Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Young, Allen William
YOUNG, Sir ALLEN WILLIAM (1827–1915), sailor and polar explorer, was born at Twickenham 12 December 1827, the son of Henry Young, of Twickenham. After being educated at home he joined the merchant service in 1842 and rose quickly. During the Crimean War he transferred from the Marlborough, an East Indiaman, to the command of the troopship Adelaide, but remained in the merchant service. In 1857, when (Sir) Francis Leopold McClintock [q.v.] was fitting out the yacht Fox in order to follow up the discoveries of Dr. John Rae [q.v.] bearing on the fate of the expedition of Sir John Franklin [q.v.], he chose Young as navigating officer. Young declined any salary and contributed to the cost of the expedition. During the two years spent in following Franklin’s tracks Young took an active part in sledging, and explored about 380 miles of new coast line, including the southern and western coasts of Prince of Wales Land and both shores of Franklin Strait. He also discovered McClintock Channel, but was unable to cross its rough ice. In 1860 Young had command of the Fox in the North Atlantic Telegraph expedition, which surveyed a telegraph route between Europe and America via the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. He visited the east coast of Greenland, but, believing it to be impracticable for a cable route, did not land. Sailing for the west coast he landed with Rae, who was in charge of the land part of the expedition, ascended to the ice cap near Julianehaab, but returned on deciding that a telegraph line could not be carried across Greenland. Young next went to China to assist Admiral Sherard Osborn [q.v.] in equipping the Chinese navy, and commanded the Quantung during the Taiping rebellion, 1862-1864. In 1871 he was commissioner to the Maritime Congress at Naples, and in 1875 he was present at Suakin as commissioner of the National Aid Society.
With the object of assisting the government Arctic expedition which set out in May 1875 under the command of (Sir) George Strong Nares [q.v.], Young took his steam yacht Pandora to Baffin’s Bay and picked up Nares’s dispatches from the Carey Islands. He then tried to make the North-West passage, but was stopped by heavy ice in Peel Strait. The next year he again took the Pandora north, and in spite of great difficulties landed dispatches for Nares at Cape Isabella and Littleton Island. On his return he sighted Nares’s ships homeward bound off Cape Farewell. In 1882 he commanded the whaler Hope, chartered with government help, in order to search for the explorer, Benjamin Leigh Smith, who had sailed for Franz Josef Land in July of the previous year. In August 1882 the Hope found Leigh Smith and his party at Matochkin Shar, on the west coast of Novaya Zemlya, which they had reached in boats after the destruction of their vessel off Franz Josef Land.
Young was knighted in 1877, and received the C.B. in 1881 and the C.V.O. in 1903. He also held orders from the crowns of Denmark, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. He was a commander in the Royal Naval Reserve (1862) and a younger brother of Trinity House. He died in London, unmarried, 20 November 1915. He wrote comparatively little and had a strong dislike of publicity. He contributed to the Cornhill Magazine in 1860 an account of his experiences in the Fox expedition in search of Franklin, and was the author of The Cruise of the Pandora (1876) and The Two Voyages of the Pandora (1879).
[The Times, 23 November 1915; Sir F. L. McClintock, The Voyage of the Fox, 1859; T. Zeilau, Fox Expeditionen tn Aaret, 1860 (Copenhagen, 1861); Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, July and September 1882 and April 1883; Geographical Journal, January 1916; private information.]