Cheered on by a crowd of engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths, clerks and their families, the stout, broad-hulled warship they had been building for the past two years slides, stern first, down the slipway at Pembroke Dockyard. The cheers rise to a roar as she strikes the waters of Milford Haven. She bounces, bobs and shakes herself like a newborn waterfowl. Her name is Erebus.
It might be a Canadian thing to be fascinated by the doomed Franklin Expedition that ended on our northern limits – I watched several documentaries with my Dad that came out on the subject as I was growing up – and from the (maybe) tainted tinned goods they consumed to the (unmistakable) signs of cannibalism that eventual recovery missions discovered, this is a tragic tale that has long piqued my interest. Although a longtime Monty Python fan, I had never read one of Michael Palin's travel books before, so I looked forward to starting with his Erebus; a biography of sorts on the ship that Sir John Franklin captained off to its final, frigid resting place. This book is an amazing accumulation of research – from the shipbuilders' blueprints to extensive quotes from her sailors' journals and letters – and Palin paints a vivid and exhaustive story of HMS Erebus' twenty-some years of service. As a noted traveller himself, Palin retraced the routes of the Erebus during his research for this book, and his thoughts and experience from pole to pole breathe modern life into a Victorian tale. I enjoyed this very much and would read Palin again.
When I made a journey to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2014 the sight of a single whale was enough to bring everyone out on deck, reaching for cameras and binoculars. Sometimes, if you were very lucky, two or three would surface. Watching them was both compulsive and strangely soothing. Of all God's creatures, they seem the least prone to hurrying. Their lives seem to be the human equivalent of taking very long baths. When they did move, it was a performance of beauty and grace, of great weight moved with minimum effort. And there can surely be no better final bow than the languid, quietly powerful rise, flick and fall of the fluke. I like to think that those aboard Erebus drew similar comfort from the whales' company on the long and increasingly hazardous journey south.I had read before that Erebus, alongside her sister ship HMS Terror, had been captained by James Clark Ross to the Antarctic in search of the Magnetic South Pole, but this part of her story was more vividly evoked here than elsewhere; in particular I marvelled at the mental image of the ice-covered active volcano that Ross fittingly named Mount Erebus. And as for the later Arctic expedition, there wasn't much here that I hadn't already read. Even so, I found value in having the whole story of this ship's lifespan laid out in this way, encapsulating as it does a particular slice of time during the Age of Discovery; a rare time of peace during which the British Navy refitted warships to explore the globe and name, measure, and collect all that they found out there. The one complaint that I would have about this book is the way that Palin brings modern sensibilities to bear on the efforts of these intrepid explorers: I don't need to be told that imperialism, the extermination of native peoples, and the over-extraction of natural resources – and in particular, animals – isn't justified by “the spirit of Enlightenment”. In one stirring chapter, Erebus and Terror got tangled together as they tried to steer through a narrow passageway in an otherwise unbroken series of icebergs, and employing a last ditch effort to put his ship into reverse (under sail power), Ross was able to disentangle the ships and narrowly avoid the crushing wall of ice. Palin quotes from several of the sailors' journals and letters as they later thank God for their safe passage, and then he unnecessarily lectures the reader:
The sternboard manoeuvre that Ross and his crew executed in the most dire and dangerous situation would have been a great gamble at any time. It was this almighty risk, rather than the Almighty himself, that saved the lives of his men.Palin uncovered much fascinating information – trapped in pack ice off Antarctica on New Year's Day of 1842, the crews of both ships carved a ballroom into the snow and Captain Crozier of the Terror and Captian Ross (in drag) led the dancing; DNA testing of bones from the Franklin Expedition reveal that four of the skeletons had no Y chromosomes (as they were definitely European, either the Y chromosomes had deteriorated, or these seamen were seawomen in disguise) – and I can't fault the comprehensive scholarship behind this effort. And as the insertion of Palin's own thoughts and experience did elevate this book beyond dull textbook-level material for me, I can't ultimately fault him for stretching the limits of what I wanted to hear from him. Overall, a fine read; one that made me glad to be indoors as the snow falls and the wind howls outside my walls.
