The impressive memorial stone in Folkestone Old Cemetery gives few hints about a short action filled life and a long widowhood:
Stephen Court
Master Royal Navy
Died April 11th 1861, aged 34 years
Also of Susanna Alice Court, widow of the above
Died March 10th 1924, in her 88th year.
Susanna married the Arctic explorer Stephen in January 1857. She was ten years younger, and it is likely they were cousins. Even then their time together was short, as he was between commissions in the Royal Navy, having recently returned from the Crimea conflict in the Black Sea and soon to be posted to the China Sea. Some sources imply that he was not in good health when, four years later, he returned to Folkestone, on Half Pay, dying that spring.
Susanna’s parents were publicans in Dover Road. Widowed in 1861, she moved from Raglan Villas in Mill Road to the stretch of Cheriton Road from the station to the town centre. The 1871 Census shows her with four nieces: Ann E. 22, Harriet 20 and Suzy Court 15, and Ann Dale 7. Later Susanna is lodging with Helen Bailey, possibly a close relative of Stephen’s. A report of her funeral in 1924, mentions five nieces attending and several well-known Folkestone families. Probate records show that she left over £2,000.
Stephen’s exploits can be traced from Greenwich National Maritime Museum, Canadian Archives, a display in ‘The Samuel Peto’ Wetherspoons in Folkestone, and “Erebus” Michael Palin’s book.
Born in Folkestone, Stephen gained entry to Greenwich Royal Naval Hospital’s School, hinting that his father had been an officer. He became known as a good seaman and navigator on merchant ‘packet’ ships plying from Falmouth on the “Brazils” trade to South American ports. Following his experiences in the Arctic, the Royal Navy enlisted him as a Sailing Master on its warships.
A great mystery puzzled Britain in 1847 – What had happened to HMS Erebus and Terror, and to John Franklin’s crews? This expedition left England in 1845, only to disappear in the frozen seas of Canada, searching for a way to sail the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean. In two years, whaling ships and seal hunters had neither heard nor found anything.
Stephen Court joined the first search mission of 1848 as Second Master on HMS Enterprise. James Clark Ross, the greatest of Polar seamen led them in HMS Investigator, whose First Lieutenant was Robert
McClure. Stephen joined Ross when caught in ice, they searched further by sledges. They spent a winter iced, searched again in spring then, with illness amongst their crew, returned to England. (John Rae, the Scotsman who mapped 1,750 miles of Canada’s Arctic coast working with indigenous peoples, had been told by the tragic end of Franklin’s expedition by Inuit hunters. They traded him items they’d found in abandoned camps. However, his report was largely rejected.)
In 1850 a two-pronged search was to set out; westward from the Greenland side as before, and also from eastward from Alaska. Now Stephen was Sailing Master of HMS Investigator as they hoisted sail to cross the Atlantic and round stormy Cape Horn into the Pacific. His Captain, Robert McClure, lost contact with Enterprise in the North Pacific, but expected it to be ahead of them when they sailed through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean. Investigator crept eastward through pack-ice mapping coast and islands, wondering if they’d find signs of Franklin’s lost ships, or hear of them from Inuit people.
They found an anchorage as winter set in. They named it Mercy Bay. Sub-zero temperatures and howling storms confined them aboard for long periods as they eked out stores hoping they had enough fruit juices and vegetable soups to keep scurvy at bay. It was the first of four winters in the ice.
However, they had sledges, so when the weather settled, they set out across the jumble ice with Stephen making maps from Banks Island to the far-off shores of Melville Island. Though not sailing, they were the first Europeans to cross the North-West Passage and after walking ten days found Winter Harbour. Explorers from the east had reached that far, leaving a cairn of rocks, where Stephen left a message. McClure noted,“… the ever dependable Stephen Court … The sailor’s world is a small one – even more so for Arctic men …”
In summer the ship crept further between dangerous piles of ice. More mapping sledge journeys were navigated by Stephen. In the hardest winters known a “tent” of canvas was lashed between masts to protect the top deck. Assistant surgeon, Henry Piers described their 2nd winter: “ … imagine a ship frozen up with the deck covered in snow a foot or 18 inches deep … a temperature of minus 30 or 49 with strong wind … the fine snow drift … finding its way through and covering everything, the wind howling through the rigging at the same time: let him picture to himself then this covered deck lit by a single candle in a lantern; five or six officers walking the starboard side and maintaining some conversation, and twenty or thirty men, perfectly mute, slowly pacing the port side, muffled up to the eyes and covered with snow drift or frozen vapour … he will then have some idea of this winter’s day’s exercise.”
By spring 1852 the crew were malnourished and in poor health.
One day, exercising on the ice, they were shocked to see a dark figure approaching waving and shouting. It was Lieutenant Pim, whose ship had found their message at Winter Harbour. Some supplies came from his ship, Resolute, but that vessel was also to be trapped. Another dark winter was passed before the crews abandoned their vessels and “hitch hiked” on whalers, then HMS North Star, back to
England. The Navy lost five ships during that expedition. Stephen gained the “Arctic Medal for Arctic Discoveries 1818 – 1855”, depicting men, a sledge and a ship held by ice, with an ivory ribbon.
Stephen was soon on active service aboard HMS Odin in the Baltic Sea. This paddle frigate was like one of Nelson’s ships with paddle boxes and funnel added. Her big guns were used along the Finnish coast during the Crimea War. Late in the conflict, Stephen was in the Black Sea readying small vessels to bombard the Russian city of Sebastopol. His medal has the “Sebastopol” clasp on its ribbon.
With peace he returned to Folkestone to marry Susanna and for a short while they were together before he joined a ‘modern’ paddle frigate, still equipped with sails. This was HMS Furious, tasked with shepherding a flotilla of small vessels to the China Sea. A drawing shows her leading her charges south from Maderia. With no Suez Canal, that meant down to Cape Town, up the East African coast, then across to India; down past Burma to Singapore and north to Hong Kong. They’d have to call in for fresh water and food, plus coal for those with engines as well as sails. Accounts say they also helped with a wrecked ship on the way.
Stephen’s medals include “China War 1860” plus engagement clasps for “Pekin” and “Taku Forts”. A great seaman, Stephen took Furious up the Yellow River further than European ships had ever been. He was Harbour Master at Shanghai until war broke out in 1861.
But his final medal, kept by Greenwich, is from The Royal Humane Society: “HMS Furious was at anchor at the mouth of the Peiho river when AB William Wire fell from the rigging into the sea, having been knocked unconscious. Stephen Court jumped overboard and saved him.”
