Dan Snow's History Hit - Michael Palin: Erebus and Terror

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

In this archive episode, Dan Snow wrangles with a Python! He talks to comedy legend Michael Palin about his book, Erebus The Story of a Ship. The book tells the devastating true story of the Franklin expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, and how their history only slowly came to light.

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and

David Baddiel. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Everybody is currently talking about The Terror. Everyone's watching it. When I say everyone, I mean some of the people that I see on social media. The Terror is a hugely powerful drama series, a horror series,

and it's a fictionalised account of captain sir john franklin's expedition to the arctic where they got lost in the 1840s now friends of mine have watched it and are disappointed because apparently there are monsters in it which seems to me unnecessary i don't want to be historically all boring and prudish about things but if you've got a story as dramatic as franklin's expedition why do you need the monsters? You know what? I walked out of Pirates of the Caribbean. I couldn't believe my excitement. Hollywood is doing a big budget 18th century maritime history film. I'm in. I'm keen. And then there's a ghost turned up. Why? No need for it. Anyway, we thought to accompany this TV series, we'd repeat one of our best

episodes in the past. Michael Palin. You all know him. He's a national treasure. He's one of the Monty Python. He's a legend. He travels around the world. Most successful and brilliant television broadcaster of our lifetime. And he's a total legend. And it's a huge honour to have him on the podcast. We interviewed him because he wrote a book on the Erebus, which was one of the ships on Franklin's expedition. He wrote the kind of biography of that ship. And obviously we talked to him about the expedition to find the Northwest Passage and the fact that the wreck has recently been found. So great fun to have Michael Payne on the podcast. A huge honour. You can go back and listen to all these back episodes of the podcast without any ads at historyhit.tv. Please go and

check it out. It's a digital history channel with thousands of podcasts and documentaries and everything you need if you love history. Someone said to me the other day, they like the ads on these podcasts. They think they are amusing to listen to. Well, I'm flattered, but I'd rather you went and subscribed to historyhit.tv to be absolutely honest with you. There's plenty of funny and amusing and interesting things over there so please head over and do that lots of wonderful content dropping this week including a wonderful documentary we made interviewing some remarkable female veterans of world war ii for women's history month so please go and check that out in the meantime everybody enjoy michael palin talking about erebus Terra, its accompanying ship on the Franklin Expedition.

Michael Palin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What a book this is. Well, it was sort of something that came completely out of the blue. And for a long, long time, I thought I'm thought, I'm not a historian. I'm certainly not a naval historian. I just loved the idea of the life of this ship and what it had done and the places it had been and the fact it was rediscovered. All those things sort of combined to make me feel

there was a great narrative here. But there were a lot of traps on the way. A lot of people have written a lot of material, especially about the Franklin Expedition. Would i be up to um to you know their scholarly standards but um yeah it seems to have worked out okay it's worked out very well and of course you bring your not just your sort of historian and writing skills to it but that of a traveler you've seen the world so and this book took you all over the world we should say right so Erebus when was the ship built where did it where did the story begin it was built in well it was commissioned in 1823 um and built at Pembroke dockyard in Wales which is on the edge of Milford Haven so it was actually launched into Milford

Haven where there's now a big oil refinery and it was one of the newer dockyards the Admiralty had commissioned. They commissioned it probably while they were still fighting the Napoleonic Wars. And in fact, after the wars ended and Britain's navy ruled the world, we just didn't need a navy of the size they had at that time. So quite how Pembroke survived, I don't know. But it did, and it continued making warships,

of which Erebus was originally one and what was the job it was intended to do it was called a bomb ship um there was a class of about six or seven of them and they um employed mortars heavy sort of um uh 10 million mortars on on board the ship which were used for bombarding coastal positions, laying siege to places without having to make a landing. So there were quite heavy mortars, and that's why the ship's decks were diagonally planked and made stronger than they would normally be, which is, I suppose, why they ended up as being chosen for polar exploration.

But it was a bombship. It was a warship originally. Yeah, because those bombships, they were firing more to high trajectories, so there would be an enormous sort of kick from those that would go, their whole hull had to be designed to sort of not fall apart. And did that mean that they were also, why would those be used for high latitudes?

They wouldn't be crushed by the ice? Well, that was the thing. I mean, obviously, they would would meet ice they would meet sort of quite light ice it wasn't really an icebreaker but of all the ships in the navy at the time they were the they were the strongest in terms of hulls and being able to withstand that kind of pressure so they thought i mean you know the antarctic journey went further south than any ship had ever been and counted um conditions that no ship had ever been into so no one quite knew what they were going to get but they they were as strong as there was any ship around at the time i didn't know anything at all

about that antarctic history there but so please tell me about that and just but before though what what was it in that period that people was driving the british and other people to high latitude exploration north North and South Pole? What was the prize? Well, it was really down to a man called John Barrow, who was the second secretary of the Admiralty. And he was obsessed with polar successes, polar exploration in the North, because they just wanted to really find out whether there was a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But also, whalers had said there's an open sea beyond the ice up there.

And so just curiosity. And in the south, that was largely driven by the need to make a magnetic map of the world. It was very, very important at that time to understand how magnetism worked and how the magnetic field of the Earth worked. And this really involved lots of observation, places being sort of erected around the world to test the measurement. Once they understood magnetism,

then navigation would become much easier, much easier to steer ships understand about currents and everything so that was the main motive for the antarctic journey but i suppose you could also say that that that they did it because they could because after the napoleonic war britain's navy really did rule the seas and they were the sort of if you like they worked for clients like von humboldt who was a great german explorer um and gauss and people like that a lot of a lot of european research had been done especially in germany into um into terrestrial magnetism so the british navy was you know working for these clients as it were um taking the ships down there

which they couldn't themselves afford um so you know it was it was Britain was at that time reasonably settled they had a strong navy they could do it so they did and these tell me about the human what sort of sacrifice did the humans on the ships the crews have to bear I mean how long would they be away for tell no typical but tell me about the erebus's journey down to the the south seas the erebus journey to um the antarctic was i mean they had instructions from the admiralty to stay for at least two um antarctic summers uh exploration best time for exploration in the end they made three separate voyages right into deep Antarctica

so the men were away for almost four years they had time assured, Tasmania was very important or Van Diemen's Land as it was then called it was in Hobart that they had time assured

but apart from that it was then called. It was in Hobart that they had time ashore. But apart from that, it was either at sea or in the ice or in the Falkland Islands where they spent quite a considerable amount of time, but none of them seemed to like it there at all, and terrible things happened down there. But these were the Tasmania and the Falkland Islands were the two sort of stop-off points of the Antarctic so yeah four years away on that journey. And it's worth remembering I mean was anyone volunteering for that mission or were they impressed men? Did anyone have any choice going to spend four years away? No they all had a choice in fact press gangs disappeared right after

about 1815 because the Navy had so many people, so many sailors that could not be employed. I think the numbers employed in the Navy went down from about 140,000 to about 20,000 within a period of about four or five years. So a lot of sailors around wanting a job. So they could pick and choose the men they wanted. And someone pointed out all the sailors were able seamen,

which was slightly one degree up from the common deckhand, as it were. So they all had some qualifications. They were paid well. They were paid double for going to the Arctic or the Antarctic. So, you know, you made money out of it. I mean, it does seem odd that they should volunteer for something like that, but they had a captain who was prestigious. They had the backing of the Admiralty.

The ships were well-stocked, well-looked after. You weren't going to get killed because it wasn't, well, hopefully you weren't going to get killed because it wasn't oh well hopefully you weren't going to get killed because it wasn't a sort of military expedition so it was actually very attractive the antarctic expedition and on this antarctic expedition what special provisions were made what special arrangements i mean you know thick coats gloves what what kind of what were the what were there any innovations that the admiralty introduced try and keep the sailors alive and slightly more comfortable in that climate?

Well, they did have special sort of Arctic outfits, which were like that. Thick sweaters, coats, socks, boots, scarves, which were issued when they got beyond a certain latitude to the south. So it got a very cold day before that. Pembrokeshire, I'd probably need that in Pembrokeshire. Yeah. No, that was, they would get a special kit usually at the beginning, you know, once they'd gone south of the Antarctic Circle.

Beyond that, you know, nobody knew quite what they were going to encounter. They had heating on board ship they had a sort of heating apparatus and everything was sort of the heating was recycled so that when you what you cooked from the you know the steam that was generated and that warmed the ship as well so they had they had something to warm the ship. But the ship is still made of wood, no steam engine propulsion. This is sail power, is it? All sail power on the Antarctic journey. And this is what makes it completely remarkable.

I don't think any other vessel in history has gone further south than they did, purely on wind power. Which meant when they were in the ice, they couldn't turn. It was very difficult. They were stuck and just had to hope to get through. But engines were fitted for the Arctic expedition, the Franklin expedition. At the very last minute, and everything was done at the very last minute to get the Franklin expedition going, they said, oh, yes, we should have some auxiliary power. So they got 25 horsepower railway engines off a railway company down in South London,

put them in the ship, lowered them into the ships. A brilliant man called Oliver Lang was in charge of the conversion of the ships for the Arctic, fitted a special retractable propeller and installed the motors. But they weren't. They were only to be used in extreme circumstances. But, I mean, 25 horsepower is not much good in the ice.

In present icebreakers, it's about 40,000 horsepower, something like that. Let's finish the Antarctic one. So they come back, they spend four years on that expedition. And is it a success? It was very successful most of the success came in the first expedition which is when they discovered that there was a continent of antarctica and actually set foot on it no one no one really knew that

for sure before they also discovered there was a volcano which was named by james clark ross after the ship that's mount erebus they discovered the ice shelf volcano, which was named by James Clark Ross after the ship. That was Mount Erebus. They discovered the ice shelf, which became known as the Ross Ice Shelf, which was 200 foot high and stretched for miles and miles. No one had ever seen that before. They laid claim to various islands. They also found islands on the way to Antarctica, on the way back from Antarctica

where they went ashore they made magnetic observations they also checked out flora and fauna in some cases they had livestock aboard which they would put onto the island because there was a great colonizing feeling at that time that an empty island was an unproductive island and had to be productive

so we're going to put some livestock on they had chickens, goats feeling at that time that an empty island was an unproductive island and had to be productive. So we're going to put some livestock on. They had chickens, goats, sheep, and they landed a few in the hope they would breed. And then, you know, a few years' time when people would come along and say, this is a very habitable island, Jollywood. And so there was a sort of crusading spirit that we were civilizing the world as we went along. a sort of crusading spirit that we were civilizing the world as we went along. It was, and in terms of sort of mapping the Antarctic continent, it was hugely successful.

And, I mean, right until Shackleton went 60 years later, that was the, what Erebus and Terra discovered, was the official sort of map of Antarctica. And were there, I mean, are there great diaries and accounts and ship's logs? Was it a really exciting one to research this book? Yes, there were the official logs, which all the officers and the main officers had to keep. They became the property of the Admiralty after they came back. So actually, you had to be careful what you said.

So James Clark Ross's Journal of the Voyage is actually quite dry, which is for a sea story, it's not necessarily what you want. But you know what I mean, it's actually fairly formal. Though occasionally he does go over the top when they're nearly hit by an iceberg near the Falklands. He has a marvellous description there. There's a man called McCormick who was the surgeon, and I really loved his journals

because they were kind of quite eccentric, and he would talk about all the wonderful wildlife he saw and how quickly he could shoot it. Oh, I saw lovely birds. I do love birds, and I shot four this morning, and I got four teal, and I got four ptarmigan. So he was busy shooting anything he could find to get it on board ship

because, of course, they had no photography at that time, no way of recording other than bringing the creatures back. And in terms of sort of what they brought back from the naturalists, it was very, very productive. So McCormick was good. A great find, which I was given by some people in the Falkland Isles, the Dockyard Museum in the Falklands,

was access to a diary kept by a man called William Cunningham, who was a marine on board HMS Terror. And Cunningham was a less educated man, so he was not writing such a formal diary. But he kept an entry every single day. And he would just have wonderful things.

His description of seeing the volcano was just marvellous, ecstatic description. But he also talks about people getting drunk and having to be dragged back on board when they're in South Africa or something like that. How they killed a shark, which he calls Jack Shark, and they dissected that and they all ate a bit. So there's a real feeling of sort of below stairs activity

in Cunningham's diary. And how close did the expedition come to disaster? Because obviously we remember so many of these polar and Antarctic expeditions for the terrible endings and the and the privations did it go fairly smooth i mean hitting icebergs being caught in big storms but i mean that's all run of the mill the antarctic journey was amazingly successful in terms of um you know they lost about four men in four years they were sort of swept overboard mostly very very little actually no

instances of scurvy or the normal things that that would affect people on board ship for a long time so they're very very healthy um but they did have this they well they went into some storms which you kind of amazed that any little ship like that could survive. These were just going across the Southern Ocean. But also, at the very end of their second expedition around Antarctica, they were heading for the Falkland Islands. They were nearly home when suddenly they found themselves in the middle of the night

confronted by a wall of ice with a very narrow gap in it. And so they all woke up and in order to avoid each other and get through the gap at the same time the opposite happened and Terra hit Erebus its anchor was embedded in the side of the ship

two ships absolutely collided and crushed and there were a lot of descriptions from various people on board at the time saying this was the end there was no way out of this Terra slipped through the gap in the ice but Erebus was stuck and all the um their their sails and their rigging were all ripped apart by the collision but captain uh Clark Ross did this um extraordinary maneuver which is called a stern

board maneuver which is when you almost put a sail ship into reverse. Don't ask me quite how it's done, but it's very, very difficult to do, and in those sort of circumstances, perilous. But he managed to just get them through at the very last minute. And so, I mean, they avoided death by inches there. But I think in a number of the storms, you can't believe how they survived. And they all say the next morning, gosh, we're lucky to still be here. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Talking to Michael Palin.

Big time. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and

great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work Thank you. or wherever audiobooks are sold. They'd got back to Britain, but that's not the end of the story for these ships. No, far from it. They'd proved themselves to be stout survivors of polar conditions.

And John Barrow, the great man who had been sort of the impresario of naval exploration during the early part of the 19th century, was approaching his 80th birthday. He was about to leave the Admiralty. He said, we can have one last chance to do what I've always wanted to do, which was to get an expedition through the Northwest Passage, get ships through from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And we now know enough. We've got the ships, we've got the technology, and all we need now is a leader for the expedition, and let's go. Now, James Clark Ross, who was the obvious man, the obvious choice, was actually quite shaken by what had happened in the Antarctic. In fact, there's a wonderful little passage I found of a diary kept by a woman called Sophia Baggett, who was the sort of, I think she was the daughter of the man who ran the naval base in Cape Town.

And she had dinner with them when they'd just come back from the Antarctic. And she said, you know, your hands are shaking. And this was both Crozier, Captain of Terror, and James Clark Ross. She said, your hands are shaking. And apparently Clark Ross just said, yes, this is what one night in the Antarctic did for us.

So it was probably that collision has shaken them all so much. And Clark Ross said no. He'd got married. He was having children and didn't want to go to sea again. So they approached John Franklin. It wasn't everybody's choice. He was 59 going on 60. Most people thought he was too old for the expedition. But his wife was very, very vigorous, sort of networking lady,

Jane Franklin. And she was determined that he should get the post because he'd been sacked as governor general of Tasmania. And she wanted to make sure that history did him proud by Tasmania and she wanted to make sure that history did him proud by um you know leading the expedition so he became the leader and in a very very short time it's about sort of three or four months from the end of 1844 to May 1845 they got the Erebus and Terra ready they had to do some more work strengthening of the ships putting in um the small auxiliary engine getting all the crew together and it was all it was all a mad rush but they left in may 1845 on one of the most sort of best equipped and most sort of prestigious expeditions the royal navy had ever launched and you know all the all the sort of modern advantages you mentioned like they sort of had preserved food and they began to feel like a really quite a modern kit that they sailed with.

Yes, the issue of the food was always a big one in the story. They had canned food. I mean, tinned food had been, I think a Frenchman had sort of established the technology in about 1800, something like that. So even on the Antarctic, they had some canned food. A lot of canned food on the Arctic expedition. All supplied by a man called Stephen Goldner, who was not the Admiralty's first choice. He was a second choice. But he put in a cheaper bid. And there's just a lot of talk

and a lot of research being done as to whether the tins themselves were contaminated whether there was too much lead in them and all that there's there's no actually no evidence in the end in fact the most recent the most recent research suggests that there was no more lead poisoning in those than there would have been in the you know in pipes in people's homes generally. But it was a big issue, the cans of food. But yes, they had canned food. They felt utterly confident. And in the few writings you get before they actually set off from Greenland

to cross into the heart of the Arctic, it's great optimism from all the officers. This is just going to be wonderful. We're all so happy. We're terrific, enthusiastic. See you next year in Hawaii. You know, they're honestly thinking that. The only, only time you hear any doubts

are usually from the crew. And there's a very touching letter by a man called William Thompson who writes from Stromomness which is the last place in the orkney before they actually set off for the arctic and just writes to his wife and says do look after the children do look after that you know things could go wrong i may not see you again very very touching but none of that amongst the officers they couldn't failure was was failure was not an option here we come honolulu uh and so they were going to go over

the north of canada to into the uh into the pacific where where is the where was their last contact with other human where's the last place we know they were at it's um it's a a few miles um to the west of a place called Whalefish Island, and that's on the western coast of Greenland. And that's where they got their final storage together. They had a boat which accompanied them from London all that way to carry stores, which were then loaded onto the two ships before they left. They left Whalefish Island sort of mid-July 1845.

At the end of July, two whaling ships recorded seeing Erebus and Terra. In fact, one of the ships boarded Erebus and Franklin, being the sort of affable, clubbable clubbable man he was said oh let's come and have dinner and all that and then they found that the weather conditions changed the next day they had to move on back south to England so they left him and that they were the last people to see the ships and the masts were last sort of seen on the horizon at the very end of July 1845. on the horizon at the very end of July 1845.

And do we think 1845 was a particularly cold snap? So were they unknowingly going into a, even it would have been a difficult task at the best times, but were they unknowingly going to a particularly frozen North Arctic Sea? Well, we do know that the years 1846 to 1849 were amongst the coldest recorded in the Arctic. They were very, very, very severe. They actually managed to get across Baffin Bay, which is, you know, that can freeze, that can be difficult anyway. They got across Baffin Bay because we do know from discoveries in 1850 that they got to a place called Beachy Island, which is

the end of Leicester Sound, very much in the heart of the Northwest Passage, because three of the men, three graves were found there of men who died in 1846. So we know they got that far quite easily. What happened was that after that, they were sort of commissioned by the Admiralty, instructed by the Admiralty, to go due west for the Bering Strait, not to go north, not to go south. They were found eventually in the south, down near the Canadian mainland. So something must have happened in 1846 in the summer there. They

sailed down. We do know they sailed down. They were beset by the ice in September 1846. And that was further south than anyone expected them to have gone. So that's why the expeditions to look for them didn't find them. And they were stuck in the ice there for two and a half years. And that's when they decided to leave the ships and head south and take as much as they could with them. And they all perished. So they were stuck in the ice

for two and a half years, living on the Erebus, cheek by jowl, slowly their supplies running down. Yeah. I mean, this wasn't unprecedented. There had been other Arctic expeditions where ships had got caught in the ice. It was Edward Parry's expedition in 1824.

They were stuck for two winters, and they sort of survived. Parry sounds like a great character, actually. I'd love to write a book about him. He organised sort of plays and sort of shows and all that. They all have to get out and do things and put on costumes and all that. James Clark Ross to get out and do things and put on costumes and all that.

James Clark Ross was actually on one of those expeditions and played a part of a girl in two of the dramas. And this great, wonderful, sort of handsome hero had actually been in drag in 1824. But no, they were stuck. And in 1847, there were many, many search expeditions. 36 were commissioned between 1848 and 1858. And one of them discovered, much later on, 10 years after they did this, a record in a canister, in a cairn, which had been left by the ship,

saying that in May 1847 they were fine, but they had drifted south, they were stuck in the ice, but all was well and Franklin was commanding the ships. Around the side of this same document, and added 11 months later, it was a completely different story, which is that we were stuck in the ice for yet another summer.

We decided to leave. Franklin died in June 1847, fairly soon after the first message. Fifteen men and nine officers had died. No one was quite sure of what. And we were abandoning ship. So that's how we know that they left and tried to head south. And that's the only document left behind by this expedition. And, you know, the Navy was absolutely obsessed with documents.

They kept records of everything. So they're there somewhere. So you think that they could be in canisters hidden and dotted around the Canadian Arctic? Well, they could be. They could be on board. There could be records on board the ship. Both ships now have been discovered

under the wrecks of both ships have been discovered. So there could well be material on board the ships. The rest of it, no one really, I don't know, no one knows what has happened to it. The papers will have blown away. The Inuit were not particularly interested in gathering records, written records. They believed in oral history and all that. So Pepe didn't mean much to them. But there is quite interesting Inuit oral history, isn't there, about what might have happened for last survivors? Yes. yes i mean almost all the evidence is from inuit history

um because i say there's only one document in english left behind and this was gathered by various people including john ray who was a an employee of the h's Bay Company, came from Stromness in the Orkneys. He was surveying up in the Canadian, the high Canadian Arctic when he met some Inuit, talked to them and they said, yes, four summers ago or four winters ago, I can't remember what they said, but it was four years ago, we saw about 40 Kabloonas,

their name for foreigners, dragging a sled with a ship on board, with a boat on top of it, south. And they also said we found bodies at various places. They gave Ray one or two artefacts which had obviously come from the ships. And that's when he knew, he brought the news back, that they had probably all perished. Worse still, the Inuit said that it was clear from the bones, the state of the bones, bones in pots and all that, that they had kept alive by cannibalism, which of course was received as a horrific shock back in this

country. But the Inuit told them that. The Inuit also said that it wasn't to the north. They actually had gone south. They said they had sightings of both the ships. On one of the ships, they found a man. But nearly all of this was sort of discounted because there was no written record. As you say, it was all oral history.

But events subsequently have shown that the Inuit were almost exactly right about everything, even where the ships were eventually found. But the problem was that nobody, as far as we know, nobody on board either ship had a working knowledge of Inuit. They didn't speak the language. So when they did leave the ship, there's a sort of Inuit record or oral record

of meeting a group of men. And obviously they said they were in a bad state, but they traded some food with them. But then neither side could understand the other. So the Inuit went one way and the men went on further south. If at any stage they had actually been able to speak the local language, they could have gone out of the mess they were in. And this could have happened a lot earlier.

But no, the ships were just self-contained worlds where everything they needed was there. They had books, they had teaspoons with their initials on it, they had wine, they had organs to play music on, they had all that sort of thing, but nobody knew how to deal with the local Inuit. And once they were off the ship, they were just open targets, really, for the cold.

So you are a famous traveler, and you made sure during this book that you went everywhere. You've been north, south. Tell me some of the highlights of the place you've been. Well, I went to the Northwest Passage. But that was kind of quite ironic. I went in August of last year. And it was an expedition with about 90 people on board

and it called in Franklin's footsteps. So we went to Beachy Island, which is where the three bodies were discovered. And there the graves are still there now. And that was an extraordinary sort of feeling to be walking this bleak shore, which is where the three bodies were discovered. And there the graves are still there now. And that was an extraordinary sort of feeling to be walking this bleak shore, knowing this was the very first winter when three of them had died. And the ships, this is where they'd wintered.

They must have looked out on this incredibly sort of bare, exposed landscape for months and months before even going on south. We then tried to get, and what I wanted to do most of all was to get to the wreck area and be able to at least see where it was. Ideally, I would have loved to put on a scuba and dive down with the archaeologist, but that didn't seem to be possible. But we did hope that we'd get down to King William Island where the ships were found.

We got through almost to the Victoria Strait and that's when the captain said, we can't go any further because the ice is so thick that we don't know when we'll be able to get out. So it was actually just a kind of complete reworking of what had happened to Erebus and Terra. But of course, the Arctic is warming much more now. There's much less, there there's much more open sea

less ice but you know the ice that gets trapped in these narrow channels you can see that Erebus and Terra were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and we got so close to their graveyard I suppose you could say but but we understood why they why they were stuck. Why have you, you certainly haven't lost your love of travel. What is it that visiting these places, be they natural wonders or places where history has happened, what is it that makes you keep wanting to visit these places and new places all the time? land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows We'll see you then. brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet,

and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists and scientists. the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best,

people like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. I think it's partly the adventure and the drama of a new experience. I mean, I don't have to travel far. I can go to Manchester and find a bit of a city that I've never seen before. And I find that very exciting.

It opens your eyes. It forces you to look around, not just sort of stick in your hotel or stay on board. And that was the spirit of all these guys who went off to the Arctic and the Antarctic, especially to the Antarctic. They wanted to see these places. They'd never been to these places before. They wanted to record them. They wanted to get out and walk around them.

And that's what I always feel that I want to do because I learn something each time. I learn something about myself and my own ability, my curiosity, my understanding of places, my ability to sort of absorb new impressions. That's really important. That keeps my own brain ticking over. But the other thing is that I think there's a sort of continuity of history.

That's really why I was so happy to go to Tasmania and just see the little area. There's not much to it. A little sort of area of the bay just outside Hobart where the two ships moored for several months when they came back from the Antarctic. And to feel like they were there and this is what they would have looked out on

and there's the same lighthouse about a few miles down the strait. So there's that sort of feeling that there's some, I don't know, spiritual connection is putting it a bit far but just sort of observing what they would have seen as they left an area, it's like being in Stromness

and looking out to sea and seeing the two capes and that would be the last they would have seen of Britain and beyond that it's just the roughest, some of the roughest seas in the world and this is what they would have gone to so I was kind of experiencing their own butterflies And beyond that, it's just the roughest, some of the roughest seas in the world. And this is what they would have gone to. So I was kind of experiencing their own butterflies, you know, by my own sort of, by looking at it myself. Now that we've stolen you away from comedy and from travel, you're a historian now, I'm glad to say.

We've got you inside the tent. How did you find writing history and researching it? Did you find it exciting? Well, I did. I mean, I was trained as a historian. That's what I did at Oxford, unfortunately. I used to do history in the evening and comedy and acting during the day. So I rather just did enough to get by.

I think you chose the right... I think you went down the right path. What, history or comedy? But, I mean, it's always been an interest of mine and in fact when we were doing Monty Python we wrote the Holy Grail which is sort of based on

a version of history so was Life of Brian so historical research was always there in the back of my mind this was the first time I'd actually done a book involving pure research and I just was very very nervous of getting into someone else's territory and i know people who spend years and years working on some tiny aspect of the voyage and what i did was just take an amalgam of all that i was very much dependent on a number of very good correspondence

number of very good books about the period. I took these all in and decided the best thing I could do is to try and write a sort of thriller. I mean, it's got to be a story which carries you through and doesn't suddenly drop you in a mass of detail. And so, you know, one's sort of attention span sort of goes off. I wanted to keep the tension there as well as the information about what was happening.

So that was a tricky thing to do. And if I pulled it off, then I'd be very happy. I'm going to ask one of those absolutely infuriating questions. People come up to me going, are you tall and what's your favorite bit of history? What bits of the world haven't you been to yet and you want to go to? I haven't been to any of central asia um the

stans and i really would like to go to the area around the altai mountains i think they're in either mongolia or one of the stans you've probably been there have you been there anyway just because in all the histories of europe so many um uh invasions have come from central asia and i don't know what it's like up there why did they want to leave or why why did it make them such fearsome fearsome warriors um where did kublai khan come from and all that so there's an area there that i would i would love to see i don't know about you but i feel i haven't scratched the surface i mean do you do you feel you've seen lots of stuff or do you still the more you travel the more the more you think, well, there's a whole valley.

There's valleys and mountain ranges that just because you're walking through one area, you don't get to see, you can't see everything. Yeah, no, I absolutely totally agree with you. People tend to say, oh, Michael, you've traveled the world. I mean, I've been to many countries, but, you know, I've been through those countries sometimes four or five days. I haven't been up the side roads. I haven't seen these mountains and the canyons and the far far regions of the country because you can't get there there's always something more to see and i think that's the great thing about traveling is that it just asks many more questions than it gives answers and people thought oh what's the world like well go and see it you know which bit do you mean um so there's always

something there's always something else to see and i think the to me the ticking off of countries is unimportant that doesn't mean anything it's where you go to in those countries and i could go back to all the places i visited which happened to be i think 98 countries something like that and and see something there I'd never seen before. Well, and I completely agree with you. I find Britain, and I walk everywhere, I explore things, and I'm finding new things out about this country that I've crisscrossed 100 times. I'm finding out new things every day.

So it's good to hear you can have adventures at home as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. And the more I read, researching this, about what the scientists were looking for and you listen to'll never, ever complete a task like that, but you complete little tasks, and that's the main thing. Michael Palin, thank you so much. The book is called? Erebus, the Story of a Ship. And it is out right now.

Go and buy it, everybody. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I've got a little tiny favour to ask.

If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and everything will be awesome. Thank you. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual,

are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel. those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel. Get Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. you