4/3/2023 0 Comments Michael palin erebus![]() ![]() This paper presents results from an ongoing research project which aims at developing a numerical tool for route planning of container ships. Fossil wood in Tasmania (Van Diemcn’s Land), 2: 5–11. Hooker, the Assistant Surgeon of the Erebus”. In this interesting and readable work there are various, acknowledged, botanical contributions by Hooker, who is introduced (p. General details of the whole voyage are given in Captain Sir James Clarkross’s “A voyage of discovery and research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions”, two volumes, London, 1847. ![]() Tasmania, Sydney, and New Zealand and in the Falklands (with an excursion to Hermite Islands in Tierra del Fuego and west of Cape Horn). The “voyage” consisted of three expeditions to the south with the two ships Erebus and Terror with breaks between in. Huxley: “Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker”, vol. A full outline account of it is given in L. Palin doesn’t let it go there either, taking up the story in the eighties when frozen bodies were exhumed and examined, confirming traces of lead poisoning from badly packaged canned food and the grisly spectre of cannibalism.Hooker’s “Antarctic Voyage”, as it is often and somewhat misleadingly called, was the first of his important botanical expeditions. Rescue missions were sent, thanks in no small part to the tireless campaigning of Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, but nothing was known until the explorer John Rae heard tell from the local Inuit about what befell those poor souls. The ships became trapped in the ice, forcing the crew to set out on foot and sledge. It is Franklin who take charge of an again refitted Erebus – now sporting iron plating on her hull and a steam-driver propeller capable of delivering twenty-five horsepower which would allow speeds of up to four knots – for its attempt on the Northwest Passage, the sea route to the Pacific through the Arctic Ocean across the top of the Americas. A voyage, as Palin writes, that “never again in the annals of the sea would a ship, under sail alone, come close to matching.” They took another run at it a year later in 1843 and although the never made it as far as the south pole, their voyage was hailed as a great success. This was recently reckoned to be about the size of France so little wonder the ships were forced to retreat to the Falkland Islands. They pull in first at Van Diemen’s Land, running into the Governor, John Franklin, before coming up short at the Ross Ice Shelf. He takes us south from the shipyards where the Erebus was refitted towards the Antarctic for the ship’s four year exploratory mission under James Clark Ross. Palin, no stranger to epic journeys either, is a gifted storyteller who gently allows the tale to unfold – we’re almost one hundred pages in before we see any of the cold stuff. Starvation and hypothermia, amongst other things, did them in, rather than the paws of a phantom polar bear, as detailed in the recent, and rather good, TV series The Terror, based on the Dan Simmons novel. Some 130 men trekked away from both The Erebus and her sister ship, HMS Terror, only to die a cold death. When it was uncovered from its watery grave in 2014, the war ship turned exploratory vessel HMS Erebus had been missing for roughly one hundred and seventy years, abandoned when its Arctic expedition ended in ice-bound disaster. ![]()
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