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72

A LATE VICTORIAN MOUNTED SKULL,, LATE 19th CENTURY; and a collection of roe deer and other heads.<..

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A LATE VICTORIAN MOUNTED SKULL,, LATE 19th CENTURY; and a collection of roe deer and other heads.<..
A LATE VICTORIAN MOUNTED SKULL,
LATE 19th CENTURY; and a collection of roe deer and other heads.
e100/200

Sir Henry Gore-Booth's arctic voyages
The 'beau idea' of his daughter Constance Markievicz, the adventurous Sir Henry was born in 1843 and developed a taste for hunting, shooting and fishing from his earliest childhood. After schooling at Eton he turned his attention to the sea, knocking about Sligo Bay in a half-decked yawl with a local boy, Thomas Kilgallon (who would later become butler at Lissadell) as crew. So began a lifelong affair with the sea.

In his early twenties Sir Henry accompanied his friend Arthur McMorrough Kavanagh salmon fishing to the north of Norway on the yacht Eva. On three voyages, between 1864 and 1866, Sir Henry learnt the ropes and the art of navigation under Kavanagh and the Eva's Captain, Caines. In the 1870s he took further fishing trips up to Spitzbergen and in 1879 hired the 55-foot Isbjorn, crossing the Barents Sea to the coasts of Novaya Zemlya, reaching 48 degrees 24 minutes north. Sir Henry, accompanied by his guest Admiral Albert H Markham, studied the nature and drift of ice floes and collected natural history specimens, the beginnings of a large natural history collection which would be housed at Lissadell. Markham wrote up the voyage in his 'Polar Reconnaissance' (lot 86).

In 1881 Sir Henry made a promise to his friend Benjamin Leigh Smith, who was embarking on a cruise to Franz Josef Land, that he would lead a search party north if Leigh Smith did not return in the autumn as planned. Leigh Smith's yacht Eira was in fact crushed by the ice, forcing him to winter in Franz Josef Land. With his friend overdue, Gore-Booth took up his promise, buying a 63-foot wooden ketch which he had hastily strengthened for the ice, and prepared to set out on his rescue mission. The vessel was named Kara and Sir Henry sailed with his friend the Arctic traveller and pioneer Arctic photographer William John Alexander (Johnny) Grant and a crew of ten Scottish whalers to Novaya Zemlya (whence he assumed Leigh Smith would have made to seek help) in May 1882.

The Kara and the whaler Hope met up with Leigh Smith and his crew in their boats at Matochkin Sharr, Novaya Zemlya, successfully effecting their rescue, and the Kara proceeded to cruise north along the Novaya Zemlya coastline. She was beset by ice in Systina Sound but was successfully refloated and sailed home in early September. Leigh Smith presented Gore-Booth with photographs recording the Eira's 1880 cruise (lot 78A) in gratitude for the Kara's rescue mission. These early reconnaissances of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya by Leigh Smith and Gore-Booth were minuted by the Royal Geographical Society as showing that these coastlines were more accessible than had been previously believed. Sir Henry continued to make fishing trips to the Arctic, taking the Kara to North Greenland and Iceland fishing for bottle-nosed whales south of Jan Mayen Island in 1884, and cruising on a steam yacht to Spitzbergen, the Leven Islands and Novaya Zemlya in 1888. He embarked on what would be his last voyage, on a whaling and sealing trip on the Kara to North Greenland, in 1892.

These frequent trips to the far North took a toll on Sir Henry's health. The primitive facilities provided by the Kara can be envisaged from the model (lot 79). Despite extended visits to South Africa and the Caribbean, Sir Henry died of pneumonia in Switzerland in 1900 at the age of 56.
Nicholas Lambourn
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