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 in and one 10 in.

War service
HMS Terror saw 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 9–12 August 1814 and of Fort McHenry in the Battle of Baltimore on 13–14 September 1814; the latter attack inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that eventually became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner". In January 1815, still under Sheridan's command, Terror was involved in the Battle of Fort Peter and the attack on St. Marys, Georgia.

After the end of the War, Terror was laid up until 1828, when she was recommissioned for service in the Mediterranean under the command of David Hope. On 18 February 1828, she ran aground on a lee shore near Lisbon, Portugal as a result of a hurricane; eventually refloated, she was withdrawn from service after repairs.

Arctic service
Bomb vessels were strongly built in order to withstand the enormous recoil of their three-ton mortars, and this made them suited to Arctic service. In 1836, command of Terror was given to George Back for an expedition to the northern part of Hudson Bay, with a view to entering Repulse Bay, where landing parties were to be sent out to determine whether the Boothia Peninsula was an island or a peninsula. However, Terror failed to reach Repulse Bay and barely survived the winter off Southampton Island, at one point being forced 40 ft up the side of a cliff by 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.

Ross expedition


Terror was repaired and next assigned to a voyage to the Antarctic in company with HMS Erebus (1826) under the overall command of James Clark Ross. Francis Crozier was commander of Terror on this expedition, which spanned three seasons from 1840-1843 during which Terror and Erebus made three forays into Antarctic waters, crossing the Ross Sea twice, and sailing through the Weddell Sea southeast of the Falkland Islands. The volcano Mount Terror on Ross Island was named after the ship.

Franklin expedition
Erebus and Terror were both outfitted with steam engines, and iron plating was added to the hulls for their voyage to the Arctic with Sir John Franklin in overall command of the expedition in Erebus, and Terror again under the command of Captain Francis Rawdon Moira 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 expedition sailed from Greenhithe on 19 May 1845 and 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 were 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 Fort Resolution, a Hudson's Bay Company outpost 600 mi to the southwest. 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 Island during the late 20th century.

The remains of the ship have yet to be found, but are designated a National Historic Site of Canada with the precise location of the designation in abeyance until the remains are found.

On 15 August 2008, Parks Canada, an agency of the Government of Canada, announced a CDN$75,000 six-week search, deploying the icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier with the goal of finding the two ships. The search is also intended to strengthen Canada's claims of sovereignty over large portions of the Arctic. Further attempts to locate the ships were undertaken in 2010, 2011, and 2012, all of which have failed to locate the ships' remains.

A British transport ship, the Renovation, spotted two ships on a large ice floe off the coast of Newfoundland in April 1851. The identities of the two ships were not confirmed. It has been suggested that these ships may have been the Erebus and the Terror, though it is more likely that they were abandoned whaling ships.

In fiction
The 2008 novel Arctic Drift uses the Terror and the Erebus as part of the plot as well as the establishing backstory.

Terror features heavily in Dan Simmons's 2007 novel The Terror.

The Franklin expedition provides a back-story in Margaret Atwood's short story The Age of Lead.

The Terror and the Erebus are featured in the Doctor Who Audio Drama story Terror of the Arctic.

The Terror and the Erebus are mentioned, in the context of Captain Ross’s expedition, by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on background to establish the difficulty of attaining the South Pole, while Captain Nemo stands upon its fictional summit.

The Terror and the Erebus are mentioned in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.