![]() ![]() Over its twenty years of active service HMS Erebus worked in both polar regions as well as in the balmy Mediterranean. Long live the memory of these remarkable, courageous, and doomed men. In short, the Franklin Expedition is a staple of Canadian history, a top-of-the-world drama with repercussions in colonial BC. These reviews continue to draw considerable traffic to the Ormsby website. Her BC visit is commemorated in Lady Franklin Rock in the Fraser River just above Yale.Īnother reason to review Michael Palin’s book is that two earlier reviews by Walter Volovsek on the Franklin Expedition have attracted thousands of readers to The Ormsby Review: Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, by Victoria-born archaeologist Owen Beattie (Greystone Books, 2017), and Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition, by Vancouver writer Paul Watson (Penguin Random House, 2017). Still hoping her husband was alive, she visited anyone with the slightest connection to the Royal Navy and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s northern operations, collecting shreds of evidence. Just as importantly, Franklin’s widow, Lady Jane Franklin, visited BC in 1861 and again in 1870. At least two of these Royal Navy men went on to settle in British Columbia. This topic - the Franklin Expedition’s BC connections - has not yet been written up, but I will urge an assiduous researcher to start by combing through Captain John Walbran’s coastal history classic, British Columbia C oast Names (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1909, and reprinted many times since). Men from Franklin’s previous expeditions and voyages, and personnel from later expeditions sent in search of him, visited the Royal Navy’s new Pacific station at Esquimalt after it opened in 1848. ![]() Or had it? What possible connection exists between British Columbia and Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition of 1845-48? As someone who practically camped out in the BC Archives in the 1980s, I can answer that question. Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) is not a BC author, Erebus is not a BC ship, and the Franklin Expedition had nothing to do with British Columbia. A vigilant reader of The Ormsby Review might be startled to see Michael Palin’s Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time reviewed here, and I might appear to be on thin ice. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada (Vintage Canada), 2019Įditor’s note. Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time ![]()
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