Arctic Exploration: the fatal quest for the Northwest Passage
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Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are packing our tins of preserved beef, donning our thermal undies and sailing off in search of the Northwest Passage. And joining me on the good ship, You're Dead to Me, are two very special shipmates.

In History Corner, she's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. What a title! You may have read her long-running science column in The Guardian newspaper or her recent book, Higher and Colder, on the history of extreme exploration. And you will definitely remember her...

from our episode on Victorian bodybuilding. It's Dr Vanessa Heggie. Welcome back, Vanessa. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, he's a sensational stand-up and the host of the brilliant The Comedian's Comedian podcast, which I love. You may have seen him on BBC Live at the Apollo recently or on Conan O'Brien's show, but you will definitely remember him from our back catalogue, including episodes on the history of fandom and Blackbeard the Pirate.

It's Stu Goldsmith. Welcome back, Stu. Aye, aye, Captain. He said, clinging on to the thing that you set up some three minutes ago about how we were on the good ship, you're dead to me. Captain. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be back. I'm very excited to be here. Lovely to have you back, Stu. Thank you. I'm clearly giddy with glee to be here. I know you're interested in climate change as an area of interest.

policy and discourse, but also comedy, right? Yes, for sure. Yes, I absolutely love trying to make jokes about ocean acidification fly in a comedy club on a Friday night. It is weirdly addictive and I'm pretty hooked. So what does the Northwest Passage mean to you, or the Arctic at least? Oh, very little. And when I found out this was going to be the subject, it did occur to me to do revision and I didn't because I've got principles. Good. So I shall be looking forward to all of this information being new. So what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, will know about today's subject. And I am guessing everyone knows where the Arctic is. But if you are confused, it's the bit at the top. Think polar bears, not penguins. Antarctic just means no bears. Anti-bear. No, it doesn't. Does Arctic mean bear? In what language? The language of people who named it. Really? Arctic means bear? Yeah, and Antarctic means no bear. Wow, I'm leaving. I can't learn anything better than that.

Okay, so there we go. In terms of the history of Arctic exploration, maybe people have heard of John Franklin's famed 19th century expedition, which recently was fictionalised in a novel, and then the TV series The Terror. God, that was great. Good telly. It also has inspired many novels, a book by national treasure Michael Palin, I love him so. And of course, if you're a fan of giant foam skeletons, guitar solos and double denim, you'll know that Iron Maiden also have a heavy metal song called Stranger in a Strange Land about

If you're listening from Canada, you might be familiar with the song Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers. But what is the Northwest Passage? Or what was the Northwest Passage? Why did so many explorers risk everything to find it? And how was the humble tin can both blessing and a curse? Let's find out. Right. We've called this episode Arctic Exploration, but really we're talking about the Northwest Passage.

Which is what? Or which was what? I mean, is it still a thing? It sure is. The Arctic Passage is a seaway between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean going through the Arctic Ocean. It's a maze of hundreds of different islands and also a lot of sea ice. So it goes across the top of the North American continent and

And it's probably many northwest passages because obviously the way you sail through it will depend on how big your ship is and where the ice is at any one time. Does that mean that some people claim to have done the northwest passage and then you can look at them and go, well, you didn't go round that island on the left, so technically you haven't done the northwest passage. Not the official one. So there's northwest passages? Yes. Ah, already we're in trouble.

And for sort of geography fans, when we say around North America, it's around North America but under Greenland. Yes. And then under Russia. So that whole kind of... Well, it's sort of between Russia and America. Gotcha. OK. So you're sort of rounding off. Once you go past Alaska, you're clear. You're out. We're cribbing here for the benefit of the listener. We're cribbing from quite a confusing map, which is one of those maps you look at and go, well, that doesn't look like a regular map. And you realise it's because it's on one of the top bits that's curved. Yeah.

So Russia is at the top, pointing down towards Alaska. Yeah, and thanks to the climate catastrophe, which you've been trying to mine for jokes... Yes, in a responsible way. ..and in fairness, it's a very good show, what's quite interesting and perhaps depressing now is you can now comfortably cruise through this Northwest Passage on a lovely luxury liner. Do you know when that was first possible, which year that became possible? When did it... possible to cruise on a liner? Or any ship. 1977. It's a good guess, Vanessa. Yeah.

Well, it's mostly in the 21st century that it's regularly passage. There's some early stuff in the 1960s, but it's not until about 2008 that cargo ships can go through regularly. And the first proper luxury liner is 2016. It's probably going to be easier in the future as the amount of ice reduces quite significantly with

climate change. But you'll need breathing apparatus because of all the methane from the melting permafrost. Quite possibly. But the time period we're talking about, it was much colder and it's much icier and it's much, much harder to navigate. Yes. Given how inhospitable this environment would have been, why do you think European explorers were so keen to go and stick their flag up this back passage?

I would say, glossing over the awful entendre that you just conjured, I would say, why do people do anything money and war and power? So probably if you get to be in charge of the bit that's on the top of the world, you get the strategic advantage over, I would guess, certainly, well, sort of everywhere that it looks down on. It's like if you're in an aeroplane, you're high up and you can quickly get anywhere that the aeroplane can see. I fell off

This metaphor has made it more confusing. Is it power and war? I think you did well with the first answer. The second answer started to veer away a bit. I mean, power and war is pretty good. It's pretty much exactly there. I mean, the main appeal of it is it's a massive new trade route. It's a superhighway through to China. So Northern Europe can get to China and Asia without having to go around the bottom of South America or of Africa or going overland. And there's all those lovely Chinese luxury goods that you can trade for.

Yeah, and one of the things that's happening now with the melting of the Arctic is that now it's becoming a lot more contested. And this is like Trump demanding to forcibly purchase Greenland because at the moment, if it becomes more viable, then all of that kind of... I believe China and Russia and America already have kind of... They're encroaching militarily on it because it's exactly the same problem playing out again. But you're right. Money and power and war and the insatiable desire for Chinese porcelain

And porn as well, that drives everything. Was there any sex in the Arctic? I don't know if there was any sex. Maybe. Intricately carved walrus artefacts and things. Intricately carved walrus artefacts. We should say, I mean, it wasn't just Europeans who were exploring Northwest Passage. As always on this show, we have to sort of say, it's not just European explorers. I mean, indigenous peoples were already...

They'd already discovered it by being born there. They were living there. Yeah, definitely. And they were moving around extensively in the area as well. So there's evidence of some migrations prior to the 12th century. And I think for this space, it's important to remember that it's quite resource scarce. So there'll be populations who'd be following food sources like walruses or like fish stocks. There's also evidence of trading between North American populations and sort of Norse populations as well. And there may also have been moving for other resources like iron deposits and stuff like that. So there's quite a lot of movement going on in the Arctic early on.

Yeah, well, we've done an episode on the Vikings getting to Newfoundland a thousand years ago. So I guess those interactions continued. Yeah, and they're using much smaller vessels than the ones we're going to talk about later. So they're using sort of the skin and bark boats and also using sleds. They're doing a combination of water and land traverse to get across these spaces. So it's not big, long ships, not huge, not massive battleships. We're talking about a little coracle, a little canoe. Yeah.

Sort of kayak styles and cometics and things like that, yeah. Well, how long... What's the maximum range of a kayak? Because presumably you need to carry the stuff that you're going to live off when you're kayaking. Well, there are reports of them landing on the Scottish northwest coast, so presumably from Greenland or possibly from the north coast of America. That's a lot of paddling. Yeah. I mean, it's allegedly, but there's evidence of small boats there. Blimey. That is absolutely taking my breath away. I'm just looking at the map going, Scotland's not even on the map.

No, but you could get to the Faroe Islands and then get down to the Orkneys and then get down. If you think of it as a seaway, actually, all these things are much closer together. They feel very remote to us, but that's because we don't travel by water. So there's a motorway service station in between. Lee Delamere Services, brackets, Faroe Islands. OK, so we've done some foreshadowing there because we've talked about the 12th century and indigenous communities, but we need to get on to the Europeans because they're the ones with all the sort of drama and danger.

The first European Voyager was in 1497, and like you, Stu, he had a Bristol connection. You're a Bristolian now by choice. I'm a Bristolian by birth and later by choice. Do you know who this explorer might have been? 1497, set off from Bristol. Blackbeard. LAUGHTER

I mean it was a Kerbal guess wasn't it? 1497 set off from Bristol was it someone awful like Cabot? It was Cabot! Oh God. Yeah it was Cabot who had a variety of names we call him John Cabot in England but he was Zwan Caboto because he was Venetian which is a

different dialect. Was he really? I didn't know that. He was a Venetian. Oh good, we can declaim him. You could try. Say it again please. Zouane Chabotot. Zouane Chabotot. But also he was also Jean Cabot to the French and he was John Cabot. Any old name in a port as they don't say. But what a lovely to have a basic name and then turn up and just do regional variations on it. It's good isn't it? Yes, when I perform in Paris I'm Stuart Goulston. Lovely.

Yeah, that's good. So 1497, Vanessa, he sets off from Bristol. Why? And in what ship? Because he's a Venetian. What's he doing in Bristol? Well, I'm not sure we really know why he moved to England. There are little bits of his life that are mysterious, but he was there by the late 1400s.

And the chances are that this is something to do with what Christopher Columbus is doing for Spain. So there's some interest in sending people out on voyages. And he gets permission basically from the king to set off for an Arctic voyage. Has a fail in 1496. Has a second go in a boat called the Matthew in 1497. He gets as far, we think, as the coast of Newfoundland. But he's mostly along sort of the coastline of Quebec around the coast of Canada. He names some things, unfurls a flag.

gets very excited about it, comes back home thinking that he's discovered China. Oh! Much colder than we were expecting, I'm going to say. Yeah. So John Cabot, or Zwan Cabot, was sent off by Henry VII, Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII, from Bristol, returns to Bristol and says, I found China! Job done! There are more expeditions and they're not... They don't go that well, do they, Vanessa?

No, he's definitely not alone in getting quite confused about where he is. There's also the Italian explorer Giovanni di Verrazzano. He sails a huge part of the North American coast all the way from Florida, again, pretty much up to Newfoundland. And he's looking specifically for the Northwest Passage. And he thinks he finds it, but he finds it much further south than anyone expected it to be. And it turns out what he thought was the open Pacific Ocean, he'd actually landed about 3,000 kilometers south in North Carolina.

When Cabot, or Cabotidza, or whatever we're calling him. Ciabatta. Ciabatta, thank you. When he landed and thought it was China, did he really think it was China, or did he think, well, we've got to say something? We can't prove this is China, but if we say China, I might get two years of a sedan chair before anyone works it out. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely going to be, you don't want to come back and say, no, it's definitely not China. You probably want to say, could be China. Your Majesty, we've completely failed. You're not going to say that, are you? It's possibly China.

Yeah. That money you gave me, wasted. It's gone. Threw it in the sea. I cut my head off in advance. So you're right. So Giovanni de Verrazzano...

thinks he's found the Northwest Passage, he's actually found North Carolina, which actually, of course, is where Blackbeard operated. Ah, of course. We're linking back to your earlier episode. So that was 1523. Then we get more explorers heading off to chart Newfoundland's coastline, and then they're competing in this sort of 16th century game show, which we might sort of loosely call Claim That Arctic. It is everyone's racing. So let's talk about Martin Frobisher, because he's next up in the list. So who is Frobisher? He's another Englishman? Yeah.

Yeah, Frobisher is in fact our first English-born person to actually have a go at the Northwest Passage. He gets sponsorship from a private trading company, the Muscovy Company, and they're the people who have a monopoly on the trade between England and Russia. So they would really also like a monopoly on the trade to China as well. That would be really helpful for them. And they managed to sponsor him for three expeditions in the 1570s.

But every case he finds the ice is too dense for him to get through. On his first expedition, he allegedly has five of his crew kidnapped by indigenous peoples. And then kind of in return on another expedition, he himself adopts three Inuk people and takes them back to the UK. He takes an Inuk man who's Kalicho, an unrelated Inuk woman, Arnak, and her infant son, Natak.

And I'm saying referred to because we obviously don't know what their actual names are. We only know what names were reported for them. So it might not be their original names. He takes them back to Bristol, shows them off to local people. They are the first indigenous North American people to ever visit the UK, but they don't survive very long. All three of them die very soon after they land in the UK. Kaliko possibly from injuries from the abduction, but Arnak and her son from an infection, maybe measles.

Yeah, I mean, it's a very sad reminder of the sort of cost of these explorations, obviously going out and the danger of it. But also if you're sort of kidnapping people and bringing them back home, that's also pretty cruel. If people want to know more about that, we did an episode with Professor Caroline Dodds-Pennock on the Columbian Exchange, which talked about those sort of movements of people and goods and ideas. But let's get back to slightly cheerier notes. Frobisher found some treasures.

He did. He found a beach narwhal, which he referred to as a sea unicorn for obvious reasons. Oh, lovely. Naturally. And he also found some really interesting black rocks, which were shiny inside, and he thought that he'd found gold. And that's part of the reason he managed to get funding for his second few expeditions, was to find more gold. Gotcha. Unfortunately, it turned out to be false gold. Again, probably sensible to suspect you found gold, and maybe we need to go back for another mission just to absolutely make sure. Yes, but I think he was very keen on going, it's definitely gold.

It's Go Go Gold. Yes, exactly. Our next contestant is a man called Henry Hudson. Heard the name? Er, no. OK, that's fair. He's quite famous. I've heard of the movie Hudson Hawk and the Hudson River, and that's all my Hudson's. The Hudson River? The Hudson River. Yes. Yeah, well, obviously he invented or fell in that river, and as a result it was named for or after him.

You're not far off there, actually, Stu. So he's got a bay named after him. He's got a river named after him. I was going to say, why do you think he went down in history? But falling in a river is a pretty good guess. Did it thawed? He was ice skating and he skated towards the king. And at the last minute, there was a crack.

Methane, permafrost. I enjoyed the attempt. Vanessa, why is this guy so famous? He gets a bay named after him, he gets a river named after him. That must mean he did something heroic, no? Yeah, well, he attempted the first ever overwintering in the Arctic. So the idea was to sail up, stay in the ice over the winter and then have a further sail afterwards to try and find the Northwest Passage. So to be fair, it was pretty challenging. He got as far as Labrador.

And he found what he thought was open sea. And it turns out to be what's now known as Hudson's Bay. And that's where they iced in. And I think it's probably worth saying why this space is so confusing to people. Because if you imagine you're in an absolutely massive sea bay and all you can see in the far distance with your telescope is ice, it's not clear whether that's actually land or if it's just an ice barrier that's going to melt in the summer. So it's that sort of thing that's confusing them.

Yes, is that why they're going to stay over winter? We're here now, we're going to wait and see what happens when it melts. Exactly, and when there's all these hundreds of islands, they can sometimes be connected by ice and you don't know if that's one single piece of land or if in the summer you'll be able to sail on through because the ice will melt. So that's why people keep getting lost and confused because it's really hard what it's going to look like in the summer when you're there in the winter and vice versa. How do you think these explorers felt about explorers who were sailing around, for example, you know, sort of islands in the South Pacific where it always looks great and the weather's nice? They must have been like, well, oh, call yourself an explorer, mate. LAUGHTER

I don't even know if I've found land or not. This is 1610, the Hudson attempts this overwintering. It doesn't go well. There are, I think, saying tensions on the ship is underselling it. Yeah, so he successfully overwinters, but then when the ice melts in the summer, his crew are like, well, we're going home now, and he wants to go further north, so there's a mutiny. Ah, what was the name of the vessel, please? It was the Discovery. That was the Discovery. It's a good name for a boat, isn't it? Matthew's quite a rubbish name for a boat. It's nice, but it's not. The Mutiny is...

It's a slightly prophetic name. And when was Henry Hudson pleased? 1610. 1610. And they stayed and there was a mutiny on his boat, the Discovery. Well, we don't have certain reports of what happened on the mutiny because obviously we only have the mutineer's story about what happened. Oh, presumably they won. Yes. Gotcha. So we've got a journal from the ship's navigator who's called Abacut Prippett

And apparently... Such a great name, sorry. Abacut Prickett. Hi, Henry Hudson. Forgive the mutiny. Lots of love, Henry. Written in someone's left hand. It's pretty much exactly that. He basically said that there was some rumour that Hudson was hoarding food and that men didn't like that. And then apparently there was some sort of dispute over a stolen coat.

and fundamentally the outcome was allegedly alive and well, Hudson, his teenage son, 700 crew members were put in a small boat with supplies and kind of sent off into Hudson's Bay to fend for themselves and the Discovery sailed home with everybody else. Listen, as the owner of a really nice coat, I get it. And the upshot is that Henry Hudson is left to die. And is never seen again. And never seen again. And they're never seen again. No, I mean, fair play to him for trying, but in fairness, Stu, it's quite embarrassing that the moment of your death is encapsulated and they name it after you.

Like there's a sort of awkwardness there. Well, I mean, at least you're getting something named after you. If I get hit by a bus and they change the bus route to be called Stu's Route, I wouldn't mind that. OK. Yeah. That's a bit of a legacy, isn't it? Much like his crew, we have to leave Hudson behind. Sorry, Hudson. Nice, lovely link. Thank you. I'd feel more happy about the link than the naming of the bay. I'd be dying in the Arctic thinking, well, maybe one day a podcaster in the future, I don't know what that is, but maybe they'll segue away from me with a reference to my death. LAUGHTER

Various other explorers kept venturing into these very dangerous waters. Can you chart us a course through these next two centuries of attempts? What are the highlights or lowlights? Sure, the stories are going to be all the same, which is people going, getting lost, getting trapped in the ice and coming home or not coming home. I think one of the big stories is the expedition by Jens Monk, who was sent out by the Danish king. And that one's just notable because he lost all but three of his crew due to scurvy and came back.

So that was 1619. So there's a little bit of a lull in the 17th century. People aren't trying for the Northwest Passage for obvious reasons. Because they've heard about Jens Munch, presumably. Yeah, but there's this infrastructure being set up. So the Hudson's Bay Company is founded in the 1670s. And the result of that is it's setting up forts and trading posts and ports.

to enable fur trade and things like that. And that's a resource that the Arctic explorers could start using. And it also means that quite a few people are getting their first experience of the Arctic on land working for the Hudson's Bay Company, and then they try for the route itself. And so fur is important because it's the warm clothing, right? It's a fabric of desirability. Is it luxurious or is it just practical?

It's both. It's a luxury when you get it home to Europe, but in the Arctic, obviously, it's incredibly practical and incredibly useful, although it can be quite difficult to work with, so you do need to learn some local and indigenous skills in order to be able to stitch it into something that actually functions in this space. And then you'd think people would quit looking for the Northwest Passage because we've had several disasters, but they sort of have another crack. You've got...

Samuel Hearn in 1770, another fur trader, he tries to locate the Northwest Passage by doing something a bit different. Do you want to guess what he tries doing, Stu? And he finds the Northwest Passage? He's looking for it. He's looking for it, and he's looking for it in a special way. Special way. On land? Yeah.

Wow! He's thought, hey, if it's a passage that's got edges, I'll find them. Yeah, he walks it. He's basically going to get his 10,000 steps in, and then some. Whoa. For charity? Yes, he's going from the Hudson Bay all the way up to the Arctic. It's a huge amount of territory he's traversing, with a team presumably, with assistants. I mean, it's not just a

one man on his own, is it? Yeah, and it'd be using the resources of the Hudson's Bay Company for things like that. And you would sometimes also hire indigenous trackers to come with you as well. So it would be a small group usually doing this sort of expedition. And often some of you would go one way and leave supplies for the others and things like that. So it was quite complex.

He concludes the passage is just further north than he can get, right? He just sort of goes, I've done a lot of walking and I still can't find it. So, you know. And is this a classic example of like, hey guys, I'm walking this way. Isn't it incredible? And the indigenous trackers who are showing him the way are like, well, we go this every Tuesday. It's a bit like that. And they're also saying things like that is called...

barren plains for a reason. There's no food there. Please don't trek across that. Gotcha. Yes. Okay. Good. Tomorrow we strike out for Death Valley. Can we not? Yeah. I mean, we should also mention James Knight in 1715. He,

I mean, do you want to talk us through his... Well, he was an ex-Hudson's Bay Company employee, so he's one of those people who got their experience in the Arctic and at the grand old age of 60 decided to try for the Northwest Passage and sailed out and again disappeared. We found his boat in the Hudson's Bay in the 1990s. Oh, really? Wow. They proper sunk. They sunk. They sunk.

Yeah, that's a proper failed mission, isn't it? When your boat is underwater, you're like, OK, we might have to call this one, lads. And we found them in the 90s. Were they like an important archaeological discovery or was it just nice that we found them? I think it's more nice that we found them. I mean, there's some lovely artefacts and things being brought up, but as we'll discover, it's often the case that when you bring up a shipwreck, it poses more questions than it answers. Like, why on earth were they here? What were they doing?

Yes. Were they lost or was this the panel along? But at least you can bury them and stop all the hauntings in the Hunters' Bank. I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent, she will work undercover and if she is caught...

She's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

OK, next on the list is your dead-to-me's previous subject, Captain James Cook. OK. You must know the name, presumably, Stu? Of course I've heard of Captain Cook. Yes? Captain James T. Cook. Yes, and his Starship Enterprise... No, no, no, that's something I'm getting off topic. Yeah. He's going the other way. He's trying to do the Northwest Passage from the Pacific, so he's looking for the...

back door in, which is interesting. Does that work for him? Not really. He has exactly the same experience in that he tries going through the Bering Sea and then discovers a wall of ice, retreats back for restocking. And unfortunately, this is when he lands in Hawaii in 1779 and gets murdered. So not a good outcome, but at least he didn't sink, I guess. Yes. His second in command, Charles Clark, takes over. They have another go through the Bering Strait, still find ice. And it's actually one of his crew members, George Vancouver...

I think the name is a clue here. Great name. He does huge explorations up the west coast of Canada and Alaska in the 1790s. And he concludes that the Northwest Passage, if it exists, is so far north, it'll never be free of ice. There's no way to pop out on the Pacific side because it'll always be frozen. So 1779, Cook dies. George Vancouver says, this is just not going to happen. We've got to stop trying this.

No one gets the memo because on go the next explorations. So Cook dies, you know, he gets into a big fight with the indigenous peoples and angers them and they kill him. So that's sort of the end of that one. But then we get Sir John Barrow.

And he's got a plan. Definitely. We are peak hunt for the Northwest Passage time now. We're into the 19th century. It's all really kicking off. So Sir John Barrow is second secretary to the Admiralty. He really pushes not just for Northwest Passage, but also for attempts at the North Pole as well. This is again partly for trade and power and the rest of it. But it's also the fact that America is now independent. So there's now pressures on the British in the sort of

North American regions. Russia has now taken Alaska, so they're not the only power in the area. The French are there. There's a lot going on. Russia has taken Alaska? Yep, Russia's in Alaska. Russia used to own Alaska? Yeah, for a very long time. When did that happen? When did it end? Oh, I want to say 1880 purchase. Check that out.

I can't remember the odd day. Later than you think. Wow. Yeah. OK. So there's lots of political pressures on the British in this area. They're not the dominant power anymore. Yes. And also we've just had the Napoleonic Wars and there's this massive well-resourced navy who kind of don't have any more battles to fight so it's useful for them to have something else to do. And so the Northwest Passage is kind of part of that deal. We've paid for all these ships and now they're just sitting idle. God, I love the moment of realisation when they were like, well, that's Napoleon dealt with. What are we going to... Hang.

Like, I love the idea of someone who ever had this, I'm going to get some land for this idea. Yeah. 1867 is the Alaska Purchase. So you're pretty close to 1880. I think that's in the ballpark, isn't it? We have a kind of post-Napoleonic change of...

of purpose for the Royal Navy, which means now the Navy is no longer private companies. It's now the Navy, the Admiralty. And so Barrow, he's off for his expeditions in 1818. And do they succeed? No, he sends out two different expeditions in 1818 in two different directions. And both of them find an impenetrable wall of ice and have to come home. Good. Ditto.

I'm getting a lot of ditto on this. It's a lot of like, we found some ice, we went home. Yes. This really, this episode is all about failure to traverse the North West Passage in many ways. So far. I failed to pronounce the North West Passage there, so I can't really... OK, so we've got naval officers sitting around, naval gazing, but they can't get through the ice. Naval gazing! I felt that didn't get what it deserved.

How would you entertain a ship full of sailors who are sort of hunkered over in the ice? Drag sea shanty. I'm up for that. Drag sea shanty competition. Nice. And in stages, knockout tournament. That'll keep us going for a month, surely. 32 drag artists whittle them down. Yes, lovely. Okay.

I mean, that's pretty good. I mean, I just went straight off the top of my head there, but I think that would work. Yeah. You may be surprised later on to find out what they really did. Oh, my God. Please let it be a drag sea satty competition. RuPaul's Northwest Passage Arctic. Vanessa, was Britain alone in organising these Arctic explorations in the kind of 1820s, 30s, you know, that sort of post-Napoleonic time?

time? No, definitely not. And obviously Russia being in Alaska had an advantage and the Russians were sponsoring a couple of deliberate attempts at the Northwest Passage themselves at this time. But I think also there's a lot of other nations who are in the area more to do allegedly scientific work or exploratory work, not necessarily just the Northwest Passage. So the Danes managed to finish their mapping of Greenland's east coast in 1829. And there's this specific

three-way research expedition with the French and the Norwegians and the Swedes that they actually call the research expedition that's going around and mapping things and checking the weather and tides and doing things like that. So there's a lot of North European nations asserting their right to be in the Arctic doing science and exploring. And this is the reason for the word allegedly. What they're doing is, hey, guys, we're just doing research. Just mapping it. No research. Just meteorology. Just really into clouds. These aren't rifles. It's a complex tripod. Sure. Yeah.

OK, so we've got various powers and superpowers in the region. But in the 1840s, Britain, hello Britain, at last, launches the most famous Arctic mission of all, the Franklin. In the 1840s. So it's pretty, you know, this is kind of peak Queen Victoria era. She came to power in 1837, so we're in the Victorian era. And the Franklin expedition is the big one. It's the one that we're probably going to focus the rest of this episode on.

Can you talk us through this Franklin chap? Who is Sir John Franklin? John Franklin. So by this point in the 1840s, he's quite famous. He's a well-known naval explorer and sailor. He has experience in Arctic waters. He circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders and got shipwrecked in the Torres Strait and then had to come home overland through China.

So he's had plenty of experience. He was actually one of the crews on that first 1818 expedition out that John Barrow sent out. He'd done an overland expedition to find passage in 1819. And in 1823, he'd had a third expedition out by sea. And that was the one that really made his name because he came back with really good maps of the area. He wrote a popular book and he got knighted. So he was really well known as an Arctic explorer at this point.

He seems to be bored at home and he asked to be reposted. And in 1837, he's sent out to be the lieutenant governor of Tasmania or Van Diemen's Land, as it was known then. This does not go well for him. This is a very violent, rough penal colony. There's terrible treatment of the prisoners. There had been the mass killings and almost extermination of the Aboriginal people there. He does not manage this particularly well. Neither he nor his wife seem to get on with the local politicians or power players or the press.

They aren't able to bring in any of the reforms they want. And in the end, he kind of is relieved from the post in about 1843. And he's coming home under a bit of a cloud.

So, Stu, he sounds perfect for an Arctic exploration, but maybe not so good for running a colony. Yes, unless they were playing the long game and they were like, we need someone to go back into the Arctic, so let's give them a really inappropriate job in the meantime. Oh, so he quits. In somewhere called Van Demons, which is awesome. Sounds like the Scooby gang would have a field day with that. So he sounds like he should be top of the list for candidates being drawn up to lead this latest expedition.

Is he? Is he the kind of number one go-to guy? He's not even close. Really? So Barrow has a list of alternative people, all with Arctic experience, who he wants. But they pretty much, most of them turn it down. At least one of them turned it down because apparently he'd promised his wife he'd never go back to the Arctic again. One of them is turned down by the Admiralty for being too young. And he kind of ends up with his last choice of Franklin, who is 59 at this point, fresh back from Tasmania, really keen to sort of...

get back his reputation which he feels has been tarnished by what's happened. So on the 19th of May 1845 the HMS Erebus under Franklin and the HMS Terror under Crozier. Crozier had been offered the position to lead and he'd apparently turned it down out of modesty. So those two

Oh, that's so wonderfully tense. He was offered the chance to lead. To lead the expedition, yeah. But he was in charge of the other boat. Yeah, he's in charge of the second boat. And he was told to lead and he said no. He said nah. You were last choice, it should be you. Okay, so we have an illustrious explorer, but he's had a bit of a bad time of it six years off. He was at the bottom of the list.

The other guy wanted the job, was offered the job, but turned the job down out of modesty and is now second in charge. And meanwhile, they've named their ships... Was he Jared Harris in The Terror? He might be. Yeah, I think he was. But they've also named their ships The Terror and Erebus. Erebus being the Greek god of darkness and the underworld. Yeah, it is just up from naming your ship The Last Choice and The Albatross. It really is, isn't it?

These are not inspiring names. I prefer Discovery. Even Matthew was sort of nice. The Terror. The Terror and Erebus. Why would they call it the Terror? Do we have any information on what, like, who would have named it? Would it have been Queen Victoria or would it have been the Admiralty? These are naval ships, so it's probably the Admiralty. Is it that it already exists? Yes, it exists. They're like this, oh, I see, this is a warship previously. It's been kicking around. We've got nothing to do with it. Let's chuck it up the, right, gotcha. So Crozier is captaining the Terror. Yeah. And Franklin is captaining the Erebus and the overall mission. Thank you.

And off they go. And these are not ordinary naval ships. They're naval vessels. Yeah, but they've been souped up, basically. So they've got an internal central heating system that's steam-powered. And they have these very fancy, powerful screw propellers that are reinforced with steel. And they're supposed to enable the ships to actually pass through at least loose pack ice and do a bit of icebreaking as well. So these are icebreaking ships. These are steel-hulled.

They're no longer sale. I mean, they presumably might have sales as backups. They have sales. The screw is a backup, basically. Okay, it's a backup. But this is the new technology. This is Victorian engineering. This is coal. We're chucking coal in it to turn the screw? Yes. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. And they are vastly provisioned as well. So the plan is to have at least three years of food supplies in there because we know the Arctic is resource limited. Yeah.

So they're taking things like 8,000 tins of food with them. Amazing. This is a problem, though. I don't think anything can go wrong with that tin food. No, definitely. And the issue is that they're planning it at quite short notice. So the tins have to be made really, really quickly. And the supplier, Stephen Goldner, ended up doing them as a rush job. So some of the lead soldering from the outside wasn't applied properly and has dripped down inside the cans. That can't be bad, lead in your face.

There'll be no side effects from that at all, I imagine. Just relax in the terror. So Stephen Goldner is the provisions officer who just sort of basically just sold us 8,000 tins of meat and then goes, it's probably fine. OK, that's great. I mean, he's probably working under the basis that it's not going to come back to him if there's something wrong with it. I wonder if that was a concern when you're heading out on the terror in the Erebus or Erebus, when you're heading out thinking, well, everyone that provisioned this ship...

Do you know what I mean? If you were a sailor, you might be thinking, well, what is the redress if this stuff doesn't go as planned? Yes, you can't just send a memo home saying, you know that food you sent out? Very leady. Very leady. So 129 crew on the two ships.

Stu, what food would you pack for an Arctic expedition? You've got 8,000 tins to fill. What are you popping in there? Oh, I could put anything in a tin. Spaghetti hoops. My wife's too good for them. She won't have them in the house. Spaghetti hoops, for sure. I think, well, you'd want carbs. You'd want meat, I think. You'd want protein and carbs. Yeah.

But you'd also not want to neglect your fruit and veg. Would the fruit and veg need to go into tins for three years? It sure would. Peaches I'd go for. I don't know what's available at the time. Every fifth tin I'd want to be a secret tobacco stash. You could reveal at parties. And make up for your drag show. Of course.

Of course. So we need 8,000 tins, 2,000 of which are just lipstick. Yes. Perfect. Thank you. And that's only one of the reasons I've never been asked to be quartermaster. I was going to say. I don't think the Navy's going to phone you up any time soon. Lipstick would be made of beeswax. You could probably eat it. It's better than eating boots, right? It's probably edible. Yes. Okay. Fair enough. What are the foods of the time? Can you get a Frey Bentos? It would be a lot. Well, sort of.

Frey Bentos is about 1880 it's a little bit later but it would be oh my god you're good but it would be it would be tinned salted meat and tinned salted vegetables as well and occasionally fruits and to find a scurvy it's going to be citrus fruits citrus fruits there's lime juice and lemon juice you might also get things like pretty much

Everything you wanted to store would be in a tin. So you might even get stuff like tin salted butter and stuff for early supplies. And those 8,000 tins are going to weigh a hell of a lot, right? Yeah, that's an awful lot of weight in the steerage, isn't it? But these are steam-powered, well, not quite steam, but sail and steam-powered ships. So they're designed to sort of plough through the ice. They've got some power behind them.

All right, so we've got two ships, 129 crew, two captains, one of whom was offered the job and turned it down, one of whom shouldn't have been offered the job but took it anyway. And off we go with our lovely voyage. Talk us through it. So we stop at Orkney for some fresh water and then we finally sail on to Greenland where we go to Disco Bay, cool up, bring in some fresh meat supplies. Hang on, I'm going to stop you there. Is this drag show happening or what? We're at Disco Bay.

In Greenland. How are we spelling disco? With a K. Oh, you've ruined it. That's even cooler. It's more kind of 80s. D-I-S-K-O.

Tragically, this is also where the men write their last letters home. Oh, let's put a downer on it. And Franklin tells them that there's going to be no swearing and no drinking on the expedition. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. How to motivate your crew. Yeah, another mutiny, perhaps. They get food, they get water, off they go. They go to Greenland and then what? What's...

That's the big question, because that's the point at which the story gets kind of murky. I did think the BBC drama that I saw had certain elements to it which could, A, didn't seem provable, and B, how would you find out anyway? Yeah, you mean the famous snooker scene? Yeah, for sure. Not to mention the enormous redacted that loomed out of the redacted, which is a fantastic bit. But I was at the time going, what world?

are we in here? So we just don't know. We do have a sighting in July 1845. There's two whaling ships, Prince of Wales and Enterprise, both better names. They spot the expedition in Baffin Bay where they're holed up waiting for slightly better weather to continue. And that is the last time that any Europeans see the ships or

the crew. Wow. And up to now? Up until very recently. Gotcha. Spoilers. We'll come to stuff later. They are able to leave a message for the future by using a can and the place where they ended up landing. So that's a pile of massive cans. It's got a can inside it because you use a metal box or a wooden box.

This is very a low, a low. A can in the can. So it's a big pile of rocks with a message in, basically, and you hope future explorers will find it and pass the message back to your loved ones. Gotcha. Okay, so they've left messages behind under the cairns. And what happens to these ships...

Do we not know? We don't know. They banished. There's no messages back. There are campaigns to go and rescue them. Obviously, Lady Jane Franklin is very keen to get her husband rescued. So this is Sir John's wife. Yes, this is Sir John's wife. And she is a force to be reckoned with. She's an explorer in her own right. She went up Mount Wellington when they were in Tasmania. She did all these bushwalks and things like this. She's actually the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founders Medal in

in 1860 in recognition of all the amazing geographical work that was done on the expeditions that she sponsored to go and look for her husband. So she's quite a force. She manages to get the Admiralty after the three years are up to send out the first rescue missions. And that's actually a three-part mission. There's an overland expedition. There's a sea...

following Franklin's route. And then there's also a ship in the Pacific that they redeployed to go up and see if they popped out through the Russian side. So they've actually successfully gone for the Norbert's passage. And are sitting pretty on a big pile of cash and whale meat. Yes, exactly. All hiding from their wives. The Admiralty also agreed to offer a reward for information. So they offer a reward of £20,000, which is two and a bit million.

Billion-ish in today's money. Yeah, it's a good amount of money. For anyone who assists the crew, but also £10,000 if you just know what happened to them and can tell the Admiralty their fates. So you get double the money to assist, but only £10,000 to tell them actually what happened. Yeah, double the money if they're alive and you help for £10,000 if you happen to know what happened to them. OK, all right. Why did they wait three years? They had three years of food, right? They had three years of food. Right.

Partly these expeditions were deliberately icing themselves in over the winter and sometimes didn't get to escape in the summer. So it wasn't unusual for an expedition to go out and be trapped in the ice for 18 months, 19 months. That was normal. That was completely normal. So even with no word back after three years, the chances are that it could still be alive in the Arctic and they were going to put all their resources and money in finding them if they were just happily safe. That's extraordinary, isn't it? Tell me again when they first set out. They were last seen in 1845.

So they set out in 1845. They set out in 1845 and also in 1845 were last seen by the Prime and the Enterprise. The Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales and the Enterprise. And then three years later, Lady Franklin says, I do think maybe we need to send some ships. We need a plan of something. Because they're running out of food. If they're still alive, they will need help. And off goes this sort of big...

mission and what do they find Vanessa? So the initial Admiralty expeditions don't find any trace of Franklin they don't find where he is Lady Franklin continues to push them a little bit to send out further expeditions the first traces are found in 1850 and that's when one of the Admiralty expeditions that's the Lady Franklin as it happens finds three graves on a place called Beachy Island and that's John Hartnell and William Brain from Erebus and the lead stoker John Torrington from the Terror and

So they knew that the ships had spent the winter in the ice at this point from 45 to 46, but they still didn't know what had happened to them or to the rest of the crews after that point. So three men had died and been buried and they're able to say, well, look, the crew had...

buried three men in the first wind set. But there was no can. There was no, yeah. No information on the men. And someone buried them so those people are alive. Yes. At that stage. They were definitely alive sometime in 1846. Isn't that weird that they hadn't left any information with them about what had happened? Well, this is only their first year of voyaging out of three. So it's not an emergency. Oh, I see what you mean, yes. They just sent letters home. Yes, right. At what stage does the Admiralty go, we think they're lost?

They officially declare them dead in service on the 31st of March 1854. So that's when they've been away nine years and there has been no sightings and no traces of them. Wow. They're officially MIA but then KIA so killed in action I suppose but

the nail in the coffin is 1854 as a report isn't it John Ray yeah so the main work done in the 1850s trying to look for Franklin is this Scottish explorer John Ray he's funded by the Hudson's Bay Company as well as the Admiralty on some of these and he's doing that inland exploration so he's going through rivers and lakes and looking at the coastline and his big thing was he really relied on indigenous testimony and Inuit populations to try and get reported sightings of white people in

the Arctic to find out what was going on. He managed to trade or buy some relics that he could prove came from the Franklin ship. So like a spoon with a mark on it or a cat band, a navy cat band. And by tracing this and sort of going back to places where he thought they might possibly have been, he was able to build up this story about what probably happened to them and write a report for the Admiralty that said they probably all died. They landed and probably all died somewhere in the region of King William Island. And he had some

really unpleasant evidence that they'd experienced some real desperate times. This is a quote from his report that he got from an Inuit witness, that from the mutilated state of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it's evident that our wretched countrymen have been driven to the last resource, cannibalism, as a means of prolonging existence. Ooh. And did they tin each other? Well, that's the thing. The kettle is for boiling meat, right? Yes. Brings a whole new meaning to pop the kettle on, doesn't it? Ooh.

Cooking each other in a kettle. Think like fish kettle. I don't know what that is. That's a long dish for cooking a fish in. Oh, I see. Not a kettle kettle, as I understand it, but like... A boiling thing. They found a cauldron, effectively, with human body parts in it. Yeah. I mean, that seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it? It's not great, is it? Or, I mean, but what it could be is that they all died and then there were two left and one of them killed the other and cannibalised them. So you can't say it was all of them cannibalising everyone. No.

So this is obviously shocking news. Nine years to officially sort of declare the mission a complete failure and everyone dead. And then this sort of comprehensive report by Ray. How did the British public back home? You know, this is the height of the Victorian Empire. This is sort of pomp and circumstance. You know, we are Britain is a superpower at this point. And suddenly this message comes back saying everyone's dead and they ate each other.

This is, I mean, it's a huge admiralty fail in terms of publicity because John Ray was actually writing a separate report for the public. They probably shouldn't have published the cannibalism story. I was going to say, how did they let that get out? But once it's out, it's out. And there is huge resistance and denial to it. And that's made easier by the fact that this is not what John Ray saw himself firsthand. This is still all secondhand reports from indigenous witnesses. So there are people like Charles Dickens is the really famous one who are writing these sort of op

Ed Peace is basically saying, and I'm going to use his words here, that these are savage people. They can't be trusted. They're natural born liars. They're just making stuff up and you couldn't possibly believe what they have to say. Some people were not so offended. They saw the cannibalism as the last heroic stand. Like this is real desperation. This is real grit and courage. But for other people, I think particularly for Lady Jane Franklin, this is an unacceptable slur on the name of her husband and the expedition.

Yeah. Wow. I mean, the big takeaway for me, with all respect to Franklin, is that Dickens wrote like that. That's a shame. I mean, that's a very difficult thing for people to hear, but...

Is that the last word on the expedition then, Vanessa? I mean, nine years it's been missing, a report has been issued, the public is scandalised, the Admiralty presumably in the... Well, do they get chastised and criticised or is it just bad luck? It's just bad luck. It's another one of the expeditions. Most of them had failed at this point. But Lady Jane Franklin is not accepting this. The Admiralty are not going to send out any more search and rescue missions, so she starts funding her own. She basically crowdfunds it. Oh, in order to find a...

To prove that there wasn't cannibalism. Yes. So she sends out an expedition in 1857. It sails out of Aberdeen and that one finds some certainty. In 1859, it discovers the cairn, the one I mentioned. It has a note inside it, which is the last written note of the expedition. It's known as the Victory Point Note. And it is in King William Island, as John Rainey had suggested.

The Victory Point note is actually two separate notes. So it's one note that's written in May 1847 that says everything's well. And then there's one written in April 1848 that says, no, everything's really bad now. So they're two conflicting stories. And according to the note, Franklin had died sometime in June 1847.

We don't know why, but over the course of being stuck in this area, 24 men on the ship had died. Captain Crozier had taken over the whole expedition. And after 19 months of the boats being stuck and drifting in the ice, they decided to leave the boats and try and head overland to get to a Hudson Bay Company camp in order to be rescued. And it seems like when we sort of think where the finds are, the corpses were, the message and the Inuit testimony, that what happened was all of the men died on that inland trek.

So the survivors of the ship went overland and then just succumbed to cold dehydration? Cold, starvation, scurvy. There were reports of them literally dropping as they walked across the ice. There were reports that make it sound like they were probably suffering from the symptoms of scurvy and other starvation-related diseases. That is a sad end to a drag show. Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, sorry, a comedy show, but that is just pretty bleak, isn't it? That's super bleak. So was there any proof, yay or nay, on the cannibalism? Besides, when she found the note in the can, did it end, and no matter what anyone says, we definitely didn't eat Tony. Yeah.

There was almost certainly cannibalism of some of the members, yes. I mean, it's always a little bit difficult, but there have been remains found. There is a suggestion that that happened, yes. Okay. Sort of put me off journeying to the Northwest Passage, really. I quite fancied it to begin with, but now... Yes. How far, just to remind me, how far did they get?

In terms of the Northwest Passage? King William Island, did they? King William... Whereabouts is that? This is not helpful for a podcast. Yeah, for radio. Sorry, about halfway. No, maybe a third of the way. A third of the way. Yeah. So into Baffin Bay and then into the belly of the beast and one another. Gone. And never out. So that's it. So that's the Franklin disaster. And I mean, presumably that stopped all these expeditions. Surely this enormous...

PR scandal disaster. They just took more food and fatter sandwich. Yeah. They took the opposite approach. It's Roel Amundsen actually finally makes a successful attempt on the Northwest Passage. He starts in 1903, doesn't

Doesn't actually make it all the way over to Alaska until 1906, so it still takes him three years to do it. But he does it in small boats and sleds. He doesn't take a big ship. He learns from the local travel. Is that the first part? Not until 1907? Well, he starts in 1903 and he gets there in 1906. So 60 years later, it's finally done by Amundsen, who of course later famously is the conqueror of the South Pole, the race to the South Pole.

That's it. Northwest achieved. But not for a large boat. Oh, of course. Of course. So the whole point of it is still... You can't trade in a small kayak to China. So, well, no, unless... What's the one? Is it saffron? What's the one? It's so small. Musk probably would be the best option. Plutonium. Yes. Something really... Oh, too heavy. At what point does trade happen via that route, if ever? Well, the cargo ships are 2008, so it's late.

2008? We invented planes and then it didn't matter so much. Oh, God, that is a killer, isn't it? There's you halfway through Tony's leg looking up and saying, oh, God, this whole thing's been pointless. So 1497, John Cabot had tried. 2008 is the first time a ship of that size actually was able to clear those waters and go from one side to the other. God, this is extraordinary history. It's extraordinary history.

Well, tune in next week. Thanks, Joe. All right, what have we learned since then? Because since then we've got marine archaeology and sat-nav and geostationary satellites and archaeology. Yeah, so there are still competing versions about what exactly happened to the expedition. Lots of people have gone back to look for more relics, more skeletons and so on to recollect the testimony. There's an idea that some of the men didn't die entirely on the walk. They may actually have gone back to one of the ships, remanned it and sailed it a little distance and then it sunk and that's where the

What, they walked halfway, half of them died, then they turned around and went back to the ship? It's definitely a theory. We exhumed the bodies on the island in 1984 and did proper forensics on them. And that's when they were discovered to have very high levels of lead. So there was a strong theory that actually lead poisoning led to some of the deaths. Although even there, there's some questions because people in the 19th century had much higher levels of lead in their body anyway. Oh, sure. Especially if you've eaten another body. Yeah.

Sorry to keep harping on about the cannibalism, but I wasn't expecting that. That's actually part of the problem, is that the levels of lead recorded in the hair over time don't quite match with when they should have been eating the tins, so maybe it wasn't that, so even that is in dispute. And a lot of hope was pinned on finding the boats, because they thought, if we get the boats...

then we'll get the answers. They were declared a National Historic Site for Canada in 1992, and that's before they were found. So they were a historic site and no one knew where they were, which I think is quite fun. And it's, again, with Indigenous testimony, Parks Canada finally managed to find both of the boats. They got the Erebus in 2014 and the Terra in 2016.

But even here, that's just caused more problems in some cases. So the terror wasn't quite where they thought it should be. It didn't have its anchor down, so it looked like it had been sailing. Some hatches are open, some are closed. So was it sinking or not sinking? There's a small boat on it, so why didn't they use that for evacuation if it sank? There's just more questions to be answered. We don't really know the detailed complete fate of everyone on that expedition still. Whoa. Whoa.

I mean, this is where I should chip in with a funny comment, but I'm afraid I'm reeling from that. That's incredible. Me too. 2014, 2016, both ships found and more questions raised. It's a very tragic history, but an extraordinary history. And I suppose the geopolitics were sort of underlining all of that. Science sort of played a role, parts of it, the meteorology, the study and so on. Are you going to tell me the Hudson Bay Company still exists, only now it's called America? What happened to them? Funny that became a department store.

Did it? Yeah, Hudson's Bay Company. But that's not the actual Hudson's Bay Company. She's giving me a look, everyone. Is it really? I believe it takes its roots from there, yeah. So the... Wow, guys, we're going to retail. Golly. The nuance windows!

Time now for the nuance we know. This is the part of the show where Stu and I sit quietly in Disco Bay with our drag outfits. With our various drag outfits. Yeah, exactly. For two minutes while Professor Dr Vanessa takes the ship's wheel to tell us something that we need to know about Arctic exploration. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Vanessa. Okay, I want to undermine the entire point of this episode by asking people to think about how incredibly boring exploration actually is.

That might seem counterintuitive because exploration is about movement and adventure and novelty. But the reality is that a lot of the Northwest Passage expeditions, particularly by sea, were frequently static because getting your boat stuck in the ice over winter was part of the tactic of getting around. And sometimes that ice didn't melt in the summer. So you could end up being stuck in the same place for a year, two years, same horizon, same contagion, same food for all of that time.

When we debate the legacy of great explorers, we often talk about their leadership skills and we tend, I think, to focus on the drama. Did they get their men through disaster and death and crisis? But I think we also need to think about how they motivated their teams and stopped them from being bored because that sort of basic psychology is a really crucial part of leadership, particularly for this sort of expedition.

An iced-in boat does still need a certain amount of maintenance. You can keep people occupied swabbing decks and making food. You can send people out to do science. They can take the weather measurements. They can draw up maps and things like that, but it's not enough. We also need arts and crafts. So you're going to have some men who are going to be painting. They're going to be sketching. They're going to be whittling. They're going to be singing. But these ships also put on, for example, extravagant theatrical productions with full sets, costumes, and brand-new musical songs. Now, sissy that mission.

They also produce what we call zines, so amateur magazines that would have satirical plays and poems and drawings and cartoons that the men would actually sometimes take home as keepsakes of this really cool time they had in the ice with all of their friends, like a happy memory. So the skill of the expedition leader is balancing that sort of irreverent fun with not losing respect and control, but also making sure that your men aren't bored. And they're doing this with this sort of eclectic mix of science and exercise and food and celebration, but also crucially using the arts as well.

So as well as 8,000 tins, Franklin also took over 1,000 books on his voyage to stock the library to keep everyone interested. So there's a lot of lessons we can draw here, and I think the really crucial role of the arts to keeping up human morale is definitely in there. But what I'd like to emphasise is that while our most common image of exploration is this sort of macho adventure novelty, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time, it's actually quite boring, routine, domestic work. See, Mum? Comedians can be useful on a mission.

Chief morale officer. Yeah, exactly. That's always what I'd rely on. Yeah. You know, if we start eating each other, provided I'm the person that first suggests it, I might get a rep as the ideas guy. Let's not kill Stu. He's full of ideas. Yeah. I mean, it's extraordinary and a really important point, isn't it? The idea of a team leader is someone who has to be able to get people through the boring Tuesdays as well as through the storms and hurricanes.

Yeah, really interesting. Yes, and if you're signing up for a mission, what you want is, who's leading this mission? Oh, Boring Tony. Great. Oh, yeah, I'm there. I'm there. We always come back with Boring Tony. I've over-improvised the name Tony. It was a different one from earlier on. So what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Stu to see how much he's learned. Now, I didn't want to start taking notes because I thought if people are taking notes, that renders the entire quiz concept meaningless. And as a high leaderboard contender, I thought I'm going to not do it. And then there were so many dates and things, I started making notes. So I've got my notes here. You've got extensive notes there. They are.

Pretty extensive. And there were certain passages where I kept thinking, don't worry about the quiz, just riff. But it was too late. I needed to write down the information. Jen Brister took eight pages of notes, so I think you're OK. I think I've done eight pages. I've got ten questions for you. OK. You're always very good at this. OK. Question one for you, Stu. Yep. Question one. Giovanni di Verrazzano thought he had found the Northwest Passage in 1523, but where was he actually?

Where was he actually? Yeah, he was 3,000 miles away in... 1523. Home of Blackbeard. He was in Bristol. No, sorry, you just said Home of Blackbeard. That's a different question. Yeah, later Home of Blackbeard. Oh, later Home of Blackbeard. He was in the Caribbean. North Carolina. North Carolina. North Carolina. Sorry. Where's that one? I've written it down somewhere. Let's

Back on page one of the notes. Oh, God, no, it is. I can literally see it now. Question two. Why did Henry Hudson's crew stage a mutiny against him in 1610? In 1610, there was a mutiny because they were... Oh, it was the argue about whether or not he'd nicked a coach and or hoarded food. But we don't know if that's true. That's just what they said. That's correct. Question three. Which island did Captain Cook encounter when seeking the Northwest Passage and that is where he died?

It was Hawaii. Question four. What were the names of Franklin Expedition's two ships? The Erebus or Erebus and the Terror. Yes, terrible names for ships. Question five. How were indigenous communities able to traverse the Northwest Passage and also later Amundsen?

Sleds and mostly sleds. Yeah, and smaller boats. Small boats. Yeah, small boats with animal skins. That's right. Question six. Who was the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founders Medal in 1860? That was Lady Franklin. It was Lady Jane Franklin. Question seven. What supplies might have contributed to the Franklin crew's eventual death? Well, sort of lead. Lead in the tins. Yes, contamination. That's right. Well done. Contamination from lead in the tins. That's right. Question eight. What was the victory point note?

It was left in a cairn. I'm going to refer to my notes, so I did write it down. The victory point note was 1859. It was left in a cairn and it... Yep, that's what that was. On King William Island. It was, and it was Franklin's death being reported, but I'll let you have that. Question nine. Which famous novelist denounced the Inuit reports of cannibalism on the Franklin Expedition?

Dickens. It was Dickens. And this question turned for nine out of ten. Which Scandinavian explorer finally navigated the passage in 1906? Amundsen. Nine out of ten. Very good, Stu. Oh, no, but it fell apart at the beginning. You threw me with the black beard thing. Can you chuck me another question and we can cut that first one out? I won't look at my... I'm going to put it on the floor. Hit me with any question. Off the top of my head. Go on. OK. What was the original name of John Cabot?

Ah, Giovanese, Venetian, Ciabotti. Ciabotti. Ciabotti. Ciabatta. Ciabatti. One of the Venetian version of John Cavett. Giovan... Ciabotti. Yeah, there we go. Yes! Giovan Ciabotto. Ciabotto. I meant Ciabotto. Ten out of eleven. Yes! Ten out of eleven.

The legacy continues. Well done, Stu. Thank you very much, Stu. Lovely spending time with you, sort of going through this tricky bit of history. But I mean, it's fascinating, right? I've enjoyed it enormously. If you want more of that, you can check out our episodes with Stu on Blackbeard and ancient medicine, which are sort of medical and maritime too. For more of Dr Vanessa, or Professor Dr Vanessa, choose our Victorian bodybuilding episode, which is also about sort of masculinity in the 19th century, sort of similar themes.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear these episodes first, because they come out a month earlier on BBC Sounds. Switch on your notifications, otherwise you won't be told. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the incredible Dr Vanessa Heggy from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we had the stupendous Stu Goldsmith. Thank you, Stu. Thanks for having me. And if anyone listening to this knows my mum, can you drop her a text and tell her you heard it, because she'll be awfully proud.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we navigate another treacherous historical subject. But for now, I'm off to go and bin all my tin food and scrub my kettle. Bye! This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Matt Ryan. It was written by Matt Ryan, Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoose and our executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. In this series, we're going to have a planet off. We decided it was time to go cosmic, so we are going to do Jupiter! Jupiter!

It's very well done that because in the script it does say in square brackets wrestling voice question mark. And once we touch back down on this planet, we're going to go deep. Really deep. Yes, we're journeying to the centre of the earth with guests Phil Wang, Chris Jackson and Anna Ferreira. And after all of that intense heat and pressure, we're just going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.

And also in this series, we're discussing altruism. We'll find out what it is. Exploring the history of music, recording with Brian Eno and looking at nature's shapes. So if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to The Infinite Monkey Cage first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught...

She's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.