Arctic bound – Brian Maye on Wexford-born explorer Robert John Le Mesurier McClure

Wexford-born Robert John Le Mesurier McClure was a Royal Navy officer and an Arctic explorer who discovered the Northwest Passage, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. October 17th is the 150th anniversary of his death.

He was born on January 28th, 1807, at The Rectory, Main Street, Wexford town, son of Capt Robert McClure of the 89th Foot, who was from Co Derry, and Jane Elgee, whose father was an archdeacon and rector of Wexford. Robert John was thus a first cousin of Jane Wilde (née Elgee), the mother of Oscar Wilde. His father died five months before his birth and after living at the home of his maternal grandfather, at the age of four he was taken into the home of his godfather, Gen John Le Mesurier, hereditary governor of Alderney in the Channel Islands.

At the age of 15, he went to Eton and afterwards attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, but not wanting a military career, he ran away to France before joining the Royal Navy in 1824 as a midshipman. Six years later, he passed his exam to become a lieutenant and participated in the Arctic expedition of HMS Terror (1836-37) under Capt George Back. Terror became frozen in ice in the Foxe Channel and the badly damaged ship eventually recrossed the Atlantic, barely making the west coast of Ireland. This rather frightening introduction to the Arctic, however, doesn’t seem to have put him off the area.

Following his promotion to full lieutenant, he served on the Hastings and the Niagara on the Canadian lakes, during which he captured a notorious outlaw who’d been raiding along the Canadian border but because the capture occurred in American territory, the government refused to pay the £5,000 reward it had offered. Further naval service followed for McClure in the West Indies and Havana and after some time with the coastguard, he volunteered in 1848 as first lieutenant on HMS Enterprise, under James Clark Ross, which sailed to the Arctic to try to find the missing expedition of Sir John Franklin, from whom there had been no word since 1845.

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Near the end of 1849, he was promoted to commander and appointed second-in-command to Capt Richard Collinson’s Arctic expedition; its purpose was also to try to discover Franklin’s fate.

HMS Investigator under McClure and HMS Enterprise under Collinson left Plymouth in January 1850 but they became separated in a gale in April and McClure carried on alone and in advance of Collinson. Rounding the northwest point of America, he discovered a channel that he named Prince of Wales Strait. By September, Investigator was locked in ice and exploring parties set out on foot. McClure discovered, on October 26th, that the strait opened into Melville Sound and realised that he had found a northwest passage. It was unknown at the time that Franklin had found another route five years previously.

Investigator was again locked in ice in September 1851 in the Bay of Mercy and the crew spent another two winters trapped in the Arctic.

Malnutrition and scurvy affected the men; McClure had always shown great concern for their health and welfare and had won their affection and respect. Fortunately, a sledge party from HMS Resolute, part of Capt Henry Kellett’s expedition, discovered them and they eventually got back to England in September 1854.

McClure was knighted and promoted to captain and a strait in the Arctic was named McClure Strait in his honour. He was also honoured by British and French geographical societies and was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.

He subsequently served in the Second China War (1857-60) and for his action during the capture of Canton, he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Promoted to rear-admiral in 1867, he spent his latter years living a quiet country life and was promoted to vice-admiral on the retired list in 1873.

His late marriage to Ada Tudor occurred in 1869 and they had no children. He died in Duke Street, St James’s, London in 1873 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, where the epitaph on his gravestone reads: “Thus we launch into this formidable frozen sea. Spes mea in Deo.”

He’d given his journals of his major Arctic expedition to Capt Sherard Osborn and Osborn’s edited account of the enterprise was published in 1856 as The Discovery of the Northwest Passage by HMS Investigator and ran to several editions, according to David Murphy, who wrote the entry on McClure in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. Another version of his Arctic adventures, under the title Voyages, came out in 1884.

There is a portrait of him in London’s National Portrait Gallery, painted by Stephen Pearce (1858).

“He will always remain one of the great leaders of Arctic expeditions,” according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.