Michael Palin

I have to confess to having been completely ignorant of HMS Erebus until reading this book. That is a woeful confession because the ship had two notable, although quite separate, claims to fame.

It, although perhaps by convention I should say ‘she’, was originally commissioned for the Royal Navy following the Napoleonic Wars, with her twin ship HMS Terror. After general service throughout the Mediterranean Sea, Erebus was reconfigured as a research and exploration vessel, with a specific show more view to sailing through the Antarctic. Her keel and body were strengthened with thick planks of oak, to help it sustain encirclement by pack ice in polar seas.

Their first substantial expedition commenced in 1840 under the captaincy of James Ross, and saw her departing for Tasmania and New Zealand, before venturing deep into the Antarctic Ocean. This was a research expedition, and had a particular emphasis on the establishment of geomagnetic stations at various points around the southern hemisphere. Regulated by the then still fairly new technology of chronometers, these stations would be capable of taking readings simultaneously. There was also, however, a prevailing fascination with the still unexplored Antarctic regions. While probing the pack ice, HMS Erebus sailed further south than any voyage had previously managed.

Following their successful return to Britain, in 1845 Erebus and The Terror were despatched to norther climes, under the command of Sir John Franklin and with crews totalling around 130 men, in an attempt to establish the Northwest Passage. They were now equipped with steam engines (not custom built but, rather, converted from railway locomotives) to complement their full set of sails. This expedition did not mirror the success of the first voyage, and both ships became icebound. They were eventually abandoned by the crew, who tried to make their way south across the ice pack, although none of them survived to make a return to occupied territory. There were encounters with indigenous Inuit hunters, who subsequently claimed that the final remnants of the crew had survived as long as they did by resorting to cannibalism. Forensic examinations of the remains of some members of the expedition that were uncovered during the 1980s appeared to substantiate that claim. They also gave clear evidence that the provisions carried by the two ships were also inadequate, and had in addition been compromised by lead poisoning and botulism. Both ships had been considered to be lost without hope of recovery, until 2014, when a cartographic survey of the Arctic Ocean commissioned by the Canadian government located remains subsequently identified as being from HMS Erebus. Two years later the wreck of HMS Terror was also found.

Michael Palin’s account is very accessible, written with his customary clarity and cheery tone, although he does not allow that to compromise or detract from the integrity of his research. He flags up the delicious irony of one of the senior figures in the expedition, whose role was to record new wildlife, but whose greatest joy seemed to be shooting the various birds that proved foolish enough to fly within musket range. He also peppers the story with references to his own voyages throughout the polar regions.

This is an engaging and informative book, and represents popular history at its best. show less

A new Michael Palin travel narrative is always something to rejoice about. I must admit that I didn’t even know that he had been to North Korea (as far as I know, the documentary hasn’t aired in Australia on free to air television). So it was a lovely surprise overall to be able to read about his travels without a huge waiting time.

Generally Michael’s travels are long journeys with a crew, professional photographs etc etc. Unfortunately he’s not getting any younger (celebrating his show more 75th birthday in North Korea) and with North Korea being a country with quite a few restrictions, the journey was limited to two weeks. As you might expect, getting the clearance to both travel and film in North Korea was quite convoluted with the trip being on, then off, then on again. The group also had a number of ‘minders’ from the tourism association reviewing what was said, filmed and photographed. Michael was limited to one notebook and an iPhone camera, but his journal is just as detailed as we have come to expect from his travels.

To the average person, North Korea is a country that nobody knows much about except the occasional news report which usually is more about America. Michael does an excellent job of explaining the country from that average person’s point of view and how the average person might live. He is also very open in the mistakes he makes when interviewing – pushing for individual responses on the leadership and negative parts of living in a closed country doesn’t get him anywhere (and tends to cause great embarrassment). There are also the cultural differences that people might not expect, such as taking photographs of the backs/parts of statues of the leaders is just not done. He makes mistakes and sticks his foot in it but this is part of what makes North Korea Journal a great read. We would make the same mistakes if we were there!

The photographs are also fantastic, ranging from the stunning natural beauty of the country to the magnificent murals that are painted in train stations and on public buildings. The cities have apartment buildings painted bright colours and there are magnificent public squares that are huge. Some hotels and airports are new but eerily empty. A visit to a farm has a tractor (old by Western standards) added to look more professional. It’s a country of contrasts and although Michael does his best to find the real people and their day to day life, it rarely happens. The team are taken to fancy but quiet bars and conversations are monitored. It’s quite different to some of Michael’s other journeys, where the unknown is readily found out and people are willing to show the crew anything and discuss everything.

Overall, this is an engaging read about a country I don’t know much about with a sense of trepidation through the narrative. Michael Palin tries to make it as accessible as possible, but is frank about the limits in doing so.

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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

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