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- Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Captain Francis Crozier was a major figure in 19th century Arctic and Antarctic exploration who led the doomed Franklin Expedition's battle to survive against the odds. It is a compelling story which refuses to be laid to rest and recent discovery of his lost ships above the Arctic Circle gives it a new urgency. The ships may hold vital clues to how two navy vessels and 129 men disappeared 170 years ago and why Crozier, in command after Franklin's early death, left the only written clue to the biggest disaster in Polar history. Drawn from historic records and modern revelations, this is the only comprehensive account of Crozier's extraordinary life. It is a tale of a great explorer, a lost love affair and an enduring mystery. Crozier's epic story began comfortably in Banbridge, Co Down and involved six gruelling expeditions on three of the 19th century's great endeavours – navigating the North West Passage, reaching the North Pole and mapping Antarctica. But it ended in disaster.
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‘A rarity in polar biography: a page-turner’
Arctic Book Review
‘Wonderfully detailed and graphic account’
Irish Examiner
‘A welcome addition to the polar library’
Sunday Business Post
‘[Michael Smith] is consolidating a reputation as champion of those unsung heroes who deserve greater recognition than history had given them’
Irish Independent
‘A riveting read’
Newry Reporter
Dedication
This book is dedicated to those who mean most to me: Barbara, Daniel, Nathan, Lucy and Zoe.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the help and support of a large number of people, and I am extremely grateful to all those whose assistance has made it possible to chronicle the life of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. Any omissions are unintentional.
Special mention should go first to those members of the Crozier family who gave me valuable support and every encouragement to write this biography. They willingly provided documents and detailed knowledge about the family and its most famous son. I extend my sincere thanks to Carol Crozier, James Crozier and John Crozier for their help and much-appreciated kindness, and to Rodney Freeburn who has been of considerable assistance. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Martin Crozier, who generously and enthusiastically shared his unrivalled knowledge of the Crozier lineage and who was a constant source of assistance. Sincere thanks.
The people of Banbridge – the birthplace of Francis Crozier – are evidently very proud of their close association with such an illustrious figure, and the town’s pride was reflected in the warmth of my reception and the support I received during my research. Personal thanks must go to Jason Diamond of Banbridge Genealogy Services, whose help and co-operation have been invaluable. His thoughtful contributions at the outset were very important to my research and I owe him a great deal. Mention must also be made of Evelyn Hanna and the staff of Banbridge Library, who were always helpful and generous with access to the archives and with local knowledge. I also acknowledge the assistance of Lissa O’Malley at Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council.
I am grateful to Brenda Collins of the Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum and Berni Campbell of Central Library, Letterkenny. I am particularly indebted to the late Shirley Sawtell for her patient endeavours on my behalf in the library of the Scott Polar Research Institute and to Robert Headland, former archivist, for access to the Institute’s archives.
I would also like to acknowledge the obliging archivists and other staff at Ballynahinch Library; Berkshire Record Office; British Library; National Archives; Mike Bevan, David Taylor and Barbara Tomlinson and staff at the National Maritime Museum; National Portrait Gallery; Public Record Office Northern Ireland; Mary Chibnall in the library of the Royal Astronomical Society; Julie Carrington and staff at the Royal Geographical Society; Matthew Sheldon, head of research collections at the Royal Naval Museum; Royal Society; Dr Norman Reid, keeper of manuscripts at St Andrew’s University; and the Archive Office of Tasmania; Alan Derbyshire at the Victoria & 6Albert Museum Conservation Department; Emma Dadson of Harwell Restoration; Zoe Reid, Senior Conservator at the National Archives of Ireland; Paul Cook, Senior Paper Conservator at the Royal Museums Greenwich.
I received valuable assistance from John Hagan, a native of Banbridge now living in Tasmania. He gave me important advice and valued help in researching and understanding the association between Francis Crozier and Tasmania. I must also thank Doris Hagan for her contribution.
Frank Nugent – a member of the first Irish party to sail the North West Passage – was a generous and considerate supporter of this book. I will always be grateful to him for his unselfish assistance and willingness to share his considerable knowledge of Ireland’s long involvement in polar exploration.
I must place on record my gratitude to Ryan Harris, Head of Survey for the Underwater Archaeology Team at Parks Canada who generously shared his time and specialist knowledge of the search for Erebus and Terror. His insight and first-hand experience were hugely important to understanding the modern-day challenge of locating the ships, and I am grateful.
My thanks must also go to Regina Koellner, an enthusiastic and generous supporter of Francis Crozier, who was always ready to help with constructive and valuable suggestions. Crozier himself would have been impressed with her passionate commitment to his story. I am also grateful to Russell Potter, an authority on Arctic exploration, who was generous with his knowledge. I am also indebted for the helpful advice I received from Dr Jim McAdam, David Murphy, Maria Pia Casarini, Louie Emerson and Horace Reid.
Where possible, I have identified all known sources of the material used in this book and provided full accreditation where it can be properly established. I have also made every reasonable effort to trace copyright holders of documents and photographs. Any omissions are unintentional and I would be pleased to correct any errors or oversights.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Joe O’Farrell, a learned and inquisitive observer of polar history, who generously read the manuscript and provided much thoughtful and constructive advice. Thanks, Joe.
It would not have been possible to write this book without the astute involvement of my two sons, Daniel and Nathan, whose skill and patience in handling my incessant requests for assistance with modern technology has been invaluable. Without their calming influence, this book might well have been written with a quill and ink.
Finally, I must say a huge personal thanks to Barbara, my wife. She was unwaveringly supportive and patient, and these few lines can never fully express my deep gratitude.
Contents
Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, explorer, sailor and scientist.
Notes
In general, the terminology in use during the nineteenth century is employed in this book and where necessary, the modern version is also included. For example, Van Diemen’s Land refers to Tasmania (in use after 1855) and I have generally used Great Fish River or Back’s Great Fish River which was in use at the time and is today known as Back River.
The question as to how to refer to the native people of the Canadian Arctic during the age of exploration is difficult. Although the most acceptable term today is ‘Inuit’, the term ‘Eskimo’ (or ‘Esquimaux’) was commonly used during the nineteenth century, when most events in this book took place. For the purposes of this book, I use Inuit and only employ Eskimo where it comes from a direct quotation or reference. Alternatively, significant events in this book occurred around King William Island which is called ‘Qikiqtaq’ in the Inuktitut language. For simplicity, I refer to King William Island which was in widespread use at the time. No discourtesy is intended.
The punctuation, spelling and grammar used in original quotations are faithfully repeated, however erratic they may be.
Temperatures are shown in Fahrenheit with conversion into Celsius and weights are generally given in imperial measure with approximate metric conversions. Distances are usually given in statute miles with rough conversion to kilometres. Data from the UK National Archives and the Bank of England provide an approximation of the current purchasing power of past monetary values.
Introduction
Pointing the Way
In April 1848, Captain Francis Crozier, by then in command of the largest expedition ever sent to discover the North West Passage, scribbled a nine-word message on a scrap of paper, signed his name and placed the note in a tin cannister before vanishing into the Arctic wilderness. Crozier’s note was discovered eleven years later, and for the next 160 years explorers, scientists and enthusiasts followed the clues he left in an attempt to solve the mystery of what lay behind the biggest disaster in the history of polar exploration.
The most significant breakthrough has come in recent years with the remarkable discovery of the expedition ships, Erebus and Terror, lying in shallow waters above the Arctic Circle. Crozier did not launch the crusade for clues, but his message sent the crusaders in the right direction.
The precise wording of Crozier’s message was: ‘And start on tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.’ Although ambiguous and lacking much detail, the note at least revealed Crozier’s intentions and gave generations a clear indication of where to search in the vast, scarcely populated Arctic wastelands stretching for at least 800,000 square miles (over 2,000,000 square kilometres).
The crucial document, which was found in 1859, was a regulation navy 12 form traditionally left to indicate a vessel’s geographic position to those sent in search of a missing ship. Most of the words added to the printed document were written in the margins by the captain of Erebus, James Fitzjames, who outlined past events, such as the party’s geographical position at the time of abandoning the ships and news of the expedition leader, Sir John Franklin’s, death.
Crozier’s short message, which is squeezed into a corner of the document and appears almost as an afterthought, is the only surviving written clue to the expedition’s plans for escape. Due to the lack of space, he wrote the short message upside down in the corner of the document.
It was a pivotal discovery which sent generations to the barren area along the western and southern coasts of King William Island, leading to a trail of skeletons, scattered debris and ultimately the wrecks of Erebus and Terror. One authority said it was ‘the most evocative document in the long history of Western exploration of the Arctic regions’.
The unfortunate venture is generally known as the Franklin Expedition after Sir John Franklin, who was appointed as leader at the outset. However, Franklin had died a year before Crozier wrote his terse message. While Franklin led his men into the jaws of the ice, the responsibility for leading them out fell into the hands of Captain Crozier.
The search which followed was extraordinary by any standards. The North West Passage expedition initially left London in May 1845 and was last seen on the edge of Baffin Bay in July of the same year, with all 129 on board Erebus and Terror reportedly in good spirits. The first relief expeditions were sent north in 1848 and over the next few years around forty ships combed the labyrinth of Arctic waterways in a vain attempt to trace the missing men. The official naval search ended in 1854, nine years after the expedition sailed, and the privately financed Fox expedition under the leadership of Leopold McClintock discovered the document and Crozier’s key message in 1859.
McClintock’s return was the signal for the start of an unprecedented quest 13to uncover what happened to Crozier and his party. Over the next 160 years, at least fifty official and unofficial expeditions ventured into the Arctic, hoping to solve the mystery or to retrieve scattered relics from the snow. The true number of searches is impossible to calculate because so many private groups travelled unannounced to the area. However, more parties went in search of the dead than were ever sent to find the living.
A breakthrough was achieved in 2014 and 2016 when specialist teams found the expedition’s ships, Erebus and Terror, on the sea floor in remote waters above the Arctic Circle. Experts believe the hugely significant discoveries will go a long way towards answering many questions and are eagerly analysing the large variety of objects already retrieved from the depths.
However, locating the ships is only the first stage of a long and complex process. Assorted relics like the ship’s bell from Erebus, Victorian era scientific instruments and discarded clothing and shoes were the first objects recovered. But the biggest prizes yet to be claimed are the expedition’s logbooks, charts and even personal letters which experts believe have survived decades under water and can be safely reclaimed for historians to pore over and analyse. Overall, the full investigation of the secrets kept by Erebus and Terror will take at least ten years or possibly more.
It will also provide an important opportunity to explore the remarkable story of Captain Crozier, particularly as there was considerably more to Crozier’s life than an unrecorded death somewhere in the Arctic.
Crozier was among the most prolific and under-valued explorers of the age. He entered the navy as a child, survived the brutal Napoleonic War and emerged to sail with great distinction on six expeditions to the ice in an outstanding naval career lasting almost forty years. Crozier was deeply involved in the nineteenth century’s three great endeavours of maritime discovery – navigating the North West Passage, reaching the North Pole and mapping Antarctica. Only Crozier’s great friend, Sir James Clark Ross braved more polar expeditions. 14
There is a perception that all the great stories from the history of polar exploration involve the outstanding figures of the ‘heroic age’ of Antarctic discovery in the early twentieth century, such as Roald Amundsen, Tom Crean, Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton. All are rightly saluted for their memorable exploits, yet to focus entirely on this era would be mistaken. There are other half-forgotten explorers who made history and yet have been neglected by history. Such a man was Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier.
Francis Crozier, who sprang from an old-established Irish family over 200 years ago, was the pioneer whose voyages opened the doors of the Arctic and Antarctic for the more recognised figures who followed in his wake. For example, the destination in The Worst Journey in the World, the famous book about a hazardous journey to Cape Crozier during Captain Scott’s last expedition in 1911, was discovered by Crozier and Ross in 1841. Other landmarks familiar to readers of Antarctic history – McMurdo Sound, Ross Island, Mount Erebus and the Great Ice Barrier (now Ross Ice Shelf) where Scott died – were discovered and named by Crozier and Ross sixty years before Scott and Shackleton landed on the continent.
As one of the few early explorers to venture into both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, it might be assumed Crozier would be known from pole to pole for his accomplishments. But fame and recognition have eluded him. He was a modest, unassuming man who somehow never strayed into the limelight and received limited reward for his prodigious efforts. He was honest, dependable and without a hint of vanity, although he never rose above the rank of Captain.
Unlike others, Crozier was never asked to write a book about his voyages and adventures in places which others could only dream of visiting. Sadly, he did not live long enough to enjoy a peaceful retirement, writing his memoirs and savouring a little of the limelight. Alone among the era’s renowned circle of polar explorers in the first half of the nineteenth century – including Back, Franklin, Parry, Richardson and Ross – Crozier did not receive a knighthood for his great endeavours.
15Crozier faded from history in the years after his death. Only the assiduous efforts of a hard core of admirers, particularly around his hometown of Banbridge, County Down, have kept the memory of Francis Crozier alive. The towering Crozier monument in the centre of Banbridge is a permanent reminder of this regard.
I have always nursed a fondness for the unsung hero, the neglected individual whose character and achievements are underestimated or have been overlooked by history. It was this curious fascination that led me to write the first biography of the indestructible Irish polar explorer, Tom Crean. The title, An Unsung Hero, seemed singularly appropriate.
Crozier is another unsung hero. He was an exceptional explorer poorly treated by history, who deserves far wider recognition for accomplishments that would have been remarkable in any age of exploration. Helped by the new discovery of Erebus and Terror, we now have the perfect moment to re-open the file on Crozier.
This is the first comprehensive biography of Crozier and it has a simple aim: to place Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier among those exceptional individuals who shaped Arctic and Antarctic history.
Chapter 1
A Bond with History
The long line to Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier can be reliably traced back 600 years and with less certainty by a full 1,000 years. It is appropriate that a man who left such an indelible mark on history should emerge from a distinguished family whose fortunes over the centuries were intertwined with history itself.
Crozier’s earliest-known ancestors originated in France and later settled in England. Family members migrated to Ireland in the seventeenth century and created a dynasty of Irish Croziers whose most illustrious son was Francis Crozier.
The clue to his origins comes from the name ‘Crozier’ itself, which derives from the French word croise, meaning crusader. In Old French – in use up to the fourteenth century – the name was written Crocier, which is more akin to the present-day English spelling. Over the years, the family name has been variously spelt Croyser, Crozer, Croisier, Crosier and Croysier.
The ancestors of Francis Crozier were of Norman descent and first emerged when they joined the armies of William the Conqueror to invade England in the momentous year of 1066. After they defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings, large swathes of captured lands were given to William’s supporters, including Robert le Brus, who was to establish a line 18of Scottish kings. The Croziers were among the closest allies of le Brus, whose most notable descendant was Robert the Bruce, the Scottish king who triumphed over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.
Members of the Crozier family followed le Brus into newly acquired estates in the north of England and later settled along the notoriously volatile border between England and Scotland in the ancient county of Cumberland (now Cumbria). During the following centuries, generations of Croziers established themselves as landowners in Cumberland and in the fertile valleys alongside the Liddel and Teviot rivers to the south of the old Scottish town of Hawick.
Some Croziers were among the villainous freebooters – called ‘moss troopers’ – operating along the unruly frontier between England and Scotland, where robbery, kidnap and murder was rife. Sir Walter Scott’s classic poem Rokeby (1813) refers to an incident where ‘a band of moss-troopers of the name Crosier’ murdered a well-known landowner in the borders.1
Others led a more peaceful existence, notably William Crozier, who was among the band of scholars credited with helping to create Scotland’s first university at St Andrew’s in 1411. Around this time emerged Nicholas Crozier, the man identified as the founder of the Irish strain of Croziers.
Nicholas moved from the Cumberland town of Cockermouth in the early 1420s to start a new life on farmlands at New Biggin near the small village of Heighington, County Durham. Over the years, the Heighington Croziers put together a sizeable estate of around 1,000 acres and built a fine home named Redworth Hall (a modernised Redworth Hall still stands on the site). It was from these roots set down by Nicholas Crozier in the fifteenth century that the Irish Croziers would emerge around 200 years later.
John Crozier, a seventeenth-century cavalry captain, was the first member of the family to settle in Ireland. He left the Durham estate in the early 1630s as part of Britain’s scheme to subdue Ireland through the mass plantation of Protestant settlers from Scotland and England into the province of Ulster, resulting in wholesale land seizures and a seismic shift 19in power away from the Catholic majority. The reverberations of the plantation are still felt to this day.
Captain Crozier was a member of the troops stationed at Dublin Castle to guard Sir Thomas Wentworth, the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland. Wentworth, a key advisor to King Charles I and a ruthless reformer, was later created Lord Strafford and executed for treason in the sinister political struggles which led to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 and the rise to power of Oliver Cromwell.
Crozier, perhaps sensing the growing political turmoil and impending civil war in England, decided to remain in Ireland with his family and build a new life. His father, Nicholas Crozier, sold parcels of land from the family estate in Durham to pay for his son’s new home and within a century the Croziers owned more than 1,000 acres of prime land in the north of Ireland.
The Croziers were part of the large Presbyterian community that settled around the counties of Antrim and Down. They cemented their social status over the years with a succession of well-chosen marriages into other leading northern families, among them the Magills and Johnstons. At this time, a family motto was developed: Dilengta fortunae matrix; Hard work is the mother of success.
In 1692, Captain Crozier’s youngest son William moved to Gilford, County Down with his three sons, John, Samuel and William. Here, he bought a sizeable estate named Loughans from a local landowner, Sir John Magill. The property was later renamed Stramore (‘great valley’) and divided in two. The lowland portion, called Lower Stramore, was given to William’s second son, Samuel, while John, the eldest son of William Crozier, occupied the upland property to the northwest of Gilford, named Upper Stramore. An adjoining estate – The Parke – was purchased for the youngest son, William.
Among the direct descendants of the Croziers from Upper Stramore was Francis Crozier. Two years after moving to Upper Stramore, John 20Crozier married Mary Fraser, a member of the eminent Lovat family, one of Scotland’s oldest and wealthiest landowning dynasties. Like the Croziers, the Frasers are originally thought to have come to England with William the Conqueror.
John and Mary had eleven children; their ninth son, George, married Martha Ledlie of Ardboe, County Tyrone in 1742, and was Francis Crozier’s grandfather. The union of George and Martha yielded a family of six children.
The youngest son, also named George, married Jane Elliott Graham from Ballymoney Lodge in the small but rapidly developing nearby town of Banbridge, County Down. It was another fruitful marriage and George Crozier and his wife Jane produced a family of thirteen children – seven girls and six boys – including Francis Crozier.2
Francis Crozier was born into a prosperous, well-to-do family, led by his astute and enterprising father, George. He was a successful solicitor who manoeuvred the family away from its traditional sphere of property ownership and soldiering and built one of Ireland’s most successful legal practices. George Crozier was also a man who made the most of high-ranking friends and a generous slice of good fortune.
The key to his commercial success was a close association with the Marquis of Downshire and Lord Moira, the heads of two of the richest and most powerful landowning families in Ireland. George Crozier’s legal firm on occasions acted for both Downshire and Moira, links which provided an entrée into the upper reaches of Irish society and, with it, affluence. The bonds were strengthened in later years when George’s son Thomas assumed control of the business and became renowned as Downshire’s solicitor in Ireland.
The Croziers’ association with the Downshire and Moira families went back almost 200 years. The Downshire line in Ireland was established by Moyses Hill, an Elizabethan soldier who came from Devon in 1573. The Hills later acquired estates at Cromlyn – from the Irish cromghlin (‘crooked glen’) – to the south of Belfast and subsequently became close neighbours of the early Croziers. Wills Hill, the first Marquis of Downshire, built the historic Hillsborough Castle in the ‘crooked glen’ almost two centuries after the arrival of Moyses Hill.21
Ireland (indicating Banbridge, County Down).
Banbridge, County Down.
22The Moira dynasty was established by Major George Rawdon, a soldier from Yorkshire who sailed to Ireland in the 1630s with Captain John Crozier and who settled at Moira on Down’s border with Antrim, a few miles to the north of the flourishing Crozier estates at Stramore. By the late eighteenth century, George Crozier’s circle of friends included Francis Rawdon, the second Earl of Moira, the distinguished soldier and colonial statesman who later became Lord Hastings.
Apart from powerful friends, George Crozier also had abundant good fortune on his side thanks to the rapid emergence of the Irish linen industry and the Industrial Revolution, which brought an explosion of commercial activity around Banbridge in the eighteenth century. Over the space of only a few decades, the once sleepy settlement on the banks of the River Bann – known as Ballyvally until the turn of the eighteenth century – was transformed into a thriving industrial community as local farmers turned to bleaching linen at the numerous falls that punctuate the river.
The gradual introduction of machinery-propelled linen making from a modest cottage industry to a dynamic modern enterprise and by the time of Francis Crozier’s childhood in the early 1800s, Banbridge boasted the largest linen market in County Down. Cloth from the town was exported to mills in England, Scotland and even America. The few miles on the River Bann between the small towns of Banbridge and Gilford were a bustling scene of activity which one eyewitness eloquently described as a ‘continued theatre of beauty, genius and commerce’.
In 1791, George Crozier took full advantage of his prosperity and position to build a house in the centre of Banbridge. His new home, originally called Avonmore House but subsequently renamed Crozier House, was an impressive Georgian mansion situated opposite the parish church in Church Square, Banbridge. Spread over three floors and with an ample basement, the house – it still stands – features above its entrance a lunette decorated with the sleeping Venus and Cupid. 23
The birthplace of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier in Church Square, Banbridge, County Down. The property, built in 1791, was originally called Avonmore House and became known as Crozier House.
24It was at Avonmore House in the early autumn of 1796 that the eleventh child of George and Jane Crozier was born. The precise date of birth is not clear, though it is thought to have been 17 September. The boy, the couple’s fifth son, was named Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier after Francis Rawdon, the Earl of Moira.
Little is known about the early life of the young Francis beyond the certainty that it was a privileged upbringing in a typically religious household. He attended Henry Hill School in Banbridge, run by the Presbyterian minister, Reverend Nathaniel Shaw.
However, his birth was followed by a period of upheaval in Ireland with the emergence of the radical Society of United Irishmen, a revolutionary organisation aimed at uniting the Catholic and Protestant communities to overthrow British rule. In the schism which followed George Crozier was forced to steer a delicate path between the Downshires and the Moiras, who took opposite sides in the conflict.
Downshire, the embodiment of the establishment, wrote that George Crozier’s family was ‘one of only four or five [Presbyterian] families in Banbridge’ opposed to the United Irishmen. George Crozier backed the winning side in the dispute. The United Irishmen were roundly defeated and in 1801 Ireland became an integral part of the United Kingdom under the Act of Union – the first time that all parts of the British Isles were subject to single rule.
But despite the outcome, the Crozier family soon began to shift their faith from the traditional Presbyterian roots to the Anglican Church of Ireland. In the following years, family members became ministers in the Church of Ireland.
One indisputable fact about the early life of Francis Crozier is that he enjoyed only a short childhood. In the summer of 1810, at the age of 25thirteen, Francis was plucked from the cosy security of the family home and sent off to join the Royal Navy. The decision to send young Francis to sea remains a mystery, even though it was customary to dispatch youngsters with sea-going ambitions into the navy as early as ten years of age. Many of those who later earned fame in the polar regions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – among them Edward Parry, James Clark Ross and Robert Scott – began their naval careers somewhere in the years between childhood and adolescence.
But the enrolment of Francis in the navy was at odds with the pattern elsewhere in the Crozier family at that time. Although earlier generations of Croziers had served as soldiers, George Crozier appears to have broken the mould by steering his sons towards peaceful occupations in the Church or the world of commerce. Two sons – William and Thomas – followed their father into the legal profession, while Graham, the youngest, became a Church of Ireland vicar.
Francis was the exception and it is unclear why George Crozier allowed his young son to forego his affluent life in Banbridge for the brutal rigours of the Royal Navy, which at the time was deeply embroiled in the bloody Napoleonic Wars with France. The Battle of Trafalgar, the most decisive naval engagement of the war, had been fought only five years before the fresh-faced teenager from Banbridge enlisted, while the Peninsular War, one of the key campaigns, was at that very moment in full swing. More than 90,000 British seamen alone were destined to die in the war which claimed the lives of approximately 5,000,000 combatants and civilians.
So eager was George Crozier to get his son into uniform that he turned to his influential coterie of friends for help. During the early months of 1810, he approached Lord Downshire to pull a few strings at the Admiralty. Downshire contacted Lord Vincent, a well-connected family friend who only a few years earlier held the supreme rank of First Lord of the Admiralty. The seventy-five-year-old grandee, who had over half a century of military campaigns to his name, knew all the right people 26and shortly afterwards Francis was readily accepted into the navy.3
Francis Crozier, still three months short of his fourteenth birthday, made the journey from boyhood to manhood when he travelled south from Banbridge to the port of Cork in the summer of 1810. He formally enlisted on 12 June and his first posting was aboard Hamadryad, a 34-gun warship stationed at Cork. It was the beginning of a lifetime of duty and devotion to the Royal Navy.
Chapter 2
To the Arctic
The Napoleonic Wars, a defining moment in British history, provided an epic backcloth to the early naval career of the youthful Francis Crozier. The Peninsular War, the long campaign in Spain and Portugal that destroyed the myth of French invincibility, was into its second year when Crozier sailed under Royal Navy colours for the first time. In 1812, less than two years after Crozier’s enlistment, Napoleon launched his catastrophic invasion of Russia. The Battle of Waterloo, the final and decisive act of the war, was fought only five years after Crozier enlisted.
The navy was a critical factor in the war, and the defeat of Napoleon provided Britain with a century of virtually unchallenged supremacy on the high seas. When Crozier joined in 1810, the navy commanded an awesome fleet and could muster around 143,000 men. It was the heavy defeats the navy inflicted on Napoleon’s fleet and the rigorous naval blockades of French ports, cutting off supplies and destabilising the economy, which proved so important in the ultimate defeat of France.
Crozier’s maiden voyage on Hamadryad was typical of the era. After escorting merchant vessels across the Atlantic to the Newfoundland Banks, Hamadryad returned to Lisbon with fresh troops for the Peninsular campaign. From the outset, Crozier found himself among veterans of the sea. 28Sir Thomas Staines, Hamadryad’s captain, had lost an arm in battle, and the ship itself, which was originally a Spanish vessel captured off Cadiz in 1804, had a colourful past.
Conditions at sea were in stark contrast to the sheltered, comfortable surroundings of Banbridge. Life afloat in the early nineteenth century was rough, hazardous and enforced by a strict code of discipline that was barbaric by today’s standards.
Fortunately, Crozier joined as the navy was making a slow transition from the brutality and primitive conditions of an earlier age to a more humane regime with better pay, food and hygiene. This was due to the new regulations introduced by the Royal Navy as a result of the Admiralty enquiry into the mutinous seizure of Captain William Bligh’s Bounty in 1789. But navy warships of the time were still invariably dirty and overcrowded and hundreds of men would struggle for space in the dimly lit and smoky recesses below decks. Hamadryad, a frigate, accommodated about 200 men.
Punishment was mercilessly severe, although considerably more lenient than in earlier years when miscreants were subjected to keelhauling or had their right hand nailed to the mainmast. Flogging was still commonplace in Crozier’s time and offenders in the early nineteenth century could expect at least three dozen or more lashes, depending on the whim of the captain.
Accidents and disease – scurvy, yellow fever and typhus – were a far bigger danger to men than enemy cannon or muskets. Only 6,000 of the 90,000 deaths on navy ships during the war were as a result of enemy action. By contrast, over 70,000 men were lost due to fatal sickness, wounds or mishap.
Despite the hazards, it appears that Crozier made the adjustment to his new life with great aplomb and that he learned fast. He soon picked up the tools of his trade – navigation, mathematics, tidal calculations and general seamanship – which offered the route to advancement and promotion for any would-be officer.29
At the end of 1812, the sixteen-year-old Crozier gained his first promotion when he was appointed midshipman, the lowest officer rank. It appears he impressed his senior officers, and Sir Thomas Staines took Crozier with him when he was appointed captain of Briton in 1812.
A 44-gun frigate, Briton was plunged straight into action, policing the dangerous waters in the Bay of Biscay where French and American ships tried to outrun patrolling British ships and get their precious cargoes into ports such as St Malo and Bordeaux.
In June 1812, the navy was forced to open a new front when America declared war on Britain, a conflict that would last until 1815 and end in stalemate. Crozier was summoned into action when Briton was deployed to escort a convoy of 49 merchant ships around the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies. When one of the merchantmen became disabled during a violent storm, Briton ushered the damaged ship into Rio de Janeiro for repairs. At Rio, Captain Staines was ordered to change course to the Pacific and to assist Phoebe and Cherub in arresting Essex, an American frigate harassing British whalers.
The orders meant taking Briton alone around Cape Horn against the prevailing strong westerly winds. Rounding the Horn in a sailing vessel is invariably a precarious voyage and Crozier endured a ferocious baptism as Briton was assailed by violent storms that incapacitated over 100 crewmen – about half the ship’s complement. After a hair-raising trip, Briton docked at the Chilean port of Valparaíso in late May 1814, where it was discovered that the Essex had already been apprehended.
Briton was now ordered to sail thousands of miles across the Pacific towards the Galapagos Islands and the more remote Marquesas Islands, where Staines was to link up with Tagus in pursuit of another American frigate. It was a long, hot voyage across the open expanse of the Pacific and though Briton and Tagus failed to track down the American frigate, the ships did find signs that the Essex had been active in the area before its apprehension. 30
On Nuku Hiva – one of the largest islands in the Marquesas group – the navy found remnants of a village and fort built by the Americans, who had claimed it for the United States and named it Madison Island after the sitting US President. Staines had other ideas and promptly took formal possession for Britain.
Crozier used his time in the Marquesas to collect specimens of weaponry from the friendly islanders. On his return to Ireland, he presented the collection to the Marquis of Downshire and the weapons were subsequently put on public display at Hillsborough Castle in 1881.
The trip from the Marquesas back to South America in September 1814 was eventful, due to sloppy navigation by the Briton and Tagus. Navigators miscalculated longitude by a margin of three degrees and came across an unknown island that did not appear on Admiralty charts of the time. Staines moved closer to the heavily wooded coastline and was surprised when four canoes appeared and approached the ship. He was even more surprised when men in the canoes spoke to him in perfect English. He soon discovered that everyone on the remote island spoke English.
The island was Pitcairn and its English-speakers were the direct descendants of the mutineers from Captain William Bligh’s Bounty. The mutineers and local Tahitians first arrived on the island in 1790 and Briton and Tagus were only the second outside vessels to reach Pitcairn, an isolated and rugged volcanic spot of barely 2 square miles (3 square kilometres) across.
The little community-in-exile numbered 46 men, women and children when Briton and Tagus anchored offshore in 1814 and among those greeting the visitors from the Old World was Thursday October Christian, the son of the mutiny leader, Fletcher Christian.
A more noteworthy figure on Pitcairn was John Adams, the last survivor of the original band of mutineers. A stocky and heavily tattooed figure in his early fifties, Adams cheerfully showed the British naval officers around his paradise ‘kingdom’. Pride of place was a library of books plundered from Bounty, each carefully inscribed with the distinctive signature of Captain Bligh. 31
When Staines made a tantalising offer to take Adams back to England, the ageing mutineer was sorely tempted. After nearly twenty-five years in hiding, the promise of a return to his homeland was almost irresistible. But his Polynesian wife and family were distraught at the prospect, fearing that Adams would be hanged for his part in the mutiny. Adams – sometimes called Alexander Smith – reluctantly agreed to stay on Pitcairn and he lived the rest of his days in exile. He died in 1829, aged around sixty-five.
Briton and Tagus returned to Valparaíso in early 1815, before taking another voyage round Cape Horn. Their arrival in England on 7 July 1815 came just three weeks after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, which signalled an end to the Napoleonic Wars.
The following year – 1816 – saw Crozier assigned to the 38-gun frigate Meander on guard duty on the River Thames. In 1817, he passed the Admiralty exams for mate and joined Queen Charlotte, a first-rate warship of 104 guns patrolling the English Channel. In 1818, at the age of twenty-two, Crozier was posted as mate to Dotterel – a 387-ton, 18-gun brig-sloop – where he served for three years.
One of his first missions was to bring urgently required provisions to the isolated South Atlantic island of St Helena, where Napoleon had been exiled after his defeat at Waterloo. Supply ships from Britain had failed to reach the small community and the Dotterel formed part of a convoy to bring relief to the islanders.
Crozier’s advancement coincided with a period of major upheaval in the navy, which was forced into huge changes when the Napoleonic Wars ended. By a twist of fate, this disruption was to lead Crozier into polar exploration.
The Royal Navy was at that time the world’s most powerful fighting machine. But it was an enterprise geared to war and heavily over-provisioned for peace. As the peaceful era of the 1820s approached, the fleet was largely idle and the Admiralty was faced with the major headache of how to deal with thousands of unwanted men. 32
Managing the ordinary seamen was brutally simple. By 1817, more than 100,000 sailors had been thrown back onto the streets from which most had been press-ganged. But most officers were men of patronage or wealth and not so easily discarded from the payroll. As Joseph Hume, the radical reformer, noted at the time: ‘Promotion in the army and navy was reserved for the aristocracy’. Despite the massive overmanning, the number of officers actually rose in the years following the end of the war, though nine in ten were unemployed.
The logjam of superfluous officers was a huge barrier to further advancement, particularly as any new commissions were invariably granted to officers based on their age. Admirals were often still in service at the age of eighty, and some officers spent decades without ever securing a meaningful posting. By the 1820s, the chances of junior officers such as Crozier progressing up the ranks were slim.
Into the post-Napoleonic breach came the unlikely figure of John Barrow, an accomplished civil servant at the Admiralty who proposed a variation on the biblical exhortation to turn ‘swords into ploughshares’. Barrow’s solution was exploration.
Sensing the urgent need to redirect the navy’s efforts, he was to resolutely shape the nation’s policy on exploration for the next thirty years and ‘fathered’ a generation of explorers, including John Franklin, Edward Parry, James Clark Ross, and Francis Crozier.
John Barrow was an éminence grise who for over four decades quietly wielded enormous power from his office at the Admiralty. He was the last civil servant to see Nelson alive before Trafalgar in 1805 and it was Barrow’s suggestion in 1816 to send Napoleon into exile on St Helena.
Untypical of the elite who ran the country or controlled the military machine, Barrow was propelled to the heart of government by sheer intellect and driving ambition. The son of a poor hill farmer from near the Cumbrian town of Ulverston, he left school at thirteen and continued to study the classics, mathematics and astronomy. By his early twenties Barrow could speak and write Chinese.33
