Erebus: The Story of a Ship

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Palin transports us back in time to 1826 when the bomb vessel, Erebus, was launched from Pembroke Dockyard in Wales.

As my book Erebus The Story of a Ship is all about the sea, where better to film than amongst the beautiful buildings of the old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Hooker obsessively recorded the plants and animals that he saw on the voyage, offering Britons their first glimpse of the diverse wildlife of the southern hemisphere.The journey he led would brave fierce storms and unimaginable cold to chart vast swathes of the most untamed continent in the world. It therefore seems appropriate to be the name of an Antarctic volcano, that further lived up to its name when, on 28th November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901 flew into its slopes, killing all on board. I had already decided I'd probably get the book, although I was pretty familiar with the Franklin story and the repeated attempts on the North West Passage, have several books on the topic and a forebear who commanded an early Arctic Naval expedition in which Franklin commanded the smaller vessel (shamefully not mentioned by M. In some ways, there are parallels with this book which follows the adventures of HMS Erebus, built in a Pembroke dockyard as a 'bomb' vessel but kitted out pretty quickly for Polar exploration.

And they have one of the finest memorials to the great tragedy that was the Franklin expedition, where HMS Erebus and all her crew perished. The first, magnificently successful voyage was a four-year, three-winter discovery of the Antarctic, led by James Clark Ross, notable for sailing through pack ice to discover the Ross ice shelf. We see their plans, we then sail with the crews and suffer with them as the ships explore and move through the Antarctic. Nelle prime oore del mattino del 7 giugno 1826, presso il cantiere navale di Pembroke, in Galles, una folla curiosa ed eccitata assiste al varo di una ‘bombarda’, una nuova nave da guerra.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. Over the years I've read a number of polar exploration books so I was familiar with aspects of this story. Michael Palin - Monty Python star and television globetrotter - brings the remarkable Erebus back to life, following it from its launch in 1826 to the epic voyages of discovery that led to glory in the Antarctic and to ultimate catastrophe in the Arctic.

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 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. My biggest takeaway, afforded by this being such a recent book, is the theory that several of the sailors on the expedition could have been female, judging by absences of Y chromosomes in some remains.Once described as the ‘handsomest man in the navy’, Ross was well-built and calmly authoritative: the obvious choice when the Admiralty decided to commission a voyage to the Antarctic. It may be just the nistory from the logs and diaries, but Micheal Palin makes it exciting and harrowing as the gales blow and the storms and cold drip the boats a crew. In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time. Che io vada matta per viaggi di scoperta e avventura lo sapete già (basta guardare la mia libreria), potevo farmi mancare questo libro? Con linguaggio semplice ma accurato, e con tono umanamente partecipe, spiritoso e divertente quando serve e quanto basta, rispettoso e commosso dove è più opportuno, Palin dà una marea di informazioni sulle navi, sulla corsa alle esplorazioni che dominò la Marina britannica dopo la fine delle guerre napoleoniche, sulla sete di scoperte scientifiche unita all'orgoglio imperialista, sulle personalità dei protagonisti, sulla vita a bordo, narrando contemporaneamente anche il suo personale viaggio sulle tracce della nave, sugli stessi luoghi a distanza di due secoli, con tutt'altri mezzi e con tutt'altri occhi, da Capo Horn all'isola di Beechey, dove dà un ultimo saluto alle tombe di tre componenti della spedizione Franklin lì sepolti.