![]() ![]() But Antarctica never captured the national imagination what the British navy needed now was confirmation of its superiority by making the discovery, once and for all, of a route through the North-West Passage.Ĭhosen to lead the mission was Sir John Franklin, at 59 someone many considered too old for such a hazardous journey. Under the leadership of the charismatic James Clark Ross, she and HMS Terror sailed further south than anyone had been before. In 1839, Erebus was chosen as the flagship of an expedition to penetrate south to explore Antarctica. The solid, reinforced hulls of HMS Erebus, and another bomb ship, HMS Terror, made them suitable for discovering what lay at the coldest ends of the earth. The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. Palin doesn’t let it go there either, taking up the story in the eighties when frozen bodies were exhumed and examined, confirming traces of lead poisoning from badly packaged canned food and the grisly spectre of cannibalism.Ntrepid voyager, writer and comedian Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy’s HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014. Rescue missions were sent, thanks in no small part to the tireless campaigning of Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, but nothing was known until the explorer John Rae heard tell from the local Inuit about what befell those poor souls. The ships became trapped in the ice, forcing the crew to set out on foot and sledge. It is Franklin who take charge of an again refitted Erebus – now sporting iron plating on her hull and a steam-driver propeller capable of delivering twenty-five horsepower which would allow speeds of up to four knots – for its attempt on the Northwest Passage, the sea route to the Pacific through the Arctic Ocean across the top of the Americas. A voyage, as Palin writes, that “never again in the annals of the sea would a ship, under sail alone, come close to matching.” They took another run at it a year later in 1843 and although the never made it as far as the south pole, their voyage was hailed as a great success. This was recently reckoned to be about the size of France so little wonder the ships were forced to retreat to the Falkland Islands. ![]() They pull in first at Van Diemen’s Land, running into the Governor, John Franklin, before coming up short at the Ross Ice Shelf. ![]() He takes us south from the shipyards where the Erebus was refitted towards the Antarctic for the ship’s four year exploratory mission under James Clark Ross. Palin, no stranger to epic journeys either, is a gifted storyteller who gently allows the tale to unfold – we’re almost one hundred pages in before we see any of the cold stuff. Starvation and hypothermia, amongst other things, did them in, rather than the paws of a phantom polar bear, as detailed in the recent, and rather good, TV series The Terror, based on the Dan Simmons novel. Some 130 men trekked away from both The Erebus and her sister ship, HMS Terror, only to die a cold death. When it was uncovered from its watery grave in 2014, the war ship turned exploratory vessel HMS Erebus had been missing for roughly one hundred and seventy years, abandoned when its Arctic expedition ended in ice-bound disaster. ![]()
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