#Plastered onto Crozier's face

[leadandblood]

Honestly? I look like if Crozier and Fitzjames had a kid and that's so hot of me. If I ever start t i will be unstoppable

[writing-creative-fiction]

Two ‘expeditions’ of my own in recent weeks have taken me out of the unbearabe heat of an unusually searing summer sun into the cool, air-conditioned enclaves of, first London’s National Portrait Gallery and secondly, Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum.

The Portraits

In the Victorian Gallery of the Portrait Gallery, among many representations of  influential men and women of that era, I discovered the following remarkably similar portraits by Stephen Pearce (1819-1904): the one on the left is of Sir Robert McClure R.N. (1807-1873); the one on the right is of Sir Francis Leopold McClintock R.N. (1819-1907).

McClure

McClintock

McClure joined the Royal Navy in 1824, made his first Arctic voyage in 1836-37, and played a prominent role in the search for the lost Franklin expedition of 1845. He was rewarded by Parliament for being the first to traverse the elusive and much sort after North West Passage – albeit he did so partly on foot – in 1854, and survived a Court Martial for abandoning his ships to serve in China and ultimately be promoted to Vice-Admiral in 1873.

McClintock joined the Royal Navy in 1831 and made his first Arctic voyage in 1848, just as concerns for the fate of the 1845 expedition were beginning to be raised. He commanded the 1857-59 expedition that discovered the Victory Point Record, among other relics and artefacts, that eventually proved the loss of Franklin and his entire crew of 129 men. Knighted in 1860, McClintock continued to command Royal Navy voyages until his retirement in 1884.

Also of interest in relation to this project, are these plaster medallions – created by Bernard Smith (1820-1885) – of (on the left) Sir John Richardson R.N. (1787-1865) and (on the right) Sir James Clark Ross R.N. (1800-1862).

Richardson had accompanied Sir John Franklin on two Arctic voyages, in 1819 and 1825, and in 1847 he led the first of the expeditions sent in search of the misssing 1845 expedition. Richardson also wrote a magnificent biographical entry on Franklin for the eighth volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in February 1856, and it was reading this tribute that inspired Charles Dickens to say (in a letter to John Forster, dated March 1856)

I think Richardson’s manly friendship and love of Franklin, one of the noblest things I ever knew in my life. It makes ones heart beat high, with a sort of sacred joy.

(Dickens (vol 8), 1993, p. 66)

Dickens drew on this ‘manly friendship and love’ to develop the characters of Richard Wardour and Frank Aldersley when working with Wilkie Collins on their Arctic drama The Frozen Deep (see Brannon, 1966) and subsequently when creating the character of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

But I digress onto a pet subject! Sir James Clark Ross R.N.  – represented by the right-hand medallion above – is credited with discovering Magnetic North in 1831, commanded an expedition to the Antarctic in 1839-43, and led an Arctic expedition in search of Franklin in 1848-49. His uncle, John Ross, was also an Arctic explorer but fell out of favour with the Admiralty after turning-back on an expedition because he had seen a ‘mountain range’ that it later transpired was an hallucination caused by weather conditions.

This portrait of Sir Edwin Landseer also caught my eye, especially as I had just had lunch in Trafalgar Square watching a group of young Italian tourists clambering all over the finished lions. Here they are shown alongside their designer and creator in his workshop. Landseer, of course, was renowned from an early age for his represenations of wildlife and animals, among which is his only Arctic painting ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, which I featured in my first blog post in November 2017.

The Songs

At the National Maritime Museum, at an event organised in partnership with another of my favourite institutions The English Folk Dance and Song Society, I discovered a little of the history and lyrics of songs associated with Dr. John Rae, the Orkney-born Arctic explorer and Hudson’s Bay Company Factor who caused outrage in mid-century Victorian England by implying that the men of the lost Franklin expedition may have resorted to cannibalism. He had strong evidence to prove this, and science has more recently confirmed his findings, but he was derided and disbelieved in his own time and denied the honours and recognition that he deserved – again I digress to a favourite pet subject, and shall post more about this I suspect during, and/or following, my visit to Rae’s homeland in October this year.

As for the songs, there was one I was already familiar with as it is still sung regularly in Folk Clubs and at other traditional music sessions around the UK today. Called Lady Franklin’s Lament it has, like most songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, many different versions of varying length.  Waltz and Engle, writing in 2015, state that “Broadside versions [of this ballad] probably date from the period 1850-1853”.

The version we learnt at the workshop was entitled Lady Franklin’s Lament for her Husband.  Longer than the commonly sung, more recent, versions it was sourced through both the Glasgow and Edinburgh Broadside Ballad Collections by the workshop’s co-ordinator, Orkney folk singer Aimee Leonard. In common with all versions, however, it tells the tale of a sailor dreaming that he’s heard “a female” who “can take no rest” weeping aloud that

Ten thousand pounds would I freely give, To say on earth that my husband do live.

The female is, of course, Franklin’s wife, Jane, who did offer rewards of £2000 and £3000 in March 1848 and March 1849 respectively, but not of as much as £10,000; maybe there is some poetic licence here. Nevertheless, Lady Franklin’s rewards were no doubt an incentive that preyed on the mind of many a poor sailor searching the Arctic seas for the lost expedition, and their exaggeration of the amount – or their conflation of it with larger rewards offered by the Government – is understandable.

The second song, Lament for Francis Crozier, was written in 2001 by Irish singer, mountaineer and polar explorer Frank Nugent whilst sailing near King William Island in a ship called the Northabout.  Francis Crozier had met, and fallen in love with, Franklin’s wife’s niece, Sophia Cracroft, when his ships called at Van Diemen’s Land (VDL; renamed Tasmania in 1856) during a voyage to Antarctica in the 1830s. Franklin was then Governer of VDL and entertained the Officers of the ships on which Crozier was serving – coincidentally, these were the same two ships, The Erebus and The Terror, on which Franklin sailed to the Arctic in 1845 with Crozier as his second-in-command. Crozier saw this voyage as his great chance to impress Sophia and thus win her heart, and her hand in marriage.  Sadly, as we know, this was not to be, and indeed it is likely that it never could have been.  Instead, Crozier was forced to take command of the expedition when Franklin died in 1847 (we know this because of the Victory Point Record I mentioned earlier) and he himself perished, we know not how, along with all the men under his command. As the song concludes:

Oh, what hardship and pain, did your poor seamen suffer … … you starved on the banks of Back’s Great Fish River The [North West] Passage it led you to heaven’s green shore.

Song 3 came from a collection of Songs of the North printed on board HMS Assistance during her 1850-51 expedition in search of Franklin. One of the ways in which crews entertained themselves during long lingering months stuck amid Arctic ice was to put on theatre shows and HMS Assistance was, at this time, home to The Royal Arctic Theatre – just as their compatriots aboard HMS Resolute in 1850-51 were home to the periodical newspaper The Illustrated Arctic News, a parody of London’s Illustrated London News, established in 1842.

Song 3, then, was sung at the closing of The Royal Arctic Theatre on 4th March 1851 by Lieutenant R.D.Aldrich R.N. and it opens with a plea to:

Come cheer up my lads! the season draws near When all wish to strive, nor care where they steer, …

whilst its chorus avows that:

Our hearts are all stout, and our motto shall be, Ready! aye ready! Ready! aye ready! To rescue our comrades from dire misery.

Dire misery indeed! But admirable sentiments with which to reinvigorate cold, hungry men suffering a multitude of minor ailments after a winter stuck in Arctic ice that was now abating and allowing their ships to move on.

Conclusions

These songs and portraits tell us much of the character and spirit of the men who ventured, literally, to the ends of the earth in order to advance geographic and scientific knowledge. They represent in words and pictures the images that their subjects and masters wanted the public to hear and see; images of men who could conquer the bleak wilderness of the Arctic and remain true to the gentlemanly ideals of the British establishment; images a nation’s ability to withstand everything the world could throw at it; images, ultimately, of arrogance and intransigence in the face of all circumstance.

  Works Cited

Brannan, Robert Louis, Under the Management of Mr Charles Dickens: His production of The Frozen Deep. New York: Cornell University Press, 1966

Dickens (vol 8), Charles, The Letters of Charles Dickens; Volume 8. 1856-1858, Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Waltz, R. B., & Engle, D. G. (2015). Lady Franklin’s Lament (The Sailor’s Dream) [Laws K9] – part 01. Retrieved May 28, 2016, from http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/ballads/LK09.html

    Songs and Portraits Two 'expeditions' of my own in recent weeks have taken me out of the unbearabe heat of an unusually searing summer sun into the cool, air-conditioned enclaves of, first London's…