Beneath the Ice in the North West Passage

Since I wrote this, the wreck of HMS Erebus has been discovered.

A Present for Archaeologists of the Future

A

s global warming raises the mean temperature in the Arctic glaciers melt and the sea ice recedes. What will be revealed when this happens? One possibility is that in the shallow depths of newly thawed seas, puzzled explorers may well see the remains of a nineteenth century railway locomotive. How can this be? Did the Victorians attempt to build a Grand North Western Passage Railway? No; the answer is a little more prosaic. It lies in a cost cutting exercise by the Admiralty when it was setting up the Franklin Expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.

               It was suggested at quite a late stage that the two ships selected, Erebus and Terror, should be fitted with engines. The idea was not that they should operate as ice breakers, but just to manoeuvre in the tight spaces that opened up in the ice. Rather than buy new engines for the purpose, some bean counter at the Admiralty suggested that a couple of old railway locomotive should be bought and placed in the aft hold of each ship. Incredibly, this idea was adopted and carried out. The locomotives, from the London and Greenwich Railway and the London & Birmingham Railway, were mounted athwartships, that is facing across the width of the ship, and the propeller shaft was connected directly to the driving wheels.

H.M.S. Terror seems to have been fitted with the locomotive from the London & Birmingham Railway, as this letter written to his sister by Lieutenant Irving shows:

H.M.S. Terror,

Greenhithe

May 16^th. 1845

My Dear Katie,

               ....We tried our screws and went four miles an hour. Our engine once ran somewhat faster on the Birmingham line. It is placed athwart ships in our afterhold and merely has its axle extended aft, so as to become the shaft of the screw. It has a funnel the same size and height as it had on the railway, and makes the same dreadful puffings and screamings, and will astonish the Esquimaux not a little. We can carry 12 days coal for it; but it will never be used when we can make progress at all by other means.

               “London’s First Railway” by RHG Thomas goes on to say: “Each ship carried an engineer, three stokers and a copy of Gregory’s book on locomotives; but whether the engines were ever used is not known, and what eventually became of the ships has also remained a mystery”.

               The boilers of the locomotives required fresh water from which to raise steam and to provide this from sea water distillation equipment was installed on both ships. It has been suggested that the fresh water may well have been contaminated with lead by this machinery and that this could have contributed to the crew’s suffering from lead poisoning.