This brought him satisfaction in more ways than one: ‘I had thus afforded me of landing on a piece of Antarctic ice for the first time, to pick up a penguin. On 7th January he shot a penguin, and later in the day, four more: ‘two with one shot’. Surgeon Robert McCormick, a veteran of Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, keeps copious notes on the animals encountered, and attempts, Pythonically, to shoot most of them: He also makes excellent use of diaries and letters written by officers and crew. In travelogue style, he revisits places the Erebus visited like the Falklands, and Tasmania, and compares then to now, helping to place us there too. Michael Palin spends much of the first half of the book describing these exhilarating Antarctic adventures, and he does it with a wry enthusiasm, bolstered by his own experiences as an eminent explorer and film-maker. In 1839, she was refitted for James Clark Ross’s command, to explore the southern oceans and the Antarctic, and to set up observatories for measuring the earth’s magnetism - it was thought it would aid navigation, like GPS. She was made for hurling ordnance at America’s coastal defences. He was a bravely optimistic, genial man who sermonised well, but was ill suited to the ferocious demands of leading an Arctic expedition of 128 men into the unknown.Įrebus began life as a ‘bomb ship’. She was commanded by Sir John Franklin, an older commander very much in the imperial mould. Instead of fighting battles, it was now battling the elements, in the cause of scientific discovery and imperial expansion.Įrebus had been tasked by Sir John Barrow, 2nd Secretary of the Admiralty, with looking for a way through to the Pacific from the North Atlantic the ‘North West Passage’. It was during a golden period for British exploring, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the Crimean War of 1854, with a Royal Navy that had shrunk from 145,000 men to 19,000. Immediately after her disappearance, 10 years and £28 million (in today’s money) were spent looking for her. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada. Vividly recounting the experiences of the men who first set foot on Antarctica’s Victoria Land, and those who, just a few years later, froze to death one by one in the Arctic ice, beyond the reach of desperate rescue missions, Erebus is a wonderfully evocative account of a truly extraordinary adventure, brought to life by a master explorer and storyteller.In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. The ship was filled with fascinating people: the dashing and popular James Clark Ross, who charted much of the ‘Great Southern Barrier’ the troubled John Franklin, whose chequered career culminated in the Erebus’s final, disastrous expedition and the eager Joseph Dalton Hooker, a brilliant naturalist – when he wasn’t shooting the local wildlife dead. Michael Palin brings the remarkable Erebus back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic. In 1848, it disappeared in the Arctic, its fate a mystery. HMS Erebus was one of the great exploring ships, a veteran of groundbreaking expeditions to the ends of the Earth.
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