His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in
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