Michael we are here in the old Naval
College Greenwich to discuss Erebus your
book. I wanted to begin with this idea
of ships. You clearly have a
fascination with sailing and with the
open sea but I know that when you were
younger it was actually trains that you
were into, you used to be a trainspotter
so I wondered where your first
experience of ships came from and that
fascination began. It's very interesting
I think you become fascinated with
things that you can't have and can't see.
And I was born and brought up in
Sheffield which we were always told was
about as far from the sea as anywhere in
Britain, you know, all of 45 miles. And yet
I don't know where it actually came from
but I was always fascinated by naval
stories by... I think because the Navy, with
all these great battles, seemed far more
sort of glamorous than just people
trudging across the open fields and all
that. You were at see and there were ships being sunk
and all that. I suppose that's where it
must have come from but I think it was
just because I loved the sea but because
I never saw it until I was about six or
seven years old and we went on the holiday
to Norfolk and ever since then I just I
love being by the sea. I feel very
comfortable by the sea and the sound of
waves and all that is just tremendous.
And I suppose it's just, it's a short
step from that to wanting to know about
ships and ships that go to sea. And yet I have
no competence in that area. I mean I've
sailed a bit with disastrous results. I
don't really understand it. I would be
hopeless at climbing the rigging and
getting the sails up but I do love, I
love being on ships and I've managed
to do a lot of that on my travel series.
Because you have, you've written several
books and you've made several TV series
where you've travelled the length and
breadth of the globe, if that's the right
phrase to use. You mentioned actually
in the book Erebus that when you were
traveling with those programs you used
to like to leave your hotel and to go to
the seafront and to look out to the
ocean wherever you were, to take that
time to do that. There is something isn't
there about looking out to sea where you
feel time does melt away because when
you look out to the horizon it could be
almost any time and
do you find yourself imagining what
it might have been like for those older
ships setting out on to those same
waters? Well, exactly and also that's
something, it's a sort of huge
awareness of this huge area I mean 71%
of the globe is sea, so when you stand by
the sea you just feel terribly small and
yet you want to, I want to investigate it.
I want to either dive in and swim or
paddle or, better still, go on a ship
and see where it would take me. And that
of course was what fascinated me about
Erebus was this little ship went to
places where there were no maps. These
people were going into the unknown and I
think that's what's always fascinated me,
since I was very, very small. What it
must be like being on your own somewhere
where no one's ever been before.
That was a very potent thing to me.
I think it's quite hard for people to get
their head around now, isn't it, because
as you say we have GPS, we all have
phones in our pockets that can tell us a
map of anywhere in the world. It
must be quite hard I think for people to
understand what it must have been like
for people to get on a ship and to head
out to the unknown and possibly to
know that you might never come back!
Because it was so dangerous what they were doing.
Which of course several of the
letters that people who were on Erebus, both
in the Antarctic and the Arctic say just
that: 'We're not quite sure if we'll come
back.' There was a great deal of religious
feeling at the time, feeling that
God would look after you the,
Almighty would see you through. When they
have terrible accidents, which they did,
or near crashes, it was always the
Almighty saved us and all that. So that
was a strong thing, but the rest of it
I can't quite get my head around how
they, what they felt, they definitely knew
they were going somewhere where people
hadn't gone before and as far as I could
tell in the Antarctic they all went
along with that. They were all quite
excited when they got below you know 74
75 degrees south, further south than
Cook had been and all that sort of thing.
And I think that they just do it and
you've got to have an inspirational
leader who will push them on, they've got
to have absolute confidence in the ship
and at that time it was a very
well-equipped, a very well-built ship and
I think they believed that they would be
safe. So that's the thing. The rest of
it is just like, it's mundane traveling.
It's scrubbing the decks one day even
though you're scrubbing the decks at the
furthest south anyone's ever been before.
I, as a writer, I stopped to
say hey guys, do you realize just what
that was, you've broken a record no one
has ever seen that far down, that south
of the earth - oh no we got to scrub the decks
have our pudding in a minute.
Just the mundanity of daily life. There are some
fascinating,
I call them characters in the book but
obviously they're real people, but you
unearth some amazing sort of characters.
I was a big fan of McCormack
because of his, because he'd just go around shooting
every single animal he discovered
because he was there you know
finding these these new species but
putting gun to them - for
science of course. Yes, I like the fact
he felt obliged to shoot as many of
these birds or animals as he could find.
And the rarer the bird, the more
important it was to shoot it, stuff it,
and send it back home. Were there any of
those men that you have researched
through the course this book that you
came to admire more than any others? I
mean obviously there are lots of admirable
people and the things that they did were
extraordinary, but was there anyone who
you felt a particular affection for?
Yes, I'm particularly fond of
Crozier: Frances Rawdon Moira Crozier.
to give him his full name. Who actually never
made the top table as it were. There was
something about him that he was always
number two but he was extremely good
at what he did and he was the
captain of Terror on both the voyages
and very likely he was on the last men
standing in the Arctic and all
that. And I loved certain
aspects of Crozier's I liked very much. One
was that when he was sailing with
Franklin up to the Northwest Passage
Franklin was very, very clubbable. He
liked people to come round
for dinner, come on, join us,
and he would insist on Crozier coming
to dinner. It was all right for his own
officers because they were onboard the
same ship. Crozier had to come on a small
ship across the North Atlantic, have his
dinner, then go back after a few glasses
of wine and find his ship again. And at
one point he just says I just cannot
bear being asked to
dinner any more by Captain
Franklin. So he had little things like
that, were very human. I think he was just
a quiet man, he had this unrequited love
affair for a long time,
a lady called Sophia Craycroft
which is in the book. And it
was clearly never going to go anywhere
but somehow he kind of stuck at it
and wrote her letters and all that and
kept going off to sea and then coming
back. So what it was like for him when he
finally went to the Northwest Passage I
don't know; he was clearly not very happy.
And he suffered from depression
and all that so there was a real human character
there. I felt this is somebody who was
brilliant at their job but somehow
didn't quite fit in and never quite got
the glory that the leaders did.
All of these journeys of course were about
discovery and they never knew quite what
they might discover. I wondered whether
for you, as a writer, researching and then
writing this book, whether there was
anything that you discovered either
about Erebus or even about yourself
that surprised you through the process.
I did discover a lot of little details but
I mean the main thing was that I realized
how small this ship was really. It was a
hundred and four feet long and there was
sixty nine men on board and I likened it
to a chilean boat that we'd been on
on one of the filming trips I did which
was about 200 feet long and had 29
people on board and it was a real squash.
So I mean I can't imagine really how
they all survived and how they got on.
And that fascinated me and I suppose
that a lot of it must have been to do
with just discipline. They had work to
do all the time, there's a pattern of
life. But the rest of it
interested me, the fact that they never,
very few of them could swim because
learning to swim was kind of admitting
that there might be, you might get
thrown into the sea. You just didn't
think about that. And the letters that
they wrote; there were one or two letters
that we got from I'd say below decks and
the very very few examples of written
material from the crew, it was nearly all
the officers
And there's a man called William
Cunningham and it really brought the
journey to life. William Cunningham and
his stories. And there were you know
Franklin and McCormick would be
talking about the Latin names of the
flowers and the animals whereas
Cunningham would just be
saying you know half the men got drunk
again today, had to drag them back and
give them a stomach pump, this was on the Falklands,
killed a live bullock and all that
stuff. It was really earthy. With Cunningham
you really felt that you get the smell and
flavor of the ship. The rest of it, yeah,
it's fascinating, but there was
those little glimpses, to me really,
really made the story come to life. Well
reading the book absolutely does make
that story comes to life. There's an
extraordinary photograph right at the
beginning, of the wreck, the recently
discovered wreck
It's fascinating to see those things
that have come back from the ship
but to read the story I think it's just
a fantastic read.
So Michael thank you so much.
Pleasure, thank you