Exit, pursued by a bear

Michael Palin fills the gaps in the story of Erebus and its grisly fate in the Northwest Passage. By Michael Kerr

TEREBUS

343pp, Random House, £20, ebook £9.99

he founders of the Icehotel, which has been remade every winter since 1989 in the Swedish village of Jukkasjärvi, 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, like to boast that their fusion of accommodation and art is the first of its kind in the world. Michael Palin has news for them: Britain’s Victorian polar explorers beat them to it.

On New Year’s Eve in 1841, sailors on two ships icebound at the Antarctic, the Erebus and the Terror, revelled in the novelty of being able to walk between them over a frozen sea. A couple of the officers cut from the hard snow the figure of a seated woman about eight feet long, which they called their Venus de’ Medici. Then they dug into the ice and carved out not only a room but a table and a sofa.

“The celebrations that followed,” Palin writes, “were unconfined. A passing penguin would have observed sailors blowing horns, beating gongs, holding pigs under their arms to make them squeal, as each ship tried to outdo the other in sheer volume of noise.” It could be a sketch from Monty Python, except that in Erebus:

The Story of a Ship, the author is not in comic mode. Nicholas Crane, current president of the Royal Geographical Society, has described Palin, one of his predecessors, as “the world’s most appealing practitioner of geographical curiosity”, and it’s that curiosity which drives his stirring new book.

Palin was asked five years ago to speak at the Athenaeum in London about a member of the club, living or dead. He chose Joseph Hooker, who, Palin knew from his own television travels in Brazil, had been an acquisitive director in the 19th century of the Royal Botanic Gardens in

Kew. Then he discovered (“a revelation”) that Hooker, while in his 20s, had served as assistant surgeon and botanist on the Erebus, a sailing ship whose crew spent 18 months in Antarctica and returned to tell the tale – “the sort of extraordinary achievement that one would assume we would still be celebrating”.

We might well be, had success at one Pole not been overshadowed by disaster at another. In 1846, while Sir John Franklin was commanding

Erebus and Terror in their search for the Northwest Passage, both ships, with all 129 men, vanished into the white. An expedition that began with imperial confidence and, we now know, probably ended in cannibalism.

Before reading Palin’s book, I was well aware of the disaster, and of how, largely thanks to the campaigning and cajoling of Franklin’s wife, 30 searches by