Under the command of the dashing Captain James Clark Ross, the crew of the Erebus then spent the next four years voyaging further south than anyone had ever been before.Īs Palin notes, they were “polar pioneers”, at one time even sighting the Antarctic continent itself: a barren white landscape that looked like a huge sheet of paper waiting for someone to write on it. Her hull was strengthened with six-inch oak planking, and extra thick copper sheeting was used to cover the bow from waterline to keel. But it wasn’t until she was converted from a warship to an ice-ship that Erebus acquired a distinct identity. A tough, squat vessel, she spent a couple of years patrolling the Mediterranean as a visible reminder that Britannia ruled the waves. Designed to fling shells high over coastal defences, they are referred to in “The Star-Spangled Banner”, where “the bombs bursting in air” alludes to the fire from British bomb ships. It’s a fascinating story that he brings full-bloodedly to life, stripping away the barnacles of the past to reveal the hidden history of a ship that spent years encountering places such as Cape Disappointment, Delusion Point and Exasperation Bay.Ĭommissioned in 1823, the 372-ton Erebus was one of the last warships known as bomb vessels. Photograph: Getty Images/Altrendoīut before Franklin took it on its final voyage, Erebus had spent several years successfully exploring other equally bleak parts of the planet, and it is this previous life that forms the first two-thirds of Palin’s book.
In classical mythology, Erebus usually referred to the depths of the Underworld, and the ship that bore this name had certainly found a suitable resting place for itself.Įarly journeys … Cape Disappointment, Washington. Lost for almost 170 years, it lay virtually intact on the Arctic seabed, swaddled by strands of kelp and preserved by the ice like a giant ship in a bottle. (Whales are so reluctant to hurry, he points out, that their lives appear to be like “the human equivalent of taking very long baths”.) The second is that he has plenty of new material to draw on, the most important of which was the discovery of Franklin’s ship HMS Erebus by a Canadian underwater archaeology team in 2014. The first is that he’s Michael Palin, which means that his narrative is driven by a deep sympathy for explorers and adventurers, while also being illuminated by flashes of gentle wit. Despite angry protestations from such influential figures as Charles Dickens, and a determined one-woman campaign by his widow Lady Jane, it looked suspiciously as if Franklin (or one of his crew) had become The Man Who Ate His Men.Īlthough the story of this disastrous voyage has often been told, two things distinguish Michael Palin’s revisiting of it. What had begun as a voyage into the icy unknown had apparently turned into a real-life Heart of Darkness. Several years after he should have returned, a search party stumbled across a sad trail of relics in the snow, including a chronometer, four teaspoons, and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, together with some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth. A search party found a chronometer, four teaspoons, and some human bones that had been gnawed on by human teeth
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