HMS Terror (1813)
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HMS Terror was a bomb vessel designed by Sir Henry Peake and constructed by the Royal Navy in the Davy shipyard in Topsham, Devon. The ship, variously listed as being of either 326 or 340 tons, carried two mortars, one 13-inch and one 10-inch.
Terror saw war service in the War of 1812 against the United States. Under the command of John Sheridan, she took part in the bombardment of Stonington, Connecticut on August 9 - 12, 1814, and of Fort McHenry in the Battle of Baltimore on September 13 - 14, 1814; the latter attack inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star-Spangled Banner. In January, 1815, still under Sheridan's command, Terror was involved in the attack on St. Marys, Georgia.
In 1836, command of Terror was given to George Back for an expedition to the northern part of Hudson Bay, with plans to cross the Melville Peninsula overland and explore the opposite shore. Terror was beset in the ice for 10 months and at one point was pushed 40 feet up the side of a cliff by the pressure of the ice. In the spring of 1837, an encounter with an iceberg further damaged the ship, which was in a sinking condition by the time Back was able to beach the ship on the coast of Ireland at Lough Swilly.
Terror was repaired and next assigned to a voyage to the Antarctic in company with HMS Erebus under the overall command of James Clark Ross. Francis Crozier was commander of Terror on this expedition, which spanned three seasons from 1840 to 1843. The volcano Mount Terror on Ross Island was named for the ship.
Erebus and Terror were both outfitted with 20hp steam engines, and iron plating added to the hulls, for their next voyage to the Arctic, with Sir John Franklin in overall command of the expedition in Erebus, and Terror again under the command of Crozier. Their expedition was to gather magnetic data in the Canadian Arctic, not to find the Northwest Passage, which is a common misconception. The ships were last seen entering Baffin Bay in August 1845. The disappearance of the Franklin expedition set off a massive search effort in the Arctic. The ships' fate were revealed in a series of expeditions into the Arctic between 1848 and 1866 when it was discovered that both ships had become icebound and were abandoned by their crews. Subsequent expeditions up until the late 1980s, including autopsies on crew members, revealed a horrible story. It appears tainted rations (from the lead solder on food tins) drove the crew insane and led to several deaths from lead poisoning. Subsequently after two years trapped in the ice, with the men suffering from scurvy, the surviving crew attempted to march to safety in Canada. Along the way they began devouring each other until two crew members remained. Unable to go further, they perished and were discovered skeletonized in a rowboat they were using as a sled. None of the members of the Franklin expedition are thought to have survived, although it has never been proven that none escaped.
See HMS Terror for other ships of this name.
[edit] References
- Pierre Berton: The Arctic Grail. ISBN 0-670-82491-7.
- Scott Cookman: Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition. ISBN 0-471-37790-2
- Martyn Beardsly: Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin. ISBN 1-55750-179-3
- Owen Beattie: Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. ISBN 1-55365-060-3
- Elizabeth McGregor: The Ice Child.
