George Francis Lyon | |
|---|---|
_(by_John_Jackson).jpg) Portrait byJohn Jackson | |
| Other name | Said-ben-Abdallah |
| Born | (1796-01-23)23 January 1796[1] Chichester, England |
| Died | 8 October 1832(1832-10-08) (aged 36) |
| Branch |  Royal Navy |
| Years of service | 1808–1832 |
| Rank | Captain |
| Commands | HMS Hecla,HMS Griper |
George Francis LyonFRS (23 January 1796 – 8 October 1832) was an English naval officer and explorer of Africa and the Arctic. While not having a particularly distinguished career, he is remembered for the entertaining journals he kept and for the pencil drawings he completed in the Arctic; this information was useful to later expeditions.
He was born inChichester,[2] the elder son of Lieutenant Colonel George Lyon of the 11th Light Dragoons and Louisa Alexandrina Hart. She was in turn the second daughter of SirWilliam Neville Hart and Elizabeth Aspinwall.[1] He was educated atBurney's Academy inGosport, Hampshire.[2]
After joining theRoyal Navy he was entered on the books ofHMS Royal William atSpithead in 1808 before going to sea aboardHMS Milford.[2]
In 1818, he was sent along withJoseph Ritchie bySir John Barrow to find the course of theNiger River and the location ofTimbuktu. The expedition was underfunded, lacked support and because the ideas of John Barrow departed fromTripoli and thus had to cross theSahara as part of their journey.[clarification needed]
A year later, due to much officialdom they had only got as far asMurzuk where they both fell ill. Ritchie never recovered and died there, but Lyon survived and travelled a little further around the region. Exactly a year to the day he left, he arrived back in Tripoli, the expedition being a complete failure.
Having been promised a promotion on his return, he now set about trying to pester theAdmiralty into fulfilling their promise. He irritated enough people that his reward was, in 1821, to be given the command ofHMS Hecla underWilliam Edward Parry on his second attempt at theNorthwest Passage. Among Lyon's lieutenants wasHenry Parkyns Hoppner. The expedition also includedFrancis Crozier andJames Clark Ross.[3] Lyon received his promotion to captain on his return.
In 1824, he was given command ofHMS Griper, a ship that had proved itself a poor Arctic vessel onWilliam Edward Parry's 1819 expedition. His goal was to sail toHudson Bay and then north throughRoes Welcome Sound toRepulse Bay and then go overland through unknown country to reachJohn Franklin's furthest east at Point Turnagain on theKent Peninsula. The Inuit had told Parry that there was salt water three days' walk to the west, but this was apparently theGulf of Boothia.[4]
Hudson Bay was unusually ice-filled, and on 1 September 1824, nearCape Fullerton, just west of the entrance to Roes Welcome Sound, a storm drove the ship onto a rock or iceberg. All hands expected the ship to sink but when the gale died down it was still afloat. On 12 September,Griper was forced to anchor offshore in a gale with heavy seas and snow. It lost its anchor cables and the masts and rigging were badly damaged. Lyon took three weeks to work the hulk out of Hudson Bay. Arriving at Spithead without anchors the ship only stopped when it fouled a three-decker's mooring cables.
While he was well known in society, this last failure effectively saw himblacklisted in theRoyal Navy and he never had another command. Having been made an honoraryDoctor of Civil Laws (DCL) by theUniversity of Oxford in 1825,[2] he was elected aFellow of the Royal Society on 15 November 1827.[5] He died on 8 October 1832, on board thepacket boatEmulous en route fromBuenos Aires to Britain to be treated for eye problems.[2]
He married Lucy Louisa, younger daughter of the Irish revolutionaryLord Edward Fitzgerald, on 5 September 1825.[6][7][8] They had a daughter, Lucy Pamela Sophia Lyon, born in September 1826.[9] Lucy Louisa Lyon died that same month, while her husband was away in Mexico. He did not find out about her death until he landed atHolyhead, having survived the wreck of the ship bringing him home.[8] His daughter went on to marry Reverend Thomas Ovens in 1849, had three children, and died in 1904.[9]
An aspect of his personality that was rare at the time was his genuine interest in the "natives" of the countries he visited. Wearing athawb and learning fluentArabic, he managed to blend in withthe inhabitants of North Africa; he was tattooed by theInuit in the Arctic, using needle and sooty thread, and ate rawcaribou andseal meat with them. The expedition achieved little, spending two years in the Arctic and getting only as far theFury and Hecla Strait before being stopped by ice. But the information recorded about the Inuit tribes that he met proved valuable to later generations of anthropologists, such asFranz Boas andKnud Rasmussen, who relied on his journals as a reference point for their own observations.[10]
