Life Of Erebus

- Michael Palin

I TRACE MY FONDNESS for Canada back to the dark days of winter 1970, when CBC, having been international trailblazers for a fledgling series called Monty Python’s Flying Circus, decided it was a madness too far and dropped the show. To my joy and delight, Canadians protested, marching in sub-zero temperatures, carrying banners asking for their cherished Monty Python back.

I already knew a lot about Canada, as it was a country beloved by British geography masters, being friendly and coloured pink, and because all maps were on Mercator’s projection, it looked absolutely colossal.

I can only assume the manager who planned Monty Python’s first overseas tour in 1973 had not been taught geography, otherwise we would not have not been leapfrogging across Canada playing one-night stands at towns that were often thousands of kilometres apart. The show in Saskatoon was cancelled for lack of interest, and some of the racier sketches didn’t exactly play well in places like Regina. (When asked by the Regina tourist board for a comment on the city, my cast mate Graham Chapman pointed off into the prairie and said “Why didn’t they put it over there?”)

Now, 45 years on, I find myself drawn back to Canada. Not just to Canada, but to its Far North, about which none of my geography masters had much to say because they knew so little about it. This time it was tragedy rather than comedy that called to me. While researching material on the 19th century botanist Joseph Hooker, who rose to become one of the greatest directors of London’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, I discovered that in 1839 he served aboard a ship called HMS Erebus. At the tender age of 22, he’d joined an expedition to the Antarctic, during which