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attempt to secure fresh meat. Instead, he increased the provision of tinned meat, soup and vegetables, as well as lime juice and other alleged antiscorbutics. But on 13 January 1837, one of the men died. As well, ten of the ship’s crew of sixty—both officers and men—were now sick, complaining of “languor” and “shooting pains or twitches betokening weakness” in the ankles and knees. One, named Donaldson, “evinced a disposition to incoherency.” Another was suddenly “seized with syncope,” or dizziness. The provision of canned meat and “anti-scorbutics of every kind” failed to help. While Back had suffered through horrific privations before—scurvy and starvation amongst them—during previous overland expeditions, he was unnerved by the disease eating away at the Terror’ s crew: “Who could help feeling that his hour also might shortly come?” He felt utterly helpless, that the situation was “beyond our comprehension or control.” At one point, he wondered if the cause might not in fact have been an illness carried aboard by one of the crew, at another he mused about the influence of the dank, hothouse atmosphere inside the ship and the freezing dry cold without.
    Donaldson, the man who had shown signs of incoherency and who remained in a “drowsy stupor,” died on 5 February. On 26 April, he was followed by a Royal Marine named Alexander Young who, before dying, had requested that he be autopsied. The ship’s surgeon found Young’s liver enlarged, water in the region of the heart and the quality of his blood “poor.” When Back demanded in an official letter to the surgeon, Dr. Donovan, “his opinion of the probable consequences if the ship were detained another winter in these regions,” Donovan’s answer was that “it would be fatal to many of the officers and men.” And so, when the Terror was finally released by the ice after ten months, Back ordered the ship, badly leaking, to make for home. With a hull bound round with chain cables to seal the cracks caused by the ice and “in a sinking condition,” the Terror somehow limped across the Atlantic. Even then, in July, Back watched in impotent fury as the disease continued to spread: “The whole affair, indeed, was inexplicable to the medical officers as we had the advantage of the best provisions.” As the Terror made towards Ireland, the “apprehension of sickness had induced most of the men to go without food.” Back himself remained an invalid for six months after the dreadful voyage.
    The Back expedition was an enormous setback for the Admiralty. Still, there was no attempt by British authorities to examine the causes of the illness amongst Back’s crew. Even if there had been, the probable cause—the expedition’s heavy reliance on tinned foods and the absence of fresh meat—would almost certainly have eluded suspicion. Indeed, four years after Back’s return there was a push within the Royal Navy to replace all livestock on expeditions with tinned food. Wrote Captain Basil Hall:
    Meat thus preserved eats nothing, nor drinks—it is not apt to die—does not tumble overboard or get its legs broken or its flesh worked off its bones by tumbling about the ship in bad weather—it takes no care in the keeping—it is always ready, may be eaten hot or cold, and this enables you to toss into a boat as many days’ cooked provisions as you require.
    In 1844, Second Secretary to the Admiralty John Barrow argued for one final attempt to complete the Northwest Passage. Barrow wanted to finish what he had started a quarter-century before, fearing that England, having “opened the East and West doors, would be laughed at by all the world for having hesitated to cross the threshold.” Glossing over Back’s setback, Barrow, in his bid for funding, opted to