship in the morning and returning in late afternoon after a stint on Discovery’s decks.

As a member of these working parties, Crean quickly gained some knowledge of Discovery as a working vessel and the mood on board. It also helps explain why he volunteered to join a ship making ready to sail into largely unexplored territory for perhaps two or three years.

However, it needed another intervention of fate to bring Crean onto the Antarctic stage alongside the likes of Scott, Shackleton, Wilson, Lashly, Evans and Wild, some of the most famous names from the Heroic Age of polar exploration who were all together on board Discovery that day in Lyttelton.

Crean’s opportunity came when Scott encountered an ugly problem with a member of the Discovery crew, seaman Harry J. Baker. Surprisingly, the Baker incident has been widely overlooked in chronicling events at this time.

Baker, who appears to have been a troublemaker, struck a Petty Officer for some unknown reason and promptly deserted. This left Scott with an unexpected vacancy to fill only days before he was due to sail south and he went straight to Captain Rich on the Ringarooma for help.

Scott chose not to mention the Baker incident in his bestselling book on the expedition and Markham provided only scant information about the seaman. Indeed, Baker does not warrant a single mention in the lengthy Scott tome, even in the list of crew members. It is as though he did not exist. However, it was the little-documented desertion of Harry J. Baker which was directly responsible for introducing Tom Crean to polar exploration.

Seaman Baker, who was 25 years of age and came from Sandgate in Kent, appears to have caused problems on the Discovery’s long journey from England and was not popular. But the only formal record of Baker’s misdemeanours can be found in a handwritten letter from Scott to the Royal Geographical Society dated 18 December 1901 as Discovery was preparing to leave New Zealand for the last time.7 It was also written three days before Bonner’s fatal accident and the subsequent desertion of another seaman, Sinclair, who felt responsible for Bonner’s death and also fled.

Scott hinted at earlier difficulties with seaman Baker when he confided to the RGS:

‘Baker was a good seaman but unpopular with his messmates.’8

Striking a PO was an offence regarded as very serious in the Royal Navy at any time and Scott immediately ordered Baker’s arrest. In his letter to the RGS, Scott dutifully reported:

‘He [Baker] struck a Petty Officer and learnt from me that I could not afterwards keep him in the ship – in consequence of which, he ran away. I immediately issued a warrant for his arrest and offered a reward for his apprehension, but he has not yet been found.’9

Sir Clements Markham, presumably acting on Scott’s information, later wrote his own truncated version of events in his Personal Narrative. He described the Baker incident in the following way:

‘Discharged at Lyttelton as objectionable. He ran. Messmates did not like him.’10

Markham later amended his initial entry with a more abrupt verdict on Baker, striking out the original comments and writing:

‘Ran at Lyttelton. Objectionable.’11

Nor does Ringarooma’s log provide any further background into the circumstances of Crean’s appointment and transfer to Discovery. But it does show that Crean was assigned to Discovery before Bonner’s death. The final entry in the log on 9 December, some eleven days before Bonner’s death, simply records:

‘Discharged Crean AB to SS Discovery.’12

Records of the Discovery expedition at the RGS show that Crean was recruited on 10 December 1901. Scott merely recorded in his letter to the RGS:

‘By permission of the Admiral, Captain Rich of the Ringarooma was able to fill this vacancy [Baker] with one of his men named Crean.’13

The farmer’s-son-turned-sailor had now graduated to exploration and for his troubles Crean was paid the going rate for an able seaman, some £2 5s 7d per month (£2.28 or the equivalent of £201 a month at today’s prices). The general assumption has always been that Crean volunteered for Discovery in those days before Christmas, 1901, although there is no conclusive evidence either way. However, it seems inconceivable that Captain Rich would have ordered the seaman to join the expedition, given the hazardous nature of the journey. It was also consistent with Crean’s nature to volunteer.

One popular anecdote claims that a shipmate of Crean’s heard him offering to volunteer for the expedition and declared: ‘I didn’t think you were crazy enough for a mad trip to the end of the world.’ Crean responded: ‘Haven’t I been mad enough to come from the other end of the world?’

Crean’s daily trips to Discovery as a member of the auxiliary working parties obviously would have alerted him to the vacancy caused by Baker’s assault on the Petty Officer. But there were other issues. Any seaman who did answer the call for volunteers for such a journey would have earned considerable respect and admiration on the lower decks. Any sailor with a knowledge of history would also have known that exploration had been a well-trodden route to promotion in the British navy since the days of Cook and others.

But the decision to volunteer also reflected an early indication of Crean’s innate self-confidence and inner belief in his own ability. This, allied with the sense of independence which he had developed during his tough upbringing, had created a formidably strong character.

The likely voluntary nature of Crean’s secondment to Discovery also underlines the essential haphazard nature of the early days of polar exploration. Like the vast majority of the Discovery party, Crean had no experience of the polar environment and had received no training for the rigours ahead. The basic qualification for so many on board was a strong sense of adventure and the promise of travel into the unknown. In Crean’s case, there was the added factor that he happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The average age of the men in the Discovery party was only 27 and Crean at 24 would have been entirely comfortable with his new messmates. For someone who had lied over his age to join the Navy at fifteen in the quest for adventure, volunteering for a trip into the unknown for an unknown duration would have represented a new and exciting challenge. Crean had become a popular figure among the seamen on the Ringarooma during his near two years’ turn of duty. His messmates confirmed his popularity by arranging a collection to buy a small parting gift for the Irishman before his journey. The small token of friendship was a photo album with a simple inscription which provides a clear indication of the high regard in which he was held. The inscription with the album reads:

‘This was presented to Thos Crean by his shipmates of HMS Ringarooma as a true token of respect and good wishes for his future welfare and safe return on his departure to the Antarctic Regions as a volunteer in the British ship, Discovery. December 20, 1901.’

Another personal possession he took on his way south was the little scapular, still tied round his neck by the leather cord.

3 Into the unknown

Preparation for the send-off from New Zealand quickened and Scott planned to sail from Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch, on 21 December 1901, before making one brief final stop at Port Chalmers, Dunedin, to take on the last few supplies of coal for the trip across the treacherous Southern Ocean. However, the great adventure did not get off to a very encouraging start because of the fatal accident to seaman Charles Bonner.

Departure day had begun well, in almost festive mood. The arrival of Discovery in New Zealand had aroused tremendous local interest and thousands flocked to the modest little port to bid Scott’s party farewell. The clamour to catch a final glimpse of the explorers was such that special trains packed with well-wishers were chartered from the centre of nearby Christchurch. On arrival they found bands playing, whistles hooting and the enthusiastic crowds cheering and waving.

The Bishop of Christchurch came on board and ceremoniously blessed the explorers after a short service on the mess deck. Soon afterwards, the warship, Lizard, and Crean’s former vessel, Ringarooma, led the heavily-laden Discovery slowly out of Lyttelton Harbour and Scott reported another five gaily dressed steamers, crowded with passengers who accompanied them on the initial stage of their long journey. Scott noted:

‘Wharves and quays were packed with enthusiastic figures. It was indeed a great send off.’1

William Lashly, the stoker who was to become so closely linked with Crean in the annals of Antarctic folklore, said there were ‘hundreds’ on the quays to hail Discovery and added:

‘Our stay in Lyttelton has been a busy but pleasant one. I think the people are very nice in every thing and every way. They really seem to think we want a little enjoyment before we leave here. We had a splendid sendoff – all the ships in harbour came out to the heads and wished us God speed and safe return …’2

But at this point, death struck Bonner, the young seaman. Bonner, who was 23 years of age and hailed from Bow in London’s East End, had joined Discovery in June 1901, from HMS Jupiter. He was one of Scott’s earliest recruits for the expedition.

Unfortunately, the celebratory mood proved too much for the seaman, who had been drinking heavily and rashly climbed above the crow’s-nest to the top of the mainmast in his eagerness to gain the best view of proceedings below as Discovery began to move gently out of Lyttelton Harbour. Scott remembered the sorry episode in his book:

‘There, seated on the truck, he had remained cheering with the rest until in a moment of madness he raised himself into a standing position, supported only by the slender wind vane which capped the mast. Precisely what happened next will never be known; possibly the first of the sea swell caused him to lose his balance; we below only know that, arrested by a wild cry, we turned to see a figure hurtling through the air, still grasping the wind vane from the masthead. He fell head foremost on the corner of an iron deckhouse and death was instantaneous.’3

Lashly, never a man for over-embroidery, wrote in his diary:

‘He lost his balance when the ship met the first swell and fell to the deck still clutching the weather vane.’4

Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson, the surgeon and zoologist on Discovery, remembered that many of the hardened sailors were affected by the tragedy. His diary records that some of the men ‘wept like children’ and James Duncan, the shipwright, said the accident had ‘cast a gloom over the ship’s company’.5 Seaman Sinclair, who is thought to have given Bonner a bottle of whisky before he climbed the mainmast, later stole some civilian clothing and disappeared. Scott described the incident as ‘one of those tragedies that awake one to the grim realities of life’ and explained that ‘sadness and gloom’ descended on the ship. Bonner was buried shortly after arrival at Port Chalmers on 23 December. And as a bleak reminder of the ‘grim realities’ of the meagre life below decks in the Royal Navy in the early Edwardian era, Scott’s report to the RGS reveals that Bonner’s ‘few clothes and belongings’ would be sold on board the Ringarooma. The proceeds, he noted, would ‘probably be very small’.

Bonner’s replacement was not Crean, but Jesse Handsley, a native of Gloucester and a former shipmate of Crean from the Ringarooma who had also volunteered to join the expedition.

The final send-off from Port Chalmers on Christmas Eve, 1901, was noticeably more restrained than the scene at Lyttelton three days earlier, with events undoubtedly overshadowed by the tragic loss of Bonner. The ship, weighed down with coal, provisions and livestock, steamed ponderously away from civilisation at 9.30 a.m. Louis Bernacchi, who was physicist on the expedition, said every hole and corner of the ship was utilised for something ‘… until the Plimsoll line had sunk so deep it was forgotten’. He described the send-off as a ‘most un-ship-shape confusion’.

Although the second send-off was a muted affair, Ringarooma was nearby and Crean was able to bid his own personal farewell to former comrades. It would be almost two and a half years before Discovery returned from the South and once again berthed at Lyttelton.

Christmas Day, 1901 was not what Crean or the rest of the crew might have expected as the Discovery moved slowly south – the first British expedition to sail to the Antarctic since Sir James Clark Ross 60 years earlier. There seems to have been little celebration and the mood on board was more pensive. The death of Bonner was still fresh to the memory and some among the traditionally superstitious sailors may have felt it was a bad omen for the expedition.

Scott, contemplating at least one year out of contact with civilisation, wrote:

‘Christmas Day, 1901 found us on the open expanse of the Southern Ocean, but after such a recent parting from our friends we had none of us had much heart for the festivities of the season and the day passed quietly.’6

The traditional Christmas dinner was postponed because of the death of Bonner and not eaten until 5 January when Discovery had crossed the Antarctic Circle. Shipwright Duncan, who came from Discovery’s home town of Dundee, summed up the melancholic mood on board as the new year, 1902, dawned with the ship ploughing through the Southern Ocean. He wrote:

‘New Year’s morning broke fine, bringing back memories of old, turning my thoughts to My Dear Loved ones at Home, we being about 14,000 miles from them and in Latitude where there has not been any ships for a century and I may say cut off from the civilised world but return as yet being doubtful. Hoping for the best.’7

Nonetheless, Discovery enjoyed very good weather which was enormously fortunate in view of the heavily over-laden decks and the notorious reputation of the stormy Southern Ocean. It is the most ferocious stretch of water on earth and a strong gale would have posed a serious and potentially catastrophic threat to the ship. Scott admitted that the consequences of gales would have been ‘exceedingly unpleasant’ and accepted that the expedition would have lost its deck cargo – a jumble of provisions cases, heaps of coal, 45 terrified sheep and 23 howling dogs.

The Discovery party sighted its first iceberg on 2 January 1902 at latitude 65½° south. A day later, Discovery slipped across the Antarctic Circle – 66° 33′ south – and Bernacchi recorded a peculiar sea-going custom in which ordinary seamen are permitted to drink a toast with both feet on the table. It is possible to visualise the ample frame of Crean indulging in this odd ritual for the first of many times he would cross the Circle.

The Discovery party recorded their first sight of Antarctica at 10.30 p.m., 8 January 1902. Scott wrote:

‘All who were not on deck quickly gathered there, to take their first look at the Antarctic Continent; the sun, now near the southern horizon, still shone in a cloudless sky, giving us full daylight.’8

Bernacchi, whose family originated in Italy, was more expansive, even though he alone of the Discovery party had sailed south before. Bernacchi was physicist on Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition, which in 1899 had been the first to deliberately spend a winter in the Antarctic. Now, as he saw the familiar landscape a second time, he was captivated:

‘It was a scene of fantastic and unimagined beauty and we remained on deck till morning.’9

Bernacchi’s book, The Saga of the Discovery, paints a glowing picture of life on the lengthy expedition, though others tell a slightly different tale. Bernacchi said:

‘Discovery throughout the whole of her three years’ commission was what is known as “A Happy Ship”. One cannot recall a serious quarrel either among the officers or the men. She was a floating abode of harmony and peace.’10

However, it was not a view shared throughout the ship and the crew below decks were beginning to complain. For the men the rigid, mind-numbing routine and discipline of naval life remained constant, regardless of the icy conditions. One of Crean’s fellow seamen, Thomas Williamson, writing at the time, painted a different picture to Bernacchi when he said:

‘… this monotonous idea of scrubbing the decks every morning in the Antarctic, with the temperature far below freezing point, is something terrible; it seems as though they cannot forget the Navy idea or commandment (thou shalt not miss scrubbing decks no matter under what circumstances) … as soon as you turn the water on it is frozen and then you have to come along with shovels to pick the ice up which the water has made.’11

Frank Wild, who was to serve both Scott and Shackleton with great distinction, gave a clear signal that Discovery had been a troubled ship right from the start off the coast of the Isle of Wight. He wrote bluntly in a letter home: