THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
By 1838 James Ross was very disappointed. Of all Barrow's Arctic hands he was now the only one without a job. But there was hope yet. Barrow had turned his eyes in a new direction, revealed by Richardson in a letter to Ross dated 24 August 1838. Richardson had approached the Admiralty and told them that ‘your greatest ambition was either the N. or S. Pole – you did not much care which’.1
The South Pole? Here was something truly new and exciting.
Antarctica occupied a somewhat nebulous position in the minds and maps of the world's navigators. The ancient Greeks had said it was there. In the 1520s Magellan had drawn an astonishingly accurate map of it without ever seeing it. It had been circumnavigated by Cook in 1773 and by a Russian, Bellingshausen, in 1820. In 1821 an American sealer called John Davis had landed on the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost strip of land which reaches out to Tierra del Fuego.
People were sure Antarctica existed, without any proof, but had no idea of its precise nature. The most popular view held that it was a continent of dry land peopled by outlandish beings of (naturally) great wealth – a cross between Atlantis and Timbuctoo, before the latter had been found wanting. One enterprising Frenchman had even taken shiploads of colonists to the south, only to be driven back by gales and ice.
The myths were not entirely wrong. Antarctica did contain wealth, if not the ‘minerals, diamonds, rubies, precious stones and marble’2 predicted by one French explorer. Cook had reported teeming multitudes of seals and whales, both of which were in high demand. Since the 1760s, when a Canton merchant had discovered a way of separating a seal's outer hair from its soft underfur, sealskin had been a sought-after fashion accessory. By the 1820s, however, most of the accessible populations had been wiped out. The northern whale, too, had almost disappeared. But balleen, or whalebone, was now more in demand than ever to satisfy the craze for corsets in an increasingly prosperous and style-conscious world. By 1830, the balleen from a single Greenland whale fetched £2,500, which was more than enough to pay for a journey to the Antarctic and back. Accordingly, during the 1820s and 1830s, American and British firms used their profits from the north to probe the unknown treasures of the south.
The sealers were a hardy race. Dropped on an isolated scrap of rock, the gangs spent months and sometimes years killing and butchering their quarry, fending as best they could until they were picked up (which did not always happen). But they were poor explorers, lacking the expertise to make charts and what was more keeping all discoveries secret for fear of competition. One captain admitted openly that when his holds were full he abandoned his men lest they reveal where they had been and thus jeopardize his find. There were, however, exceptions, such as Edmund Fanning of Connecticut and James Weddell of Lanarkshire. The latter, in 1822–4, sailed further south than Cook, and made a record-breaking penetration of the Weddell Sea that would not be bettered for ninety years. And in 1830-2 a captain from the British firm of Enderby Brothers – whose interest in Antarctic exploration was such that it eventually bankrupted them – had sighted a portion of the continent which would be called Enderby Land. Back in 1773, Cook had been dismissive about Antarctica. The continent probably did not exist, and even if it did, the conditions he had experienced suggested that it would be a cold, hopeless place. For six decades this had been accepted naval dogma. But with new evidence coming in from sealers and whalers, the British Admiralty was forced to reconsider. Antarctica was there. Moreover, it had commercial prospects. And these prospects, unless they were careful, might be usurped by Barrow's bug-bear – the foreigner. The push southwards began in earnest in 1838 and, as with the push northwards twenty years previously, it was given a cloak of scientific respectability.
The prompt came from Sabine – now Colonel Sabine – who addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Newcastle in August 1838. To his earnest audience he pointed out the deficiencies in the study of magnetism, particularly in the southern hemisphere. He called for a year of international cooperation in which European nations would set up observatories across the globe, coordinate readings on fixed dates, and compare results. He also suggested that Britain mount an expedition to determine magnetic variations in the region of the South Pole. His suggestions became resolutions which were passed to the Admiralty and which, after the usual greasing of the wheels by Barrow, received official consent. It was just in time too. The foreigner was already at the gates.
In 1837, Captain Jules Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville had set sail from Toulon on the Astrolabe, He was fifty, crippled by gout, and looked as if he would die before the end of the voyage. (Unsettlingly, he heard one of his men suggest as much as he hobbled aboard.) He didn't really want to go to the South Pole at all. His heart had been set on a pseudo-scientific pleasure cruise through the South Seas. Having already acquired the Venus de Milo for France he had no desire for further glory. But King Louis-Philippe had ordered him south, with a reward for each degree passed beyond 67° and ‘whatever you choose to ask for’3 if he reached the Pole. So south he went.
To everybody's surprise, maybe even his own, D'Urville did magnificently. He did not reach the Pole but he did make the first-ever landing on the main continent. It was not very prepossessing. He discovered a barren wasteland which he described very accurately as ‘a formidable layer of ice … over a base of rock’4 and which he named Adelie Land after his wife. And, ‘following the venerable custom which the English have carefully maintained, we took possession in the name of France’.5 Then spying a new variety of penguin he named that, too, after his wife. After which he set sail for home. It was now January 1841.
D'Urville had barely reached open seas when he encountered a ship skating in a fast, haphazard fashion across the ocean. It came within hailing distance but careered on its way without making contact. Puzzled, D'Urville pressed on. The ship he had seen was the Porpoise, one of a six-vessel American expedition under the command of Lt. Charles Wilkes which had sailed from Virginia in 1838. The expedition had been proposed in Congress as early as 1821, but only now had it become reality. A collection of beautifully named cockleshells – Peacock, Flying Fish, Sea Gull - the fleet was ill-equipped, shoddily manned, and physically rotten. Yet, under Wilkes, it managed to chart a purported 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline before returning home. However, the value of its findings was undermined by subsequent bickering in which Wilkes, a heavy-handed man, had to endure courts martial, public investigations and private charges brought by his officers. In due course his name was cleared, but by then his thunder had been stolen by another: James Ross.
By the late 1830s James Ross was the most experienced polar officer in the world and, with Parry out to pasture and Back in shell-shocked retirement, he was Barrow's man of the moment. During the last twenty years he had spent seventeen in the Arctic and overwintered for eight. As the discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole he was a pre-eminent magnetist. He was also, it was said, the handsomest officer in the Royal Navy. What more suitable, more popular and more glamorous person could there be to lead a British expedition to the South Pole?
Ross was given two bomb ships: Terror, newly repaired after its
service with Back in the Arctic; and its twin, Erebus. If any vessel was perfect for polar exploration, a bomb ship was the one. Designed as mortar platforms to pound coastal installations, bomb ships were strong, had capacious holds, and had a shallow draught – eleven feet -so that they could creep close to shore. By now accustomed to preparing ships for icework, the Admiralty dockyards set to on Erebus and Terror with practised efficiency. The ships’ decks were doubled in thickness, with waterproof cloth being sandwiched between two layers of planks. Fore and aft their interiors were braced with interlacing oak beams to resist and absorb shock. Their hulls were scraped smooth and double-planked. Their keels were sheathed in extra thick copper. Treble-strength canvas was fitted.
By any standards the enterprise was phenomenally well equipped,* from its ice saws and portable forges to its stocks of provisions – sufficient for three years and including 2,618 pints of vegetable soup, 2,398 pounds of pickled cabbage and 10,782 pounds of carrots to keep scurvy at bay, not to mention a small flock of sheep – to its stores of winter clothing and to Ross's insistence that ‘every arrangement [be] made in the interior fitting of the vessels that could in any way contribute to the health and comfort of our people’.6
The men, too, were the best that could be found. While Ross was in command of Erebus, Terror was given to his old friend Lt. Crozier, who had sailed with Ross on all of Parry's voyages and who had been his second-in-command on the abortive rescue mission of 1836. Each ship held a crew of sixty-four. Ross had Edward Bird, from the Franklin-Buchan voyage of 1818, as first lieutenant, Crozier had Archibald McMurdo who had sailed with Back to Repulse Bay. Oddly, given their scientific aims, there was no provision for scientists. Ross deemed them unnecessary. Those that came had to come in the guise of medics. So Robert McCormick, a hot-tempered geologist who had sailed with Darwin, was chosen as ‘surgeon’ for the Erebus while a twenty-one-year-old botanist called Joseph Dalton Hooker was chosen as ‘assistant surgeon’.
J. D. Hooker – later to become Britain's foremost naturalist – was bitterly disappointed to be playing second fiddle. He had wanted to be the expedition's official plant finder. He wanted to go ashore and discover things nobody had ever seen. But as Ross explained, a ‘surgeon’ ‘must be well known in the world beforehand, such a person as Mr. Darwin’.7 Hooker was devastated. He was a friend of Darwin, and had slept with a copy of his unpublished work beneath his pillow. ‘What was Mr. Darwin before he went out?’ he countered. ‘He, I daresay, knew his subject better than I now do, but what did the world know of him? The voyage with the Beagle was the making of him.’8 Hooker feared that McCormick – who had sailed previously on the Beagle but had left the ship at Rio de Janeiro because his fellow naturalist, Darwin, was being given preferential treatment – might steal his glory. He had hoped that the Erebus might be his stepping stone to fame. He was to be sadly disabused.
The equipment he was given met few of his requirements. ‘Not a single instrument or book [was] supplied to me as naturalist’ with the exception of twenty-five reams of drying paper for plant specimens, two botanizing vascula, and two of ‘Mr. Ward's invaluable cases’.9 And when given his instructions by various members of the Royal Society, he was astonished at the surly treatment he received. ‘None of them seemed cordial to me in the least degree,’ he wrote to his father. ‘On leaving the room no one even wished me a pleasant or successful voyage.’10 Shrugging his shoulders, he resigned himself to his position. It could have been worse: one of the Admiralty Lords had asked what on earth botany and geology had to do with the expedition in the first place.
Neither of the two ships handled well. Nor did they look pretty. But when they left the Thames in autumn 1839 they represented the cutting edge of naval ingenuity. No sailing ships before, and none since, had been so finely prepared for their task. The Erebus and Terror leaped like eager bulldogs into the Atlantic. ‘It is not easy to describe the joy and lightheartedness we all felt,’ Ross wrote, ‘as we passed the entrance to the Channel, bounding before a favourable breeze over the blue waves of the ocean, fairly embarked on the enterprise we had all so long desired to commence.’11
Ross's expedition started a year later than its competitors, yet such was its purpose, strength and sheer indomitability that it sailed – literally – through their findings.
No enterprise by Barrow's men could be complete without Scoresby and, sure enough, Scoresby raised his head at the first mention of magnets.
In the past years, when not preaching to his congregation in industrial Bradford, Scoresby had been absorbed by the study of magnetism. Much of his time had been spent on the new craze of ‘animal magnetism’, or hypnosis, for which the Reverend Scoresby had found an uncanny aptitude, particularly where female subjects were concerned. But he had also devoted time to terrestrial magnetism. During his investigations he had devised a new and improved set of compass needles which ‘can be magnetized without taking asunder, and if varnished and placed in pairs, would never lose their power’.12 This was unheard of. Never in all the years of the Admiralty had anyone been able to construct a compass which did not suffer some deterioration. And in the new iron ships that were being built by Barrow's much-feared projectors a stable compass needle was essential.
In 1836, following a successful demonstration at Bristol, Scoresby was invited to send his new needle to the Committee for the Improvement of Ships Compasses. Among its members were Sabine and Beaufort. Its chairman was James Ross. He was invited to test a sample of Admiralty needles which were so poor that Scoresby could only believe they had been deliberately chosen for their uselessness. Beaufort assured him otherwise: ‘I am afraid that those sent to you were not worse than the average supply from the Dockyards – at least they were not selected for their badness but taken at random.’13 Two weeks later Scoresby delivered a damning report on the Admiralty needles and included an example of his own, the patent for which he was willing to forgo provided it would be of use to the Admiralty. For some reason Scoresby's own needles did not work and he feared they had been compromised by contact with another magnet. The Committee pointed out that a similar design – consisting of ‘three thin steel plates (clock springs) as nearly as may be of the same length, breadth and thickness as those of Mr. Scoresby's needles and separated by a barrier of brown paper instead of the wood Mr. Scoresby uses’14 – had been in existence since 1823. To this judgement, signed by James Ross, Scoresby could only reply that he had ‘the honour of acknowledging the reply of the Committee on compasses’,15 and that he would try harder. While he did so the Admiralty introduced a new compass that was in every respect Scoresby's design.
James Ross ploughed south. On 31 January he anchored in St Helena where he set up the first observatory, not far from the house to which Barrow had consigned Napoleon back in 1816. Already McCormick had gathered so many specimens that his cabin was overflowing and his fellow officer, Edward Bird – who had no feeling for natural history – was finding space for them in his own quarters. By St Patrick's Day they were at the Cape where they set up a second observatory and departed on 6 April to the cheers of the crewmen clinging to the rigging of HMS Melville. On 15 May the expedition was ensconced in the dramatic bowl of Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen Island.
Christmas Harbour was a ‘most dreary and disagreeable’16 place, Ross recorded. A gale blew for forty-five of the sixty-eight days they were at anchor, reaching such strengths that at times they had to lie flat in order not to be blown into the sea, and there were only three days on which it neither snowed or sleeted. Nevertheless they managed to erect an observatory where for two months, at hourly intervals, they recorded a flurry of extreme magnetic activity. There was enough grazing to keep the sheep well-fed, wild ducks were plentiful and penguin soup, the officers agreed, was very like that made from hare. McCormick peeved Bird with yet more specimens, and Hooker applied himself with mad enthusiasm to his task, chiselling specimens out of the frozen soil or, if the frost was too hard, sitting on them until they thawed. Then they were off again, through gales and hurricanes, the waves driving over them in solid sheets, until on 16 August 1840, their sails in ribbons, they arrived at Hobart, Van Diemen's Land, and settled into an anchorage that would later be called Ross Cove.
Their relief was great. The last leg had been hard with five men washed overboard, one of them – the Erebus’s boatswain – never to return. At one stage the Erebus had lost its sails and been driven helpless with bare masts. But their relief was nothing compared to that of Sir John Franklin, whose domain they were now entering.
Here, at last, Franklin had managed to find people who disliked him. In this stifling society of 24,000 citizens, 17,592 convicts and 97 indigenous Tasmanians, marbled by veins of snobbery, resentment and despair, Franklin was at a loss. He was a sailor, not an administrator, and no matter how hard he worked he could not hide the fact. The unsophisticated upper crust, perched on their antipodean plinth, saw him as weak, inexperienced and threateningly liberal. His wife, Jane Lady Franklin, was viewed with even more distrust. According to the Colonial Secretary, an ‘undermining, cool-headed icicle’17 called Captain John Montagu, she was ‘a clever, mischievous intriguing woman’.18 She was widely seen as the power behind the throne, her husband ‘a man in petticoats’,19 which was not entirely untrue. Seasoned officials were horrified at her attempts to investigate the plight of female convicts, to found a new college and to rid the island of its snakes by paying a bounty of one shilling per dead serpent delivered to her door. Their wives, too, found Lady Franklin overly blue-stocking for comfort. When she introduced the concept of educational ‘conversaziones’ they threw up their hands in horror. ‘Why could not Lady Franklin have the military band in,’ wrote one, ‘and the carpets out, and give dances, instead of such stupid preaching about philosophy and science, and a parcel of stuff that nobody could understand.’20 Such was their antagonism that even the genial Franklin noticed ‘a lack of neighbourly feelings and a deplorable deficiency in public spirit’.21
In this atmosphere of hostility, Franklin welcomed his old friends with joy. It was clear he had been anticipating their arrival, for all the materials necessary for building their observatory were in place and within a day, once Ross had selected the site, 200 convicts were working on the foundations. ‘The arrival of Captains Ross & Crozier has added much to Sir John's happiness,’ wrote Lady Jane, ‘they all feel towards one another as friends & brothers, & it is the remark of people here that Sir John appears to them quite in a new light, so bustling & frisky & merry [is he] with his new companions.’22
Such was Franklin's enthusiasm that the observatory was completed, and all its instruments installed, within nine days. Even the convicts took heart and, according to Ross, were most disappointed at not being allowed to work past 10 on a Saturday night, despite having started at 6 that morning. The observatory had a surreal, Dali-esque air. Previously, the site had been a wild spot, swarming with wildlife and covered in trees. Now the trees had been cleared and in their place rose a grove of granite pedestals, fluted and pilastered in classical style, on which were balanced the precious magnetic instruments. No man could touch the instruments lest the recordings be affected and so a few yards from each pedestal was another pedestal carrying a telescope through which the necessary readings could be viewed.
Lady Jane thought it was a load of rubbish. She visited the site and left soon afterwards, being ‘about as wise when we came away as when we went in’.23 What she wanted to see was the Erebus, where ‘Captain Ross has a copy of Negelin's portrait of Sir John in his cabin, & so it is much visited.’24 Nonetheless she commissioned a portrait of Ross, Franklin and Crozier standing before the observatory, which she intended to send to Sabine. ‘There you are all 3 with your hats off,’ she later wrote to Ross, ‘& you with the dear bunch of wattle in your button hole – I insisted on this.’25 The wattle was a flirtatious token from Lady Jane, who had fallen for Ross in a mild way. Ross obviously reciprocated, writing later that his memories of Tasmania were ‘precious, almost hallowed’. Hobart was ‘our own home of the Southern Hemisphere’,26 and he wore the wattle whenever possible, muttering ‘Tasmania’ as he did so.
Lady Jane admired Ross, but her real favourite of the expedition was Hooker, whom she described as ‘a youth of about 20, very boyish looking, of rather an interesting appearance’.27 Taking him under her wing she directed his researches with amateur enthusiasm and maternal autocracy. She ‘would like to show me every kindness’, complained Hooker, ‘but does not understand how, and I hate dancing attendance at Government House.’28 However, he adapted as usual to adverse circumstances. Having been abducted for a three-day botanizing trip aboard the Governor's yacht – ‘two of them at sea, and the third, a Sunday, it rained furiously’29 – he incurred Lady Franklin's displeasure by working on the sabbath. ‘But I thought it excusable as being my only chance of gathering Anopterus glandulosus.’30 He also shocked her on a picnic by screaming so loudly she thought he had been bitten by a snake. It transpired he had found a new species of orchid.
Ross's arrival was like a Christmas hamper to the inhabitants of Hobart. Despite their fatiguing journey the officers and men offered more news and entertainment than could be found in several years’ worth of colonial life. Even the anti-Franklin press was muted, restricting itself to the accusation that Ross was bribing seamen to join his expedition, a charge which was negated embarrassingly by the flood of people begging to be taken aboard. But Hobart held one major disappointment for Ross. It was there that he heard of the activities of D'Urville and Wilkes. He was not pleased. Regardless of the fact that both expeditions had sailed a year before his own they had, in his eyes, committed an unforgivable act of disrespect. ‘That the commanders of each of these great national undertakings should have selected the very place for penetrating to the southward, for the exploration of which they were well aware, at the time, that the expedition under my command was expressly preparing, and thereby forestalling our purposes, did certainly surprise me. I should have expected their national pride would have caused them rather to have chosen any other path in the wide field before them, than one thus pointed out, if no higher consideration had power to prevent such an interference.’31
Curiously, while he learned of the French expedition second-hand from local newspapers, he was most affronted by a letter left for him by Wilkes, detailing the American achievement and supplying a chart of the coastline he had seen. It was a well-meant letter, intended to help a fellow explorer. To Ross it was salt in the wound. But no amount of ‘forestalling’ – a favourite word among nineteenth-century explorers – could keep Ross from the South Pole. ‘Fortunately, in my instructions much had been left to my judgement in unforeseen circumstances; and impressed with the feeling that England had ever led the way of discovery in the southern as well as the northern regions [this was not quite true] I considered it would have been inconsistent with the pre-eminence she had ever maintained, if we were to follow in the footsteps of any other nation. I therefore resolved to avoid all interference with their discoveries, and selected a much more easterly meridian on which to endeavour to penetrate southward.’32
Wilkes had explored Antarctica between the 100th and 160th meridians, but he had been prevented from landing on the continent by the pack ice surrounding it. From sealers’ reports, however, Ross learned that on the 180th meridian they had seen a lagoon-like expanse of open water beyond the pack. Ross reckoned that his reinforced ships might have a chance of breaking through the ice and into the clear water beyond. Wilkes's ships had only displaced 100 tons or so; Ross's ice-crackers displaced 370. Bearing this in mind he bade farewell to the Franklins and set sail on 12 November 1840. Carrying some 800 of Hooker's and McCormick's specimens, plus two pots of jam from Lady Franklin, they headed for what McCormick predicted would be ‘a region of our globe as fresh and new as at creation's first dawn’.33
On New Year's Day 1841 they crossed the Antarctic Circle, an event which they celebrated by intoxicating ‘Billy’, the ship's goat. Two days later, while Billy was ‘paying the usual penance for his debauchery’,34 they reached the ice pack. The so-called consolidated pack was solid at the edge but inside could be seen stretches of open water – narrow leads rather than the lagoon they had been promised, but open water nonetheless. Ross chose his point and rammed the pack. The ice held, but so did the Erebus, For the next hour he repeatedly rammed the same spot – an act of extraordinary seamanship – until at last it gave way and the two ships broke through to the mass of loose floes which lay beyond. By noon they had wormed their way so far into the pack that clear sea was no longer visible. By midnight they were seventy miles into the ice. Ross and Crozier wove their way through the ice, followed by hordes of penguins who waddled from floe to floe in pursuit of the strangers and pursued by seabirds which McCormick, after long hours of practice, was able to shoot so that they fell on deck. On the morning of 9 January they sailed triumphantly into open sea. They had broached the inner lagoon.
Conditions could not have been more different to those they had expected. McCormick likened the weather to ‘the finest May day in England’.35 At night the sun skimmed along the horizon while the sky turned an intense indigo. The sea was calm, the air hazy, the light brilliant and, as their ships sailed south past silent, monstrous icebergs, following compasses whose dip revealed that the South Magnetic Pole was almost upon them, every man was filled with a sense of near-biblical awe. No human being had ever reached this spot; it was the clean white sheet of creation for which McCormick had prayed.
On 11 January they sighted an outline through the haze. It was lost for an hour or two, but eventually re-emerged as a mountain. It became clear that, as McCormick recorded, ‘we had discovered a land of so extensive a coastline and attaining such altitude as to justify the appellation of a Great New Southern Continent’.36 The land was still 100 miles distant, by Ross's calculations. But as he pressed on to the south-west he discovered a lump of rock rising from the sea at 71° 56’ south, 171° 7’ east. In the full dress regalia of a Victorian sea captain he took possession of it in the name of his monarch. And so, with a ceremony conducted knee-deep in guano, amidst knee-high hordes of yattering penguins – D'Urville would have appreciated the scene -Possession Island became the first territory claimed for Britain in the name of Queen Victoria.
Soon Ross was bestowing names like confetti. The first summit they had seen on the 11th became Mount Sabine. Rounding a headland – Cape Adare – he sighted an enormous chain of mountains, up to 10,000 feet high, which he called Admiralty Range, each peak being honoured with one of their Lordships’ names. Another range was immortalized as ‘eminent philosophers of the Royal Society and British Association’.37 A cape bearing a curious, conical hill was called Barrow. Government ministers, the expedition's officers, Ross's fiancee (a cape), his prospective father-in-law (the island to which the cape belonged) and even his fiancee's uncle (another cape on the same island) entered the charts.
By Saturday 23 January they were at 74° 23’, further south than any man had been before. Extra grog was served to the popular toast ‘sweethearts and wives’, and to less familiar ones ‘further south still’ and ‘the discovery of the magnetic pole’. On Tuesday the Magnetic Pole was only 174 miles away. On Wednesday it was seventeen miles nearer and Hooker nearly killed himself landing on Franklin Island, the latest piece of rock to swell Her Majesty's dominion. On Thursday the Magnetic Pole was nearer still. But on that day they saw something which drove the Pole from their minds.
At 10 a.m. McCormick's ‘attention was arrested by what appeared to be a fine snowdrift, driving from the summit of a lofty crater-shaped peak … As we made a nearer approach, however, this apparent snowdrift resolved itself into a dense column of smoke, intermingled with flashes of red flame.’38 Here, at the bottom of the world, surrounded by ice and snow, they had found a live volcano. Nothing, truly, could have been more astonishing.
Rising 12,400 feet into the air, the volcano was christened Mount Erebus. Connected to it by a saddle of ice was a dormant cousin of 10,900 feet, which became Mount Terror. Another small island was sighted, but nobody bothered to claim it. They merely gave it the name Beaufort and left it in peace.
The situation of these two ships, their 128 officers and crew, their diminishing flock of sheep and their pet goat Billy, floating in conditions of utter strangeness, thousands of miles from a homeland which they might never see again, was encapsulated by Hooker in an eloquent letter to his father:
The sun never setting, among huge bergs, the water and sky as blue, or rather more intensely blue than I have ever seen it in the Tropics, and all the coast one mass of beautiful peaks of snow, and when the sun gets low they reflect the most beautiful tints of gold and yellow and scarlet, and then to see the dark cloud of smoke tinged with flame rising from the Volcano in one column, one side jet black and the other reflecting the colours of the sun, turning off at a right angle by some current of wind and extending many miles to leeward; it is a sight far exceeding anything I could imagine and which is very much heightened by the idea that we have penetrated farther than was once thought practicable, and there is a certain awe that steals over us all in considering our own total insignificance and helplessness.39
The totality of their insignificance was underlined when they sailed east of the volcanoes – which were, though Ross had no way of telling this, on an island rather than the mainland – and saw yet another astonishing sight, in its way even more breathtaking than the first: a perpendicular wall of ice rising three times the height of their masts and extending to the east for as far as they could see.
For some time now they had been aware of the ice blink, a cold, white line which illuminated the horizon, caused by the sun's rays bouncing off a mass of ice to the south. Now they met its source: the Ross Ice Shelf – Ross himself, being an explorer, called it the Barrier – the largest ice floe in the world, comprising a 1,000-foot drop of ice of which only 15–20 per cent showed above water. Ross's blacksmith and armourer, Isaac Savage, a man of poetic bent, dictated his impressions to a more literate mess-mate, C. J. Sullivan:
All hands … Came on Deck to view this the most rare and magnificent Sight that Ever the human Eye witnessd Since the world was created actually Stood Motionless for Several Seconds before he Could Speak to the next man to him.
Beholding with Silent Surprize the great and wonderful works of nature in this position we had an opportunity to discern the barrier in its Splendid position. Then i wishd i was an artist or a draughtsman instead of a blacksmith and Armourer. We Set a Side all thought of Mount Erebus … to bear in mind the more Imaginative thoughts of this rare Phenomena that was lost to human view
In Gone by Ages40
When Captain Ross came on deck he was equally surprised ‘to see the Beautiful Sight. Though being in the north Arctic Regions one half his life he never seen any ice in the Arctic Seas to be compard to the Barrier.’41
Ross was not only surprised but also very disappointed. The Barrier was ‘perfectly flat at the top and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face. What was beyond it we could not imagine … It was, however, an obstruction of such a character as to leave no doubt upon my mind as to our future proceedings, for we might as well sail through the cliffs of Dover as penetrate such a mass … It would be impossible to conceive a more solid-looking mass of ice; not the smallest appearance of any rent or fissure could we discover throughout its whole extent, and the intensely bright sky beyond it but too plainly indicated the great distance to which it reached to the southward.’42 At 4 p.m. they turned to follow the Barrier. Mount Erebus, still visible to the west, erupted in spectacular farewell.
Two weeks and 250 miles later the Barrier showed no signs of diminishing. If anything it seemed taller and more impenetrable than before. They discovered a point at which it sank to an unusually low height of fifty feet, which allowed Ross to climb his mast and survey the interior. All he saw was an ‘immense plain of frosted silver’43 reaching in all directions. By now the short Antarctic summer was coming to an end. Young ice was forming between the consolidated pack and the Barrier. Even with their stores and the quantities of penguins and seals available, not to mention the whales, who ‘had hitherto enjoyed a life of tranquillity beyond the reach of their persecutors’, Ross wrote with melancholy foresight, ‘but would soon be made to contribute to the wealth of our country’,44 they could not risk overwintering in the Antarctic. Whereas the Arctic had offered a glimmer of hope, here there was none. No land birds, no salmon, no polar bears, no deer – only the strange, oily creatures that lived in these frozen seas. The crews had already chewed their way through tons of cabbage and carrots and no matter how closely penguin soup resembled that of hare, the average seaman was more interested in fresh beef. Moreover, how could Ross be sure that they would escape a winter in the Antarctic? He had spent four years in the ice a decade previously and was lucky to be alive. Was he going to risk another such ordeal in seas which, as far as he knew, might have opened by a freak and which could close behind him forever?
On 9 February Ross reversed his course, hauling northward at the same time. By 15 February he was back at Franklin Island, in time to see Erebus give a contemptuous belch of fire. The sea was freezing fast. It was time to go home.
* Ross's equipment even included Mr Fox Talbot's new daguerrotyping apparatus. Unfortunately, however, this early camera was either too baffling or too unwieldy and remained in its case throughout the trip.
