Erebus: The Story of a Ship

by Michael Palin

‘Your age [Ross was thirty-four] compared with my daughter’s, your profession and the very uncertain and hazardous views you have before you, all forbid our giving any countenance to the connection.’

Once the earth’s magnetic field was understood and codified, compasses and chronometers could be set with absolute precision, and navigation would no longer be an erratic process dependent on clear skies and guesswork. The result would be a nineteenth-century equivalent of GPS.

Southern Ocean a place of all kinds of danger and depravity, from shipwreck to cannibalism. A place of infernal cold and darkness. A place where souls in torment are driven to destruction. The sort of place the Greeks had a word for: Erebus.

Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.