Erebus by michael palin7/29/2023 He points out in the book that floating Arctic ice has increased rather than decreased in the age of global warming, as shattering icebergs fill up the seas. His wish was to dive down to touch the wreck of Erebus, discovered in 2014, but his own Arctic voyage was curtailed by nothing other than thick ice. To learn more about those inhospitable environments, Palin did his best to follow the explorers’ routes himself, and intersperses personal recollections of his travels to Tasmania, the Antarctic and the Canadian North. His writing tone is conversational, skeptical, frequently on the lookout for the humorous. Palin mostly collated other histories of the two trips as his research, adding a lot of textural detail about life on board ships in the 1840s gleaned from sailors’ diaries. These are the two famous voyages of James Clark Ross and John Franklin, successive captains of the Royal Navy vessel Erebus: one to approach the magnetic South Pole in Antarctica (a success) and the other to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic (a disaster that led to the deaths of Franklin and all his men and the loss of both of the expedition’s ships). Palin is in town promoting his new book, Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time, a narrative about 19th-century expeditions that is at once breezy and gripping. Anywhere else in the world … names like the Gobi Desert, Himalaya, anything like that absolutely fascinated me.” Open this photo in gallery:Īuthor Michael Palin poses for a photograph in Toronto, on Oct. “You were going to be there for the rest of your life. “There was nowhere to go in Sheffield,” he tells me in his publisher’s office in Toronto. His interest in maritime polar exploration has its origins in that romance – and in growing up in the northern English city of Sheffield. Forester about an officer rising through Nelson’s navy in the age of sail. He admits to reading the Hornblower books as a boy – an adventure series by C.S. He does not, in fact, come straight from some naval command, but has spent the latter half of his life as a traveller and adventurer perhaps this is what gives the impression that if you asked him to climb the rigging, he would bound upward. Michael Palin, famed maniac of the nonsensical Monty Python television skits of the 1970s, looks 10 years younger than 75. Brings energy, wit and humanity to a story that has never ceased to tantalise people since the 1840s.Please log in to bookmark this story. Told in a very relaxed and sometimes - as you might expect - very funny Palin style.' David Baddiel, Daily Mail Carefully researched and well-crafted, it brings the story of a ship vividly to life.' Sunday Times The Erebus story is the Arctic epic we've all been waiting for.' Nicholas Crane It's a fascinating story that brings full-bloodedly to life.' Guardian Now available: Michael Palin's North Korea Journals Her fate remained a mystery for over 160 years. On the second, she vanished with her 129-strong crew in the wastes of the Canadian Arctic, along with the HMS Terror. On the first, she ventured further south than any human had ever been. In the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, HMS Erebus undertook two of the most ambitious naval expeditions of all time. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER: the remarkable true story of the exploration ship featured in The Terror
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