Palin, for me, comfortably passes a test that most celebrities fail – that of being someone you would enjoy an evening in a pub with. I also enjoyed his charming eye for the strange and humorous. He is clearly an intelligent and thoughtful man, able to offer his own insights into the story from his various travels. Palin is a gifted story-teller with a fresh and interesting style. While a book like this is sure to be enjoyed by someone like me, it has a much more general appeal. It is solidly researched with at best a couple of tiny technical errors to annoy the nautical pedant. Erabus proved to be a well written book about an important ship with a fascinating story to tell. But a family member lent me their copy, and on a subsequent holiday in France I dived in. In 2000 Palin became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to television.Īs an enthusiast for the age of sail who earns his livelihood writing and lecturing about ships and the sea, my heart sank at first when I heard that an aging celebrity comedian had written a history of the Erebus. His journeys have taken him across the world, the North and South Poles, the Sahara desert, the Himalayas and most recently, Eastern Europe. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted the 30th favourite by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.Īfter Python, he began a new career as a travel writer. He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Palin continued to work with Jones, co-writing Ripping Yarns. Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "The Dead Parrot", "The Lumberjack Song", "The Spanish Inquisition" and "Spam". Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows such as The Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin wrote most of his material with Terry Jones. Sir Michael Edward Palin, KCMG, CBE, FRGS is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries. It lies ten metres down in the waters of Nunavut's Queen Maud Gulf, where many secrets wait to be revealed. He examines the past by means of the extensive historical record and travels in the present day to those places where there is still an echo of Erebus herself, from the dockyard where she was built, to Tasmania where the Antarctic voyage began and the Falkland Islands, then on to the Canadian Arctic, to get a sense of what the conditions must have been like for the starving, stumbling sailors as they abandoned their ships to the ice. Palin looks at the Erebus story through the different motives of the two expeditions, one scientific and successful, the other nationalistic and disastrous. Then, on September 9th, 2014, came the almost unbelievable news: HMS Erebus had been discovered thirty feet below the Arctic waters, by a Parks Canada exploration ship. Over the years there were many attempts to discover what might have happened-and eventually the first bodies were discovered in shallow graves, confirming that it had been the dreadful fate of the explorers to die of hunger and scurvy as they abandoned the ships in the ice.įor generations, the mystery of what had happened to the ships endured. Provisioned for three winters in the Arctic, Erebus and Terror and the 129 men of the Franklin expedition were seen heading west by two whalers in late July. Nevertheless, he and his men confidently sailed away down the Thames in April 1845. But Antarctica never captured the national imagination what the British navy needed now was confirmation of its superiority by making the discovery, once and for all, of a route through the North-West Passage.Ĭhosen to lead the mission was Sir John Franklin, at 59 someone many considered too old for such a hazardous journey. Under the leadership of the charismatic James Clark Ross, she and HMS Terror sailed further south than anyone had been before. In 1839, Erebus was chosen as the flagship of an expedition to penetrate south to explore Antarctica. The solid, reinforced hulls of HMS Erebus, and another bomb ship, HMS Terror, made them suitable for discovering what lay at the coldest ends of the earth. The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. Intrepid voyager, writer and comedian Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy's HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014.
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