Arctic Exploration (Radio Edit)

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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 Hege.

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 Comedians 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.

I know you're interested in climate change as an area of 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.

So, what does the Northwest Passage mean to you or the Arctic?

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.

Maybe people have heard of John Franklin's famed 19th century expedition, which recently was fictionised 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.

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 the North American continent, 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.

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 this 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 get the strategic advantage over well sort of everywhere that it looks down on.

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.

We have to sort of say it's not just European explorers and indigenous peoples were already sort of exploring this.

They'd already discovered it by the end of the day.

They were living there.

They were, you know.

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 would be following food sources like wolverses or like fish stocks.

There's also evidence of trading between North American populations and sort of Norse populations as well.

And they 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.

The first European voyager was in 1497.

And like you, Stu, he had a Bristol connection.

Do you know who this explorer might have been?

1497, set off from Bristol?

Blackbeard.

I mean, it was a curveball guess, wasn't it?

1497, set off from Bristol.

Was it someone awful like Cabot?

It was Cabot.

Oh, God.

Okay.

Yep.

Yeah, it was Cabot, who had a variety of names.

We call him John Cabot in England, but he was Zuan Cabotto 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.

You could try.

Can I say it again, please?

Zuan Chabotto.

Zuan Chabotto.

But also he was also Juan Cabotto.

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 thing 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 still out to good sis.

He sets off from Bristol.

Why?

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 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.

Much colder than we were expecting, Your Majesty.

Yeah.

So John Cabot or Zwan Caboto was sent off by Henry VII, Henry Tudor, father of Henry VIII.

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 de Verrazzano, 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 that what he thought was the open Pacific Ocean, he'd actually landed about 3,000 kilometres south in North Carolina.

So that was 1523.

Then we get more explorers heading off to chart Newfoundland's coastline.

Everyone's racing.

Our next contestant is a man called Henry Hudson.

Heard the name?

No.

Okay, that's fair.

He's not, you know, he's quite famous because he's.

He 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.

That must mean he did something heroic, no?

Yeah, well, he attempted the first ever over-wintering 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.

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.

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.

We don't have certain reports of what happened on the mutiny, because obviously we only have the mutineers' story about what happened.

And presumably they won.

Yes.

Gotcha.

So we've got a journal from the ship's navigator who's called Abacut Prickett.

And apparently...

Such a great name.

Sorry.

Abacut Prickett.

It's Henry Hudson.

Forgive the mutiny.

Lots of love.

Henry.

There's someone's left hand.

It's pretty much exactly that.

He basically said that there was some rumour that Hudson was hoarding food and the 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, seven under crew members were put in a small boat with supplies and kind of sent off into Hudson's Bay to defend for themselves.

And the discovery sailed home with everybody else.

And the upshot is that Henry Hudson is left to die.

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.

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 Monk, 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 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.

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.

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 the...

We've paid for all these ships and now they're just sitting idle.

God, I love the moment of realization when they were like, well, that's Napoleon dealt with.

What are we gonna hang on?

Like, I love the idea of someone who ever had this, I'm gonna get

some land for this idea.

Yeah, and so Barrows, 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 come home.

Good, ditto.

So, we've got naval officers sitting around naval gazing, but they can't get through the ice.

Naval gazing!

I think 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?

What's that?

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.

Okay, so we've got various sort of powers and superpowers in the region.

But in the 1840s, Britain...

Hello, Britain, at last, launches the most famous Arctic mission of all the

1840s.

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 the 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 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.

So he sounds like he should be top of the list for candidates being drawn up to lead this new, this latest expedition.

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 and he kind of ends up with his last choice of Franklin, who is 59 at this point.

So, on the 19th of May, 1845, the HMS Erebus under Franklin and the HMS Terra under Crozier.

Crozier had been offered the position to lead, and he'd apparently turned it down out of modesty.

So, those two guys are-that's so wonderfully tense.

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 that are reinforced with steel 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 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 tiny

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 the bag.

Can't be bad.

Lead in your food.

There's going to be no side effects from that.

That's all I know.

Just relax in the terror.

So 129 crew on the two ships.

Stu, what food would you pack for an Arctic expedition?

Yeah, you've got 8,000 tins to fill.

What are you popping in?

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 have protein and carbs.

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 it.

I don't know what's available at the time.

I'd want 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.

What are the foods of the time?

Can you get a Fray Bentos?

Frey Bentos is about 1880.

It's a little bit later.

Oh, my God, you're good.

But it would be tinned salted meat and tinned salted vegetables as well, and occasionally fruits.

Tins of salted fruit.

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, call up, bring in some fresh meat supplies.

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 that.

It's even cooler.

It's more kind of 80s.

D-K-I-S-K-O.

Tragically, this is also where the men write their last letters home.

Oh, 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.

Yes.

Oh, man.

Yes, yes, yes.

How to motivate your crew.

Yeah, another mutiny, perhaps.

They get food, they get water, off they go, they come to Greenland, and then what?

What's...

That's the big question.

We do have a sighting.

In July 1845, there's two whaling ships, Prince of Wales Wales and Enterprise, both better names.

Yes, good.

They spot the expedition in Baffin Bay, where they're hold 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?

Like, have we...

Up until very recently.

Gotcha.

There's stuff spoilers.

There's stuff coming up.

We'll come to stuff like that.

There are campaigns to go and rescue them.

Obviously, Lady Jane Franklin is very keen to get her husband rescued.

She is a...

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 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.

They were last seen in 1845.

So they set out in 1845.

They set out in 1845.

And then three years later, Lady Franklin says, ah, I do think maybe we need to send some ships together.

Each need a plan of something.

Yeah because they've 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.

So they knew that the ships had spent the winter in the ice at this point from 1945 to 46, but they still didn't know what had happened to them or to the rest of the crews.

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, no traces of them.

Yeah.

Wow.

They're officially

MIA, but then KIA, so killed in action, I suppose.

But the nail in the coffin is 1854.

It's 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 cap band, a navy cap 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.

And did they tin each other?

Well, that's the thing.

The kettle is for is for boiling meat, right?

Yes.

This brings a whole new meaning to pop the kettle on, doesn't it?

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 second-hand reports from Indigenous witnesses.

So there are people like Charles Dickens, is the really really famous one who are writing these sort of op-ed pieces 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.

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.

Is that the last word on the expedition then, Vanessa?

I mean, you know, 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.

She crowdfunds that.

Oh, in order to find it, like to prove that there wasn't Calvinism.

Yeah,

okay, yes.

Okay, 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, and 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 like 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.

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.

There was almost certainly cannibalism of some of the members, yes.

Okay, so I mean,

it's always a little bit difficult, but there have been remains found.

There is a suggestion that that happened, yes.

Okay, Roll Amundsen actually finally makes a successful attempt on the Northwest Passage.

He starts in 1903, doesn't actually make it all the way over to Alaska till 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 put?

I'm sort of getting, as we go, not till 1907.

1906.

Well, he starts in 1903 and he gets there in 1906.

So 1906, it finally.

So 60 years later.

It's finally done by Amundsen, who of course later famously is the conqueror of the South Pole with a 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 you're in the business.

You know, you've got your porcelain.

Just put it in a bag.

It's a saffron.

What's that?

That's so small.

Musk probably would be masking.

Plutonium.

Yes, yes.

Something really.

Oh, it's 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?

All right, what have we learned since then?

Because since then, we've got marine archaeology and sat-nav and geostationary satellites and archaeology.

So, 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 final war was.

What they walked halfway, half of them died, then they turned around and went back to 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.

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.

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 Terror 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.

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, too.

The nuance window!

Time now for the nuance window.

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 canyons, 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, sister that mission.

They also produce what we call zines, so amateur magazines that would have satirical plays and poems and drawings and cartoons and that the men would actually sometimes take home as keepsakes of this like 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.

So, as well as 8,000 tins, Franklin also took over a thousand 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.

Amazing.

See, mum, comedians can be useful on a mission.

Chief Morale Officer.

Yeah, exactly.

That's always what I'd rely on.

If you want more of that, you can check out our episodes with Stu on Black Beard 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 your 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 to go and bin all my tinned food and scrub my kettle.

Bye!

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

versus Scepter

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 center of the earth with guests Phil Wang Chris Jackson and Anna Ferreira and after all of that intense heat and pressure we're just gonna 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 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.

This is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, Don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.