Over a total of 93 dives this year, archaeologists concentrated on three crew members’ cabins on the port side amidships: one belonging to the third lieutenant, one for the steward, and one likely for the ice master. That’s where we think we have a better chance of finding more clues to what happened to the expedition, which is one of the major objectives.” “Right now, our focus is the cabins of the officers, and we’re working our way toward the higher officers. “We focused on areas that had not been disturbed since the ship had sunk,” Bernier said. Parks Canada's Underwater Archaeology Teamįrom mid-August to mid-September, 2019, the Parks Canada and Inuit research team began systematically excavating the large and complex shipwreck. As Palin writes: “There were no marines on the Bounty.A Parks Canada diver retrieves a glass decanter at the HMS Erebus shipwreck. Seven marines accompanied both Erebus and Terror on their Antarctic missions to guard against insubordination. Who slept in hammocks? What did boiled dolphin taste like? When they suspended joints of beef under the mizzen-top in a bread bag for many months, was it good so far from home? Nautical information functions as ballast for the narrative: “Her hull was strengthened with 6-inch thick oak planking, increasing to 8 inches at the gunwale, to make a 3-foot-wide girdle”, and so on. Palin assesses the role of the ship’s various commanders and understands the importance of anchoring his prose in specificity and detail. But Palin does his best, accessing, for example, the diaries of Mne Sgt Cunningham and the muster books and description books kept by the paymaster and purser on every navy ship.Įrebus: The Story of a Ship is a fugue in many voices. As always, there are far more officer sources (notably here Robert McCormick and the genius naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker) than those of regular seamen. The prose style is fluent, though Palin might have allowed himself more jokes and fewer anachronisms (“on all accounts a bit of a drip” “there was no plan B”). Plucky Inuit recount meetings with starving white men who stagger around after their ships have sunk It is an epic story, full of appalling human suffering (everyone died) and one constantly revised as fresh discoveries float to the surface. It is a well-known tale, replete with human bones in kettles, plucky Inuit recounting meetings with starving white men who stagger around after their ships have sunk and the efforts of Lady Jane Franklin (she of the terrible handwriting, to anyone that has researched the archives) to dispatch rescue ships. That story begins two-thirds of the way through Palin’s book. It was Franklin who later captained Erebus on its final mission (by then installed with a steam-driven, screw-propeller system), a doomed assault on the Northwest Passage, the fabled trade route to the riches of Cathay, again accompanied by the loyal Terror. On its way south, the three-masted Erebus had stopped off at Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land, and met the useless Lt Governor John Franklin. They didn’t make their goal of the south magnetic pole but, writes Palin, “never again, in the annals of the sea, would a ship, under sail alone, come close to matching what she and Terror had achieved”. It is hard to imagine what the Erebus crew thought and felt as they sailed along the 30-metre (98ft) high ice cliffs of this shelf the size of France.Įrebus and Terror were the first sailing ships to break through the pack and the first to discover that an Antarctic continent existed. The crew enjoyed a double allowance of rum to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday. In September 1839, accompanied by HMS Terror, it dropped her pilot off Deal in Kent and spent four years on an Antarctic adventure, where the dashing James Clark Ross captained her to the Barrier, or the Ross ice shelf as it was then known. Erebus spent two years patrolling the Mediterranean “to annoy the Turks”, then its life as a warship ended. After Waterloo, the navy was at a loose end.
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