Erebus: The Story of a Ship

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We work beside Sir John Franklin as the ships are rebuild and provisioned for their exploration to the Arctic. Although a longtime Monty Python fan, I had never read one of Michael Palin's travel books before, so I looked forward to starting with his Erebus; a biography of sorts on the ship that Sir John Franklin captained off to its final, frigid resting place. Initially, she explored the North Pole and allowed James Clark Ross to claim British discovery of the North Magnetic Pole to the disgust of his uncle, her captain. HMS Erebus was one of the great exploring ships, a veteran of groundbreaking expeditions to the ends of the Earth.

He brings energy, wit and humanity to a story that has never ceased to tantalise people since the 1840s. As always, there are far more officer sources (notably here Robert McCormick and the genius naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker) than those of regular seamen. It is when we are introduced to the various rescue missions and those who risked their own lives to try and find Franklin and his men, that the narrative seems to really come alive. As a Canadian, the story and the tragedy of the Franklin exploration is one that is never far from the surface of our collective mythology. He is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful man, able to offer his own insights into the story from his various travels.Especially the last portion of the book; I am riding a motorbike around Colombia at the moment and I actually stayed an extra night here just to finish Erebus off. In September 2014, marine archaeologists discovered HMS Erebus, in the frozen wastes of the Canadian arctic. When I made a journey to the Antarctic Peninsula in 2014 the sight of a single whale was enough to bring everyone out on deck, reaching for cameras and binoculars. The book I think would have benefitted by a more in depth look at that fateful expedition as well the new discovery of both shipwrecks. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Palin narra di queste avventure in una maniera così coinvolgente che spesso ti sembra di stare leggendo . e gli intrepidi equipaggi, sfidando venti gelidi, ghiaccio e iceberg immensi, portano ad importanti scoperte nel campo geografico, del magnetismo terrestre, della zoologia e della botanica. Though the two ships are used as the main subject for the book, in reality the core message is about the heroic attempts to reach Antarctica and the magnetic South Pole together with a mapping expedition of the Arctic and an attempt to sail through the North West passage.