Orders, Decorations and Medals

An extremely rare and emotive China 1842 Medal to Subordinate Officers’ Steward William Gibson, Royal Navy, who perished in Franklin’s North-West Passage expedition: recent research suggests that his remains may be those that were discovered by McClintock’s search expedition at Cape Herschel in 1859

China 1842 (William Gibson, H.M.S. Wanderer) edge nicks, very fine £2500-3000

One other China 1842 Medal is known to have survived to a Franklin Expedition member, and formed part of the Fitzjames campaign group sold by Glendining's on 20-21 December 1927; his Arctic Medal was not included, his family never having claimed the award.

William Gibson was born in London and volunteered for the Royal Navy at Sheerness in January 1840, aged 17 years, being rated a Captain's Cook. Quickly re-rated Boy 1st Class, his first ship was the 16-gun brig H.M.S. Wanderer, with a crew of approximately 110 men, among them Captain of the Fore Top Henry Peter Peglar, who would eventually join Gibson on the ill-fated Franklin expedition.

H.M.S. “Wanderer” 1840-44: close encounters with slavers and pirates

Over the next four years, in addition to more regular seagoing duties, the Wanderer’s crew made a trail-blazing contribution to fighting the slave trade, especially against the traders along the Gallinas River on the west African coast. In fact, in 1840, for the first time - instead of simply intercepting slavers as they entered or left harbour - Commander the Hon. Joseph Denman, who was the senior officer on that part of the coast, and his "Wanderers", took direct action to strike at the very heart of the trade, destroying numerous large slave barracoons (or enclosures). During the course of these operations, his men often had to wade through muddy brackish water, and sleep in damp clothes on swampy ground, as a result of which 16 of them were disabled by malaria. Yet their combined endeavours achieved important results, the destruction of the barracoons drastically checking the exportation of between 12,000-15,000 slaves per year - at the very place that had long been regarded as the heart of the trade. Denman's actions were strongly approved by the Government and Their Lordships, and he was promoted to Captain. Meanwhile, other Naval officers followed his example.

By July 1842, by which stage Gibson had been an Ordinary Seaman for nine months, the Wanderer was operating in the Yangtze River, in support of the closing stages of the First China War. And a body of seamen and marines from her squadron accompanied a force of more than 6,600 soldiers attacking the city of Chingkiang on the 21st. Mate George Henry Hodgson of the Cornwallis, another man who would serve alongside Gibson on Franklin’s ill-fated expedition, distinguished himself that day, being promoted to Lieutenant that December, before joining the Wanderer in April 1843.

By February 1844, Hodgson – and possibly Gibson too – formed part of a 150-man boat expedition drawn from the Wanderer, Harlequin and the E.I.C. steamer Diana, attacking pirates in northern Borneo. Landing under heavy fire, the force carried a stockade mounting some brass guns, which were then embarked. This sharp affair resulted in 11 serious casualties, two of whom later died of their wounds - among them the Wanderer's Gunner, who was hit in three places by musket balls: the pirates lost between 50 and 70 killed, mainly at the stockade.

Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition

The Wanderer was paid off in June 1844, but three of her crew were re-united less than a year later, to begin a very different journey, a voyage to seek the North-West Passage, the fabled sea link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans via the Arctic. For, in 1845, after a British-dominated search for the North-West Passage had already spanned 350 years, the Royal Geographical Society coaxed the Admiralty into making one more attempt at finding the route. As a result, Captain Sir John Franklin was appointed to command H.M. Ships Erebus (Commander James Fitzjames) and Terror (Captain Francis Crozier); the Terror had previously sailed in the Arctic from 1836-37, and both vessels had been under the command of Sir James Clark Ross on three Antarctic voyages between 1839-43, during which time Crozier commanded the Terror. For the present expedition, however, the ships were better equipped, having been fitted with propellers to counter the Arctic winds and currents. And though photography was in its infancy, a complete daguerreotype outfit promised to capture Arctic images for the first time.

As previously mentioned, three former "Wanderers" volunteered for the Franklin Expedition, the whole for service in the Terror: Captain of the Fore Top Peglar, who joined the ship on 11 March, Lieutenant Hodgson, who joined the very next day, and Subordinate Officers' Steward Gibson, who arrived on the 19th. As a general rule, Ordinary Seamen were not taken on as volunteers and adults had to be at least Able Seamen, and since Gibson’s seagoing experience and status failed to meet such criteria, it is interesting to speculate whether his old shipmates - Peglar and Hodgson – somehow influenced his application and eventual appointment to Subordinate Officers’ Steward (he would have been responsible to the Boatswain, Engineer and Carpenter).

Be that as it may, the Erebus and Terror duly sailed north, entered the Arctic and disappeared behind a veil of snow and ice, and by 1847 there was still no word from the expedition. As a consequence, uneasiness, foreboding and alarm struck the corridors of power back in England, thereby sparking a famous spate of overland and seaborne “search expeditions” from 1847-55, as a result of which it was determined that all 129 officers and men of the Franklin Expedition perished somewhere near King William Island – but the Erebus and Terror were never found.

China & Arctic Medals issued

In terms of officialdom, the following bold notation in Terror’s muster book seemingly closed the final chapter on the Franklin Expedition:

‘By A.O. [Admiralty Order] 18 January 1854 No. 263 inclosing Notice from the Gazette, it is directed that if they are not heard of previous to 31 March 1854, the officers & crew of H.M.S. Terror are to be removed from the Navy List & are to be considered as having died in the Service - Their wages are to be paid to their Relatives to that Date - By A.O. 1 April 1854 No. 1638’.

Accordingly, William's father, Stewart Gibson, claimed his son's arrears of pay soon after the Admiralty declared him officially dead, and the young man's medallic awards followed later: the China Medal Roll states, 'Gibson DD G. 4146 William Ord. Delivd. 28/2/56', while his unnamed Arctic Medal 1818-1855 was delivered to one ‘Charlotte D. James’ on 24 June 1857, on behalf of the father 'who is in Australia’. Notably, of the 62 men aboard the Terror entitled to the Arctic Medal, only 24 are shown on the roll as having been claimed by relatives.

About the time Gibson’s Arctic Medal was being despatched to Charlotte James in 1857, a renewed but private search expedition had been mounted under Captain Francis L. McClintock, R.N., who sailed in the screw yacht Fox. And, as it transpired, the expedition was to add valuable knowledge to the fate of Franklin and his men, not least by the discovery of a document signed by Captain Crozier and Fitzjames in a large cairn near Victory Point, on the south-west coast of King William Island. Dated 28 April 1848, it indicated the Erebus and Terror had been abandoned three days previous, having been beset in Victoria Strait since 12 September 1846: ‘Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to date 9 Officers and 15 Men’.

A further reference was made to Crozier's stated intention to start with the survivors on 26 April 1848 for the Great Fish River (Back River) on the North American mainland. Information in the document also proved that Franklin and his men discovered a channel of communication between known points in Barrow Strait through to the northern coast of America, thus becoming the first to discover a North-West Passage.

Of the dead referred to when the ships were abandoned, three of them were positively identified in 1850 from carved headstones on graves found on Beechey Island by a search expedition. And since Franklin had sailed into the central Arctic with 24 officers and 105 men, it was possible to conclude that 15 officers and 90 men were still living at the beginning of the death march toward the Great Fish River. Besides the three men buried on Beechey, the remains of only one other man were subsequently positively identified among the scattering of bones found up and down King William Island: Lieutenant John Irving of the Terror.

But McClintock was about to add to these discoveries, for on 24 May 1859, near Cape Herschel, some 135 miles from where the Erebus and Terror were abandoned, skeletal remains were found with a nearby pocketbook. Of this man, who more than likely got separated from a larger party, McClintock wrote:

‘[his] dress appeared to be that of a steward or officer's servant, the loose bow-knot in which his neck-handkerchief was tied not being used by seamen or officers … ’

The nearby pocketbook contained the service certificate and other papers belonging to Henry Peter Peglar, Terror’s Captain of the Fore Top and Gibson’s old Wanderer shipmate - the whole of great significance because they represented the only personal papers recovered from the Franklin Expedition.

But - as a result of the above description of the deceased’s uniform - Polar historians Richard Cyriax and A. G. E. Jones have questioned McClintock's subsequent assumption that the skeleton belonged to Peglar. The latter was never a Steward or Officers' Servant in the Royal Navy and it seems highly improbable that a First Class Petty Officer would put on the uniform of a lowly domestic - indeed McClintock stated himself that when the possessor of the pocketbook left the ship, he had 'dressed himself in his best shore-going clothes, the clothes reserved to be worn on the day of landing once more in England'.

In fact, Cyriax and Jones concluded that the skeleton was not Peglar's, but that of a friend, to whom the latter had entrusted his personal pocketbook. They further argued that the friend in question may have been Thomas Armitage, a Gunroom Steward in the Terror, for the pair of them had been shipmates from 1834-37.

However, in the early 1990s, and as outlined above, research undertaken by Glenn Stein revealed the more recent link of Peglar and Gibson aboard the Wanderer 1840-44. Might then the remains be his? Certainly the uniform details match his status, and after four years together in the Wanderer, he may well have been chosen by an ailing Peglar to safeguard his papers. Added to which, two different styles of hand-writing were identified among the assorted papers in the pocketbook, Cyriax and Jones contending that they belonged to Peglar and Thomas Armitage - but the latter is now difficult to sustain in light of the recent discovery of the his marriage certificate, which reveals that he was in fact illiterate. Better still - in supporting the contention that the remains were those of Gibson - is that the fact that some of the writing in the pocketbook refers to ‘the grave at Comfort Cove’, a location on Ascension Island, which he and Peglar had visited between August-September 1840, and again in 1841, when recuperating from anti-slave trade operations in the Wanderer; the ‘grave’ most probably refers to one of the burial sites dotted around the cove, and presumably a site at which Wanderer malaria victims were laid to rest.

Though Franklin's sailor will never fully regain his identity, A. G. E. Jones was sufficiently impressed by this more recent research to write: ‘On the balance, it may have been more likely Gibson, not Armitage … Weighing up the tangible and intangible evidence, and the gaps in our knowledge, Gibson looks a better bet’.

References
ADM 38/1962 (Muster books of H.M.S. Terror, 3 March to 17 May 1845 & 30 June 1845); ADM 38/9306 (CDO books of H.M.S. Wanderer, 18 November 1839 to 27 June 1844); ADM 44/617 (Series EC. Claims of executors and next-of-kin for back pay of ratings who died in service 1800-1860); ADM 171/9 (Arctic Medal 1818-1855 Roll); ADM 171/12 (China War Medal 1842 Roll); The Papers in the Possession of Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop, H.M.S. Terror, 1845, by R. J. Cyriax and A. G. E. Jones (1954); Henry Peter Peglar, Captain of the Foretop (1811-48), by A. G. E. Jones (1984); The Voyage of the “Fox” in the Arctic Seas, by Francis L. McClintock (1859).

Sold with a large quantity of related research, including photocopied entries from official records and a very detailed article by Glenn Stein regarding Gibson's naval service, medal entitlement and analysis of the skeleton and artifacts found by McClintock.