HMS Terror (1813)
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. The expedition was ordered to gather magnetic data in the Canadian Arctic and complete a crossing of the Northwest Passage, which had already been charted from both the east and west but never entirely navigated.
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 and the broad circumstances of the expedition's fate was revealed during a series of expeditions between 1848 and 1866. Both ships had become icebound and were abandoned by their crews, all of whom subsequently died of exposure and starvation while trying to trek overland to the south. Subsequent expeditions up until the late 1980s, including autopsies of crew members, also revealed that their canned rations may have been tainted by both lead and botulism. Oral reports by local Inuit that some of the crew members resorted to cannibalism were at least somewhat supported by forensic evidence of cut marks on the skeletal remains of crew members found on King William's Island during the late 20th century.
References
- 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
- 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
- Elizabeth McGregor: The Ice Child.
- Dan Simmons: The Terror (Fictionalised account of the Franklin expedition). ISBN 0-59305-762-7 (UK H/C)