In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada.
Immediately after her disappearance, ten years and £28 million (in today’s money) were spent looking for her. It was during a golden period for British exploring, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars of 1815 and the Crimean War of 1854, with a Royal Navy that had shrunk from 145,000 men to 19,000. Instead of fighting battles, it was now battling the elements, in the cause of scientific discovery and imperial expansion.
Erebus had been tasked by Sir John Barrow, 2nd Secretary of the Admiralty, with looking for a way through to the Pacific from the North Atlantic; the ‘North West Passage’. She was commanded by Sir John Franklin, an older commander very much in the imperial mould. He was a bravely optimistic, genial man who sermonised well, but was ill suited to the ferocious demands of leading an Arctic expedition of 128 men into the unknown.
Erebus began life as a ‘bomb ship’. She was made for hurling ordnance at America’s coastal defences. In 1839, she was refitted for James Clark Ross’s command, to explore the southern oceans and the Antarctic, and to set up observatories for measuring the earth’s magnetism — it was thought it would aid navigation, like GPS.
Michael Palin spends much of the first half of the book describing these exhilarating Antarctic adventures, and he does it with a wry enthusiasm, bolstered by his own experiences as an eminent explorer and film-maker.
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