Edward Adams | |
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| Born | 24 February 1824 Great Barton, Suffolk, England |
| Died | 12 November 1856 (aged 32) Sierra Leone, West Africa |
| Branch |  Royal Navy |
| Service years | 1847–1856 |
| Rank | Assistant surgeon |
| Postings | |
| Expeditions |
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Edward Adams (24 February 1824 – 12 November 1856) was an English Royal Navy officer, naval surgeon, naturalist, artist and Arctic explorer.
Adams was born at Great Barton, near Bury St Edmunds, on 24 February 1824. [1] He became interested in natural history as a child. He qualified as a surgeon in April 1847, and in August of the same year became an assistant surgeon at the Royal Hospital Haslar in Gosport, Hampshire, before securing a transfer to the Naval Hospital in Devonport three months later.
In 1848, four months after his transfer to Devonport, he volunteered to join Sir James Clark Ross on his Arctic expedition to search for traces of Sir John Franklin's missing Northwest Passage expedition. Adams was aboard HMS Investigator under Captain Edward Joseph Bird. They left in May 1848, but returned 18 months later without success.
In January 1850, Adams left on another expedition to look for Franklin. This time he was aboard HMS Enterprise under Captain Richard Collinson. They reached the Bering Strait in August, and Adams was put ashore at St. Michael, just north of the Yukon delta, to investigate reports of possible survivors from Franklin's crew. He rejoined the Enterprise in July 1851, sailing east below Banks Island and Victoria Island, and penetrating further east than any ship previously. They returned to England in 1855.
Adams passed his full naval surgeon's exams, and travelled to west Africa in May 1856, on board the steamship Hecla. He died there of typhus, and was buried at Sierra Leone.
In naming the yellow-billed loon, English zoologist George Robert Gray honoured by Adams naming its species epithet after him: Gavia adamsii.
Sir John Franklin was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer and colonial administrator. After serving in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812, he led two expeditions into the Canadian Arctic and through the islands of the Arctic Archipelago, in 1819 and 1825, and served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1839 to 1843. During his third and final expedition, an attempt to traverse the Northwest Passage in 1845, Franklin's ships became icebound off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, where he died in June 1847. The icebound ships were abandoned ten months later, and the entire crew died from causes such as starvation, hypothermia, and scurvy.
HMS Enterprise was an Arctic discovery ship laid down as a merchant vessel and purchased in 1848 before launch to search for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. She made two Arctic voyages before becoming a coal depot, and was finally sold in 1903. She was the tenth Enterprise to serve in the Royal Navy.
HMS Resolute was a mid-19th-century barque-rigged ship of the British Royal Navy, specially outfitted for Arctic exploration. Resolute became trapped in the ice searching for Franklin's lost expedition and was abandoned in 1854. Recovered by an American whaler, she was returned to Queen Victoria in 1856. Timbers from the ship were later used to construct the Resolute desk which was presented to the President of the United States and is located in the White House Oval Office.
Vice-Admiral Sir Robert John Le Mesurier McClure was an Irish explorer who explored the Arctic. In 1854 he traversed the Northwest Passage by boat and sledge, and was the first to circumnavigate the Americas.
Sir Alexander Armstrong was an Irish naval surgeon, explorer, naturalist and author. After obtaining a medical degree he joined the Royal Navy and was stationed on board HMS Investigator, tasked with finding the lost expedition of explorer Sir John Franklin. Investigator was trapped in the ice at Mercy Bay in 1851 and Armstrong spent several winters in the Arctic before he returned to London.
Sherard Osborn was a Royal Navy admiral and Arctic explorer.
Beechey Island is an island located in the Arctic Archipelago of Nunavut, Canada, in Wellington Channel. It is separated from the southwest corner of Devon Island by Barrow Strait. Other features include Wellington Channel, Erebus Harbour, and Terror Bay.
Admiral Sir Richard Collinson was an English naval officer and explorer of the Northwest Passage.
Sir James Clark Ross was a British Royal Navy officer and polar explorer known for his explorations of the Arctic, participating in two expeditions led by his uncle John Ross, and four led by William Edward Parry, and, in particular, for his own Antarctic expedition from 1839 to 1843.
Vice Admiral Sir Henry Kellett, was an Irish naval officer and explorer.
Arthur Fleming Morrell was British officer of the Royal Navy, an explorer, and Commandant of Ascension Island, who saw service spanning the end of the Napoleonic era and well into the Victorian era.
Franklin's lost expedition was a failed British voyage of Arctic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic and to record magnetic data to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation. The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. After being icebound for more than a year Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin's second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus's captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared, presumably having perished.
HMS Investigator was a merchant ship purchased in 1848 to search for Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition. She made two voyages to the Arctic and had to be abandoned in 1853, after becoming trapped in the pack ice.
Sir Erasmus Ommanney was a Royal Navy officer and an Arctic explorer of the Victorian era.
The McClure Arctic expedition, one of many attempts to find the missing Franklin expedition, was significant for being the first to successfully discover and transit the Northwest Passage, which it accomplished by both boat and sledging.
HMS Herald was an Atholl-class 28-gun sixth-rate corvette of the Royal Navy. She was launched in 1822 as HMS Termagant, commissioned in 1824 as HMS Herald and converted to a survey ship in 1845. After serving as a chapel ship from 1861, she was sold for breaking in 1862.
HMS North Star was a 28-gun Atholl-class sixth-rate post ship built to an 1817 design by the Surveyors of the Navy. She was launched in 1824. North Star Bay, a bay in Greenland, was named in honour of this ship.
The Royal Navy Burying Ground is part of the Naval Museum of Halifax and was the Naval Hospital cemetery for the North America and West Indies Station at Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is the oldest military burial ground in Canada. The cemetery has grave markers to those who died while serving at Halifax and were treated at the Naval medical facility or died at sea. Often shipmates and officers had the grave markers erected to mark the deaths of the crew members who died while in the port of Halifax.
Graham Gore was an English officer of the Royal Navy and polar explorer who participated in two expeditions to the Arctic and a survey of the coastline of Australia aboard HMS Beagle. In 1845 he served under Sir John Franklin as First Lieutenant on the Erebus during the Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, which ended with the loss of all 129 officers and crewmen in mysterious circumstances.
Qalaherriaq, baptized as Erasmus Augustine Kallihirua, was an Inughuit hunter from Cape York, Greenland. He was recruited in 1850 as an interpreter by the crew of the British survey barque HMS Assistance during the search for John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition. He guided the ship to Wolstenholme Fjord to investigate rumors of a massacre of Franklin's crew, but only found the corpses of local Inughuit and crew from an unrelated British vessel. He was alleged to have produced an extremely accurate map of his homeland, but was almost certainly aided by the crew of the vessel. Although the Assistance initially planned to return him to his family after the expedition, poor sea conditions made landing at Cape York impossible, and he was taken to England and placed under the care of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).
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