Palin doesn’t only dwell on the final
disaster, but gives those tough old ships and their crews their full due. (Review
by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The end of the story of HMS Erebus is well known. In 1846, she
and her sister ship, HMS Terror,
vanished while searching for the long-sought North West Passage. It was only in
2014 that the sunken wreck of the Erebus
was found in the icy Canadian Arctic, with Terror
being discovered two years later.
The hunt for the ships began soon after
they disappeared as various stories of starving white men, long lost graves and
cannibalism began to emerge from the Inuit population in the area. With the
slightly odd British passion for elevating heroic failure above heroic success,
the captain of the Erebus, Sir John
Franklin, became one of the most celebrated figures of Arctic exploration, even
though, it must be said, he wasn’t very good at it.
But the story of the Erebus began long before. Launched in 1826, she was originally to
be a bomb ship, tough, ugly and with a shallow draft to enable her to get near
enough to shore batteries to shell them. But she was never to fire a shot in
anger, and, with Britannia ruling the waves, was turned into a polar
exploration ship. Under the command of James Clark Ross – much more successful
and therefore less well known than Franklin – she explored and charted huge
areas of Antarctica. Ross, however, had the sense to refuse to command the
Arctic expedition. Ice and voyages that could last years rather than months had
begun to pall.
Michael Palin, who has moved on from being
a Monty Python to becoming an explorer for the television age, follows the Erebus and Terror and the men – no women – who sailed in them. He tells the
story with charm and compassion, bringing to life the extraordinary age of
polar exploration and some of the characters who sailed on Erebus and Terror and
considers their horrible end – was it starvation, poisoning from badly tinned
food, TB or scurvy? Palin, however, doesn’t only dwell on the final disaster,
but gives those tough old ships and their crews their full due.
Erebus:
The Story of a Ship is written by Michael Palin and
published by Hutchinson - ISBN 9781847948137 - Margaret von Klemperer
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