Samuel Gurney Cresswell (1827-1867)

Abstract

... Samuel Cresswell was born in 1827, joined the Navy in 1842, and served in the China seas, where he was twice gazetted for service against the pirates of Borneo. On his return to England he was - perhaps through Parry's influence - appointed to the 1848-49 Franklin rescue expedition led by Sir James Ross. ... Captain Collinson took command on the Enterprise; Cresswell became second lieutenant on the Investigator under Commander Robert McClure. Unaccompanied, the latter ship passed through Bering Strait and coasted along the American north shore. Cresswell commanded the whaleboat in which the ship's surgeon Armstrong and the Eskimo interpreter J.A. Miertsching studied the "smoking cliffs" of Franklin Bay. In late autumn McClure discovered Prince of Wales Strait and won for officer and crew the honour of completing the Northwest Passage. They wintered in the frozen strait. In April 1851, McClure sent out travelling sledge parties to search for traces of Franklin. In discharge of his duty, Cresswell explored 170 miles of the east and northeast Banks Island shore, at which time some of his crew were disabled by frostbite. A second excursion took him to the south end of the strait. In the summer the ship rounded Banks Island by its west shore, a voyage of frightful peril, and her throes in the gale-driven pack have been illustrated by Cresswell in a well-known painting. She took refuge in Mercy Bay on the northeast shore of Banks Island and was permanently locked in the ice from 25 September 1851 until the spring of 1853, her crew being reduced to the verge of starvation. On his arrival in late autumn, Cresswell enjoyed a temporary celebrity as bearer of the news that the long-sought Northwest Passage had been discovered, and he was feted by the townspeople of King's Lynn. In 1954 Cresswell served at the rank of commander with the Baltic fleet in the war against Russia. Three years later he sailed to China with a detachment of gunboats, served in the Chinese war on the Peiho River, and then went on a cruise against pirates. ... He is best remembered as the artist of the cruise. His paintings of the ship in the grip of the ice and almost flung over on her side, and of his Dealy Island party, painfully dragging a loaded sledge up a ramp of ice-rubble, do more than the liveliest prose to bring home to us what was endured by the stalwarts of the British Navy in the mapping of Canada's northern archipelago with wind-jammers and man-hauled sledges.