Erebus: The Story of a Ship

by Michael Palin

It originally contained a potion made by Oxley from concentrated essence of Jamaican ginger. He claimed it as a cure for ‘Rheumatism, Indigestion, Windy Complaints, Nervous Headaches and Giddiness, Hypochondria [I love the idea of a medicine for hypochondria], Lowness of Spirits, Anxieties, Tremors, Spasms, Cramp and Palsy’. This all-too-human cure-all remains, for me, one of the most poignant finds on HMS Erebus. A reminder that epic adventures and everyday frailties go hand-in-hand.

McCormick was on deck at dawn on Friday the 13th and described his excitement at seeing Table Mountain as only a geologist could. ‘At 5.40 a.m. I saw Table Mountain on the port bow … The horizontal stratification of the white silicious sandstone forming the summit of the hills above their granite base is seen to great advantage from the sea.’ Fit that on a postcard.

On the last day of March he went ashore to enjoy himself. ‘Beer … was served out at the rate on one quart [two pints] per “biped” which was said to disorder some of the people’s attics.’ Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.

Joseph Hooker tried, rather unconvincingly, to look on the bright side. ‘I was sorry at leaving Christmas Harbour: by finding food for the mind one may grow attached to the most wretched spots on the globe.’ Not one for the Tourist Board.

The onscreen map for the seventeen-hour flight is quite eccentric, showing initially only Brize Norton, Washington and Ankara, before giving up on names altogether, once over the Atlantic. For several hours the screen resembles an Yves Klein canvas, before a tiny dot appears in the top right-hand corner, followed, minutes later, by one of the more surreal in-flight announcements: ‘We will soon be starting our descent into Ascension.’

Never again in the annals of the sea would a ship, under sail alone, come close to matching what she and Terror had achieved.

Both vessels had extensive libraries. Most ships were issued with the basic ‘Seamen’s Library’, but on this expedition it was augmented to some 1,200 volumes per ship, with technical works on steam propulsion, accounts of previous Arctic expeditions, geographical and nautical magazines, the latest bestsellers, such as The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, and evergreen favourites like The Ingoldsby Legends and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. They also had stacks of the humorous satirical magazine Punch, which had first appeared four years previously and ran until 2002.

To this day there is a pub by the river at Greenhithe called the Sir John Franklin, where you can have a pint of beer and steak and chips and stand at the spot where Franklin’s family saw him for the last time.

He added that his habit of late-night letter-writing had not gone unnoticed, ‘for Reid has just said, scratching his head, “Why, Mr Jems, you never seem to sleep at arl; you’re always writin!” I tell him that when I do sleep, I do twice as much as other people in the same time.’

Rae was an explorer in the mould of Amundsen and Nansen, listening to the locals, learning from them what to wear, what to eat and how to survive. In his lifetime he mapped 1,750 miles of unexplored territory, with the loss of only one man. What a contrast with the disastrous expedition whose fate he was the first to discover.

Schwatka it was who discovered, among many other relics, a skeleton that proved to be that of Lieutenant John Irving. It was one of only two bodies from the Franklin expedition to be repatriated, and now lies buried in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh.