11/7/2023 0 Comments Michael palin erebus tourSo, in 2014 when Palin heard Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announce that the wreck of the Erebus had been discovered in the Canadian Arctic, he set out to tell the story of this remarkable vessel and the men who sailed in her.Įrebus is now inextricably linked to the doomed Franklin Expedition which set out in 1845 in search of the final link in the Northwest Passage. The Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf and Ross Sea are named after Ross, and they named the active volcano discovered on their first voyage Mount Erebus, all of which had been recorded in Hooker’s journals from those voyages. Erebus sailed in company with the slightly smaller HMS Terror, also a converted bomb ketch. The vessel that was Ross and Hooker’s home for those four years and three voyages to Antarctica was the converted bomb ketch HMS Erebus. However, it was one tidbit of Hooker’s early career that caught Palin’s attention.Īt 20 years of age, Hooker was the botanist on James Clark Ross’ four-year expedition to Antarctica in the early 1840s to discover the South Magnetic Pole. It was Hooker who exported the first rubber plants out of Brazil to England, and then to parts of the British Empire, creating a flourishing British rubber industry (and in the process destroying Brazil’s). Palin chose the renowned 19th Century British botanist Joseph Hooker (whose story Palin had first encountered during filming of one of his travel documentaries in Brazil). It was probably his fame from the former and involvement in the latter that led to his becoming President of the Royal Geographical Society, and then being asked to address the Athenaeum Club in London, being required to tell the story of one of their past members. Most of us know Michael Palin from his days with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but he has also produced several superb BBC travel documentaries.
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