Michael Palin, famed maniac of the nonsensical Monty Python television skits of the 1970s, looks 10 years younger than 75. He is wiry and bouncy, neat and trim. He does not, in fact, come straight from some naval command, but has spent the latter half of his life as a traveller and adventurer; perhaps this is what gives the impression that if you asked him to climb the rigging, he would bound upward. He admits to reading the Hornblower books as a boy – an adventure series by C.S. Forester about an officer rising through Nelson’s navy in the age of sail. His interest in maritime polar exploration has its origins in that romance – and in growing up in the northern English city of Sheffield. “There was nowhere to go in Sheffield,” he tells me in his publisher’s office in Toronto. “You were going to be there for the rest of your life. That was the 1940s. Anywhere else in the world … names like the Gobi Desert, Himalaya, anything like that absolutely fascinated me.”
Author Michael Palin poses for a photograph in Toronto, on Oct. 17, 2018.Christopher Katsarov/Globe and Mail
Palin is in town promoting his new book, Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time, a narrative about 19th-century expeditions that is at once breezy and gripping. These are the two famous voyages of James Clark Ross and John Franklin, successive captains of the Royal Navy vessel Erebus: one to approach the magnetic South Pole in Antarctica (a success) and the other to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic (a disaster that led to the deaths of Franklin and all his men and the loss of both of the expedition’s ships). Palin mostly collated other histories of the two trips as his research, adding a lot of textural detail about life on board ships in the 1840s gleaned from sailors’ diaries. His writing tone is conversational, skeptical, frequently on the lookout for the humorous.
To learn more about those inhospitable environments, Palin did his best to follow the explorers’ routes himself, and intersperses personal recollections of his travels to Tasmania, the Antarctic and the Canadian North. His wish was to dive down to touch the wreck of Erebus, discovered in 2014, but his own Arctic voyage was curtailed by nothing other than thick ice. He points out in the book that floating Arctic ice has increased rather than decreased in the age of global warming, as shattering icebergs fill up the seas.
Why did he include these contemporary trips in his history? “I was known as a traveller,” he says. “People … might think it odd if I hadn’t been to some of the places. That was one thing, to be honest. … And also because I just felt, well, I’m not going to be able to spend all my time in libraries. I’m not that way inclined.”
Hardship is the constant of all polar journeys, and the deaths of all officers and crew on Erebus and her sister ship Terror in 1848 came after lengthy misery, involving possibly starvation, scurvy, tuberculosis, lead poisoning or maybe all of the above. Palin argues that the theory about insanity or confusion caused by lead poisoning does not seem fully justified by the most recent research, but it is clear that there was cannibalism. He seems intent on understanding just how frightful those hardships were. “A ship barely 30 metres long, made of timbers from Wales, could actually go through the Antarctic ice and could survive as long as they did in Antarctic waters. Men had to furl the sails with their bare hands because gloves were sort of … a bit pansy. They must have had to go up the rigging and change the sails when it was minus-30. How they did that I really really don’t know.”
It’s this kind of detail of everyday activity in an otherworldly environment that makes Erebus so intriguing. Palin is at his best when describing the rituals of life on board an isolated and cramped space. Erebus and Terror – so threateningly named because they were refitted bomb ships, sturdily built to support mortars for land bombardment – set sail on all their exploratory expeditions with astounding loads of stuff on board – not just barrels of food and rum and live animals, but a monkey and a dog for companionship, a library for all crew, musical instruments and costumes for theatricals. Palin goes into details about festivities and celebrations on board, dancing and fiddling that would go on all night and often end with sailors’ accounts of headaches.
One historical character whose role Palin amplifies is Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin. Her copious letters provide convincing evidence that she was a fearsome force behind his career and eventual celebration. Franklin had been given the governorship of what is now Tasmania, a job he did not excel at. After various conflicts, he was recalled to England, and it was from there his wife tried to make up for this failure with a letter-writing campaign singing his praises as an administrator. It was partly her urging that set the ambitious Northwest Passage expedition in motion – and her anxiety, two years after the mission vanished, that led to the first search parties being sent out. “She was such a presence,“ Palin says. “She was always there with a statement about this or a judgment about that. She was making the pace all the time. She first comes on the scene really in Tasmania, when the ships stop there on the way to the Antarctic. There she is, inviting the officers round and talking about them as dashing young men and all that sort of stuff. … Lady Franklin just enjoyed being able to control people. I don’t mean that in an always negative way. … And that’s really why they were given the boot from Tasmania, because the local officials in the Colonial Office couldn’t bear her. They called her ‘the man in petticoats.’ And yet, I rather admire her.”
Palin does not, in fact, come straight from some naval command, but has spent the latter half of his life as a traveller and adventurer.Christopher Katsarov/Globe and Mail
Without being an explicit criticism of British colonialism, Erebus at least makes plain that an arrogant mentality was no help to the lost Arctic expedition, once the two ships became stuck in sea ice. They had made no attempt to contact the Inuit who might have known something about the geography of the place, nor had they brought along anyone who spoke Inuktitut. “The ships were like fortresses,” Palin says. “They may have to winter in them and that’s why they had lots of books to read, but they had made no provision for what they might have to do if they ever had to leave those ships.”
What is the connection, one might wonder, between the historian/geographer speaking here and the slapstick comedian of the Monty Python sketches? “We were all overeducated boys,” he admits of the six-man troupe. It is no coincidence that his Monty Python co-star Terry Jones also went on to write books of history (on medieval Britain and Chaucer). “It was a sketch about the Middle Ages that started Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Palin says. “We were interested in the history of this legend, and you had to know a bit about the history of the legend to write the comedy.”
Even after a distinguished life of writing, and years as president of the Royal Geographical Society, Palin does not seem to think of his Monty Python identity as terribly distant. On a recent trip to North Korea for a new documentary, his producer tried to break the ice with a stern female handler by showing her a Monty Python clip. “Because my guide thought I was a sort of serious reporter journalist. And then she watched the fish-slapping sketch. It was wonderful to see her expression, she just completely cracks up. She says this is what you do? I say yes. Yes.”