Arctic Exploration: the fatal quest for the Northwest Passage

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Vanessa Heggie and comedian Stu Goldsmith to learn all about the perilous history of Arctic exploration. From the 15th to 20th Centuries, Europeans searched for the Northwest Passage, a supposed seaway between the Atlantic and Pacific through the Arctic Ocean. Indigenous groups had been traversing the passage for centuries, using small skin boats and dog sleds, but from 1497, European expeditions were launched to find and claim it. Most of these ended in failure, with explorers either returning home empty-handed or not returning at all. Some even got completely lost, arriving in Hawaii or North Carolina rather than Canada! In 1845, the most famous Arctic expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, was launched. Within a few months, his two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, with their crew of 129 souls, had vanished. It was not until 1906 that a Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen, finally navigated the passage. This episode explores the often fatal quest for the Northwest Passage, charting the various expeditions that tried and failed to find and traverse it, uncovering the men who lost their lives looking for it, and asking why Europeans were so keen to explore such a hostile region of the world. And we unravel the mystery of just what happened to John Franklin and his men out there on the ice. If you’re a fan of intrepid explorers, mysterious historical disappearances and the history of scientific advancement, you’ll love our episode on Arctic Exploration. If you want more from Dr Vanessa Heggie, check out our episode on Victorian Bodybuilding. And for more Stu Goldsmith, listen to our episodes on the History of Fandom and Ancient Medicine. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Matt Ryan Written by: Matt Ryan, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:06Speaker 03

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• 1:11Greg Jenner?

  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 Hegi. Welcome back Vanessa.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  It's great to be back. Thanks for having me.

• 1:52Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:18Greg Jenner?

  Thank you very much.

• 2:20Speaker 05

  It's a great pleasure to be back. I'm very excited to be here.

• 2:22Greg Jenner?

  Lovely to have you back, Stu.

• 2:23Speaker 05

  Thank you. I'm clearly giddy with glee to be here.

• 2:27Greg Jenner?

  I know you're interested in climate change as an area of policy and discourse, but also comedy, right?

• 2:33Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:42Greg Jenner?

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

• 2:46Speaker 05

  Oh, very, 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.

• 2:53Greg Jenner?

  Good.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  So I shall be looking forward to all of this information being new.

• 2:56Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 3:03Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Antarctic just means no bears. Anti-bear.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't. Does Arctic mean bear? In what language?

• 3:22Speaker 04

  The language of people who named it.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  Really? Arctic means bear?

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and Antarctic means no bear.

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Wow, I'm leaving. I can't learn anything better than that.

• 3:30Greg Jenner?

  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 fictionized in a novel, and then the TV series The Terror.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  God, that was great.

• 3:42Greg Jenner?

  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 the Arctic. 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?

• 4:22Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  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 around that island on the left, so technically you haven't done the Northwest Passage.

• 4:51Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 4:52Speaker 05

  Not the official one.

• 4:52Greg Jenner?

  So there's Northwest Passages?

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:55Greg Jenner?

  Ah, already we're in trouble. Okay. And for sort of geography fans, when we say around North America, it's around North America but under Greenland.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:05Greg Jenner?

  And then under Russia, so that whole kind of...

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Well, it's sort of between Russia and America.

• 5:10Greg Jenner?

  Gotcha, okay. So you're sort of rounding off, but once you go past Alaska, you're clear, you're out.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  We're cribbing here for the benefit of the listener, we're cribbing from quite a confusing map, which is, it's 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. So Russia is at the top, pointing down towards Alaska.

• 5:28Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and thanks to the climate catastrophe, which you've been trying to mine for jokes, which is obviously...

• 5:33Speaker 05

  In a responsible way.

• 5:35Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 5:47Speaker 05

  When did it... Possible to cruise on a liner?

• 5:49Greg Jenner?

  Or any ship?

• 5:50Speaker 05

  1977.

• 5:51Greg Jenner?

  It's a good guess, Vanessa?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  But you'll need breathing apparatus because of all the methane from the melting permafrost.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Quite possibly, but the time period we're talking about, it was much colder and it's much iceier and it's much, much harder to navigate.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 6:22Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 6:30Speaker 05

  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, this metaphor's made it more confusing. Is it power and war?

• 6:58Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:43Greg Jenner?

  But you're right, money and power and war and the insatiable desire for Chinese porcelain.

• 7:47Speaker 05

  And porn as well, that drives everything. Was there any sex in the Arctic?

• 7:52Greg Jenner?

  I don't know if there was any sex. Well, maybe, Chinese erotica.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Intricately carved, yeah, walrus artefacts and things.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  Intricately carved walrus artefacts.

• 8:01Greg Jenner?

  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 sort of exploring this.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  They'd already discovered it by the time.

• 8:13Greg Jenner?

  They were living there.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 8:40Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, well, we've done an episode on the Vikings, you know, getting to Newfoundland, you know, a thousand years ago. So I guess those interactions continued.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're all, 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.

• 8:57Greg Jenner?

  So it's not big longships, not huge, not massive battleships. We're talking about a little, little coracle, a little canoe.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Sort of kayak styles and cometics and things like that.

• 9:06Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  Wow, 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.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Well, they, there are reports of them landing on the Scottish North West Coast. So presumably from Greenland or possibly from the North Coast.

• 9:22Greg Jenner?

  That's, that's a lot of paddling.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's allegedly, but there are, there's evidence of small boats there.

• 9:28Greg Jenner?

  Blimey. That is absolutely taking my breath away. I'm just looking at the map going Scotland's not even on the map.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  No, but you could get to the Faroe Islands and then get down through the Orkans 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.

• 9:42Greg Jenner?

  So there's a motorway service station in between.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  Lee Delamere Services, brackets Faroe Islands, yeah.

• 9:48Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so we've done some foreshadowing there because we've talked about the 12th century and indigenous communities. But we know, we need to get on to the Europeans because they're the ones with all the sort of drama and, and, and danger. The first European voyager was in 1497 and like you, Stu, he had a Bristol connection. You're a Bristolian now by, by choice.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  I'm a Bristolian by birth and later by choice.

• 10:08Greg Jenner?

  Do you know who this explorer might have been? 1497, set off from Bristol?

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Uh, Blackbeard. I mean, it was a curveball guess, wasn't it? 1497, set off from Bristol. Was it someone awful like Cabot?

• 10:20Greg Jenner?

  It was Cabot.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Oh, God. Yeah, okay, yep.

• 10:24Greg Jenner?

  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 of Italian.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Was he really? I didn't know that.

• 10:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he was a Venetian.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Oh, good. We can declaim him.

• 10:36Greg Jenner?

  You could try, you could try.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Say it again, please.

• 10:38Greg Jenner?

  Was Zwan Caboto.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  Zwan Caboto.

• 10:40Greg Jenner?

  But also he was Juan Caboto. He was also Jean Cabot, to the French, and he was John Cabot.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  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.

• 10:51Greg Jenner?

  It's good, isn't it?

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Yes, when I perform in Paris, I'm Stu Attel. Lovely.

• 10:57Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's good. So 1497, Vanessa, he sets off from Bristol. Why? And in what ship? And what, you know, who's, who's asked him to do? Because he's a Venetian. What's he doing in Bristol?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Oh, much colder than we were expecting, Your Majesty.

• 11:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. So John Cabot, or Zwan Cabotto, 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?

• 12:01Speaker 04

  No, he's definitely not alone in getting quite confused about where he is. There's also the Italian explorer Giovanni de 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 kilometres south in North Carolina.

• 12:27Speaker 05

  Oh. When Cabot, or Cabotidza or whatever we're calling him.

• 12:32Greg Jenner?

  Cabotto.

• 12:32Speaker 05

  Cabotto, thank you. When, 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?

• 12:39Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  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.

• 12:45Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  Your Majesty, we've completely failed. You're not going to say that, are you?

• 12:53Speaker 04

  It's possibly China.

• 12:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. That money you gave me, wasted. Scum. Ruined the sea.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I cut my head off in advance.

• 12:59Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 13:09Greg Jenner?

  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? Is he, he's another Englishman?

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, Froebesher 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 abducts 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

• 14:11Speaker 04

  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. They, 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.

• 14:31Greg Jenner?

  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-Penock on the Colombian exchange, which talks about those sort of movements of people and goods and ideas. But let's get back to slightly cheerier notes. Froebesher found some treasures.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  He did. He found a beach narwhal, which he referred to as a sea unicorn, for obvious reasons.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  Lovely, naturally.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  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 three expeditions was to find more gold.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Gosh, yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, it turned out to be false gold.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  Again, again, probably sensible to suspect you've found gold, and maybe we need to go back for another mission just to absolutely make sure.

• 15:15Greg Jenner?

  Yes. But I think he was, I think he was very keen on going, it's definitely gold. It's gold, gold, gold.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 15:21Greg Jenner?

  Our next contestant is a man called Henry Hudson. Heard the name?

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Uh, no.

• 15:25Greg Jenner?

  Okay, that's fair. He's not, you know, he's quite famous.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  I've heard of the movie Hudson Hawk and the Hudson River. And that's all my Hudson's.

• 15:32Greg Jenner?

  The Hudson River?

• 15:32Speaker 05

  The Hudson River?

• 15:33Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, obviously he invented or fell in that river. And as a result, it was named for or after him.

• 15:38Greg Jenner?

  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. Why, I mean, I was gonna say, why do you think he went down in history? But falling in a river is a pretty good guess.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Did he, it thawed? He was ice skating and he skated towards the King. And at the last minute, there was a crack. Methane, permafrost.

• 16:00Greg Jenner?

  I enjoyed the attempt. Vanessa, why, 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?

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, he attempted the first ever overwintering in the Arctic. 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.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Yes, is that why they're going to stay over winter? We're here now, we're gonna wait and see what happens when it melts.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  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 gonna look like in the summer when you're there in the winter and vice versa.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  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. I don't even know if I've found land or not.

• 17:16Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  Ah, what was the name of the vessel, please?

• 17:34Speaker 04

  It was the Discovery.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  That was the Discovery.

• 17:36Greg Jenner?

  It's a good name for a boat, isn't it? The Matthew's quite a rubbish name for a boat. It's nice.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  The mutiny is a slightly prophetic name. And when was Henry Hudson, please?

• 17:45Speaker 04

  1610.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  1610, and they stayed and there was a mutiny on his boat, the Discovery.

• 17:50Speaker 04

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

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Oh, presumably they won?

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  So we got a journal from the ship's navigator who's called Abbot Prickett and apparently...

• 18:02Greg Jenner?

  Such a great name. Sorry, Abbot Prickett.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Hi, Henry Hudson. Forgive the mutiny. Lots of love, Henry. Written in someone's left hand.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  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 other 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.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Listen, as the owner of a really nice coat, I get it.

• 18:36Greg Jenner?

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

• 18:38Speaker 04

  And is never seen again.

• 18:39Greg Jenner?

  And never seen again.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Oh, and never seen again?

• 18:41Greg Jenner?

  No, I mean, fair play to him for trying. But in fairness, Stu, it's quite embarrassing that the kind of moment of your death is encapsulated and they name it after you. Like, there's a sort of awkwardness there.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  I mean, at least you're getting something named after you. If I got hit by a bus and they changed the bus route to be called Stu's route, I wouldn't mind that.

• 18:58Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 18:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's a bit of a legacy, isn't it?

• 19:03Greg Jenner?

  Much like his crew, we have to leave Hudson behind. Sorry, Hudson. Off we go.

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Nice, lovely link. Look at that. 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.

• 19:18Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 19:28Speaker 04

  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 Munk, 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.

• 19:51Greg Jenner?

  Because they've heard about Jens Munk, presumably.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:11Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 20:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:33Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 20:48Speaker 05

  And he finds the Northwest Passage?

• 20:50Greg Jenner?

  He's looking for it.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  He's looking for it, and he's looking for it in a special way.

• 20:54Greg Jenner?

  Special way.

• 20:55Speaker 05

  On land?

• 20:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 05

  Wow. He's thought, hey, if it's a passage, it's got edges, I'll find them.

• 21:00Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he walks it. He's basically going to get his 10,000 steps in and then some.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Whoa, for charity?

• 21:05Greg Jenner?

  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 assistance. I mean, he's not just a one man on his own, is he?

• 21:15Speaker 04

  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's quite complex.

• 21:29Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  And this is, is this a classic example of like, hey, guys, I'm walking this way. Isn't it incredible? And the, the indigenous trackers who are showing him the way are like, well, we go this every Tuesday.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  This is like a 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.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Gotcha. Yes. Okay. Good. Tomorrow we strike out for Death Valley. Can we not?

• 21:59Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. I mean, we should also mention James Knight. In 1715, he, I mean, do you want to talk us through his?

• 22:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:17Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really? Wow. They switched, they proper sink, they sunk.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  They sunk.

• 22:21Greg Jenner?

  They sunk. Yeah, that's not, that's a proper failed mission, isn't it? When your boat is underwater, you're like, okay, we might have to call this one lads.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  And we found them in the 90s? Were they like an important archaeological discovery or was it just nice that we found them?

• 22:33Speaker 04

  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?

• 22:46Greg Jenner?

  Were they lost or was Mr Pan all along? But yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  But at least you can bury them and stop all the hauntings in the Hudson's Bay.

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• 24:31Greg Jenner?

  Okay, next on the list is your dead to me's previous subject, Captain James Cook.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 24:36Greg Jenner?

  You must know the name, presumably, Stuart.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Of course, I've heard of Captain Cook.

• 24:39Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Captain James T. Cook.

• 24:42Greg Jenner?

  Yes, and his Starship Enterprise.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, something I'm getting off topic.

• 24:46Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Uh, not really. He has exactly the same experience in that he tries going through the Bay Ring 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.

• 25:11Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  The, his second in command, Charles Clark, takes over. They go up, they have another go through the Bay Ring Strait, still find ice. And it's actually one of his crew members, George Vancouver. I think the name is a clue here.

• 25:21Greg Jenner?

  Great name.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  Like 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. Like, there's no way to pop out on the Pacific side because it'll always be frozen.

• 25:35Greg Jenner?

  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, that's sort of the end of that one. But then we get Sir John Barrow and he's got a plan.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  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 of stuff going on.

• 26:22Speaker 05

  Russia has taken Alaska?

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Yep. Russia's in Alaska.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  Russia used to own Alaska?

• 26:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, for a very long time.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  When did that happen? When did it, when did it end?

• 26:29Speaker 04

  Oh, I want to say 1880 purchase. Check that. I can't remember the odd day. But it's later than you think.

• 26:34Speaker 05

  1880 purchase. Wow.

• 26:35Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  So there's, there's lots of political pressures on the British in this area. They're not the dominant power anymore. 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.

• 26:51Greg Jenner?

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

• 26:53Speaker 05

  God, I love the moment of realisation 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, I'm gonna get some land for this idea.

• 27:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 27:04Greg Jenner?

  1867 is the Alaska purchase. So pretty close to 1880. I think that's in the ballpark. 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 is, he's off for his, his expeditions in 1818 and do they succeed?

• 27:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:32Greg Jenner?

  Good. Ditto. I'm getting a lot of ditto on this. A lot of like, we found some ice, we went home.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Yes. This really, this episode is all about failure to traverse the Northwest Passage in many ways, isn't it?

• 27:41Greg Jenner?

  So far, so far.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  But I failed to pronounce the Northwest Passage there, so I can't really.

• 27:46Greg Jenner?

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

• 27:50Speaker 05

  Naval gazing. I felt that didn't get what it deserved.

• 27:53Greg Jenner?

  How would you entertain a ship full of sailors who are sort of hunkered over in the ice?

• 27:59Speaker 05

  Drag sea shanty.

• 28:00Greg Jenner?

  I'm up for that.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Drag sea shanty competition.

• 28:02Greg Jenner?

  Nice.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  And in stages, knockout tournament. That'll keep us going for a month, surely.

• 28:07Greg Jenner?

  Thirty-two drag artists whittle them down.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  Yes, lovely.

• 28:10Greg Jenner?

  Okay, that's, I mean, that's pretty good.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  I mean, I just went straight off the top of my head there, but I think that would work.

• 28:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  You may be surprised later on to find out what they really did.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, please let it be a drag sea shanty competition.

• 28:20Greg Jenner?

  RuPaul's Northwest Passage Arctic. Vanessa, was Britain alone in organising these Arctic explorations in the kind of 18, 20, 30s, you know, that sort of post-Napoleonic time?

• 28:32Speaker 04

  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, there's a lot of North European nations asserting their right to be in the Arctic doing science and exploring.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  And this is the reason for the word allegedly. What they're doing is, hey, guys, we're just doing research.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Just mapping it, no research.

• 29:14Greg Jenner?

  Just meteorology, just really into clouds.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  These aren't rifles, it's a complex tripod.

• 29:18Greg Jenner?

  Sure. 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 Franklin.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  In the win, the 1840s.

• 29:32Greg Jenner?

  In the 1840s, so it's, 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?

• 29:49Speaker 04

  John Franklin. So by this point, the 1840s, he's quite famous. He's a well-known naval explorer and sailor. He has experience in Arctic waters. He'd 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

• 30:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:59Greg Jenner?

  So Stu, he sounds perfect for an Arctic exploration, but maybe not so good for running a colony.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  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 him a really inappropriate job in the meantime.

• 31:11Greg Jenner?

  Oh, so he quits.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  In somewhere called Van Diemen's, which is awesome. Sounds like the Scooby gang would have a field day with that.

• 31:18Greg Jenner?

  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, is he the kind of number one go to guy?

• 31:26Speaker 04

  He's not even close.

• 31:27Greg Jenner?

  Really?

• 31:27Speaker 04

  So Barrow has a list of alternative people, all with Arctic experience, who he wants. But they pretty much, most of them turned 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, 1844. 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 guys have together.

• 32:03Greg Jenner?

  Oh, that's so, that's so wonderfully tense.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  He'd been who? He was the, he was offered the chance to lead.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  To lead the expedition, yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  And he was in charge of the other boat?

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's in charge of the second boat.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  And he was told to lead and he said no.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  He said nah.

• 32:15Speaker 05

  You were last choice, it should be you.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:17Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so we have a sort of illustrious explorer, but he's had a bit of a bad time of it six years off. He was 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.

• 32:30Speaker 05

  Was he Jared Harris in the Terror?

• 32:32Greg Jenner?

  He might be.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think he was.

• 32:33Greg Jenner?

  But they've also named their ships the Terror and Erebus. Erebus being the Greek god of darkness and the underworld.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is just up from naming your ship the Last Choice and the Albatross.

• 32:42Greg Jenner?

  It really is, isn't it? These are not inspiring names. I prefer Discovery, even Matthew was sort of nice.

• 32:47Speaker 05

  The Terror?

• 32:48Greg Jenner?

  The Terror and Erebus.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  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?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  These are naval ships, so it's probably the Admiralty.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Is it that it already exists?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Yes, it exists.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:04Greg Jenner?

  So Crozier is captaining the Terror. And Franklin is captaining the Erebus and the overall mission.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  That's your pent up.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 33:10Greg Jenner?

  And off they, off they go. And these are not ordinary naval ships, they're naval vessels.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they've been souped up, basically. So they've, they've got an internal central heating system that's steam powered.

• 33:21Greg Jenner?

  Ooh.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  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, so do a bit of ice breaking as well.

• 33:31Greg Jenner?

  So this is an ice, these are ice breaking ships, these are steel hulled, they're no longer sail. I mean, they presumably might have sails as backups.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  They have sails, the screw is a backup, basically.

• 33:38Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so backup, okay. But this is the new technology, this is Victorian engineering.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  We're chucking coal in it to turn, to turn this screw?

• 33:44Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:45Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:56Greg Jenner?

  Amazing.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  This is a problem though.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  I don't think anything can go wrong with that tin food.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  No, definitely. And the issue is that they're planning it quite short and no 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.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Well, that can't be bad, lead in your food. There's gonna be no side effects and that's all I imagine.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  It's gonna sit there in the hull for two years.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Just relax in the terror.

• 34:20Greg Jenner?

  So Stephen Goldner is the provisions officer who just sort of basically just sold eight thousand tins of meat and then goes, "That's probably fine."

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:27Greg Jenner?

  Okay, that's great.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  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 him. I wonder if that was a concern when you're heading out on the terror and the erebus or erebus, when you're heading out thinking, "Well, everyone that provisioned this ship..." Like, do you know what I mean? If you were a sailor, you might be thinking, "Well, what is the, what is the kind of the redress if this stuff doesn't go as planned?"

• 34:48Greg Jenner?

  Yes, you can't just send a memo home saying, "You know that food you sent out? Very leady."

• 34:52Speaker 05

  Very leady.

• 34:53Greg Jenner?

  Very leady. 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 there?

• 35:00Speaker 05

  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, but you'd also not want to neglect your fruit and veg.

• 35:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  Would the fruit and veg need to go into tins for three years? It sure would.

• 35:18Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  Peaches I'd go for.

• 35:20Greg Jenner?

  Good, yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 35:28Greg Jenner?

  Of course, of course. So we need 8,000 tins, 2,000 which are just lipstick.

• 35:33Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah, perfect. Thank you. And that's only one of the reasons I've never been asked to be quartermaster.

• 35:38Greg Jenner?

  I was gonna say. I don't think the Navy's gonna phone you up anytime soon.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Lipstick would be made of beeswax. You could probably eat it. It's better than eating boots, right? It's probably edible.

• 35:45Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you might. Okay, fair enough.

• 35:46Speaker 05

  What are the foods of the time? Can you get a Frey-Bentos?

• 35:49Speaker 04

  It would be a lot. No, yeah, well, sort of Frey-Bentos is about 1880. It's a little bit later, but it would be...

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Oh my god, you're good!

• 35:55Speaker 04

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

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Tinned salted fruit.

• 36:01Greg Jenner?

  And to find the scurvy, it's going to be citrus fruits.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  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 tins. You might even get stuff like tinned salted butter and stuff for early supplies.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  And those 8,000 tins are gonna weigh a hell of a lot, right?

• 36:15Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, that's an awful lot of weight in the, in the sort of steerage, isn't it? But, I mean, these are steam-powered, well, not quite, with sail and steam-powered ships, so they're, 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.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  Hang on, I'm gonna stop you there. Is this drag show happening or what? We're at Disco Bay, in Greenland. How are we spelling disco?

• 36:51Speaker 04

  With a K.

• 36:52Greg Jenner?

  Oh, you've ruined it.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  That's even cooler, it's more kind of 80s.

• 36:56Greg Jenner?

  D-I-S-K-O.

• 36:59Speaker 04

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

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Oh, that's put a down on it.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  And Franklin tells them that they, there's gonna be no swearing and no drinking on the expedition.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, how to motivate your crew.

• 37:14Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, another mutiny. Perhaps they get food, they get water, off they go, they go to Greenland, and, and then, then what? What's?

• 37:22Speaker 04

  That's the big question, because that's the point at which the story gets kind of murky.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  I did think the, 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?

• 37:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you mean the, the famous snooker scene?

• 37:36Speaker 05

  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?

• 37:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, okay.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  So we just don't know.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Well, we, we do have a sighting. In July 1845, there's two whaling ships, Prince of Wales and Enterprise, both better names.

• 37:54Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  They, they spot the, 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.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Wow. And up till now? Like have we?

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Up until very recently.

• 38:09Speaker 05

  Ah, gotcha. Yeah, okay.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  Spoilers, there's stuff coming.

• 38:12Greg Jenner?

  We'll come to stuff later.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  A can, not a can. Gotcha.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  But it's got a can inside it because you use a metal box or a wooden box.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  This is very a low, a low. A can in the can, yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  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 at home.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 38:33Greg Jenner?

  Okay, so they've left messages behind under the cans. And what happens to these ships? Do we not know? I mean, what?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  We don't know. They vanished. 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. She is a...

• 38:48Greg Jenner?

  So this is Sir John's wife?

• 38:49Speaker 04

  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 bush walks and things like this. She's actually the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's 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. And that's actually a three-part mission. There's an overland expedition, there's a sea expedition following Franklin's route, and then there's also a ship in the Pacific that they redeploy to go up and see if they popped out through the Russian side. So they've actually successfully gone for the Northwest Passage.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  And are sitting pretty on a big pile of cash and whale meat.

• 39:33Greg Jenner?

  Yes, exactly.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  All hiding from their wives.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  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-ish in today's 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 fate.

• 39:52Greg Jenner?

  So hang on, you get double the money to assist, but only £10,000 to tell them actually what happened?

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, double the money if they're alive and you help, but 10K if you happen to know what happened to them.

• 40:01Greg Jenner?

  Okay, all right. Why did they wait three years? They had three years of food, right?

• 40:05Speaker 04

  They had three years of food. So 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.

• 40:17Greg Jenner?

  That was normal.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  That was completely normal. So even with no word back after three years, the chances are that they 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.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  Tell me again when they first set out. They were last seen in 1845?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  So they set out in 1845.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  They set out in 1845 and also in 1845 were last seen by the Prime and the Enterprise.

• 40:37Greg Jenner?

  The Prince of Wales.

• 40:38Speaker 05

  The Prince of Wales.

• 40:39Greg Jenner?

  Prince of Wales and the Enterprise. And then three years later, Lady Franklin says, ah, I do think maybe we need to send some ships.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  We need a plan of some kind.

• 40:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, 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?

• 40:52Speaker 04

  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 Terrer. 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.

• 41:24Greg Jenner?

  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 winter.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  But there was no can.

• 41:31Greg Jenner?

  There was no, yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  No information on the men.

• 41:34Greg Jenner?

  And someone buried them, so those people are alive at that stage.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Yes, they were definitely alive sometime in 1846.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  Isn't that weird that they hadn't left any information with them about what had happened?

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Well, this is only their first year of voyaging out of three, so it's not an emergency.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Oh, I see what you mean, yes.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  They just sent letters home.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  Yes, right.

• 41:49Greg Jenner?

  At what stage does the Admiralty go, we think they're lost?

• 41:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:02Speaker 05

  Nine years.

• 42:03Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  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 ships. So like us. 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.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 43:16Speaker 05

  Oh, and did they tin each other?

• 43:19Greg Jenner?

  Well, that's the thing. The kettle is a boiling meat, right?

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:24Greg Jenner?

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

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Ooh, cooking each other in a kettle.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Think like fish kettle.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  I don't know what that is.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  That's a long dish for cooking a fish in.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Oh, I see. Not a kettle kettle, as I understand it, but like they've found a cauldron, effectively, with human body parts in it. Eww. Well, I mean, that seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

• 43:45Greg Jenner?

  It's not great, is it?

• 43:46Speaker 05

  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.

• 43:54Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  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 at all.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  I was going to say, how did they let that get out?

• 44:23Speaker 04

  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 pieces, basically saying, and I'm going to use his words here, that these are savage peoples, 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, and I think particularly for Lady Jane Franklin, this is an unacceptable slur on the name of her husband and the expedition.

• 45:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  Wow. I mean, the big takeaway for me, with all respect to Franklin, is that Dickens wrote like that. That's a shame.

• 45:09Greg Jenner?

  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 this just bad luck?

• 45:24Speaker 04

  It's just bad luck. It's another one of the expeditions. Most of them had failed at this point. But Lady Jen 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.

• 45:34Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  She crowdfunds a ship. In order to find, like, to prove that there was incannibalism?

• 45:38Speaker 04

  To prove it's still okay, yes.

• 45:39Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  So she sends out an expedition in 1857, it sails out of Aberdeen, and that one finds some certainty. In 1859, it discovers the can, 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 are 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

• 46:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:44Greg Jenner?

  So the survivors of the ship went overland and then just succumbed to cold, dehydration, food?

• 46:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  That is a sad end to a drag show.

• 47:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, sorry, a comedy show, but that is just, that's just pretty bleak, isn't it?

• 47:08Speaker 05

  That's super bleak. So was there any proof, yea or nay, on the cannibalism? Besides, when she, when she found the note in the can, was there, did it end, and no matter what anyone says, we definitely didn't eat Tony?

• 47:20Speaker 04

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

• 47:23Greg Jenner?

  Alright, okay, so, okay.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  I mean, it's always a little bit difficult, but there have been remains found. There is a suggestion that that happened, yes.

• 47:29Greg Jenner?

  Okay. Sort of put me off journeying into the Northwest Passage, really. I quite fancied it to begin with, but now...

• 47:35Speaker 05

  Yes, how far, just remind me, how far did they get? In terms of the Northwest Passage?

• 47:39Greg Jenner?

  King William Island, did they?

• 47:40Speaker 05

  On the King William, whereabouts is that?

• 47:42Speaker 04

  This is not helpful for a podcast.

• 47:43Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, for radio.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  No, sorry, about halfway.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  No, maybe a third of the way.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  A third of the way.

• 47:48Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  So into Baffin Bay.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  And then into the, the belly of the beast and one another.

• 47:54Greg Jenner?

  And never, and never out. So that's it. So that's the Franklin Disaster, and it, I mean, presumably that put stop to all these expeditions. Surely this enormous PR scandal disaster.

• 48:04Speaker 05

  They just took more food and fatter segments.

• 48:05Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  They took the opposite approach. It's Roald 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 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.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Is that the first, I'm sort of, as we go, not till 1907?

• 48:25Greg Jenner?

  1906.

• 48:26Speaker 04

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

• 48:28Speaker 05

  In 1906, it finally gets done.

• 48:30Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  But not for a large boat.

• 48:41Greg Jenner?

  Oh, of course, of course. So the whole point of it is still...

• 48:45Speaker 04

  You can't trade in a small kayak to China.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  So, well, no, unless you get...

• 48:50Greg Jenner?

  And if you've got any porcelain, just pop it in the bag.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  What's the one? Is it saffron? What's the one? It's so small.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Musk probably would be the best option, yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Plutonium. Yes, yes, something really, oh, too heavy. At what point does trade happen via that route, if ever?

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Well, the cargo ships are 2008, so it's late.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  2008?

• 49:05Speaker 04

  We invented planes and then it didn't matter so much.

• 49:07Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Oh, God, that is a killer, isn't it? There's you with your, halfway through, Tony's leg, you're looking up and saying, oh, God, this whole thing's been pointless.

• 49:16Greg Jenner?

  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. So...

• 49:26Speaker 05

  God, this is history, pointless. Well, tune in next week.

• 49:31Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  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 five people died.

• 49:58Speaker 05

  They walked halfway, half of them died, then they turned around and went back to the ship?

• 50:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:18Greg Jenner?

  Oh, sure.

• 50:18Speaker 05

  Especially if you've eaten another body. Sorry to keep harping on about the cannibalism, but I wasn't expecting that.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  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 tin. 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 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 Terra 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.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  We don't really know the detailed, complete fate of everyone on that expedition still.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  Whoa. I've got, 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.

• 51:18Greg Jenner?

  Me too. 2014, 2016, both ships found and more questions raised. Now, that'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.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Are you going to tell me the Hudson Bay Company still exists, only now it's called America? Something like, what happened to them?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Funny that, became a department store.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  Did it?

• 51:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, Hudson's Bay Company.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  But that's not the actual Hudson Bay Company.

• 51:44Greg Jenner?

  She's giving me a look, everyone.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Is it really?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  I believe it takes its roots from there, yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  So the, wow, guys, we're going to retail.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  Golly.

• 52:01Greg Jenner?

  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. 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.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  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 continent, 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

• 53:00Speaker 04

  motivated their teams and stopped them from being bored. Because that's what basic psychology is a really crucial part of leadership, particularly for this sort of expedition. An ice tin 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.

• 53:35Greg Jenner?

  Now, sit through that mission.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  They also produce what we call zines. So amateur magazines that would have satirical plays and poems and drawings and cartoons in 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 to 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. And 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.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 54:29Speaker 05

  See mum, comedians can be useful on a mission.

• 54:34Greg Jenner?

  Chief morale officer.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. That's always, I thought, 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.

• 54:45Greg Jenner?

  That's not Kilstew, he's, 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.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  Yes, and if you were like 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.

• 55:08Greg Jenner?

  So what do you know now?

• 55:14Greg Jenner?

  This is our quickfire quiz for Stu to see how much he's learned.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  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 gonna, I'm gonna not do it. And then there were so many dates and things, I started making notes. So I've got my notes here.

• 55:30Greg Jenner?

  You've got extensive notes there.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  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.

• 55:39Greg Jenner?

  Jen Bristol took eight pages of notes, so I think you're okay.

• 55:41Speaker 05

  I think I've done eight pages.

• 55:44Greg Jenner?

  Got 10 questions for you.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 55:46Greg Jenner?

  You're always very good at this.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 55:47Greg Jenner?

  Question one for you, Stu.

• 55:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 55:49Greg Jenner?

  Question one. Giovanni de Vrazzano thought he had found the Northwest Passage in 1523, but where was he actually?

• 55:56Speaker 05

  Where was he actually?

• 55:57Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he was 3,000 miles away in...

• 55:59Speaker 05

  1523?

• 56:01Greg Jenner?

  Home of Blackbeard.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  He was in Bristol? No, sorry, you just said Home of Blackbeard, that's a different question.

• 56:06Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, later, later Home of Blackbeard.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Oh, later Home of Blackbeard, he was in the, the Caribbean?

• 56:11Greg Jenner?

  North Carolina, North Carolina.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  North Carolina.

• 56:13Greg Jenner?

  Sorry.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  The Carolina, where's that one? I've written it down somewhere.

• 56:16Greg Jenner?

  That's back on page one of the notes.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  Oh god, no, it is, it is, I can literally see it now.

• 56:20Greg Jenner?

  Question two, why did Henry Hudson's crew stage a mutiny against him in 1610?

• 56:26Speaker 05

  In 1610, there was a mutiny because they were... Oh, it was the argument about whether or not he'd nicked a coat and/or hoarded food. But we don't know if that's true.

• 56:35Greg Jenner?

  We don't know. That's just what I said. That's correct. Question three: Which island did Captain Cook encounter when seeking the Northwest Passage? And that is where he died.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  Hawaii.

• 56:44Greg Jenner?

  It was Hawaii. Question four: What were the names of the Franklin expedition's two ships?

• 56:48Speaker 05

  The Erebus or Erebus and the Terror.

• 56:50Greg Jenner?

  Yes, terrible names for ships. Question five: How were indigenous communities able to traverse the Northwest Passage? And also later, Amundsen?

• 56:58Speaker 05

  Sleds and mostly sleds.

• 57:02Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, and smaller...

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Small boats.

• 57:04Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, small boats with skin, animal skins. That's right. Question six: Who was the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal in 1860?

• 57:12Speaker 05

  That was Lady Franklin.

• 57:13Greg Jenner?

  It was Lady Jane Franklin. Question seven: What supplies might have contributed to the Franklin crew's eventual death?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  Well, sort of lead, lead in the tins.

• 57:21Greg Jenner?

  Yes, contamination. That's right. Well done.

• 57:22Speaker 05

  Contamination from lead in the tins.

• 57:23Greg Jenner?

  That's right. Question eight: What was the victory point note?

• 57:27Speaker 05

  It was left in a can.

• 57:28Greg Jenner?

  Yep.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  And it's... I'm going to refer to my notes. I did write it down. The victory point note was 1859. It was left in a can and it... Yep, that's what that was. On King William Island.

• 57:40Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Dickens.

• 57:49Greg Jenner?

  It was Dickens. And this question turned for nine out of 10. Which Scandinavian explorer finally navigated the passage in 1906?

• 57:56Speaker 05

  Amundsen.

• 57:57Greg Jenner?

  Nine out of 10. Very good, Stu.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Oh, no. 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.

• 58:09Greg Jenner?

  Off the top of my head.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  Go on.

• 58:10Greg Jenner?

  Okay. What was the original name of John Cabot?

• 58:16Speaker 05

  Ah, Joanne Chaboty.

• 58:20Greg Jenner?

  Chaboty.

• 58:21Speaker 05

  Chaboty. One of the... The Venetian version of John Cabot. Joanne Chaboty.

• 58:28Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, there we go. Joanne Chabot.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Chaboty. Yeah, I was meant to say Chabot.

• 58:32Greg Jenner?

  10 out of 11, Stu, you've got to miss.

• 58:34Speaker 05

  Yes, 10 out of 11. The legacy continues.

• 58:38Greg Jenner?

  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?

• 58:45Speaker 05

  I've enjoyed it enormously.

• 58:47Greg Jenner?

  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 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. Just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we had the incredible Dr Vanessa Hegi from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Vanessa.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  Thank you for inviting me.

• 59:21Greg Jenner?

  Pleasure. And in comedy corner, we had the stupendous Stu Goldsmith. Thank you, Stu.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  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.

• 59:30Greg Jenner?

  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.

• 59:44Greg Jenner?

  This episode of Your 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 Nagouse. And our executive editor was James Cook. Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

• 1:00:19Speaker 07

  Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:00:27Speaker 07

  We decided it was time to go cosmic, so we are going to do Jupiter versus Saturn.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  That was 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.

• 1:00:45Speaker 07

  Really deep.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  Yes, we're journeying to the centre of the Earth with guests Phil Wang, Chris Jackson and Anna Ferreira.

• 1:00:51Speaker 07

  And after all of that intense heat and pressure, we're just going to kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  And also in this series, we're discussing altruism. We'll find out what it is.

• 1:01:03Speaker 07

  We're in 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.

• 1:01:19Speaker 06

  It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth fighting.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  A reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation.

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  And its production is an extraordinary story in itself.

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead.

• 1:01:36Speaker 06

  Join me, Misha Glenning, and three expert guests for a special live edition of In Our Time, where we discuss Casablanca. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.