Golden Age of Exploration

Pengins, starvation, and scurvy: the golden age of polar exploration (and a little beyond). All images are historical and the property of their original photographers. Modern images will be given credit in posts.

[goldenpolar]

Footage of the amazing state of preservation on the HMS Terror. Articles are saying every door was left open except Crozier's, leading some to speculate that he was last off the ship.

[goldenpolar]

Arctic ice crumbling HMS Erebus and blocking divers from researching the wreck | CBC News

Parks Canada may be in a race against time to research the HMS Erebus as bad weather damages the wreck lying in shallow Arctic waters. Meanw

Problems with last summer's season

[goldenpolar]

A lot to be excited about - Admiralty Allotment Registers

Finding next-of-kin details for men who served in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines can be fraught with difficulty. Even Royal Navy and R

Want to see who some relatives of the lower decks were? Here's information on a searchable database for next of kin allotments for the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. It doesn't have scans of the original documents, but I did find results for HMS Terror in the Antarctic and Arctic.

[goldenpolar]

On the subject of Frobisher..

The commercial whaling industry is owed a debt to advances in arctic sailing used in exploration. The economic drive to push ever further north in search of fertile whaling grounds led to the development of vessels able to navigate through ice laden waters and withstand the harsh conditions faced during repeated voyages. The whalers themselves developed techniques on ice navigating and survival, with their expertise sometimes ignored but often drawn from. It depended on who was listening.

[goldenpolar]

Engraving of the USS Jeannette trapped in ice. This was the ship that inspired Nansen to build Fram. Sailing from San Francisco in the 1870s, the expedition was an attempt by the United States to reach the north pole. The ship, however, became trapped in the ice off the coast of Siberia and crushed. Debris from the wreck was later found along the coast of Greenland, a fact that fueled Nansen's theories on a north polar current. Fram was built to test these theories by being strong enough to be trapped in the ice without severe damage and drift through these currents.

[hiswholebohemiansoul]

So in the Doctor Who comics… the Doctor and Peri travel with Frobisher… a shapeshifting penguin.

[goldenpolar]

Ok, I couldn't help but be a complete nerd about this. The penguin's name is Frobisher. Penguins are from the opposite side of the earth, but I can't help but think it was named after this guy:

Sir Martin Frobisher. He was a 16th century English privateer and explorer and one of the earliest explorers to set out in search of the Northwest passage through northern Canada (as opposed to across the North American continent, which was a thing at the time).

He made three trips to northern Canada and had reached as far north as Baffin Island. He tried and failed to establish a settlement in Canada, and his futile search for gold ended in a loss of support from the crown for any further arctic voyages, although with the limited technology of exploration at the time he was never likely to have successfully penetrated much deeper into the passage or much further north. He has a bay named after him on the southern end of Baffin Island, at the 'entrance' to the Northwest Passage. And apparently also a a penguin that spits fish in Colin Baker's lap. Who knew.

[goldenpolar]

Amundsen's ship Maud, historical and a modern photo of the wreck re-floated. This was his polar drift undertaken after completing his Third Fram Expedition to the south pole.

Fram was Nansen's ship, and Amundsen wanted her for his bid for the south pole. Nansen, however, knew this would anger the British who were already planning to send Robert Falcon Scott. The British supported the newly independent nation of Norway (it had declared independence from the kingdom of Sweden-Norway in 1905 while Amundsen was completing the Northwest Passage) and he was loath to make the mistake of challenging them. So naturally Amundsen lied about the nature of his expedition and told Nansen he needed Fram to lock it in ice and make observations while drifting on arctic currents. Captain Scott had actually wanted to meet with Amundsen and arrange comparing north to south polar observations, and Amundsen avoided the meeting. If I remember right he hid in his home to avoid Scott until Scott gave up trying to contact him.

The world had accepted an American claim to the north pole (though whether Cook or Peary had yet to be decided on) so Amundsen had no interest in the north at that time. He didn't tell anyone but his brother Leon until Fram was heading south that he never intended to sail north. When he came back from claiming the pole to negative public opinion, he knew he owed something to Nansen.

So Maud, named after Norway's queen/the wife of King Haakon VII, was built on a similar design to Fram and Amundsen headed north. His heart wasn't in it, and it was one keystone cop disaster after another. He almost got asphyxiated on fumes during meteorological observations, slipped and fell and broke his arm, and got mauled by a polar bear (probably the shot in the 2019 movie trailer with the man with gashes on his back). Eventually he gave up and Maud was abandoned, only to be recently raised and returned to Norway.

[bacchanalium]

Hey The Terror fandom, I think you may find this interesting. In 2019, there will be a movie about Roald Amundsen, the first polar explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage. 

[goldenpolar]

Really want to see this. It looks like it praises Amundsen's accomplishments while not glossing over his childishness and arrogance. People always fight over him because of the crappy Roland Huntford book, but he was just a person of contrasts who accomplished a lot using native survival tactics. He completed the northwest and northeast passages, saw both poles, and was a pioneer in polar flight but in the end his arrogance and complacency did him in. He disappeared in the arctic on a mission to more or less prove a point to his rival Umberto Nobile in a sub-standard plane.

[goldenpolar]

We know a lot about Sir John Franklin. By the time he led the expedition to the Arctic in 1845, he was a household name, a naval hero and on

A little about the cook on HMS Terror, John Diggle. The men from the lower decks seem to fall through the cracks, and its always interesting to find out about the common men who didn’t pass easily into the history books.

[moonlit-rumour]

After I wrote one of my 12 Days of Carnivale stories about him, I was actually just wondering if there was any historical info on him out there, but I didn’t bother looking because I thought there probably wouldn’t be. So thanks for this!

[goldenpolar]

Lower deck folks are always hard to get a handle on, especially if you don't have the money or geographic luck to live near where records are stored. Even then it's a gamble whether or not their correspondances survived into modern times. It would be nice if more things like this were digitized and made widely available since they give a picture of what the life of the majority of the crew would have been like.

[indifferent-century]

James Clark Ross, as a Ross’s gull

I’v been challenged to draw a bunch of birds as the Arctic figures they were named after, so first I give you James-the-Ross’s-Gull Ross, who has flown further north than any other bird.

According to the Cornell Lab, the Ross’s gull is a small, elusive bird that lives far north on the arctic tundra, and winters in the pack ice. It is so hard to track that some people used to think it didn’t really exist. How fitting for an explorer who got frozen in for four years, and was presumed to be dead, before triumphantly returning to England announcing that he had charted magnetic north! The bird also has nice early 19th century sideburns :D

Based on this fabulous 1834 portrait by John R. Wildman.

[goldenpolar]

Took a while to find it, but here it is. Follow this link and scroll down until you see 'Captain Richard Campbell, RN: The Voyage of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Southern and Antarctic Regions. Captain James Clark Ross, R.N. 1839–1843. The Journal of Sergeant William K. Cunningham, R.M. of HMS Terror April 2009

There you'll find links to the three part PDF of the journal of William Cunningham, an unofficial account (being a personal journal) of James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition. Along with some great 'extras' thrown in by the editor in part 3. Even if you're more interested in the Arctic instead of the Antarctic, this gives a great picture of what life was like on a discovery ship of the mid 19th century. A ship that happens to be the HMS Terror as well. Under Francis Crozier.

[goldenpolar]

Terror stalks ice amid fears of curse after doomed Arctic ships found

Divers have been taking artefacts from wrecks of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition but six deaths have Inuit community saying they sh

Couldn't resist posting this - I just picture millenial Tunbaaq strikes Gjoa Haven on an e-scooter with a vaping cigarette and a man bun.

To be fair to my generation, it could be listening to Nirvana in a plaid shirt bitching about how things will never be as good as they were in the 70s and 80s.

[goldenpolar]

Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north-west passage

Sir John Ross's version of his failed attempt at the Northwest Passage. As always, keep in mind these books are official accounts and though written by those who participated have a certain aura about them.

[goldenpolar]

A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, During the Years 1839-43

This is the second volume of a two-volume series documenting the Antarctic voyages by Captain Sir James Clark Ross and his crew in the mid-1

A link to the google books free scan of James Clark Ross's account of his Antarctic expedition (Volume 1).

[goldenpolar]

We know a lot about Sir John Franklin. By the time he led the expedition to the Arctic in 1845, he was a household name, a naval hero and on

A little about the cook on HMS Terror, John Diggle. The men from the lower decks seem to fall through the cracks, and its always interesting to find out about the common men who didn't pass easily into the history books.

[goldenpolar]

Historical footage of a seal hunt (looks like it was filmed in the 1980s?) This film shows some of the skill and knowledge that is necessary to do this. Note how tiny the breathing hole is and the fact that the seal itself isn't even visible until its dug out. You can see why European explorers don't write much about killing seals in the arctic. The Antarctic, however, is a different game. Antarctic seals haven't evolved with any land predators, human or otherwise. They just didn't see humans as a stimulus to flee and were easily dispatched.

[goldenpolar]

Obscure things related to the Franklin Expedition- the only image I can find of Colonial Secretary John Montagu that won't require ruining my book on the fight between him and then Lt. Governor John Franklin. This guy was instrumental in Franklin's recall from Van Diemans Land. It's politically complicated and hard to make quick but here goes-

Van Diemans Land was the quintessential penal colony. One of the institutions there was the assignment system, where transported criminals were assigned as unpaid servants to free settlers of means, mostly the colonial elite. Governer George Arthur and his favorites profited by it and he was loath to be rid of transportation. Montagu was his niece's husband and one of those favourites (he actually favored chain gangs which threatened to mess with Arthur's system but that's getting too deep). When Arthur was recalled, he encouraged Franklin to maintain the former cabinet including Montagu. Franklin then decided to overhaul the system and make Van Diemans Land a culture center free from transportation, even wanting to call it Tasmania to erase the convict past.

Montagu as Colonial Secretary was the second most powerful person in Van Diemans Land, and he and Franklin ended up at loggerheads over differences of opinion. Franklin ended up dismissing Montagu, but Montagu wasn't going down without a fight. He ran back to the Colonial office in London and argued Franklin was incompetent and under too much influence from his wife. Montagu had allies in high places, and Franklin was recalled. Its obviously a lot more complex and there are more adult temper tantrums involved, but this is the really, really short version of why "Van Diemans Land was a disaster!" And why Franklin was so hot to be back in discovery service.