Palin spends a fair amount of the time telling us the history of HMS Erebus prior to her last expedition. He not relieve the main players from a rigorous interrogation of their strengths and weaknesses, from Sir John Franklin the ship’s commander to all the other characters involved. It is a documentary in book form with the pace of a thriller. This is the story of this ill-fated ship and her crew, and Michael Palin brings a mixture of lightness of touch in his narrative allied to a commanding control of the facts. By then, of course, Global Warming had started to open up the fabled North-West Passage. It would be 170 years before she was discovered. Instead, after doing some exploring and some discovery, she foundered and sank. Her mission was in part to show that Britain and its Navy could still do some exploring and still do some discovery. She was an old ship from a much-diminished Royal Navy. In May 1845 HMS Erebus was sent by the Admiralty in London, in company with another ship, to discover a route through the high Arctic – what we would now call the North West Passage. In many ways Michael Palin’s presence is often enough to draw our attention to whatever he is showing us but in telling the story of HMS Erebus he has found riveting and moving material. As befits a Fellow and former President of the Royal Geographical Society he is constantly looking for new things to see and discover. He has travelled the world for us, bringing to our screens places we are only dimly aware of. It is however as a traveller and explorer that perhaps we have come to know him best in more recent times. He has certainly had a good go at being a reasonably serious actor. Copying an entire table or its entire content is not allowed even when credit is provided.Michael Palin may have come to prominence as a comedian. For the Erebus and Terror musters of 1845 (Franklin Expedition): the ‘Perseus’ value for the transported sailors has an unresolved acronym that is not in the table due to illegibility.ĭue to the nature of the transcriptions and their formatting, they are to be credited to Arctonauts when used or referenced.This is often crossed out text, overflow text, or updates of which only the latest value is important. Due to being tables, some text has been turned into footnotes.A ‘two months advance’ not being changed to 3/6 months in the header, may be an error of the person who filled in the muster and not reflect the values given. This includes the (non-)changes of table headers. Archaic spelling and/or mistakes have been kept in.Ditto marks (〃) have been kept in where there doesn’t seem to a value foregoing them and/or the mark may mean something different.Initials are occasionally exempted if the name can’t be found. Abbreviations for names have been resolved wherever possible. This means a few of the later columns, especially with relation to victualling and muster dates, are removed in current publications (they are rarely filled in/filled in consistently). Due to table variations, headings and columns have been simplified to a degree.They have been transcribed and cleaned up for posting, meaning that they are not exact transcriptions from the primary sources. They also provide a way to start digging into a sailor’s life, often giving their previous ship, their next ship (where possible), their age and their place of birth or residence.Īll currently published muster books are part of the public domain and can be found at the English National Archives in Kew, London, under archive code ADM 37 (“Admiralty: Ships’ Musters (Series III)”).Īll muster books published here will be of ships that were part of polar expeditions. While less descriptive than Description Books, they are far more common and still provide a lot of information about a person. Muster Books are one of the key documents when researching the crew of a ship. Helpful British Narratives Heroic Age Narratives Blogs & Websites Close menu Muster Books
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