Erebus. Michael Palin

down and haul her round to Chatham to await the call. Cove, meanwhile, ran into ferociously bad weather, one gale battering her so severely that it was generally reckoned it was only James Ross’s cool, calm captaincy that saved the ship from going under. After returning to Stromness for repairs, Ross, Crozier and the Cove set out again for the Davis Strait. By the time they reached Greenland they learned that all but one of the whalers had been freed from the ice.

      Despite this, the rescue efforts were seen as heroic. Francis Crozier was promoted to commander (confusingly, the rank below captain) and James Ross was offered a knighthood. Much to the dismay of his many supporters, he turned it down, apparently because he felt the title of Sir James Ross would mean that he might be mistaken for his pugnacious and recently ennobled uncle.

      ‘The handsomest man in the navy’ – according to Jane Griffin, the future wife of John Franklin – was, however, rather less successful in his private life. In between his many journeys, Ross had met and fallen in love with Anne Coulman, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a successful Yorkshire landowner. Ross had done the decent thing and written to her father, expressing his feelings for Anne and hoping that he might visit her at the family home. Coulman had written back indignantly, firmly shutting the door on the liaison and expressing his shock that Ross should harbour such feelings ‘for a mere schoolgirl’. His opposition was multi-pronged. ‘Your age [Ross was thirty-four] compared with my daughter’s, your profession and the very uncertain and hazardous views you have before you, all forbid our giving any countenance to the connection.’

      Anne, however, was as much in love with James as he was with her. For the next few years they continued to meet secretly. Coulman’s stubborn opposition to their relationship drove Ross to write to Anne in angry frustration: ‘I could not have believed it possible that worldly emotions could have had so powerful an influence as to destroy the most endearing affections of the heart, and cause a father to treat his child with such unfeeling hardness and severity.’ Fortunately, one of James Ross’s great qualities was his determination. Once he had set his mind on something, he was not easily deflected. He continued to keep in contact with Anne, and she with him. Their perseverance was eventually rewarded.

      HMS Terror was soon in action on another mission, leaving the Medway in June 1836 as the flagship of George Back’s latest ambitious expedition to extend his survey of the north-west Arctic. By September she was beset in the moving ice and was severely knocked about throughout the winter. She eventually broke free of the ice-pack and, still encased in a floe, drifted into the Hudson Strait. With her hull damaged and secured with a chain, Terror just about made it to the Irish coast, where she unceremoniously ran aground.

      Before disaster struck, George Back had some kind words for Terror that could have been applied to all the bomb ships: ‘Deep and lumbered as she was, and though at every plunge the bowsprit dipped into the water, she yet pitched so easily as scarcely to strain a rope-yarn.’ His description of her in fine weather made the frog sound like a prince: ‘The royals and all the studding-sails were for the first time set, and the gallant ship in the full pride of her expanded plumage floated majestically through the rippling water.’

      Erebus had no such chance to impress. Though she had come tantalisingly close to seeing some action, in the end she had merely exchanged one dockyard for another. De-rigged at Chatham and back In Ordinary again, she was becoming the ‘nearly ship’ of the British Navy.

      Throughout the early nineteenth century, the Antarctic remained terra incognita. James Weddell’s 1822–4 voyage in search of the South Pole – depicted here in his 1825 memoir – penetrated further south than any previous ship, but failed to sight land.

      CHAPTER 3

      MAGNETIC SOUTH

      When the recently formed British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Newcastle in the summer of 1838, terrestrial magnetism was high on the agenda. Now, it was felt, was the time to seize the moment – to claim the prize. Once the earth’s magnetic field was understood and codified, compasses and chronometers could be set with absolute precision, and navigation would no longer be an erratic process dependent on clear skies and guesswork. The result would be a nineteenth-century equivalent of GPS.

      One of those pushing hardest for such research was Edward Sabine, a Royal Artillery officer who had sailed with Ross and Parry to the Arctic. For the last ten years, as Scientific Advisor to the Admiralty, he had argued vigorously that Britain should use her naval superiority to gather valuable information on the earth’s magnetic field. But he also agreed with the influential Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian nobleman who had made the first studies in geomagnetism on a celebrated voyage to South America in 1802, that only if countries worked together could the world be reduced to a set of clear, empirical, scientific principles.

      The theory that linked geomagnetism and navigation had already been developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss, an astronomer at Göttingen University. To make progress towards putting these ideas into practice, Sabine and others argued for a network of observation stations to be set up across the globe, which would report simultaneously. James Clark Ross had discovered the North Magnetic Pole and established its variation from true north. Now, the logical next step was to turn attention to those parts of the earth that remained largely unexplored, in particular the remote southern hemisphere.

      Up until now, Antarctic exploration had never been taken very seriously. Much of what was known about the southern lands came from Captain Cook, who in the 1770s had twice crossed the Antarctic Circle – and he had not been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. It was a realm, he wrote, of ‘thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous’. For the most part, the region had been left to individual whalers and seal-hunters.

      Nevertheless, such descriptions as came back fed a growing popular fascination. For the Romantics, the Antarctic represented the mystery of the unknown and the untamed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, for example, which was published in 1798, depicts a cursed ship drifting helplessly into the Southern Ocean:

       The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

       The furrow followed free;

       We were the first that ever burst

       Into that silent sea.

      In Coleridge’s poem the voyage ends in abject disaster. The hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), finds the Southern Ocean a place of all kinds of danger and depravity, from shipwreck to cannibalism. A place of infernal cold and darkness. A place where souls in torment are driven to destruction. The sort of place the Greeks had a word for: Erebus.

      As artists and poets were busy frightening themselves and the public, the scientists – as scientists do – were going in the other direction, the direction of learning and logic, of exploration and explication. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the existence or non-existence of a Southern Continent was another mystery to unravel. Now the demands of science and a newly aroused sense of human potential were coming together to begin the unravelling.

      There were other motives, too. The eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel pressed the case for the practicalities of a southern expedition at a meeting in Birmingham, laying on something more than mere science. ‘Great physical theories,’ he argued, ‘with their trains of practical consequences, are pre-eminently national objects, whether for glory or utility.’ With this chauvinistic nudge, Herschel’s committee produced a memorial of resolution, which was presented to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.

      Over the winter the arguments went one way and the other, but on 11 March 1839, Lord Minto, First Lord of the Admiralty, finally informed Herschel that permission had been granted for an Antarctic expedition. It was to be a prestigious enterprise. It therefore demanded a leader