On this day in 1875, Sir Henry Kellett of Clonacody House in Fethard, polar explorer and Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy, died at the age of 68.
Kellett was born in Clonacody in 1806. After joining the Royal Navy in 1822 at the age of 16, he was appointed to numerous surveying missions which took him to Africa, South America, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, the New Hebrides and Borneo before arriving in China in 1840 where he served in the First Opium War.
In recognition of his services in that conflict, he was promoted to Captain and he would go on to survey the coasts of Central America, the Gulf of California and Vancouver Island in the HMS Herald.
In the 1850s, Kellett went on two missions to search for Sir John Franklin’s expedition which had disappeared while trying to find a route through the famed North West Passage in the Canadian Arctic. If successful, the North West Passage would allow ships to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice-versa without having to go around the Spanish-controlled Cape Horn in South America.
In 1852, Kellett had been made Captain of the HMS Resolute which later got stuck in pack-ice while coming to the aid of HMS Investigator, which had itself become stuck while searching for Franklin’s two ships- Erebus and Terror. In a cruel twist of fate, Robert Le Mesurier McClure, the Wexford-born captain of the Investigator, would be credited as the first man to discover the North West Passage while Kellett was court-martialled for abandoning the Resolute while stuck in the ice, although he was later honourably acquitted.
The Resolute was later recovered by an American whaling ship and wasn’t decommissioned until 1879 when it was salvaged for timber. From these timbers, a magnificent white oak and mahogany table was constructed by cabinetmakers at the Royal Naval Dockyard at Chatham and was presented by Queen Victoria to US President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. Since then, the desk has been used by almost every president in the Oval Office, including JFK and every president since Clinton.
Kellett spent the last years of his career in Jamaica, Malta and China. He was promoted to Vice Admiral in 1868, elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and was later awarded the British Arctic Medal. He returned to Clonacody House to live out his last years and died there, unmarried, on 1 March 1875.
Sources:
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/questions/what-is-the-resolute-desk-and-where-did-it-come-from
https://www.dib.ie/biography/kellett-sir-henry-a4438
