#arctic explorers

Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland painted in the imagination’s most delicate tints; it is colour etherealised. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one shade ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms – it is all faint, dreamy colour music, a far away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings

Crozier was popular with the Eskimo community, particularly when he helped bring sick natives on board the ships for medical treatment. Having been given responsibility for the task, he personally ferried ailing Eskimos back and forth over the ice, and in the process became one of the party’s most accomplished ice travellers. Crozier became a familiar sight to the natives on his hospital run and they soon devised their own name for him. The Eskimos initially struggled to pronounce his Scots-French name and called him ‘Croz-har’, but they soon came up with their own pet name for him, which was Aglooka, meaning ‘one who takes long strides’.

Sophy Cracroft, the ‘sad flirt’, never married. At the height of the search for Erebus and Terror in the 1850s, one of the fleet of ships sent in search of the expedition carried a letter from Sophy Cracroft to her uncle, John Franklin. She added a brief message to Crozier that, just possibly, hints at a slight change of feelings towards him. On the bottom of the letter, she scribbled the words: ‘Pray remember me very kindly to Captain Crozier’. The letter was returned unopened.