Michael Palin

When the Erebus and the Terror - under the commands of Capt. James Clark Ross and Capt. Francis Crozier respectfully - left the English Channel on Sept 30 1839, the crew knew they would be heading into purely uncharted waters. Well funded and led by scientific and exploratory veterans, the mission was to reach the South Pole, noting anything of potential profit or exploitation along the way. On the first trip, they reach the Great Southern Barrier, but are forced to turn back to Australia show more with no way through. During their second attempt, they gained 6 miles more, but to no avail. After the Falklands, they make a third attempt and are nearly crushed when pack ice violently slams the ships into each other. Both ships can take no more, but investors must have their due. If the South Pole can't be found then the Northwest Passage will, this time with the renowned Sir John Franklin. They would never return.

Being that this is the "life" story of the Erebus and not just its disappearance, the reader must be patient. There's plenty of drama, but it has a bit of a slow start. Once it gets going though, you won't put it down. The reader becomes very familiar with the crew, checking in with Erebus' accompanying ship, The Terror, when necessary. While I would've liked an equal perspective of the Terror, perhaps Palin didn't want to confuse the reader by jumping back and forth between ships. Furthermore, Palin dutifully includes maps, and constant reminders of the day, month and year, which historians often forget to do. Palin's well-known brand of wit also makes frequent appearances. All appropriately timed of course. Palin has also famously traveled to both Poles, so he offers a unique, modern parallel. It's nonfiction that is written for everyone and I can see why it's so popular. I honestly want to check out his documentary, "Pole to Pole!" show less

Michael Palin first made his name as one of the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the 1970s; he later expanded his career to cover acting and has a number of films, both comedy and drama, to his credit. Then, in the 1980s, he gravitated into a career as a professional traveller for tv shows. Starting with one episode of Great Railway Journeys of the World for the BBC in 1981, he fronted a series of shows about worldwide travel - Around the World in Eighty Days, Full Circle and Pole show more to Pole to name but three. His personable approach made these highly popular and got him a world-wide reputation (though watched now, they do occasionally betray their age); and Palin was able to put his hand to producing the necessary tie-in books to go with the tv shows. He was already an accomplished diarist, so this was a natural progression.

Anyone who has read about exploration, especially to the polar regions, will have heard of the Franklin Expedition, an attempt to navigate the fabled North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific around the north coast of Canada. Sir John Franklin led this expedition, with the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. They sailed from London in May 1845; on 13th July of that year, they left Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, where they had put in for final provisioning. They were never heard from again.

Over the years, many expeditions were launched to uncover the fate of the Franklin expedition; much has since been written about their possible fate, both factual and fictional. The story began to be pieced together as fragmentary remains of both ships and their crews came to light in the decades that followed. Finally, modern underwater survey techniques uncovered the wrecks of Erebus and Terror in 2014 and 2016 respectively.

But Michael Palin has not set out to produce another book on the Franklin expedition. Rather, he has concentrated on HMS Erebus itself, tracing its career from its construction and launch in 1826 as a bomb ship - a specialist vessel intended to carry heavy mortars and to stand off from static targets and bombard them - its mothballing after a very few years as the naval requirements of the time changed, its identification as an ideal vessel of exploration in polar regions, and its expeditions, first to the Antarctic in 1839-43 and then to the Arctic under Franklin. Erebus was not built for speed; but her sturdiness and plain lines, intended to provide a stable gun platform for a very heavy weapon, was ideal for strengthening to withstand the rigours of sailing through ice.

Palin goes into considerable detail about the Antarctic voyages, and also about Tasmania, where the expedition was based between voyages to the south. He also gives a lot of incidental detail about the Royal Navy of the time; how, after the end of the Napoleonic wars, it was searching for a role. Palin depicts well a navy drastically reduced in size with the coming of peace, and starting the transition away from the days of the press gang onto the long road to a thoroughly professional force. The success of the Antarctic expeditions and the qualities of the men who led it were an important part of that transition.

The book is excellently researched and has an easy style, though it helps that the reader is likely to have a fair idea of how the story ends. Palin intersperses the account with his own observations of some of the places mentioned, drawn from his own extensive travels; some have seen this as an unnecessary intrusion, but I felt that these interludes, which are never long, gave a great sense of connection between the past and the present. The book ends, not with the discovery of the wreck of Erebus, but with an account of Palin's visit to the region in 2017 with an organised party on board a Russian icebreaker, made all the more poignant by the fact that the trip ends when the icebreaker has to turn back some considerable distance short of Erebus' final resting place because of ice. The first rescue expedition to attempt to find Franklin's expedition travelled to the region in 1848, when the Franklin party was still alive, trapped by the pack ice; yet they remained undiscovered. Palin's coda shows that even with our modern technology, the forces of nature can still thwart the best laid plans.

The personalities come through well, illustrated with contemporary drawings and some early photographs. In particular, Sir John Franklin himself, an Arctic exploration pioneer, turns up in the story as the Governor General of Tasmania, later to resign under something of a cloud but elevated to lead the North-West Passage expedition, partially by virtue of his determined and energetic wife, Jane. The expeditions that attempted to find Franklin were in a large part due to her refusal to give up on her missing husband. Other members of the ships' crews are brought back to life by extracts from their letters and diaries.

This is a book that is well worth reading if you have any interest at all in accounts of exploration, history, the sea or the wild places of this earth. The UK hardback copy I have is a well-produced book on good paper stock. I was enthralled by the story and found the book absolutely fascinating. show less

I picked up this book because my wife and I watched the first season of the AMC television series "The Terror" which is loosely based on the actual events of the final voyage into the arctic of Erebus and Terror, British naval vessels tasked with finding and navigating the fabled Northwest Passage. That it was told by Michael Palin, one of the Monty Python troupe, was an added bonus.

I enjoyed this exhaustive biography of a ship--the people who serve aboard her, and her sister ship, are all show more here as well, but Erebus is the subject and star of this monograph. Frankly, I thought there would be a little more humor, but Palin is quite committed and serious in his task which runs through the prior triumphs of Erebus in the Antarctic to the mysterious demise at the other end of the globe to the various relief, search, and recovery expeditions from the mid-19th century to the present day. Palin, who has traveled to both polar regions, often offers up his own insights into the sights, sounds, feel, and other challenges his sources describe and would have encountered--which enlivens and enriches the text.

As I was most interested in the known details of the ship's final expedition, everything prior to that was of interest, but not of so great an interest to me. People could just as easily pick up this book for the Ross Expeditions to Antarctica as Franklin's doomed voyage into the Arctic, as they receive roughly equal treatment and consideration here. Readers who want to know more about 19th century polar exploration, and Royal Navy activities in the post-Napoleonic era will surely find much of interest here. show less

Amiable, inoffensive and light rather than funny, Hemingway's Chair, the first novel by Michael Palin, had a 3-star rating written all over it. But the book has a few surprises up its sleeve, and it took me on a bit of a journey before I ultimately rested on that 3-star rating. As a fan of Ernest Hemingway myself, I was already sold on the story of Martin, a mild-mannered everyman who works at a post office and is an aficionado of 'Papa'. He reads the stories, memorises the trivia and show more collects the memorabilia, including the titular 'Hemingway's chair'. Martin is "unspectacular" but "careful and thorough and conscientious and demanded little of others" (pg. 28), and when his post office is taken over by a slick, 'modernizing' manager – who wants to tear out the heart of the community to deploy "the Proactive Selling Technique to maximise customer potential" (pg. 170), among other godawful things – Martin decides to look to his larger-than-life literary hero for guidance.

Once the Hemingway itch was scratched, I found myself surprisingly engaged by Palin's story. The characters are all well-drawn; Martin's character development over the course of the novel is particularly deft. The coastal town of Theston is portrayed as warm and provincial, like a slightly offbeat episode of Emmerdale, and the threats of privatization, foreign takeovers and business-over-community priorities speak to the sort of painful, desperate decline that will be familiar to many English towns. The book is heartfelt and doesn't shy away from the human element: the dignified, ageing post office worker who had "once been taught to strip down a machine gun blindfold" yet is now trying to laugh off his inability to learn computers (pg. 87), and the other worker who is let go to 'make economies' and comes in days later to sign on the dole (pg. 74). Just the worthless, forgotten emissions of a spluttering British engine that abandoned its courage decades ago.

The book is quietly impressive in this respect, even if it's not the book you would expect. As I said, it's light rather than comic, and there's something warm about returning to the Nineties (Palin wrote the book in 1995), when the 'management seminars' and 'role-play' stuff (pg. 11) could be laughed off and a salary of £11,500 per year could pay a mortgage (pg. 133). Hemingway's Chair is a book that should be cherished, because if you tried to write it today it would necessarily be a much more brutal book.

Indeed, such a surprise was Hemingway's Chair that it was inching towards a 4-star rating from me, despite its innate 3-star-ness. Unfortunately, the final third of the book became rather strange and hasty, with the ending unexpectedly bleak. For such an unassuming and compassionate book, it was difficult to lurch towards where Palin takes it. But ultimately, though Hemingway and rural England are strange bedfellows, as one character acknowledges (pg. 54), the result is rather unique and successful. Hemingway's Chair is nice to read for what it is, but it's not what you would think it is. show less