An important copy of this rare map, owned by Joseph Dalton Hooker, assistant surgeon aboard HMS Erebus on James Clark Ross’s Antarctic expedition of 1839-43. Marked up with the progress of ship HMS Terror.
Hooker owned two copies of this map. The first was taken on the voyage itself, and annotated by second master, John Davis (1815-1877) where it was trimmed, segmented, and laid down on linen so it might easily fold in four. This appears to be a working copy after the voyage. While the red ink looks identical to that of the first, the hand is probably Hooker’s. The tracks cover Ross’s first voyage south from his departure from Hobart in 12 November, 1840, to the return on 6 March, 1841. The red tracks mark the voyage south, the blue show the return.
These tracks coincide with those in the “South Polar Chart shewing the discoveries and track of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror during the Years 1840.1.2.3” which is found in the second volume of Ross’s A Voyage of Discovery … (1847). It is almost certainly one of the sources for both Ross’s published map and the “Chart of the South Circumpolar Regions” used by Hooker in his Botany of the Antarctic Voyage (1844).
The annotations are more discursive than on the copy taken on the voyage or the published versions: importantly, the discovery of Mt Erebus is noted, the position of 84 icebergs, then the first sighting of Aurora Australis (the southern hemisphere’s equivalent of the Aurora Borealis), and the position of where the last iceberg was seen en route back to Hobart.
Howgego narrates this part of the voyage in detail:
“The Erebus and Terror departed Hobart on 12.11.40, arrived at the Auckland Islands a week later, then at Campbell Island the following day. On 17.12.40, after carrying out the necessary measurements, Ross and Crozier sailed south and crossed the Antarctic Circle on 1.1.41. Icebergs and floes began to multiply and the weather remained unsettled, but on 5.1.41 Ross decided to push on to the south and four days later found himself again in the open water of the Ross Sea. On 11.1.41, to the disappointment of Ross who had hoped that the magnetic pole would lie under the sea, land was sighted ahead - the coast of Victoria Land. The prominent range of mountains was christened Admiralty Range and on 12.1.41 the Union Jack was raised on Possession Island and the land claimed for Queen Victoria. Magnetometric readings suggested that the magnetic pole was still 800 kilometres away, so Ross decided to follow the coast to the south and on 22.1.41 reached a latitude higher than the previous record established by James Weddell (q.v.). On 27.1.41 Franklin Island was discovered and formally possessed, and on the following day Robert McCormick described to the south an active volcanic peak. This was named Mount Erebus, and a smaller extinct volcano to the east, Mount Terror. The South Magnetic Pole was estimated to lie at about 75ºS, 256 kilometres in the interior to the west.
“Further penetration to the south was blocked by an endless perpendicular ice-cliff, from fifteen to sixty metres high, named by Ross the Victoria Barrier but later called the Ross Ice Shelf. Turning east, the two ships followed the ice shelf for 320 kilometres, until on 9.2.41 Ross turned back to the west, having decided that to penetrate the shelf was as likely as sailing a ship through the white cliffs of Dover. By 15.2.41 he was back at Franklin Island; the sea was beginning to freeze and it was decided to make a prompt departure. The exit through the ice floes was more difficult than the entry, particularly when on 7.3.41 the loss of wind left the expedition at the mercy of strong swells. After rounding the Balleny Islands, Ross took the ships west to investigate the coastal mountains seen by Wilkes and marked on his chart. Curiously, Ross found that he could sail directly over the position at which Wilkes had placed his mountains, thereby making a mockery of the American’s observations. It would transpire that Wilkes had been deceived by the phenomenon of inverted mirage, by which the refractive qualities of the atmosphere cause distant objects to appear much closer. After what had been an exceptionally easy voyage, the Erebus and Terror anchored in the Derwent River, Tasmania, on 6.4.41; the crews of both ships were in perfect health and good spirits.”
Published in June 1839 by the Hydrographic Office, the map was prepared especially for James Clark Ross, who was given his orders just two months’ prior. So little was known of Antarctica at that time that they could afford to put the map’s title and publication details across the very centre of it. The map does however include the printed tracks of the voyages of Bellingshausen, Cook, James Weddell, John Biscoe, and Peter Kemp, with sightings as recent as February 1839.
Hooker (1817-1911), a friend and supporter of Darwin and one of the century’s leading scientists, was also the naturalist on Erebus. Writing in 1905, the distinguished geographer Hugh Robert Mill remarked: “The youngest officer on the expedition (he was only 21), Sir Joseph Hooker has outlived all his shipmates and risen to the first rank amongst British men of science, always cherishing the memory of those years of unprecedented interest passed on the great voyage of discovery and largely instrumental sixty years later in securing the renewal of Antarctic research.” Further, he describes the annotator, John Edward Davis, as “a skilled draughtsman who prepared the charts of the expedition, took advantage of every opportunity presented to him, and in his letters home gave a very vivid account of the incidents of the cruise.”
The history of Antarctic discovery commenced with James Cook’s crossing of the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773. The next crossing of the Antarctic Circle, in 1820, was by the Russian Fabien Bellingshausen. On 27 January, he reached 69º21’28“S, 2º14’50”W and spotted the ice-fields of the Antarctic mainland in the distance. Knowledge of the region grew as sealers and whalers, such as James Weddell, ventured south, but it wasn’t until the late 1830s that exploration of the region became more organized with the United States Exploring Expedition under Charles Wilkes, Jules Dumont d’Urville’s second voyage on the Astrolabe, and James Clark Ross on Erebus and Terror. All three of these expeditions specifically sought the magnetic South Pole.
Ross departed on 5 October on what was to be a four-and-a-half-year voyage in the two rather inauspiciously named, and ultimately ill-fated, specially adapted naval bomb vessels, Erebus and Terror. He captained Erebus, while command of Terror was given to Captain Francis Crozier, at the time already a veteran of four polar voyages who was to be lost, along with the two ships, on Franklin’s 1845 Northwest Passage expedition. During this time, they crossed the Antarctic circle three times, discovered Victoria Land, McMurdo Sound, Mount Erebus, the Ross ice barrier, and numerous other features. Ross was responsible for the most extensive mapping of the continental coastline to date, and on his return was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of Paris. A year later he was knighted, and the Ross Sea was subsequently named for him.
OCLC lists copies of the map at the British Library, National Library of Scotland, University of Wisconsin, and Bibliothèque nationale de France, with a further copy located at the Australian National Maritime Museum; while the official account of the voyage is relatively easy to obtain, the map itself is rare.
Very little contemporary material concerning the voyage has appeared on the market, particularly an item so centrally representative of the expedition and its aims.
Provenance: Joseph Dalton Hooker, thence by family descent.
Allan, Mea, The Hookers of Kew, 1785-1911 (London, 1967); Hooker correspondence, Kew, finding number JDH/1/2f.155-161; Davis, J.E., A Letter from the Antarctic , 1901; Mill, H.R., The Siege of the South Pole, (London, 1905); Ross, J.C., A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, During the Years 1839-43 (London, 1847); Howgego II, R27.
