Victory (ship, 1826)

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The Victory departing Woolwich on May 23, 1829

The Victory was the first steamship used to explore the Arctic .

The fully sailed small side paddle steamer was built in 1826 and initially used for Mark Cosnahan's shipping company New National Steam Packet as a package steamer in the liner service between the Isle of Man and Liverpool . However, the operation did not generate the expected profits, and Cosnahan did not succeed in finding financiers willing to buy shares in his company. Therefore, the Victory was put up for sale in 1828.

After his Arctic expedition in 1818, the polar explorer John Ross had followed the development of steamships and had come to the conclusion that a ship with a shallow draft , which had a steam engine in addition to the usual sails, offered advantages when exploring the polar waters. In 1828 he published his treatise A Treatise on Navigation by Steam , in which he presented his views on the subject. Ross suggested the Admiralty send a steamboat on an Arctic expedition, but was not interested. But he succeeded in persuading the liquor manufacturer Felix Booth , with whom he was friends, to finance such an expedition.

After Ross had inspected several ships and checked them for their suitability, he acquired the Victory on October 9, 1828 in Liverpool . In March 1829 he had her transferred to London , where the ship was prepared for the polar voyage in the Fletcher, Son and Fearnall shipyard in Limehouse : the tonnage was increased from 85 to 150 tons, various modifications were made and a new steam engine with an experimental high-pressure boiler from John Ericsson and John Braithwaite installed; the paddle wheels could be raised so that they would not be exposed to damage from ice. The crew consisted of a total of 22 seamen and officers.

On 23 May 1829, the left Victory Woolwich and headed for Scotland and then Greenland to control. From the beginning there were problems with the steam engine, which frequently failed, required repairs and did not come close to the expected performance.

After Ross had called Felix Harbor on Boothia for the first wintering on September 30th , he decided to remove the useless steam engine from the ship. The entire system was dismantled and brought ashore on October 19 and 20, 1829, so that from then on the Victory was a pure sailing ship. However, the ice conditions prevented them from covering long distances: until the second wintering period, which began on November 1, 1830 in Sheriff's Bay , it was only about five nautical miles , and until the third wintering period, which began on October 10, 1831 in Victoria Harbor - originally named after the ship Victory Harbor - it was another 14 nautical miles.

In January 1832 it became clear that it would not be possible to bring the Victory back into ice-free waters until the food was consumed and the onset of disease was to be expected. On May 29, Ross gave up the ship. The crew went on foot to Fury Beach , 322 kilometers to the north , where supplies and boats from William Edward Parry's expedition of 1824/1825 were also located.

John Ross was so dissatisfied with the Victory's steam engine that he described its shortcomings and its unreliability several times and very explicitly in his expedition report Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north-west passage published in 1835 . John Braithwaite contradicted the negative portrayal of his machine in Supplement to Captain Sir John Ross's Narrative of a second voyage in search of a North-West Passage, containing the suppressed facts necessary to an understanding of the cause of the failure of the steam machinery of the Victory , whereupon Ross published the reply Explanation and Answer to Mr. John Braithwaite's Supplement to Captain Sir John Ross's Narrative of a Second Voyage in the Victory, in Search of the North-west Passage .

The wreck of the Victory in Victoria Harbor has not yet been discovered. In Felix Harbor, however, a research team from the Royal Navy found the remains of the steam engine that had been removed in 1829 in August 2004.

literature

  • Fergus Fleming: Barrow's Boys . Granta, 2001 ISBN 1-86207-286-8 .
  • Robert Huish: The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross . John Saunders, 1835
  • Sir John Leslie / Robert Jameson / Hugh Murray: Narrative of Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas and Regions . Oliver & Boyd, 1845
  • Sir John Ross / Sir James Clark Ross: Narrative of a second voyage in search of a north-west passage . AW Webster, 1835

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