Edward Parry
private
collection
In
1818, 40 years after the last attempt, the Admiralty renewed the quest for the
Northwest Passage, but both expeditions sent out that year failed. On the most
promising route via Davis Strait through the West of Baffin Bay, veteran Captain
and expedition leader John Ross saw his way through Lancaster Sound blocked by
mountains which he named after the Admiralty's first secretary John Wilson
Croker. Unfortunately he was the only one who saw them. Lieutenant William Edward
Parry, his second in command, slogging behind in a bad sailing ship, did not
even get the chance to have a look at the alleged mountains on his own. Back in England he was keen to return to Baffin Bay to
see if there was an outlet to the West or not. The Admiralty agreed with him
and so another expedition was sent out the next year, in 1819, under Parry.
John Ross would never command a Royal Navy ship again.
A
devout Christian with a curious scientific mind, a brilliant cartographer and
navigator with a keen interest in flora and fauna, the 29 year old Parry was
the ideal choice to lead the expedition. He chose as his second in command Lieutenant
Mathew Liddon who had proved his courage and ingenuity during the war.
The
expedition consisted of two ships. HMS Hecla, a converted bomb vessel, strongly
build to fire mortars, was commanded by Parry, the smaller 12 gun brig Griper
by Liddon. Both ships had been extra strengthened for the Arctic and were
fitted out under the watchful eye of Parry himself. Officers and men were hand-picked
by Parry as this voyage was the first deliberate attempt of an expedition to
winter in the ice. To his delight many of the men who knew him from the
previous voyage volunteered again. Among them was midshipman James Clark Ross,
John Ross's nephew.
While
stationed on the East American coast in 1816, Parry had seen the difference
between well paid and well fed American sailors and the pressed, penniless
seamen of the Royal Navy. In a letter to his parents from that time he lamented
that the best men had deserted as soon as they could and probably signed up
with the Americans right away. He knew that good treatment and payment of his
men was an important factor for success.
Parry planned his expedition
meticulously, leaving as little as possible to chance. A system of stoves,
flues, pipes and screened off beams was developed to keep the temperature below
decks as high and the moisture as low as possible while the ships were beset in
the ice. It was not perfect but would be improved from voyage to voyage. The
men were also fitted out with warm clothing and a wolf skin blanket each.
The ships were provisioned for two years
and for the first time preserved meat and vegetables were taken in large
amounts on an expedition. The usual salt meat (a favourite with the seamen) was
not amiss either and great importance was placed on scurvy preventing food from
sour kraut to pickles and lemon juice up to cress and mustard seed that Parry
cultivated in his cabin when necessary. Bread on board Hecla and Griper was
weevil-free as it was baked fresh every day with the heat of the ovens helping
to keep the ships as warm as possible.
Hecla and Griper left London in the
beginning of May 1819. In early August they proved the non-existence of Ross's Croker's
Mountains by sailing right through them, explored both sides of Lancaster Sound
and what would later be the Parry Channel, the upper part of Prince Regent Inlet,
collected the Admiralty's 5000 Pound reward when crossing the 110th
meridian and finally settling for the winter in a natural harbour off Melville
Island at the end of September. This would be Parry's most successful voyage
and one that would cast the mould for all following arctic expeditions.
After securing the ship for the winter,
most masts were struck down and the upper deck tented in by placing a "housing
cloth" over the lower spars. The deck was covered in snow and sanded to
provide an insulating pavement. Snow walls outside also provided
insulation.
To stay fit in the inactive time during
the dead of winter apart from hunting trips, daily outside games and all kinds
of physical training (like climbing a pole nicknamed "Arctic
Treadmill") was mandatory for men and officers. If the cold was too severe
for outdoor activities, they circled the upper deck to the tune of a barrel
organ or sung along.
To keep the minds of every person on
board occupied, to prevent boredom and misbehaviour, Parry came up with several
means of entertainment and distractions. A school for the sailors was opened under
the auspices of purser William Harvey Hooper with the goal that every man would
be able to read the bible when returning home. Even long after they had come
back from the voyages Hooper would receive letters of gratitude from former sailor-pupils.
Parry saw the schools as an instrument of educating not only the mind but also
the soul. He wanted to make better humans and Christians out of his men. Every
Sunday divine service was held, including a sermon read by Parry, and in his
later years he promoted Christian conduct in the Royal Navy.
Music also played an important role
during Parry's expeditions. Being a capable violinist himself he regularly gave
chamber concerts with other officers and men who played instrument. The same
purpose filled the barrel organ that Parry took on every voyage. It played
hymns, the national anthem and popular songs and was used during divine service
and as entertainment as well. The barrel organ survived to this day. It has
been restored and is now on display in the Scott Polar Research Institute,
Cambridge.
My photo is embarrassingly poor as I had to take it through the
glass pane, but it gives an impression of the organ's elaborate beauty and size.
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complete with
triangle, bells and tambourine
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It is easy to imagine the officers and
men during a slow evening mending or writing or smoking a pipe while the music
of the organ suffused the whole ship. The men in the Griper probably had to
make the music on their own or had another smaller organ. We don't just have to
imagine how Parry's organ sounded, though. The SPRI recorded some of the tunes
and the CD is still widely available. It has a bit of "Twilight Zone"
to sit at the computer writing about Parry's organ and simultaneously listen to
it almost 200 years later.
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CD cover
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As another means of providing occupation
for the mind of the officers and amusement for all a newspaper was launched as
soon as Hecla and Griper had settled down in Winter Harbour. The editor was
Edward Sabine, an Irishman from Dublin, who would later become Great Britain's leading
authority in terrestrial magnetism. The "North Georgia Gazette and Winter
Chronicle" came out every week with Edward Parry himself as ardent
contributor. All "gentlemen" were encouraged to participate and entries
for the paper were to be placed in the editor's box located on Hecla's capstan.
To ensure anonymity, every contributor was advised to sign with a fantasy name
and disguise his handwriting. As Parry wrote in his announcement of the
newspaper: "Original contributions on any subject will be acceptable. The
Sportsman and the Essayist, the Philosopher and the Wit, the Poet and the Plain
Matter-of-fact Man, will each find their respective places."
The Gazette contained a variety of
entries like witty letters to the editor, poems, riddles, births and deaths of
four legged and feathered ships company, lost-and-founds and other funny and
entertaining contributions like the "Arctic Miseries" which lists a
string of accidents and nuisances that can occur when wintering in the ice.
Such as stepping into the hole in the ice the cook uses to water the salt meat,
rushing from the table because there is a wolf outside to find out it's just a
dog while in the meantime the cat carries away your dinner, being surprised by
a bear when coming home after an evening in the other ship and getting tea for
breakfast that was accidentally made from salt water. There is also a list of little
shipmate induced nuisances one is subjected to in a confined space with thin
walls like the Whistlers, Hummers, Drummers, Bangers, Nose Blowers and Door
Slammers.
Apart from Parry the officers who seemed
to have had the most zest for wielding the quill were Griper's clerk Cyrus
Wakeham and Hecla's purser Hooper. The pen names ranged from Abigail Handicraft
and Timothy Quill-Splitter (Parry), Henry Harmless and Quintilian Querulous
(Wakeham), Little-Brain Lack-Wit and Smell Rat Smoke'em (Hooper) to the plain
J. by James Clark Ross, who did his best to convey the beauty behind a natural
phenomenon with the poem "Lines suggested by the brilliant Aurora, Jan. 15,
1820".
One recurring column in the "North
Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle" was the theatre review. Again as entertainment
for the men and also to occupy the officers, the few suitable theatre plays
from the ship's libraries and also self-composed and written songs, plays and
operas were performed with the officers playing both men and women. The Arctic Theatre
opened for the first time on November 5th with Garrick's 1747 play
"Miss in her Teens". Parry and Hoppner played Fribble and Jasper, the
ill-suited suiters touting for Miss Biddy Bellair (F. W. Beechey, who also
painted the set). Biddy is secretly in love with Bob Loveit (W. N. Griffiths) but
has also Bob's widowed father (J. Nias) courting her. The play was enhanced by
an epilogue, songs and an address all by the gifted Cyrus Wakeham. The other
two female roles were played by surgeon Charles Beverly and William Hooper.
The next play to follow was Samuel
Foote's "The Liar" without Parry in an acting part, but the female
roles were again portrayed by Beverley, Hooper and for the first time James
Ross. The other actors were Nias, Sabine, Beechey and Wakeham. It is
interesting that of the seven plays that formed the repertory of the Royal
Arctic theatre in its first season the actors in most female characters were
Hooper (six roles) and Ross (five). For the crew it must have been a huge
source of amusement (as it was Parry's intention) to see their officers in
female or at least humorous roles and it speaks for the good atmosphere on
board of both ships that all these activities did not weaken the respect the
men had for their superiors.
The ships were released from the ice in
August 1820 and started to proceed further to the West but the icy maelstrom of
the Beaufort Gyre would not even yield to Edward Parry. They were back in England
at the end of October, having lost only one man.
When Parry almost instantly proposed the
next voyage to the Admiralty of course nobody had an objection. He left no
doubt that he himself did not think he would succeed in finding the passage as
the wanted to try an access towards the Northeast of Hudson Bay and knew the
chances were slim. His argument was that they had to look to rule that way out
and the Admiralty followed his reasoning. This time Parry insisted in taking
two identical ships which could provide spare parts for each other and had more
equal sailing abilities. The trusted Hecla was joined by the equally dauntingly
named Fury as she, too, had once been a "bomb".
14 officers stayed on from the last
voyage. Notable new additions were Edward Bird and Francis Crozier. Together
with James Clark Ross they were to form a close circle of friends only to be
broken by Crozier's disappearance and subsequent death. Why Francis Crozier applied
for exploration service we can only guess. At that time he served on HMS Dotterel,
protecting the English and Irish shore. But there was only so much to patrol
against as England had successfully kicked all her enemies out of the game.
There still was a vast surplus of officers and those who were on active duty in
calm seas had only a slim prospect of promotion. The Dotterel was about to be
paid off a few weeks later, so he needed another engagement. He had been on
board the Briton chasing American frigates when Pitcairn was rediscovered and
with it John Adams, the last mutineer of the Bounty. On the same voyage he collected
indigenous weapons in the Marquesas. Perhaps he was interested in exploration,
perhaps he hoped to climb up the narrow ladder of promotion faster, perhaps it
was thirst for adventure or Parry's reputation… Whatever the reason, 1821 saw
Francis Crozier join Parry's second expedition and serve as midshipman in the
Fury, his first step to become one of the most experienced polar explorers in
the age of sail.
Unfortunately for us on this and the
subsequent voyages the newspaper was scraped. Probably with Sabine and Wakeham not
participating in the expedition, Parry feared he would end up doing most of the
work himself. It would have been interesting to see if and what Francis Crozier
had contributed and to probably learn a lot more about shipboard life during
Parry's second and following voyages.
Parry took the barrel organ with him on
the Fury and an anonymous benefactress had gifted the ships with a
phantasmagoria (laterna magica) which under the artistic genius of George
Francis Lyon, who commanded the Hecla, became a big hit. (Parry's former second
in command Matthew Liddon had to stay home due to poor health and would not be able
to command another ship for the rest of his life.) Parry also took up the
regular musical soirees again.
The Arctic Theatre was revived with a
vengeance. Lyon wrote in his own ironic and eloquent style in his narrative:
"A liberal subscription having been
made amongst the officers prior to leaving England, by which a stock of
theatrical clothes, &c. was purchased, it was now proposed by Captain Parry
that … we should make arrangements for performing plays once a fortnight
throughout the winter ... As there could be no desire or hope of excelling,
every officer's name was readily entered on the list of dramatis personae.
Those ladies who had cherished the
growth of their beards and whiskers, as a defence against the inclemency of the
climate, now generously agreed to do away with such unfeminine ornaments, and
every thing bode fair for a most stylish theatre."
We know that Crozier acted at least in
two substantial roles. On November 9, 1821, the theatre opened on board the
Fury with Richard Brindsley Sheridan's "The Rivals". The comedy from
1775 is a tour de force of love and mistaken identity. Crozier played duel-happy
"Sir Lucius O'Trigger" who falls for the love letters of the ripe and
big-words-challenged Mrs. Malaprop (midshipman C. Richards), mistaking the "Delia"
of the letters for young Lydia Languish (midshipman J. Sherer). Lydia's letter
however are directed to Captain Absolute (Lyon) who made her think he is the
poor ensign Beverley, as she's rather the romantic type who believes in love
that thrives in poverty. There is a second couple of lovers with a big jealousy
issue which is not made better by Sir Lucius's "help". In the end Sir
Lucius realises that he had been played and rejects Mrs. Malaprop whereas the
other couples finally get each other, the duel(s) avoided. Sir Lucius is described in the play as "tall
Irish baronet" and although Francis Crozier might not have been
particularly tall, the role must have been great fun for him to play.
Crozier's second role was that of
country inn waiter Sam in Joe Miller's "Raising the Wind" from 1803.
The play revolves around charming freeloader Jeremy Diddler (Lyon) and also
involves mistaken identity and misrouted love letters. Sam, ironic and smart,
might be from the country but he sees right through Diddler's act. Not without
a certain admiration, though.
Unfortunately nothing is known about
other roles Francis Crozier acted in, but with his good natured personality and
sense of comradeship it is hard to imagine him not participating further.
One who is notably absent from the bills
of the first three plays, however, is James Ross and so far I haven't seen others.
He was probably quite occupied with scientific work now with Sabine staying behind
in England.
From then on the theatre was
"rigged" every fortnight on the Fury and not even frozen extremities
could stop the hardy actors from pleasing their audience as G. F. Lyon
testifies in January 1822:
"The coldness of the weather proved
no bar to the performance of a play at the appointed time. If it amused the
seamen, our purposes were answered, but it was a cruel task for the performers.
In our green-room which was as much warmed as any other part of the theatre,
the thermometer stood at 16°, and on a table which was placed over a stove, and
about six inches above it, the coffee froze in the cups. For my sins I was
obliged to be dressed in the height of the fashion, as Dick Dowlass, in the
"Heir at Law," and went through the last scene of the play with two
of my fingers frost-bitten!"
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The Arctic
Theatre
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A few weeks after that performance, the
Fury and Hecla received their first visitors from the Inuit group in the
vicinity of Winter Island, providing welcome distraction and resulting in a
peaceful coexistence beneficial to both sides. Parry and Lyon studied their new
neighbours at Winter Island and Igloolik, where they wintered in 1822/23, with
great interest and presented a fascinating insight into Inuit life in their
respective narratives. Apart from anthropologic and more or less scientific studies
and experiments, living in close proximity to each other entailed mutual visits
and hunting trips, festivities and music, learning from each other and
providing medical assistance when many of the Inuit fell sick and Francis
Crozier was employed to transport some to the ships for help. Friendships were
struck and according to Charles Francis Hall Crozier might have exchanged names
with an Inuit boy and so became "Aglooka".
When in 1823 the ice in Fury and Hecla
Strait would still not yield and despite all precautions scurvy started to raise
its ugly head in both ships, Parry decided to return home to England.
He was not ready to give up on the
Northwest Passage, though. The spring of 1824 saw him sail through Davis Strait
again and with him many of his merry band of Arctic thespians. 15 officers
stayed on from the last expedition including Crozier, Ross and Bird, the three
arctic musketeers. This time the Hecla was selected as leading ship with the
Fury being commanded by Henry Parkyns Hoppner, who had come a long way from
being Parry's first lieutenant in the Alexander during the John Ross expedition
in 1818. (G. F. Lyon had gotten his own
expedition at the same time, unsuccessfully trying with the old and still poorly
performing Griper to reach Repulse Bay through a strait in the west of Hudson's
Bay.)
James Clark Ross had advanced to
lieutenant and shared that post with Horatio Austin in the Fury. Edward Bird
was one of the Fury's midshipmen and Francis Crozier, still midshipman, served
under Parry in the Hecla. Promotion also meant a pay rise which was nothing the
Navy was too generous about in peace times
The ships left Deptford on May 8, 1824, but
this time the journey did not sail under a favourable star. They encountered
one of the most severe winters with the temperature about 20 degrees lower than
in the five years before in the same latitude. One of the bad omens of the
voyage came early on when the expedition got beset already in the "Middle
Ice" in Davis Strait for weeks before the exhausted officers and men were
able to extricate the ships. They reached the entrance to Prince Regent Inlet by
mid-September only to be almost pushed out of Lancaster Sound again by the
young ice and adverse winds. They tediously fought their way back into Prince
Regent Inlet and in the beginning of October had to settle for winter quarters
in Port Bowen that Parry had discovered five years earlier.
By then wintering in the ice had become
a routine to Parry and his men. The organ, phantasmagoria, musical instruments,
school, observations, games, trips and exercise played an important role in the
winter routine again. Before he sailed, Parry had been given some trunks with
theatrical outfits by the ladies of Bath, his home town, but he had the feeling
that after three winters in the ice "our former amusements being almost
worn threadbare" something new was required to keep officers and men
occupied and distracted from dark, mischievous or mutinous thoughts. The
ingenious solution was proposed by Captain Hoppner and the officers of the Fury:
a masquerade with officers and men being able to participate on equal terms,
where everything could be worn from a simple domino (which was the minimum
costume to be admitted) to an elaborate fancy dress and everybody could decide
freely how much he wanted to participate.
Right after the announcement both ships
were abuzz with a happy frenzy of creative activity that had the desired effect
of lightening up everybody's mood, give the whole company something to occupy
their minds with and let roam free their inner child.
Hierarchy was cast aside when a mix of
officers and men performed little scenes together to show off their costume
making, acting and comedy skills. The Blue Bell, a well-known Deptford watering
hole that was undoubtedly frequented by many of the men before departure, was
resurrected in the ships' holds including the portly owner James Jones,
impersonated by Fury's Marine Sergeant John Morrison. Currency in the pub consisted
of tokens bearing Captain Hoppner's seal of which three were distributed to
each of the men before the ball. They were already used beforehand to pay for
masquerade-related items such as borrowed petticoats, wigs, artificial flowers
or other much needed attire or the use of a shipmate's craftsmanship. Here the
Heclas had an unfair advantage, being in possession of the heaps of discarded
dresses from the ladies in Bath.
By employing "celebrated artists in
this country" skilfully painted bills, transparencies and scenery added to
the festive atmosphere.
The following illustration shows a masquerade on
board the Resolute in 1850 as an example for the costumes that most likely would also have been used during Parry's voyage
The first masquerade was announced for
November 1st, 1824, at six O'clock in the "Royal Arctic
Assembly Rooms" on board the Fury (Hecla's would take place in the
"Royal and Original Polar Rooms"). In the intervals between the
amusements "two celebrated performers on the Violin" would play
quadrilles, waltzes, country dances and reels.
The first pair to appear was Edward
Parry as a veteran from Waterloo, including wooden leg, with his spouse
"Sukey" (James Halse, purser in Fury) playing a violin and tambourine
while robustly demanding to be gratified in pennies form the delighted audience.
The second pair was Captain Hoppner as a
"fashionable lady of rank" with Francis Crozier as "her"
black footman, outfitted in a livery of "a light blue coat with scarlet
facings, scarlet breeches, white stockings and a gold laced hat". Fury's
purser William Mogg writes in his unpublished narrative they were "aptly
supported", which seems to indicate that Francis Crozier's thespian
talents could well keep us with those of his shipmates.
Other
characters were monks, street vendors, farmers, Highland chiefs, bricklayers, a
recruiting captain, seamen of the Temeraire, street sweepers and an important
doctor who kept calling a cab to take him home, throwing a fit when he heard
that there was no such thing as a cab in the arctic.
The next masquerade took place in Hecla
on January 3rd, 1825. One scene contained three undertakers chasing
a ghost and burying him in a heap of sand on the deck, not knowing that the
smallish ghost was Captain Hoppner. Notwithstanding being handled a bit rough,
Hoppner reappeared shortly after escaping his sandy grave dressed as a country
squire, telling the undertakers that he hoped he wouldn't need them anytime
soon. Unfortunately Hoppner died eight years later from poor health.
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Edward Bird, Charles Richards, Francis
Crozier
Head of Masqerade Ball by C. Staub, February
2, 1825
© RoyalGeographical
Society (with IBG) |
The third masquerade on February 2nd1825 was held on Fury under the motto "We aim at Cheerfulness".
Apparently it was opened by the three midshipmen Edward Joseph Bird, Charles
Richards and Francis Crozier. Richards is playing the flute while Bird and
Crozier are pirouetting away to his tune. The drawing is done by a C. Staub but
other than that there seems to be a Staub Point near Melville Island I couldn't
find out more about him, yet.
The
masquerades would alternate with Parry's musical soirees and so every week had
at least one highlight. The ships were freed from the ice in late July 1825.
They proceeded down Prince Regent Inlet where disaster struck in August. The Fury
was thrown ashore at what would become Fury Beach and eventually had to be
abandoned by the end of the same month. Both crews squeezed into Hecla and returned
to England in Mid-October 1825.
Most
of the Fury's provisions had been left on the pebbled beach in Prince Regent
Inlet and almost ten years later would save John Ross and his nephew when they
had to abandon their ship during a privately financed expedition.
Parry, Ross, Bird, and Crozier would
undertake one more expedition together. They took the Hecla to Spitzbergen to
find the geographical North Pole, but Parry was defeated by the ice and returned
to England without wintering again. His ideas and inventions prevailed, passed
on to the officers of the "Parry School" and from them to following
generations. The company of the Arctic Theatre and participants in the
masquerades grew considerably after 1848 with the number of ships that wintered
in the Arctic while searching for Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128. Among the missing, as captain of HMS Terror and Franklin's second in command, was Francis
Crozier, one of the first Arctic thespians.
Sources
Published
George
Francis Lyon:
The
private journal of Captain G.F. Lyon, of H.M.S. Hecla, during the recent voyage
of discovery under Captain Parry
London,
John Murray, 1824.
William
Edward Parry:
Journal
of a voyage for the discovery of a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the
Pacific London, John Murray, 1821.
Journal
of a second voyage for the discovery of a north-west passage from the Atlantic
to the Pacific
London,
John Murray, 1824.
Journal
of a third voyage for the discovery of a northwest passage, from the Atlantic
to the Pacific
London,
John Murray, 1826.
Rev.
Edward Parry, M.A.:
Memoirs
of Rear-Admiral Sir W. Edward Parry
Longman,
Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859.
Ann
Parry:
Parry
of the Arctic
London,
Chatto&Windus, 1963.
Edward
Sabine et. al.:
The
North Georgia Gazette, and Winter Chronicle
London,
John Murray, 1819.
S. M. Silverman
The Authorship of the Newspaper on Parry’s First Arctic Expedition, 1819-20
Arctic, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 1985, P. 65 - 67.
Michael Smith
Captain Francis Crozier, Last Man Standing?
Cork, The Collins Press, 2006.
Unpublished
William
Mogg
The
Papers of William Mogg
University of
Southampton Special Collections
GB
738 MS 45
