James Ross, so sanguine about events only a few months earlier, had come out of retirement to search for his friends, thereby breaking his promise to his wife. He took command of the 450-ton Enterprise, while Captain Bird - Crozier’s old colleague from their first Arctic expedition - took the 400-ton Investigator. Also on board Enterprise was John Robertson, the surgeon who had struck up a close friendship with Crozier during the Antarctic voyage on Terror.
The voyage was a complete failure. Enterprise and Investigator arrived in Arctic waters too late in the season and by September 1848 were halted by the ice on the edge of the Barrow Strait. The party was frozen in for eleven months at Port Leopold on the northern coast of Somerset Island, hundreds of miles to the north of where Crozier’s party was fighting for its life.
During the winter, foxes were trapped alive and fitted with copper collars carrying details of the relief expedition before being released into the wild in the faint hope that the men of Erebus and Terror might capture the animals. The futility of depending on foxes to find men lost in hundreds of thousands of square miles of Arctic wilderness summed up the hopelessness of Crozier’s party.
Captain Crozier: Last Man Standing?, Michael Smith
(via actualmichelle)
Captain Crozier: Last Man Standing?, Michael Smith
(via actualmichelle)
