Erebus. Michael Palin
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Название: Erebus
Автор: Michael Palin
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781771644426
isbn:
Ironically, it was on one of the few fine days that the worst happened.
The crew were busy mopping up and men were in the rigging spreading the sails out to dry, when the boatswain, Mr Roberts, was struck by a swinging staysail sheet and, as an eyewitness remembered, ‘whirled overboard’. A lifebuoy and various oars were immediately flung out to him, but the ship was making six knots at the time and he slipped quickly astern. Two cutters were lowered into the sea, but as they’d had to be tightly lashed down against the storms, precious time was lost in launching them. The whole tragedy was witnessed by Surgeon McCormick, who was walking the quarterdeck at the time. ‘The last I saw of him was as he rose on the top of a wave, where a gigantic petrel or two were whirling over his head and might have struck him with their powerful wings or no less powerful beak, for he disappeared all at once between two seas.’
One of the rescue cutters was hit by a cross-wave and four of her crew were thrown into the water. It is unlikely any of them could swim, there being a superstition among sailors that learning to swim was bad luck – an admission that things could go wrong. The rescue attempt could therefore have led to a multiple drowning, had it not been for the sharp reactions of Mr Oakley, the Mate on Erebus, and Mr Abernethy, the gunner, in the other, returning boat. They immediately pushed back from the ship and managed to pluck all four men out of the rolling sea, ‘completely benumbed and stupefied by the cold’. The now-overloaded cutter ran alongside the ship for some time, taking on more and more water before it was finally plucked aboard.
Roberts’s cap was recovered, but that was all. The boatswain is so central to the life of a ship that his demise must have been a shock to everyone. His piping and shout of ‘All Hands!’ would have been as common a sound as the ship’s bell. The expedition had sustained its first loss of life, just short of the first anniversary of its launch.
On 12 August they caught a glimpse of a cloud-shrouded coast line. Charts and sextant readings told them they were off the south-westerly point of New Holland (what is now Western Australia). This must have raised hopes that the worst was over, but the most destructive storm of all was still to come. The very next day it struck with more fury than any they had yet experienced. The ship was engulfed and the wind blew with such demonic intensity that the main topsail was ripped to shreds and the staysail wrenched off, leaving only the bare pole from which it once hung. ‘One vast, swelling green mountain of a sea came rolling up astern,’ McCormick recalled, ‘threatening to engulf us, sweeping over the starboard quarter-boat, in upon the quarter-deck which it deluged, drenching me to the skin, as I clung to the mizzen-mast catching hold of some gear to avoid being washed overboard.’ His graphic account continues with a memorable description of his skipper, roped in place on the deck, defying the elements, evoking Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick: ‘Captain Ross maintained his position on the weather quarter by having three turns of the mizzen topsail halyards round him for support.’ The heavy seas persisted, and although the wind abated, the hatches had to remain battened down the whole of the next day, ‘with lighted candles in the gunroom’ to dispel the gloom below decks.
On the night of 16 August, under a bright full moon, Ross records, with what can only have been almighty relief, ‘we saw the land of Tasmania ahead of us’.
Hobart in 1840, home to a mixture of free settlers and convicts. Erebus’s arrival in August of that year caused huge excitement locally.
CHAPTER 5
‘OUR SOUTHERN HOME’
In 2004, on a visit to Tasmania, I read Matthew Kneale’s book English Passengers. Though there is dark humour and fine description in the story of a mid-nineteenth-century emigrant to Tasmania, it is also a powerful indictment of the rigidity and cruelty of Victorian imperial certainties – the same certainties that motivated Barrow and Ross and Sabine and Minto, and Melville and von Humboldt and Herschel, and all the great men who dominate the life and times of HMS Erebus. These were men of intelligence and intellectual curiosity, stimulated by the spirit of the Enlightenment to search and discover, to push back the boundaries of knowledge, convinced that the more they measured and traced and calculated and recorded, the more beneficial it would be for mankind. But this sense of purpose also contained within it an implicit sense of superiority, which, when misused, fed the dark side of Britain’s increasing self-confidence. And nowhere was the light and shade of Victorian Britain more sharply defined than in the self-governing colony on whose shores HMS Erebus arrived more than three months after leaving Cape Town. Van Diemen’s Land had a population of 43,000; and 14,000 of them were convicts.
On board HMS Erebus as she made her way up Storm Bay, past the Iron Pot Lighthouse and into the shelter of the Derwent estuary, were men who had distinguished themselves on many journeys and in many fields, who had mastered the art of sailing ships through the fiercest waters on the planet, and who carried with them cases – and, indeed, cabins – full of scientific evidence. On land were many thousands of men and women who had been forcibly removed from their home country because they were judged to be born criminals, morally unsalvageable, incapable of rehabilitation. Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, embodied this unforgiving attitude and expressed it uncompromisingly in one of his letters: ‘If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict’s child should ever be a free citizen . . . It is the law of God’s Providence which we cannot alter, that the sins of the father are really visited upon the child in the corruption of his breed.’ The recipient of this letter was now the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin.
As Erebus sailed towards Hobart harbour in mid-August 1840, her captain expressed his relief, contrasting ‘the rich and beautiful scenery on both sides of the expansive and placid waters of the Derwent’ with ‘the desolate land and turbulent ocean we had so recently left’. McCormick, too, saw only a pleasing prospect: ‘The approach to Hobart Town is very picturesque.’ Sergeant Cunningham’s reflections, on the other hand, hit a rather different note: ‘This being Van Dieman’s [sic] Land, I could not help thinking . . . how many unfortunate beings has seen it . . . with a full heart and a melancholy boding that they were to terminate their existence in it, outcasts from Society and aliens from their fatherland, separated from wives, parents, friends and from every tie that links man to this vain and sublunary world. I turned from the scene with a thankfull remembrance how much better off I was than some thousands of my fellow men.’
The debate as to whether the place they had landed in should be called Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania was officially settled in Tasmania’s favour fifteen years later, in 1855. But there had been an earlier name: Lutruwita, which was the name by which the Aboriginal inhabitants knew the island, and had done for a thousand years or more. It was now redundant. As the convicts were brought in, the indigenous population was booted out. By the time the Ross expedition arrived, the brutal process of clearing the original inhabitants from their land was almost complete. Those who were left alive were confined to an Aboriginal mission on Flinders Island, off the north coast, where they were taught English ways.
The educated people of Hobart – those familiar with English ways – would have heard of the Antarctic expedition long before it arrived. The local newspapers had been following its preparations with great interest. It would, after all, be one of the boldest and most prestigious undertakings they had witnessed since the colony had been officially established, sixteen years earlier. There had been almost daily speculation about the expedition’s aims – finding the South Magnetic Pole, discovering a new continent, СКАЧАТЬ