If it is God’s will that we should not meet again I hoop we will meet in heaven their to enjoy life everlasting. Long rollers, as if carved out of the essence of glass bottles, came rolling towards us now and then topped with a beautiful pot-of-porter-looking head.Īnd with our foreknowledge of what will happen to Erebus and Terror in the Arctic, who could not be moved by the letter of carpenter Alexander Wilson, sent from Stromness to his wife, as the ships are about to depart for the Northwest Passage: The sea is of the most perfect transparency-a beautiful, delicate, cold-looking green, or ultramarine. We can also appreciate the evocative writing of Captain Fitzjames: I opened my door to prevent it being jammed, and hurriedly put on two or three articles of dress and jumped up the hatchway We learn a lot about the quick-thinking Second Master of the Terror (and accomplished artist), John Davis, when he records that, when all hands are called on deck as Erebus and Terror are about to collide during a storm: We find out a great deal about poor Francis Crozier’s hope for love with Sophia Cracroft when she privately describes him as:Ī horrid radical and an indifferent speller He has a real eye for the telling phrase in someone else’s writing. After a while you begin to feel you know the jaunty naturalist Robert McCormick, the self-doubting Captain Francis Crozier, the wickedly humorous Captain James Fitzjames, and the intensely loyal but (one suspects) distinctly annoying Lady Jane Franklin. What distinguishes Palin’s narrative is his interest in bringing the people alive-by quoting their own words, or by taking descriptions from contemporary sources, or even just by describing the sort of accommodation and entertainment they would have had aboard ship. Ross’s Ross In The Antarctic (1982), and Fergus Fleming’s Barrow’s Boys (1998) if you want to delve more deeply into either story. These tales have been well-told in the past. In a parallel narrative strand, the story of the contemporary search for the Northwest Passage is introduced, along with a cast of naval characters that we’ll encounter again as the story progresses. He starts with the launch of Erebus, commissioned as a bomb vessel, in 1826, and charts its early and forgotten activities in the Mediterranean, before it was repurposed as an ice-strengthened exploration vessel for Ross’s Antarctic expedition in 1839. Click to enlargeīut I’m glad I cracked and bought the book in the end-Palin’s punctilious research belies the careless cover. Even the horror-fantasy television series The Terror managed to produce a better depiction of the barque-rigged vessels used on the Franklin expedition. And the depiction of a ship sporting a spritsail and square mizzen topsail (both of which the Erebus lacked) made me heave a sigh and put the book back on the shelf more than once. The cover illustration of a ship recklessly proceeding under full sail into a jagged icefield doesn’t inspire confidence. I confess I judged this book by its cover a couple of times before eventually buying it. I suppose that lets you know what you’re getting into, but where do you stop? One Ship, Several Other Ships, Two Epic Voyages, A Whole Bunch Of People Who Were Involved To A Greater Or Lesser Extent, Some Interesting Historical Context, Some Personal Reminiscences, And The Greatest Naval Mystery Of All Times. By contrast, the subtitle of the US edition drizzles on a bit, going with One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time. The UK edition of this book is succinctly subtitled The Story of a Ship. Location of the Erebus and Terror wrecks (prepared from a public domain map) The Terror turned up in a bay on King William Island ( Qikiqtaq in Inuktitut) in 2016 *. The wreck of the Erebus was discovered in relatively shallow water in 2014, off the Adelaide Peninsula (known as Iluilik by the Inuit)-and that’s what prompted Palin to write this book. All hands were lost, along with the Erebus and its sister ship Terror, under still-mysterious circumstances. Franklin’s expedition, to Arctic Canada in search of the Northwest Passage, famously failed. Erebus tells the story of the expedition ship that took James Ross to the Antarctic and John Franklin to the Arctic. He has written fiction, published a number of volumes of autobiography and numerous books to accompany his travel documentaries, but I think this is his first venture into writing popular history. He rose to fame with Monty Python in the 1970s, and then in 1989 began a career as a presenter of more-or-less gruelling travel documentaries, starting with Around The World In 80 Days. Michael Palin needs no introduction from me. They might have had monogrammed dinner plates and personalised silver cutlery, but the didn’t have very good maps.
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