Erebus and Terror Wrecks Foundįor 170 years, such snippets were all that existed. Stories from local Inuit of white men who had slowly perished of ships that had been caught in, and then disappeared beneath, the ice. Letters from one of the men, some written phonetically and some backward and few fully deciphered. Other clues trickled in: An abandoned sled, with two skeletons and numerous personal effects. A note at another site, dated April 1848 and indicating that Franklin and 23 others were dead, the ships had been trapped in the ice for 18 months, and the survivors were abandoning ship and striking out across land. Rescue expeditions turned up tantalizing clues: A trio of graves at one site. A Series of Clues to the Fate of the Franklin Expedition As Palin writes: “There were no marines on the Bounty.Sir John Franklin and his crew, illustrated for the London News, circa 1845. Seven marines accompanied both Erebus and Terror on their Antarctic missions to guard against insubordination. Who slept in hammocks? What did boiled dolphin taste like? When they suspended joints of beef under the mizzen-top in a bread bag for many months, was it good so far from home? Nautical information functions as ballast for the narrative: “Her hull was strengthened with 6-inch thick oak planking, increasing to 8 inches at the gunwale, to make a 3-foot-wide girdle”, and so on. Palin assesses the role of the ship’s various commanders and understands the importance of anchoring his prose in specificity and detail. 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.
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