My letter “E” pick for this year’s A to Z Reading Challenge was EREBUS by Michael Palin. Yes, that Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. Palin is an avid traveler and a keen historian, and he leaves no detail unexplored as he leads us through the life and loss of the great HMS Erebus, a former bomb ship commissioned in 1826 for the royal navy of Great Britain. In 1839 it was refitted to be an exploration vessel, and explore, it did. After spending a few years sailing around the Mediterranean, it headed for the Arctic, where, on one voyage, Captain James Clark Ross discovered the magnetic North Pole. From there it went on to Antarctica, where Captain Ross discovered the Ross ice shelf, and named Mount Erebus on Ross Island, off the coast of Antarctica for his fine ship. The researchers on these trips conducted studies in magnetism, and returned with vital oceanographic data as well as collections of plants and birds.

Unfortunately, all of that is not what Erebus is best known for (and probably why Palin researched so painstakingly to make us aware of all that came before). Erebus was one of the ships that carried the ill-fated Franklin Arctic expedition. In 1845, Erebus and her sister ship, Terror became hopelessly locked in the Arctic ice, forcing 130 men to trek across the ice until they died from hypothermia and starvation. The sunken wreckage of Erebus was discovered in 2014 and Terror was found in 2016. Both ships are now designated a National Historic Site of Canada with the precise location known only to a select few.

All in all, this was a good read (and a good listen as Palin narrates the audiobook). There was a tremendous amount of research done, and a tremendous amount of detail – some of it more than a little mundane. The final fourth of the book delves more into the horrible tragedy that was its last voyage, but not with the same focus on detail, as there were no journals or goodbye notes ever recovered from the wreckage, leaving a lot of the story to conjecture. I would have a liked more of that to balance out some of the dry material that came before, but I still found a lot of this story fascinating. Four stars.