Erebus

Terror’s most inhospitable continent on earth, with no relief from the relentless cold and no human contact of any kind, other than those men squeezed together on the two ships that carried them into this wilderness,” Palin writes. “And here they were, for a third season, grasping frozen lines with frozen hands, soaked to the skin, clinging to the rigging as the ships pitched and tossed and icebergs three times higher than their masthead loomed out of the darkness. And Cape Town still 2,500 miles away.”

Achieving a farthest-south point of 78 degrees 9 minutes in February 1842, a record that stood for nearly 60 years, Ross discovered the features and places that are today most familiar about Antarctica, including the 12,500-foot volcano Mount Erebus (which he named for his stalwart ship), the Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf.

Palin takes us along this journey through glimpses into journals, letters, and logs of Ross and his officers, bringing these men to life through his lyric ear and his finely tuned sense of irony.

After Ross’ resounding successes, we follow Erebus

as she is prepped for her next mission, Franklin’s expedition to find the Holy Grail of the mid-1800s: the Northwest Passage. Here the story is better-known, and so less wondrous, and Palin brings it full circle to the discovery, in 2014, of the wreck of Erebus

off the Adelaide Peninsula, and two years later, just to the northwest off King William Island, Terror.

Despite Palin’s predilection for lightheartedness, the inherent melancholy of this story emerges when he spends time in these vast, silent spaces himself. He is remarkably adept at bringing us back into the first-person present without a lot of self-serving hoopla so that we can see these places as they are today, some of which remain hauntingly unchanged.

After visiting the Beechey Island graves of crewmen William Braine, John Torrington and John Hartnell during his own trip through the Northwest Passage, he describes looking out over Erebus Bay: “It’s as bleak and isolated a spot as its namesake in the Antarctic. There are a few ice-floes collecting there, already more than when we arrived. In a few weeks this featureless gray-brown panorama will be all white, like a sheet pulled over a body.”

Graced with elegant maps, photos, and images of sketches and paintings made during the journeys, Erebus is a must for anyone whose shelves and souls are burdened with stories of polar exploration and sailing mastery. Mitman Clarke