Captain Francis Crozier Read online

  This book is dedicated to those who mean most to me:

  Barbara, Daniel and Nathan.

  Contents

  Frontispiece

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: A Modest, Unassuming Man

  1

  A Bond with History

  2

  To the Arctic

  3

  Seizing the Moment

  4

  A Promise

  5

  Fatal Errors

  6

  Wreck of the Fury

  7

  North Pole Trek

  8

  Arctic Rescue

  9

  South

  10

  Flirting with Love

  11

  An Epic Voyage

  12

  Dangerous Waters

  13

  Trembling Hands

  14

  ‘I Am Not Equal to the Hardship’

  15

  A Sense of Tragedy

  16

  The North West Passage

  17

  Ice

  18

  ‘No Cause for Alarm’

  19

  Breakout

  20

  A Slow Execution

  21

  Last Man Standing?

  22

  The Unsolved Mystery Endures

  23

  A Fitting Memorial

  Appendix: Francis Crozier: A Chronology

  References

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  If you have enjoyed this book …

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  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 for what 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 a difficult one for a writer. Although the most acceptable term today is Inuit, the term Eskimo (or Esquimaux) was commonly used during the nineteenth century. For the purposes of this book, I have opted for the contemporary term of Eskimo. 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 conversion to kilometres.

  Acknowledgements

  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. 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.

  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 has 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 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 Shirley Sawtell for her patient endeavours on my behalf in the library of the Scott Polar Research Institute and to Robert Headland, the archivist, for permission to inspect and quote from material in the Institute’s archives.

  I am very grateful for the consistently 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.

  I received painstaking and valuable assistance from John Hagan, a native of Banbridge now living in Tasmania. He gave me important advice and valued help in researching and comprehending the links between Francis Crozier and Tasmania. I must also thank Doris Hagan for her contribution, which is much appreciated.

  Frank Nugent – a member of the first Irish party to sail the North West Passage – was a generous and considerate supporter of this work. I will always be grateful to him for his unselfish assistance and willingness to share his knowledge of Ireland’s long involvement in polar exploration. I am also grateful for the helpful advice I received from David Murphy and the useful contributions of Maria Pia Casarini, Louie Emerson, Dr James McAdam and Horace Reid.

  I have, where possible, 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. My special thanks to Joe O’Farrell for reading the manuscript and providing much thoughtful and constructive advice.

  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.

  Michael Smith

  June 2006

  Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, explorer, sailor and scientist.

  Introduction

  A Modest, Unassuming Man

  There is a common perception that all the great stories from the history of polar exploration involve the outstanding figures of the early twentieth century – the ‘heroic age’ – such as Roald Amundsen, Tom Crean and Ernest Shackleton. Each undoubtedly warrants his place in the pantheon of great figures whose incredible exploits rightly separate them from us mere mortals.

  Yet to focus entirely on this era would be mistaken. There are explorers from an earlier age who also deserve to have their extraordinary stories told – men whose lives and remarkable achievements rank with those of their successors, and whose feats merit greater praise. Such men made history and mapped the unknown, yet have been largely overlooked or forgotten in the modern era. Such a man was Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier.

  Francis Crozier sprang from an old-established Irish family about 200 years ago to travel on six histor
ic journeys of exploration and discovery at both ends of the world. It would be impossible today to be as cut off and isolated from civilisation for as long as Crozier was during his successive journeys into unexplored territories; or to be as lost as Crozier was at the end of his life.

  In an outstanding career at sea spanning almost 40 years, the name Captain Francis Crozier was coupled with the three great endeavours of nineteenth-century exploration: navigating the North West Passage, reaching the North Pole and mapping the Antarctic. Few explorers of the polar regions spent as much of their lives on the ice as Crozier and even fewer equalled his record of six voyages – voyages characterised by long, dark winters above the Arctic Circle whilst deprived of fresh provisions and long before modern-day emergency support and communications.

  What is not always fully appreciated is that the pioneering journeys undertaken by Crozier opened the doors of the Arctic and Antarctic for those who followed in the twentieth century, among them Amundsen, Crean and Shackleton. As one of the few explorers of any era to venture into both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, it might be assumed that Crozier’s name is known from pole to pole. But fame and recognition eluded Crozier.

  He was a modest, unassuming man who received scant reward from his superiors and who was never asked to write a book about his adventurous life and great exploits. Alone among his renowned circle of friends and fellow explorers – among them Parry, Ross and Franklin – Crozier did not receive a knighthood or any notable commendation for his prodigious efforts.

  Following his death in one of the most barren and desolate corners of the world, he faded from history. Only the assiduous efforts of a hard core of admirers, particularly around his Irish home town of Banbridge, County Down, have kept the memory of Francis Crozier alive.

  I have always nursed a fondness for the unsung hero, the unobtrusive person whose character or achievements are underestimated or even overlooked by history. It was this curious fascination that led me to write the first biography of the indestructible Irish polar explorer, Tom Crean and to employ the appropriate title, An Unsung Hero.

  Crozier is another unsung hero: an outstanding explorer poorly treated by history and who deserves far wider recognition for accomplishments that would have been remarkable in any age of exploration.

  This is the first comprehensive biography of Crozier and it has a simple aim: to place Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier among those exceptional men who shaped Arctic and Antarctic history.

  chapter one

  A Bond with History

  The long line to Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, one of the nineteenth-century’s most prolific and undervalued polar explorers, can be reliably traced back 600 years and with less certainty by a full thousand 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 emerge when they joined the armies of William the Conqueror to invade England in the historic year of 1066. After defeating the English at the Battle of Hastings, large swathes of captured lands were given to William’s valued supporters, including Robert le Brus, who was to establish a line of 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 small 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 – known as ‘moss troopers’ – operating along the unruly frontier between England and Scotland, where robbery, kidnap and murder were 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 in 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.

  The mass plantation of Ulster by settlers in the first decades of the seventeenth century saw John Crozier, a cavalry captain, leave the Durham estate in the early 1630s and travel to Dublin Castle as a member of the troops guarding 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.

  One charge levelled against Wentworth was that he had been preparing to send the army in Ireland – among its ranks Captain John Crozier – to England in support of the king against the mounting parliamentary opposition to the monarchy. 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 north-eastern counties of Antrim and Down. They cemented their social status over the years with a succession of wellchosen 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 the 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 – called 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 Crozier married Mary Frazer, a member of the eminent Lovat family, one of Scotland’s oldest and wealthiest landowning dynasties. Like the Croziers, the Frazers first came to Britain 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 Franc
is 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 Crozier, a successful solicitor who manoeuvred the family away from its traditional sphere of property ownership and soldiering, and who built one of Ireland’s most successful legal practices. George Crozier was 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 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 to subdue uprisings. The Hills later acquired estates at Cromlyn – from the Irish word cromghlin, meaning ‘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.