Cape Crozier is the most easterly point of Ross Island

Ross Island

Ross Island is an island formed by four volcanoes in the Ross Sea near the continent of Antarctica, off the coast of Victoria Land in McMurdo Sound.-Geography:...

 in Antarctica. It was discovered in 1841 during James Clark Ross

James Clark Ross

Sir James Clark Ross , was a British naval officer and explorer. He explored the Arctic with his uncle Sir John Ross and Sir William Parry, and later led his own expedition to Antarctica.-Arctic explorer:...

's expedition with HMS Erebus

HMS Erebus (1826)

HMS Erebus was a Hecla-class bomb vessel designed by Sir Henry Peake and constructed by the Royal Navy in Pembroke dockyard, Wales in 1826. The vessel was named after the dark region in Hades of Greek mythology called Erebus...

 and HMS Terror

HMS Terror (1813)

HMS Terror was a bomb vessel designed by Sir Henry Peake and constructed by the Royal Navy in the Davy shipyard in Topsham, Devon. The ship, variously listed as being of either 326 or 340 tons, carried two mortars, one and one .-War service:...

, and was named after Francis Crozier

Francis Crozier

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was born in Ireland at Banbridge, County Down and was a British naval officer who participated in six exploratory expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic...

, captain of HMS Terror. The extinct volcano Mount Terror

Mount Terror (Antarctica)

Mount Terror is a large shield volcano that forms the eastern part of Ross Island, Antarctica. It has numerous cinder cones and domes on the flanks of the shield and is mostly under snow and ice. It is the second largest of the four volcanoes which make up Ross Island and is somewhat overshadowed...

, also named during the Ross expedition, rises sharply from the Cape to a height of 10597 feet (3,230 m), and the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf

Ross Ice Shelf

The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica . It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 km long, and between 15 and 50 metres high above the water surface...

 (formerly known as the Barrier or Great Ice Barrier) stretches away to its east.

First landing, 1902

The first landing at Cape Crozier was on 22 January 1902, during Captain Scott's Discovery Expedition

Discovery Expedition

The British National Antarctic Expedition, 1901–04, generally known as the Discovery Expedition, was the first official British exploration of the Antarctic regions since James Clark Ross's voyage sixty years earlier...

. A party from RRS Discovery

RRS Discovery

The RRS Discovery was the last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built in Britain. Designed for Antarctic research, she was launched in 1901. Her first mission was the British National Antarctic Expedition, carrying Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton on their first, successful...

 landed by small boat on a stony beach area a little to the west of the Cape. A postbox was set up there, prominently marked, for messages to be collected by any future relief ship. Scott, Edward Wilson

Edward Adrian Wilson

Edward Adrian Wilson was a notable English polar explorer, physician, naturalist, painter and ornithologist.-Early life:...

 and Charles Royds

Charles Royds

Vice-Admiral Sir Charles William Rawson Royds KBE CMG ADC FRGS was a career Royal Navy officer who later served as Assistant Commissioner "A" of the London Metropolitan Police from 1926 to 1931...

 climbed the slope to a vantage point from which they could view the Barrier surface, and they were also able to observe the large Adelie Penguin

Adelie Penguin

The Adélie Penguin, Pygoscelis adeliae, is a species of penguin common along the entire Antarctic coast. They are among the most southerly distributed of all seabirds, as are the Emperor Penguin, the South Polar Skua, the Wilson's Storm Petrel, the Snow Petrel, and the Antarctic Petrel...

 colony which inhabited the surrounding ice-free terrain.

Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-13

Captain Scott seriously considered Cape Crozier as the base for his second Antarctic expedition. On the previous trip the Discovery, in McMurdo Sound, had been frozen into its berth for nearly two years, and had barely escaped in February 1904, a circumstance that had led to an expensive relief operation and some opprobrium for Scott. There would be no chance of the Terra Nova

Terra Nova (ship)

The Terra Nova was built in 1884 for the Dundee whaling and sealing fleet. She worked for 10 years in the annual seal fishery in the Labrador Sea, proving her worth for many years before she was called upon for expedition work.Terra Nova was ideally suited to the polar regions...

being icebound in the open seas off Cape Crozier, but the unsheltered location would make landings of stores and personnel difficult, the shore base would be at the mercy of rough weather, and the land route to the Barrier surface was problematic. Scott decided to return to McMurdo Sound for his base, though to a more northerly anchorage (Cape Evans

Cape Evans

Cape Evans is a rocky cape on the west side of Ross Island, forming the north side of the entrance to Erebus Bay.The cape was discovered by the Discovery expedition under Robert Falcon Scott, who named it the Skuary. Scott's second expedition, the British Antarctic Expedition , built its...

).

Winter journey, 1911

Wilson was keen to continue researching the Emperor Penguin embryo, and needed to obtain eggs at an early stage of incubation, which meant collecting them in the depth of the Antarctic winter. In the Zoology section of the Discovery Expedition's published Scientific Report he suggested a plan for a "winter journey" whereby these eggs could be retrieved. This journey, with Captain Scott's approval, was undertaken between 27 June and 2 August 1911, by Wilson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard was an English explorer of Antarctica. He was a survivor of the Terra Nova Expedition and is acclaimed for his historical account of this expedition, The Worst Journey in the World....

 and Henry Robertson Bowers. Cherry-Garrard later described the trek in his book, The Worst Journey in the World

The Worst Journey in the World

The Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910–1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. It was written and published in 1922 by a survivor of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and has earned wide praise for its frank treatment of the difficulties of the expedition,...

. In the winter darkness and extreme weather conditions the journey proved slow and hazardous, but despite mishaps three eggs were retrieved and later presented by Cherry-Garrard to the Natural History Museum. Ultimately, however, their scientific value proved minimal.

Restricted site

Cape Crozier is within a restricted area and permission is required to visit it. It is part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest

Site of Special Scientific Interest

A Site of Special Scientific Interest is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom. SSSIs are the basic building block of site-based nature conservation legislation and most other legal nature/geological conservation designations in Great Britain are based upon...

classified by SCAR (Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research). Cape Crozier is home to one of the largest Adelie Penguins colonies in the world (~150,000 breeding pairs), a smaller Emperor Penguin colony (~600 breeding pairs), and one of the largest South Polar Skua colonies in the world (~1,000 breeding pairs). It also hosts several rare species of lichens.

Sources

• http://www.scar.org/publications/bulletins/150/aspa124/
• http://skimountaineer.com
• http://wwwnhm.ac.uk
• Edward Wilson: Diary of the Discovery Expedition, Blandford Press 1966
• Scott's Last Expedition Vol 1, Smith, Elder & Co 1913
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World, Penguin Travel Library edition 1983
• George Seaver: Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, John Murray 1940 edition