Erebus by Michael Palin

Author:Michael Palin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Although Erebus and Terror had been refitted by the end of July, Ross had to stay in these bleak and stormy surroundings until the next magnetic-term day, which wasn’t until September. Always on the lookout for ways to keep the men busy and to stem the increasing number of incidents of fighting and drunkenness, he turned his attention to the small cemetery above the harbour.

‘In order to give our people healthful exercise and useful occupation,’ he wrote, ‘I directed them to be employed building a wall seven feet thick and as many high round the spot which had been hitherto used as a burial ground but which was at present without any enclosure.’ There weren’t many graves to enclose. One, though, belonged to a key figure in Antarctic exploration: Captain Matthew Brisbane, who had accompanied the Scots whaling captain James Weddell when he had achieved the furthest south in 1823. Brisbane had been a resourceful, if unlucky, ship’s master, who had survived three shipwrecks, each time building himself an escape vessel out of the wreckage. Whilst in charge of the British settlement at Port Louis in 1833, however, he and a number of others had been murdered and dragged out of their homes by a group of renegade Argentines and rebellious native convicts. His body had then been roughly buried. Nine years on, Ross, doubtless feeling some kind of kinship with a fellow explorer, ordered the bones to be given a proper burial in the newly walled cemetery, complete with a brand-new headstone. The inscription read ‘To the Memory of Matthew Brisbane who was barbarously murdered on the 26th August 1833. His remains were removed to this spot by the crews of H.B.M. [Her Britannic Majesty’s] ships “Erebus” and “Terror” on the 25th August 1842.’

The headstone still exists. As does the cemetery, now unused and overgrown. The turf wall erected by the men of Erebus and Terror has mostly been weathered away, and it’s easy to scramble through the makeshift fencing that now encloses the old graveyard. There, in the north-west corner, beneath one of the Falklands’ very few trees, is a replica of Brisbane’s gravestone. The original, removed from this exposed site on the side of the hill, is now kept in the fine Dockyard Museum at Stanley.

While walking back from the museum some days later, I run into a modern-day explorer, one of the crew of the Ernest Shackleton, a British Antarctic Survey ship, which has just arrived in port from South Georgia, bringing home scientists and observers from various remote Antarctic destinations. They invite me on board, where I can see that they are still readjusting to ‘normal’ life after many solitary months collecting extraordinarily detailed data on the fringes of the Southern Continent. These latter-day Hookers and McCormicks nod appreciatively when they hear of my interest in their counterparts of the 1840s. The Ernest Shackleton’s sister ship is called James Clark Ross.

After my visit, I walk back to Stanley along the shore path. Out

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