Francis Crozier

Erebus and Terror in the Antarctic, by James Wilson Carmichael. National Maritime Museum, London.

In 1839, Crozier again joined James Clark Ross on the Ross expedition, as second-in-command of a four-year voyage to explore the Antarctic continent in the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Crozier commanded Terror, and was appointed to the rank of captain in 1841. Erebus and Terror returned in 1843, having made the most significant penetration of the Antarctic pack ice and discovered large parts of the continent—including the Ross Sea and Ross Island, Mount Erebus and the Ross Ice Shelf.[3][4]

Crozier was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843, in recognition of his outstanding work on magnetism.[5]

In 1845, Crozier joined Captain Sir John Franklin as captain of the Terror on the Franklin expedition to traverse the last unnavigated section of the Northwest Passage. Crozier was considered to lead this expedition, but his Irish ancestry and humble birth counted against him. The privilege of selecting subordinating officers, almost always given to the second-in-command, was given to James Fitzjames. After Franklin's death in June 1847, he took command of the expedition, and his fate and those of the other expedition members remained a mystery until 1859, when a note written by Crozier and James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, was discovered on King William Island during an expedition led by Francis McClintock. Dated 25 April 1848, the note indicated that the ships—stuck in thick pack ice—had been abandoned. Nine officers, including Sir John Franklin, and 15 crewmen had died. Also stated was their intention, on 26 April, to set out on foot for Back's Great Fish River on the Canadian mainland.[6]

Unverified Inuit reports collected between 1852 and 1858 indicate that Crozier and one other expedition member might have been seen in the Baker Lake area, about 400 kilometres (250 mi) to the south, where, in 1948, Farley Mowat found "a very ancient cairn, not of normal Eskimo construction," inside which were fragments of a hardwood box with dovetail joints.[7] McClintock and later searchers found relics, graves, and human remains of the Franklin crew on Beechey Island, King William Island, and the northern coast of the Canadian mainland.

In 2014, the Victoria Strait Expedition found two items on Hat Island, in the Queen Maud Gulf, near King William Island; part of a boat-launching davit bearing the stamps of two Royal Navy broad arrows, and a wooden object, possibly a plug for a deck hawse, the iron pipe through which the ship's chain cable would descend into the chain locker below.[8][9] The expedition located one of Franklin's ships, preserved in reasonably good condition.[10][11] The wreck lies at the bottom of the eastern portion of Queen Maud Gulf, west of O'Reilly Island[12] and has been confirmed to be that of Erebus.[13] In 2016, a well-preserved ship matching Terror's description was located in Terror Bay, off the southern coast of King William Island.[14] The exploration of the wrecks continues.

Geographical features named after Crozier include:

• Cape Crozier on the eastern side of Ross Island, Antarctica
• Cape Crozier on the western flank of King William Island, in the Canadian Arctic
• Cape Crozier at the western entrance of the Bay of Mercy on Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic
• Crozier Strait which lies between Cornwallis and Bathurst Islands, in the Canadian Arctic
• Crozier River, near Fury and Hecla Strait in the Canadian Arctic
• Crozier Point on Spitsbergen, in the Arctic north of Norway
• Crozier Channel, to the north of Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic
• Crozier Island in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island
• The lunar crater Crozier, located at 13.5° S, 50.8° E on the Moon's near side
• Crozier Hill, Victor Harbor, South Australia
• Crozier Place, a street in Stanley, Falkland Islands
• The hydrographic survey vessel HMS Crozier was named after him in 1919.
• Francis Street in the suburb of Keilor Park in Melbourne, Australia

Francis Crozier appears as a character and the primary narrator of the 2007 best-selling novel, The Terror by Dan Simmons, a fictionalized account of Franklin's lost expedition, as well as the 2018 television adaptation, where Crozier is portrayed by Jared Harris.[18] Both the novel and the television adaptation depict Crozier as the sole survivor of the expedition and joining an Inuit tribe instead of seeking to return to his homeland.