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A happy surprise sandwiched between a signing in Belfast and an appearance at the Dublin History Festival was a detour to the town of Banbridge, County Down. This was the birthplace of one of my favourite characters in the story, Francis Crozier, captain of Erebus’s travelling companion, HMS Terror. Believed to be one of the last to perish in the Arctic, Crozier’s sacrifice on the fatal expedition to the North-West Passage is commemorated with a massive monument, featuring carvings of the ships and concrete polar bears, which looms over the town square, next door to the Crozier’s elegant Georgian family home, which is being restored.

Erebus Sails On — On the way from Belfast to Dublin took a detour to the home of Francis Crozier in Banbridge. He captained HMS Terror when she disappeared into the Arctic. His house is very fine, and the memorial outside is flanked by concrete polar bears.

Less than a week later I was in Providence, Rhode Island for the start of a week-long US and Canadian tour. Beautiful buildings on the hill but I gave my first transatlantic Erebus talk in an old snuff movie house, now reborn and called the Columbus – which seemed a good name for a talk on exploration. The Americans and Canadians don’t do understatement, so instead of the book being called Erebus The Story Of A Ship, over this side of the Atlantic it’s called Erebus, One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and The Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time, and the cover is black.

More black halfway through my talk in Brooklyn. At one point all the lights went out and the screen went dark as the power cut off. Playing for time, I said that this was a recreation of the Polar winters, when, for five months of winter the sun never rose above the horizon.

Flew from Providence to Newark. A little touch of nostalgia as we skimmed low over the cranes of Newark Docks, where, thirty years ago, and by the skin of my teeth, I’d boarded the container ship that would carry me on the last leg of Around The World In Eighty Days. At the Explorers Club in New York I met a number of grizzled Arctic veterans. One of them winked and said “I can get you down to the wreck, Mike”. It’s been my dream to actually scuba down to Erebus and touch her sides, but Parks Canada seem to have put comedians low down the list of applicants! I learned that the ice was so bad up there this year that they could only manage a day and half’s diving onto the wrecks.

Great audiences at the Opera House in Toronto. An old vaudeville theatre, which had only recently hosted Tom Jones. My last speaking event of the tour was at the very smart new HQ of the Canadian Royal Geographical Society, looking out over the Ottawa River just beside the Rideau waterfall. The highlight of the evening, and probably of the whole tour, came as a complete surprise to me, when John Geiger, on behalf of the RCGS, presented me with the first ever Louie Kamookak medal. This was named after the great Inuit historian and explorer, who died, far too young, earlier this year. He made it his life’s work to find out valuable Inuit evidence of what happened to the Franklin expedition. In a small way, I feel we were fellow-travellers.

On The Road Again

Calm Before The Storm

Busy Summer

The Last Lap

Friday, 13th April, 2018

As anyone whose ever had to write a book to a deadline will know, the closer it gets to that deadline the more reasons you find to make coffee, check your email, catch up on the last 15 minutes of that irresistible podcast, stare out of the window, or if you’re feeling really energetic, go to sleep. I’ve been fighting these psychological battles rather a lot recently, but thanks largely to the grumpy weather, I’ve never been tempted to stray far from my desktop, and I can report that after eight months of concentration, my book is just about complete.

Erebus research trip to the North West Passage August 2017.
Left: Greenland. Taken on the flight from London to Vancouver. Right: Rock stacks on King Leopold Island. It looks silent but home to thousands of birds and one of the noisest places on Earth.

It’s to be called Erebus The Story of a Ship and it’s my first foray into historical non-fiction. I think the reason I’ve been able to complete it at all is because I have grown more and more fascinated by the story. The more detail you unearth, the more you realise what exciting times those were in the 1840’s, when crews crowded onto small ships to explore the Great Unknown.

Left: Arriving at Resolute. One of the most northerly airports in the world. Right: Remnants of the old US refueling station at Resolute. Now living sculptures.

Left: I was given the pilot’s cabin. Right: Walking in the arctic can get quite warm.

The story is about facing the unknown, and Erebus did that not once but twice. Her Antarctic journey was a triumph. Her Arctic journey was a disaster. And three and a half years ago, she turns up again, in pretty good shape, on the seabed in the Canadian Arctic. All the elements for a great tale. I cross my fingers that the eight months writing has not been wasted. I have a terrific editor who is helping me whip it into final shape, so as spring struggles through and our resident flock of house sparrows perform gymnastic mating feats outside my window, I’m feeling in upbeat mood. Watch this space!

Beechey Island. Two of the graves of the first men to die on the Franklin expedition 1846.

The Death of Stalin is out there in the wider world, except if you’re in Russia, where it remains banned. The opening figures in the USA are promising, though I felt a bit like one of Stalin’s victims when I found they’d removed my face from the US poster. Still, maybe it’ll make it easier for me to get a Russian visa!

Hope you’re all well out there. Please keep in touch.

Working with Whitehouse. Or rather not working. Waiting in the Gents Cloakroom to be called on to the Death Of Stalin set. August 2016. Nice suits. Sorry about the plastic bottle!!

Erebus Sails on into the New Year

Friday, 5th January, 2018

Shocked to see that my most recent post was in mid-October. Where has the time gone ? Well, it’s been mostly used up sitting in front of my desktop waiting for words of genius and brilliance to materialise on the screen in front of me. And waiting, and waiting. This writing books thing is unspectacular and very un-visual but, as they say, someone’s got to do it.

The good news is that I passed the halfway point on my Erebus book in early December and my editor has seen it and is still talking to me, which has spurred me on to return to the keyboard and finish the thing. I’m enjoying it. Especially the glass of wine with which I reward myself at the end of each day’s scribbling. Unlike a novel, which is all in your head, the story of the adventures of Erebus in the Polar wastes is in library archives and learned books, and digging out the facts is time-consuming, and seemingly endless. But very rewarding and often exciting.

Left: The waterfront, Porto. Right: The Cathedral at Viseu.

The exhibition Death In The Ice, just finishing at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, has remarkable video footage of marine archaeologists exploring the sunken wreck of the Erebus, discovered in 2014, 30 feet below the surface of the Arctic waters, and I was lucky enough to meet and share a lunch with Ryan Harris, the leading diver and the first man to see Erebus for 170 years. Every now and then I do have to gasp with wonder, which I hope will transfer to the page ! All being well, it’s still on course for publication in September 2018.

Top: Christmas in the Streets of Viseu. Surprised couple! Bottom: Believe it or not, this is a railway station. Sao Bento Station in Porto.

I took a few days off in early December to accept an invitation to a literary festival at Viseu in Portugal. It’s a small but attractive old town about two hours drive from Porto (now there’s a place worth visiting. Rising steeply from the river and delightful to explore). Viseu endeared itself to me for two reasons. One is that the full title of their event was the Festival of Literature and Wine, and perhaps more importantly, because its football team are called the Academicals. Hamilton Academicals – you have a Portuguese rival! If only they could be drawn together in some European competition!

Left: Fame at last! Viseu, Portugal, December 2017. Right: With Leonor and Luis, my two guardians at the Viseu Festival of Books and Wine.

I’ve one of those “Life On Screen” things coming up – on Sunday night Jan 7th, BBC2 – which reminds me of how old I am and how much I’ve done and how I would like to do it all over again. Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Now, back to the book. Happy New Year to you all.

Death of Stalin Day

North-West Passage

Following The Fleet

Monday, June 19th 2017

Whoever thought writing was a sedentary activity should have been with me these past few weeks. Since my week in the Falkland Islands in March, my researches into the saga of HMS Erebus have taken me to Pembroke Dockyard in Wales, where the ship was built 190 years ago, to the Orkney Islands, the last sight of home for the ill-fated crew of Franklin’s Arctic expedition, and just last week to Hobart, Tasmania which was the base for Erebus’s most successful voyages, into the heart of the Antarctic.

Top: The men who built HMS Erebus in 1826 would have walked through these very same gates at Pembroke Dockyard. Bottom: With my guide, historian Ted Goddard, at Pembroke Dockyard Museum.

A lot of the places where my story is set are remote corners of the world, so it takes a while to get there, but one thing they have in common is an almost unpolluted atmosphere. It’s quite a shock to look up into the heavens above Port Stanley or Western Australia (where I went to a Writers Festival on my way to Hobart) and see the sheer mass of flickering, sparkling light that fills the skies. Its a sight that takes the breath away, and one we big city dwellers never get to see.

Top left: Shop that’s changed hands. Stromness, Orkney Islands. Bottom leftt: Arctic explorer John Rae lies in St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall with his gun by his side. Right: Some of the houses at Stromness are so tightly wedged together that they have to shave a bit off the bottom of the building to let people through.

The only trouble is that I know that soon I’m going to have to stop travelling and sit down and write my book. Instead of seeing stars I’ll be seeing spellcheck. Ah, well, I’ve always enjoyed the writing process. Not that it’s always as smooth as it seems. I recently had to sort through my writings that date back more than 50 years, to try and decide which to send to the British Library archive. In the end I gave up and sent everything.

Orkney Islands. Interior of a chapel inside a Nissen Hut built and decorated by Italian prisoners in the Second World War using whatever they could find on the Islands.

So many of the best Python ideas sprang from squiggles and doodles and crossings out, that what I was giving the British Library was bound to be a bit of a mess, but a kind of productive mess, which they would sort out. And they seemed very happy to do that. The fact that all my Python material was hand-written, and then re-written, and then chopped up and inserted into someone else’s sketch didn’t seem to worry them. And it doesn’t really worry me any more. I’m an obsessively tidy person, and yet it’s the untidiness of the Python sketches that reveals the thought processes behind them.

Late afternoon on the Huon River, in Tasmania’s Deep South. The settlement by the water is called Franklin, and they build the most beautiful woooden boats there. They give lessons in boat -building. Check out The Wooden Boat Centre.

In Hobart, capital of Tasmania, even the telephone junction boxes are works of art. Come on London, catch up!

“Don’t tidy up histery’ I wrote in my notebook, and then crossed it out and wrote it again, spelling “history” right.

Hope you all have a really great summer – and for those in the southern hemisphere, a really great winter.

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Erebus Sails On