Thomas Abernethy

Thomas Abernethy (1803 – 13 April 1860) was a Scottish seafarer, gunner in the Royal Navy, and polar explorer. Because he was neither an officer nor a gentleman, he was little mentioned in the books written by the leaders of the expeditions he went on, but was praised in what was written. In 1857, he was awarded the Arctic Medal for his service as an able seaman on the 1824–25 voyage of HMS Hecla, the first of his five expeditions for which participants were eligible for the award. He was in parties that, for their time, reached the furthest north, the furthest south (twice), and the nearest to the South Magnetic Pole. In 1831, along with James Clark Ross's team of six, Abernethy was in the first party ever to reach the North Magnetic Pole. Early and personal life Thomas Abernethy was born in 1803 at Longside in northeast Scotland. While he was a child, his family moved to Peterhead, a nearby port. His parents were James Abernethy, a stonemason, and Isabella Robertson. Thomas had an elder sister, Ann, who was born in 1801, and twin brothers, James and William, who were both born in 1816. Thomas went to sea at the age of ten and when he was about twelve he was apprenticed as a merchant seaman on the sloop Friends. He travelled to the West Indies and twice to Newfoundland. In 1819, he became a greenhand on the maiden voyage of the Peterhead whaling ship Hannibal, which hunted bowhead whales around the eastern coast of Greenland, and in its third season sailed into the Davis Strait on the western coast, where ice conditions can be much heavier. In 1829, Abernethy married Barbara Fiddes, the daughter of a ship's carpenter, and they lived at Deptford, southeast London, near the Royal Naval docks. They had no children. Abernethy was nearly six feet tall and well built – there are no known photographs or portraits of him. He had dark hair and a ruddy complexion. In 1829, John Ross described him as "decidedly the best-looking man in the ship" and he thought that men of his appearance were best able to endure cold. Clements Markham described him as "a handsome man with a well-knit frame, and was resourceful and thoroughly reliable." Arctic with Parry, 1824–1827