5/17/2023 0 Comments Erebus the story of a ship![]() But Palin does his best, accessing, for example, the diaries of Mne Sgt Cunningham and the muster books and description books kept by the paymaster and purser on every navy ship.Įrebus: The Story of a Ship is a fugue in many voices. As always, there are far more officer sources (notably here Robert McCormick and the genius naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker) than those of regular seamen. The prose style is fluent, though Palin might have allowed himself more jokes and fewer anachronisms (“on all accounts a bit of a drip” “there was no plan B”). Plucky Inuit recount meetings with starving white men who stagger around after their ships have sunk ![]() It is an epic story, full of appalling human suffering (everyone died) and one constantly revised as fresh discoveries float to the surface. It is a well-known tale, replete with human bones in kettles, plucky Inuit recounting meetings with starving white men who stagger around after their ships have sunk and the efforts of Lady Jane Franklin (she of the terrible handwriting, to anyone that has researched the archives) to dispatch rescue ships. That story begins two-thirds of the way through Palin’s book. It was Franklin who later captained Erebus on its final mission (by then installed with a steam-driven, screw-propeller system), a doomed assault on the Northwest Passage, the fabled trade route to the riches of Cathay, again accompanied by the loyal Terror. On its way south, the three-masted Erebus had stopped off at Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land, and met the useless Lt Governor John Franklin. They didn’t make their goal of the south magnetic pole but, writes Palin, “never again, in the annals of the sea, would a ship, under sail alone, come close to matching what she and Terror had achieved”. It is hard to imagine what the Erebus crew thought and felt as they sailed along the 30-metre (98ft) high ice cliffs of this shelf the size of France.Įrebus and Terror were the first sailing ships to break through the pack and the first to discover that an Antarctic continent existed. The crew enjoyed a double allowance of rum to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday. ![]() In September 1839, accompanied by HMS Terror, it dropped her pilot off Deal in Kent and spent four years on an Antarctic adventure, where the dashing James Clark Ross captained her to the Barrier, or the Ross ice shelf as it was then known. Erebus spent two years patrolling the Mediterranean “to annoy the Turks”, then its life as a warship ended. After Waterloo, the navy was at a loose end. The search for the North-West Passage, which might offer a shorter route to India, had obsessed explorers since John and Sebastian Cabot had discovered Newfoundland in the reign of Henry VII.Palin is strong on historical context. His voyages and work were both remarkable, but the public was then more interested in Arctic than Antarctic exploration. Ross’s own interests were primarily scientific, mapping the world and searching for the magnetic poles. It would be associated with James Clark Ross, described frequently as the handsomest officer in the Navy, as well as with Franklin. In its 20 years of life, Erebus would make voyages to the Antarctic as well as the Arctic. ![]() This proved to be HMS Erebus, one of the two ships which, under the command of the veteran explorer and naval officer, Sir John Franklin, had set sail in the early summer of 1845, charged by the Admiralty to discover the long-sought North-West Passage which would link the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Four years ago, the wreck of a sailing ship was discovered deep underwater in the frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic. ![]()
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