Away at Christmas

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First published 2009 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX www.eandtbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-9040-2778-2 Copyright Š Jeremy Archer 2009 This edition published in 2009 The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

987654321 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the UK by CPI Group Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for extracts used within this book. Where this has not been possible the publisher will be happy to credit them in future editions.

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Away at Christmas Heroic Tales of Exploration From 1492 to the Present Day

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Acknowledgements

MANY PEOPLE have provided me with invaluable help during the research, writing and production of Away at Christmas. I am extremely grateful to my old schoolfriend, Michael Hatchard, for introducing me to Lorne Forsyth of Elliott & Thompson, without whose enthusiam Away at Christmas would not have been published. My editor at Elliott & Thompson, Mark Searle, has been hugely supportive – while demonstrating commendable tolerance of my many foibles – as has his capable assistant, Ellen Marshall. My agent, Roger Field, has once again exercised great care in proofreading and editing the manuscript and helping me to avoid the many pitfalls that await authors.

Alasdair Macleod and Jools Cole of The Royal Geographical Society have both been notably generous with their time in assisting me with both research and marketing ideas. In producing such marvellously clear and informative maps and end-papers, the cartographer, John Plumer, has made an enormous contribution. Thanks must also go to Helen Szirtes, Nicky Gyopari and Clive Hebard. My longsuffering wife, Amanda, continues to let me toil away at weekends and in the evenings, always putting food on the table, even though I all too often allow it to go tepid – or even cold. When I first started writing my Christmas booklets – from which this book has grown – our late, dear friend, Trish McGregor, gave me the encouragement that I needed to continue.

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Foreword by Sir Ranulph Fiennes BOTH DURING my Army days, and more recently, while exploring some of the more inhospitable regions on Earth, I have often found myself ‘away at Christmas’. It could be a time of lonely reflection: should I not really have been enjoying a traditional family celebration on Exmoor, rather than fighting the elements in the great outdoors?

Away at Christmas comprises varied and fascinating descriptions of Christmases past, as spent by a wide range of explorers, adventurers, sailors, soldiers and travellers. As I can confirm from my own experience, Christmas was seldom – if ever – completely forgotten, however unfavourable the circumstances.

Some of these Christmases are joyous, rather more are distinctly muted while a few are dominated by nothing less than a struggle for survival. However, all are fascinating, particularly with the accounts placed in their proper context.

The sequence of increasingly austere Christmas celebrations of Sir John Ross and his companions during their ‘famous sojourn of four winters in the Arctic’ illustrates the point. The first year they enjoyed ‘an unusually liberal dinner, of which roast beef from our Galloway ox formed the essential and orthodox portion’; four years later ‘a fox having been taken, served for our Christmas dinner’.

With long-forgotten expeditions competing for space with well-known tales, the reader also gets a feeling for the long struggle to get to know and understand our planet. All these factors combine to make Away at Christmas what it is – a thoroughly entertaining read.

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Introduction ON 30 OCTOBER 1939 Life magazine published an article by Charles J. V. Murray about Rear-Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the first man to fly over both the North and South Poles: ‘One of the remarkable facts about Admiral Byrd’s success is that it has been accomplished in a dying profession. The professional explorer is an anachronistic fragment, caught, like the kangaroo, behind the evolutionary eight-ball. A romanticist, he is suspect in a materialistic world. Doomed by a shrinking geography to comb comparatively worthless vacancies, he may even be ashamed to justify exploring for exploring’s sake.’

In Little Gidding, T. S. Eliot takes a rather different view.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Less than three months into his epic three-year, round-theworld voyage, Joshua Slocum (see entry for 1897) described the motivation of many explorers when he wrote: ‘I had penetrated a mystery, and, by the way, I had sailed through a fog. I had met Neptune in his wrath, but he found that I had not treated him with contempt, and so he suffered me to go on and explore.’

Of course the nature of exploration has changed with the passage of time. Many of the early explorers would not have thought of themselves as explorers. They were a mixture of opportunists, traders, government servants, pirates or whalers. The Royal Geographical Society now places more 1

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emphasis on providing ‘a dynamic world centre for geographical learning – supporting research, education, expeditions and fieldwork, as well as promoting public engagement and informed enjoyment of our world’, rather than on ‘exploring for exploring’s sake’.

There are other, compelling, factors at play. On 28 August 2007 it was reported in the Guardian that the North West Passage was ‘nearly ice-free for the first time since records began’. Climate change – together with its many, yet-to-beunderstood, ramifications – has rapidly risen to the top of governments’ agendas and explorers have come into their own once again. If, in T. S. Eliot’s words, we do not ‘know the place for the first time’, there may well be no place left to know.

For this book I have researched how adventurers – explorers, travellers and ‘free spirits’ – have spent Christmas over the past 500 or so years. Unlike my wartime anthology, Home for Christmas, much of the material in this book comes from diaries, or narratives written up after the event. There were few opportunities to send letters from such far-flung corners of the earth. While Away at Christmas has no pretences as a comprehensive history of exploration, it nevertheless encompasses the spread of European influence (sources and relevance permitting). Concise background information has been included in order that the saga of sequential expeditions – for example, the search for the North West Passage – can more easily be followed.

Whether the ultimate reasons for the exploits described herein were political ambition, personal vanity, territorial expansion, scientific advancement, proselytizing, fortuneseeking or the winning of a ‘race’, such as those to the South Pole or the Moon, one can only marvel at the achievements of the adventurers, a depressingly large number of whom gave 2

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their lives in the process. Equally impressive is the fact that these intrepid adventurers seldom forgot to celebrate Christmas, however precarious their situation. As an aside, the reader will discover that the boundaries of our traditional festive fare are seriously tested by such delicacies as seal liver, stewed cockatoo, fricasseed guillemot, tenderloin of musk-ox, fried rock wallaby, penguin or bear steaks.

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Christmas Island STRANGE to tell, there are actually two Christmas Islands.

One is in the Indian Ocean while the other is part of the Republic of Kiribati, in Micronesia. The only thing they have in common is that each was ‘discovered’ on Christmas Day. Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean was discovered by Captain William Mynors of the British East India Company on 25 December 1643. My great-great-uncle, William May, later recorded for posterity: ‘This Island, known as Christmas Island, was taken possession of, in the name of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria of Great Britain, Ireland, and Empress of India, by Captain William Henry May, commanding Her Britannic Majesty’s ship Impérieuse, on the 6th day of June 1888.’ 1 The main industry is phosphate extraction and the two major festivals are Christmas and Chinese New Year; only 18 per cent of the population are Christians, compared with twice that percentage of Buddhists. The Japanese occupied Christmas Island between 31 March 1942 and the end of the Second World War. The island has an area of around 50 square miles, of which most was designated a National Park in 1989, while the land rises over 1,000 feet above sea level. The island supports the largest and most varied land-crab community in the world: the human population of just 1,500 is dwarfed by more than 100 million red land crabs – gecarcoidea natalis – that take part in an annual mass migration to the sea.

Micronesia’s Christmas Island was discovered by Captain James Cook on 24 December 1777. Cook wrote: ‘As we kept 1

The Life of a Sailor by Admiral of the Fleet Sir William Henry May GCB GCVO

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our Christmas here, I called this discovery Christmas Island.’ Geologically, Christmas Island is the world’s oldest atoll, some 160 square miles in area, lying just 100 miles north of the equator. The average height above sea level is just 10 feet although some of the sand hills rise three or four times as high. On 17 March 1888 Captain William Wiseman of HMS Caroline annexed Christmas Island and, in June 1902, the British Government granted a 99-year lease to Lever Brothers.

Initially 72,863 coconut palms were planted on 1,457 acres. In 1914 Central Pacific Coconut Plantations Limited took over the lease and, by 1937, some 400 tons of copra were being harvested annually from around 750,000 coconut palms. The island was a major staging area during the Second World War: the airfield and extensive road system date from that period.

Christmas Island, with a population of around 1,800, received its independence from the United Kingdom in 1979.

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~ 1492 ~ As every schoolchild knows from the doggerel, on 3 August 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail on the ‘ocean blue’ from Palos de la Frontera in Spain with three ships, the Niña, the Pinta and his flagship, the Santa María. The Santa María had a complement of 54 men while the smaller two carried just 18 men each. The trip was financed partly by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, partly by a syndicate of seven wealthy Genoese merchants living in Seville, and partly by the Pinzón family of Palos, who not only built the ships but also put up one-eighth of the money.

It was a true voyage into the unknown. Columbus was convinced that he had reached the fabled Indies, which is why he called those natives that he met Indians. When he arrived off Cuba, Columbus believed he had found the Japanese mainland. For over a month he cruised the waters off the island of Hispaniola (a corruption of La Isla Española, or ‘The Spanish Island’, which is now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic) encountering, and sometimes befriending, the islanders. On Christmas Eve, on the way to meet a young Taíno chief named Guacanagarí, the Santa María stuck fast on a reef off Hispaniola.

Columbus took the difficult – but inevitable – decision to transfer his flag to the Niña, leaving behind 39 crewmembers from the Santa María to found the first European settlement in the Americas since the Vikings had landed in Newfoundland and Labrador some 500 years earlier. It was called La Navidad, or ‘The Nativity’, because it was founded on Christmas Day. The reluctant colonisers were left with a year’s supply of food, sufficient equipment with which to construct a fort, and specialists that included carpenters, 6

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caulkers, physicians, tailors and coopers. When Columbus returned to Hispaniola on his second voyage just 11 months later, he found that Christmas Town had been burned down and all his men were dead.

~ 1607/8 ~ Two English colonies were briefly established on Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, during the late 1580s.

Lack of supplies and the impending war with Spain prompted the evacuation of the first on 18 June 1586, after just a year.

Sir Walter Raleigh was the inspiration behind the second settlement, the members of which sailed from Plymouth on 8 May 1587. The following year the dramatic appearance of the Spanish Armada intervened, preventing the despatch of planned reinforcements. By the time a relief expedition finally arrived in August 1590, there were no signs of European life on Roanoke. The mystery of the ‘Lost Colony’ has never been satisfactorily resolved.

Thus the first English Christmas celebration on the North American mainland to have been documented was that of 1607 at Jamestown, Captain John Smith’s fledgling colony in what is now Virginia. Under the auspices of the Virginia Company of London, 105 settlers had sailed from Blackwall in the Susan Constant, the Discovery and the Godspeed on 19 December 1606. Little more than a year later, fewer than 40 people were left alive to observe Christmas with an Anglican church service in their small chapel. The officiating minister was the Reverend Robert Hunt, who survived that first service by just a few days. Captain Smith described the chapel as ‘a homely thing like a barne, set upon cratchets, covered with rafts, sedge and earth’.

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A year later the colonists were running short of food and Smith set off up the James River with a barge, a boat and 46 men to barter for food with Powhatan, a local chieftain with whom he was on good terms. Of that trip Smith wrote: The next night being lodged at Kecoughtan sixe or seaven dayes, the extreme wind, raine, frost, and snow caused us to keep Christmasse among the Savages, where we were never more merrie, nor fed on more plentie of good Oysters, Fish, Flesh, Wild-foule, and good Bread, nor never had better fires in England then in the dry warme smokie houses of Kecoughtan.

The following October Smith was injured when a keg of gunpowder exploded and had to return to England for treatment. Although he never went back to Virginia, he continued to promote the interests of the Virginia Company, before making himself unpopular with the controlling shareholders. In April 1614, Smith sailed to Maine and Massachusetts Bay and, with the approval of Prince Charles, named the area New England.2 Attempting a similar voyage the following year, he was captured by French pirates off the Azores and only managed to escape after weeks of captivity. Smith never returned to America but spent the rest of his life writing about his experiences. He died on 21 June 1631, at the age of 51, and is buried in St. Sepulchre’s in the City of London.

2 From Captain John Smith’s A Description of New England, published in 1616: ‘The most remarqueable parts thus named by the high and mighty Prince Charles, Prince of great Britaine.’ He later became Charles I.

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