Arctic Exploration: the fatal quest for the Northwest Passage

Summary

You’re Dead to Me: Arctic Exploration – The Fatal Quest for the Northwest Passage

Release Date: March 28, 2025

Introduction

In this gripping episode of BBC Radio 4’s comedy podcast You’re Dead to Me, host Greg Jenner delves into the perilous history of Arctic exploration, focusing on the relentless quest for the Northwest Passage. Joined by historian Dr. Vanessa Heggie and comedian Stu Goldsmith, the episode navigates through centuries of daring expeditions, heroic endeavors, and tragic failures in the icy expanse of the Arctic.

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1. Understanding the Northwest Passage

Greg Jenner sets the stage by explaining the geographical and historical significance of the Northwest Passage—a maritime route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Ocean. Dr. Vanessa Heggie clarifies, “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” (03:55).

Notable Quote:

"History isn’t just about dates and textbooks – it’s about extraordinary characters, amazing stories, and some very questionable fashion choices." – Greg Jenner (00:44)

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2. Early European Explorations

The discussion begins with early European explorers like John Cabot and Giovanni di Verrazzano. Cabot, a Venetian under the name Zuan Cabot, set sail from Bristol in 1497 seeking new trade routes. Despite reaching Newfoundland, he mistakenly believed he had found China, a sentiment echoed humorously by Stu: “I mean, it's a very sad reminder of the sort of cost of these explorations” (11:35).

Notable Quote:

"They were living there." – Helena Bonham Carter on indigenous navigation (07:45)

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3. Henry Hudson’s Tragic Expedition

Henry Hudson's 1610 expedition aboard the Discovery exemplifies the era's perilous nature. Attempting the first overwintering in the Arctic, Hudson's crew mutinied due to alleged food hoarding and disputes over a stolen coat. The mutiny resulted in Hudson’s abandonment to his fate in Hudson’s Bay, highlighting the extreme hardships faced (17:05).

Notable Quote:

“If you get to be in charge of the bit that's on the top of the world, you get the strategic advantage” – Stu Goldsmith on motivations for exploring (06:04)

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4. The Hudson’s Bay Company and Continued Attempts

Founded in the 1670s, the Hudson’s Bay Company established trading posts that became launching points for further explorations. Despite repeated failures due to dense ice, explorers like Samuel Hearne persisted, often integrating indigenous knowledge to navigate the treacherous waters (19:45).

Notable Quote:

“They can’t get through the ice.” – Greg Jenner on the recurring obstacle (26:19)

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5. James Cook’s Endeavor

Captain James Cook’s attempts in the late 18th century mirrored his predecessors' misfortunes. In 1779, Cook sailed towards Hawaii in search of the Northwest Passage but met his end after a confrontation with indigenous Hawaiians, further illustrating the expedition’s inherent dangers (23:26).

Notable Quote:

“There’s a lot of political pressures on the British in this area.” – Helena Bonham Carter on Sir John Franklin’s motivations (25:20)

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6. Sir John Franklin’s Fateful Voyage

The centerpiece of the episode is Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Despite outfitting the ships with advanced ice-breaking technology and extensive provisions, the expedition became trapped in the ice. Internal strife, possible lead poisoning from defective tin cans, and harsh conditions led to the crew’s demise. Lady Jane Franklin’s relentless pursuit to uncover her husband’s fate underscores the expedition’s tragic legacy (37:02).

Notable Quote:

“John Franklin is left to die and is never seen again.” – Greg Jenner on Franklin’s disappearance (18:24)

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7. The Role of Indigenous Testimony and Modern Discoveries

Scottish explorer John Rae’s investigations in the 1850s, utilizing indigenous accounts, provided grim insights into the expedition's fate, including evidence of cannibalism. The eventual discovery of the Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016 brought closure yet introduced new questions about the exact circumstances of their end (48:11).

Notable Quote:

“The skill of the expedition leader is balancing that sort of irreverent fun with not losing respect and control.” – Dr. Vanessa Heggie on maintaining crew morale (50:47)

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8. Roald Amundsen’s Success and Legacy

Finally, the episode celebrates Roald Amundsen’s successful navigation of the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906, achieved through small boats and indigenous techniques. This monumental achievement marked the culmination of centuries of exploration struggles, contrasting sharply with its predecessors’ tragic outcomes (46:55).

Notable Quote:

“It might seem counterintuitive because exploration is about movement and adventure, but the reality is that a lot of the Northwest Passage expeditions were frequently static.” – Dr. Vanessa Heggie (50:47)

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Conclusion

You’re Dead to Me masterfully intertwines humor with historical analysis, shedding light on the relentless human spirit behind Arctic exploration. The episode not only recounts the saga of the Northwest Passage but also explores the broader themes of leadership, survival, and the interplay between exploration and indigenous knowledge. As Greg Jenner aptly concludes, “It’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” (53:26).

Notable Quote:

“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 the hurricanes.” – Dr. Vanessa Heggie (52:59)

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Key Takeaways:

• The Northwest Passage was a formidable route sought for its strategic and economic potential.
• Early explorations were marked by extreme hardships, including mutinies, lead poisoning, and tragic deaths.
• Indigenous knowledge played a crucial role in the survival and eventual success of later expeditions.
• Modern discoveries have provided physical evidence that both confirm and complicate historical accounts.
• Leadership and morale were as critical as navigational skills in the success of these expeditions.

For those fascinated by history's trials and tribulations, this episode offers an engaging and enlightening journey through one of the most challenging chapters of Arctic exploration.

Transcript

[Stu Goldsmith]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung.

[Greg Jenner]

Heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage.

[Stu Goldsmith]

From World War II.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.

[Greg Jenner]

Hello and welcome to youo'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 Pearl Passage. And joining me on the good ship you're Dead to me are two very special shipmates. In History Corner, she's Associate professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Department of Applied Health Science. What a title. You may have read her long running science column in the Guardian newspaper or her recent book Higher and Colder on the history of extreme exploration. And you will definitely remember her from our episode on Victorian Bodybuilding. It's Dr. Vanessa Heggie. Welcome back, Vanessa.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you very much.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Lovely to have you back, Stu.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Thank you.

[Stu Goldsmith]

I'm clearly giddy with glee to be.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, I'm very, very little. And when I Found out this was gonna be the subject. It did occur to me to do revision, and I didn't because I've got principles.

[Greg Jenner]

Good.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

So, what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, will know about today's subject. And I am guessing everyone knows where the Arctic is, but if you are confused, it's the bit at the top. Think polar bears, not penguins.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Antarctic just means no bears, anti bear.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Language of people who named it.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Really? Arctic means bear and Antarctic means bear. Wow. I'm leaving. I can't learn anything better than that.

[Greg 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 God. That was great. Good telly. It also has inspired many novels. A book by national treasurer 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Island on the left.

[Stu Goldsmith]

So technically you haven't done the Northwest Passage. Not the official one.

[Greg Jenner]

So this Northwest Passage is. Yes, already we're in trouble. And for sort of geography fans, when we say around North America. It's around North America, but under Greenland.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

And then under Russia. So that Whole kind of.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Gotcha. Okay, so you're sort of rounding off once you go past Alaska. You're clear, you're out.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And thanks to the climate catastrophe, which you've been trying to mine for jokes in a responsible way and in fairness, it's a very good show. What's quite interesting and perhaps depressing now, is you can now comfortably cruise through this Northwest Passage on a lovely luxury liner. Do you know when that was first possible, which year that became possible?

[Stu Goldsmith]

When did it possible to cruise on a liner or any ship? 1977.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a good guess, Vanessa.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, it's mostly in the 21st century that it's regularly passaged. 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

White. Possibly. But the time period we're talking about, it was much colder and it's much icier and it's much, much harder to navigate.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes.

[Greg 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?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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. It's like if you're in an airplane, you can. You're high up and you can quickly get anywhere that the airplane can see. I felt this metaphor made it more confusing. Is it power and war?

[Greg Jenner]

I think you. I think you did well with the first answer.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Second answer started to veer away a bit. I mean, power and war is pretty good.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 over land. And there's all those lovely Chinese luxury goods that you can trade for.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

But you're right. Money and power and war and the insatiable desire for Chinese porcelain were driving corn as well.

[Stu Goldsmith]

That drives everything. Was there any. Was there any sex in the Arctic?

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. Walrus artifacts and things.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Intricately carved walrus artifacts, we should say.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, it wasn't just Europeans who were exploring North West 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

They'd already discovered it by being discovered it.

[Greg Jenner]

They were living there.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah, definitely. And they were moving around extensively in the area as well. So there's evidence of some migrations prior to the 12th century. And I think for this space, it's important to remember that it's quite resource scarce, so there'll be populations who'd be following food sources like walruses or like fish stocks. There's also evidence of trading between North American populations and sort of Norse populations as well. And there may also 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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 the seas.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Kumatics and things like that.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, how long?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, there are reports of them landing on the Scottish northwest coast, so presumably from Greenland or possibly from the north coast of Africa.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a lot of paddling.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

So there's a motorway service station in Delavaire.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Services, brackets, Pharaoh Islands. Yeah, fair enough.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

It was Cabot.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, God, yeah. Okay. Yep.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it was Cabot who had a variety of names. We call him John Cabot in England, but he was Zuan Caboto because he was Venetian, which is a different dialect.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Was he really?

[Greg Jenner]

I didn't know that he was a Venetian. So good.

[Stu Goldsmith]

We can declaim him. You could try.

[Greg Jenner]

You could try.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Say it again, please.

[Greg Jenner]

Zuan Ciabotto. But also he was also Joan Caboto. He was also Jean Cabo, did the French. And he was John Cabot.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

It's good, isn't it?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. When I perform in Paris, I'm Stuart Gulchigny.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, I'm not sure we really know why he moved to England. There are little bits of his life that are mysterious, but he was there by the late 1400s and the chances are that this is something to do with what Christopher Columbus is doing for Spain. So there's some interest in sending people out on voyages. And he gets permission, basically, from the King to set off for an Arctic voyage. Has a fail in 1496, has a second go in a boat called the Matthew in 1497. He gets as far, we think, as the coast of Newfoundland, but he's mostly along sort of the coastline of Quebec, around the coast of Canada. He names some things, unfurls a flag, gets very excited about it, comes back home thinking that he's discovered China.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So John Cabot, or Zuan Cabot. Caboto was sent off by Henry vii. Sir 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

No, he's definitely not alone in getting quite confused about where he is. There's also the Italian explorer Giovanni di Verrazzano. He sails a huge part of the North American coast all the way from Florida, again, pretty much up to Newfoundland. And he' 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.

[Greg Jenner]

Ooh.

[Stu Goldsmith]

When Cabot, or Kabutidza or whatever we're calling him Gibboto. Thank you. When he landed and thought it was China, did he really think it was China or did he think, well, we've got to say something. We can't prove this is China, but if we say China, I might get two years of a sedan chair before anyone works it out.

[Greg 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

It's possibly China.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

That money you gave me wasted, squandered, ruining the sea.

[Stu Goldsmith]

So I've cut my head off in advance.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. Frobisher is in fact our first English born person to actually have a go at the Northwest Passage. He gets sponsorship from a private trading company, the Muscovy Company, and they're the people who have a monopoly on the trade between England and Russia. So they would really also like 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 Calicho, an unrelated Inuk woman, Arnak, and her infant son Natak. And I'm saying referred to because we obviously don't know what their actual names are. We only know what names were reported for them, so it might not be their original names. He takes them back to Bristol, shows them off to local people. They are the first indigenous North American people to ever visit the uk, but they don't survive very long. They all three of them die very soon after they land in the uk. Coleco, possibly from injuries from the abduction, but Arnak and her son from an infection, maybe measles.

[Greg 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 Pennock on the Colombian Exchange, which talked about those sort of movements of people and goods and ideas. But let's get back to slightly cheerier notes. Frobisher found some treasures.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Gotcha.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Unfortunately, it turned out to be fool's gold Again.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

No.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

I've heard of the movie Hudson Hawk and the Hudson river, and that's all my. Hudson's.

[Greg Jenner]

The Hudson River.

[Stu Goldsmith]

The Hudson river, yes. Yeah. Well, obviously he invented or fell in that river as a result, it was named for or after him.

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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. I've got nothing.

[Greg Jenner]

I enjoyed the attempt. Vanessa, why is this guy so famous? He gets a bay named after him, he gets a river named after him. That must mean he did something heroic. No?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. Well, he attempted the first ever overwintering in the Arctic. So the idea was to sail up, stay in the ice over the winter, and then 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And if you've got why they're going to stay over winter, we're here now. And see what happens when it melts.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 three because the ice will melt. So that's why people keep getting lost and confused, because it's really hard what it's going to look like in the summer when you're there in the winter, and vice versa.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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 found land or not.

[Greg 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Ah. What was the name of the vessel, please?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

It was the Discovery.

[Stu Goldsmith]

That was the Discovery.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

1610.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, presumably they won. Yes, Gotcha.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Apparently such a great name. Sorry, Abacut Prickett.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

It's pretty much exactly that. He basically said that there was some rumor 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, 700 crew members were put in a small boat with supplies and kind of sent off into Hudson's Bay to fend for themselves. And the Discovery sailed home with everybody else.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

And the upshot is that Henry Hudson is left to die and is never seen again. And never seen again.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And they're never seen again.

[Greg 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 in they name it after you. Like, there's a sort of awkwardness there.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Nice. Lovely link.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Sure. The stories are gonna 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 Munch, who was sent out by the Danish king, and that one's just notable because he lost all three of his crew due to scurvy and came back. So that was 1619. So there's a little bit of a lull in the 17th century. People aren't trying for the Northwest Passage for obvious reasons, because they've heard about Jens Munch, presumably, 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.

[Greg 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Why fur? 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.

[Greg 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?

[Stu Goldsmith]

And he finds? The Northwest Passage.

[Greg Jenner]

He's looking for it.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Special way on land? Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. He wants it. He's basically gonna get his 10,000 steps in and then some.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Whoa. For charity.

[Greg 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, it's not just one man on his own, is it?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. And it'd be using the resources, 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.

[Greg 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 I. You know.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Okay, 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Gotcha. Yes. Okay, good. Tomorrow we strike out the Death Valley. Can we not?

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, he was an ex Hudson's Bay Company employee. So he's one of those people who got the 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 boats in the Hudson's bay in the 1990s.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, really?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Wow.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

They sunk.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I think it's more nice that we found them. I mean, there's some lovely artifacts and things being brought up. But as we'll discover, it's often the case that when you bring up a shipwreck, it. It poses more questions than it answers. Like why on earth were they here? What were they doing?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Were they lost? Or was this the plan all along?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes. And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover, and if she is caught, she's going to be shot. Join me for more stories of unsung.

[Greg Jenner]

Heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

From World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, next on the list is your dead to me's previous subject, Captain James Cook. Okay, you must know the name, presumably, Stu.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Of course. I've heard of Captain Cook.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, good.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Captain James T. Cook.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. And Starship Enterprise. 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Not really. He has exactly the same experience in that he tries going through the Bering Sea and then discovers a wall of ice, retreats back for restocking, and unfortunately, this is when he lands in Hawaii in 1779 and gets murdered. So not a good outcome, but at least he didn't sink, I guess.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

His second in command, Charles Clark, takes over. They go up, they have another go through the Bering Strait, still find ice. And it's actually one of his crew members, George Vancouver. I think the name is a clue here. 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 will never be free of ice. Like, there's no way to pop out on the Pacific side because it'll always be frozen.

[Greg Jenner]

So 1779, Cook dies. George Vancouver says this is just not going to happen. We've got to stop. 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 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. Yep. Russia's in Alaska.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Russia used to own Alaska.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. For a very long time.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Wow. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

And also we've just had the Napoleon 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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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. So whoever had this. I'm gonna get some land for this idea. Yeah. Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

1867 is the Alaska Purchase. So pretty close with 1880. I think that's in the ballpark, isn't it? We have have a kind of post Napoleonic change of, of purpose for the Royal Navy, which means now the nave is no longer private companies, it's now the Navy, the Admiralty. And so Barrow is, he's off his expeditions in 1818. And do they succeed?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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. Right, Good.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. This really, this episode is all about failure to traverse the Northwest Passage in many ways. So far, so far I Failed to pronounce the Northwest Passage there. So I can't really.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

What's drag sea shanty?

[Greg Jenner]

I'm up for that.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Drag sea shanty competition.

[Greg Jenner]

Nice.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Surely 32 drag artists whittle them down.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes, lovely.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. I mean, that's pretty good.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh my God. Please let it be a drag sea Santi competition.

[Greg Jenner]

RuPaul's Northwest Passage Arctic. Vanessa, was Britain alone in organising these artsy explorations in the kind of 1820s, 30s, you know, that sort of post Napoleonic time?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

This is the reason for the word allegedly. What they're doing is. Hey guys, we're just doing research in it.

[Greg Jenner]

No, really just meteorology, just really into clouds.

[Stu Goldsmith]

These aren't rifles. It's a complex tripod.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure, 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 Franklin 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 are 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 that he was really well known as an Arctic explorer. At this point, he seems to be bored at home and he asked to be reposted. And in 1837, he's sent out to be the Lieutenant Governor of Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known then. This does not go well for him. This is a very violent, rough penal colony. There's terrible treatment of the prisoners. There had been the mass killings and almost extermination of the Aboriginal people there. He does not manage this particularly well. Neither he nor his wife seem to get on with the local politicians or power players or the press. They aren't able to bring in any of the reforms they want. And in the end, he kind of is relieved from the post in about 1843 and he's coming home under a bit of a cloud.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

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. Oh, so he quits in somewhere called Van Diemen, which is awesome. Sounds like the Scooby gang would have a field day with that.

[Greg 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

He's not even close, really. Barrow has a list of alternative people, all with Arctic experience, who he wants, but they pretty much most of them turn it down. At least one of them turned it down because apparently he'd promised his wife he'd never go back to the Arctic again. One of them is turned down by the admiralty for being too young and he kind of ends up with his last choice of Franklin, who is 59 at this point, fresh back from Tasmania, really keen to sort of get back his reputation, which he feels has been tarnished by what's happened. So on the 19th of May 1845, the HMS Erebus under Franklin and the HMS Terror under Crozier. Crozier had been offered the position to lead and he'd apparently turned it down out of modesty. So those two guys.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

He was offered the chance to lead.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

To leave the expedition but he was.

[Stu Goldsmith]

In charge of the other boat.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah, he's in charge of the second.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Boat and he was told to lead and he said no, he said nah, you were last choice, it should be you.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. 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 at the bottom of the list. The other guy wanted the job, was offered the job but turned the job down out of modesty and is now second in charge. Meanwhile they've named their ships.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Was he Jarrad Harris in the Terror? He might be, yeah, I think he was.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

It is just up from Lane naming your ship the Last Choice and the Albatross.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Why would they? Do we have any information on what? Like who would have named it? Would have been Queen Victoria or would it have been the Admiralty?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

These are naval ships, so it's probably the Admiralty. So they're striking terrorists?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes, 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.

[Greg Jenner]

So Crozier is captaining the Terror and Franklin is captaining the, the Erebus and the overall mission and off they, off they go. And these are not ordinary naval ships, they're naval vessels.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah, but they've been souped up basically. So they've got an internal central heating system that's steam powered and they have these very fancy powerful screw propellers that are reinforced with steel and they're supposed to enable the ships to actually pass through at least loose pack ice. So do a bit of ice breaking as well.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

They have sails. The screw is a backup.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. It's a backup. Okay. But this is the new technology. This is a Victorian engine. Coal.

[Stu Goldsmith]

We're chucking coal in it to turn. To turn this group.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, yeah, yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Okay.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

This is a problem, though.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Tin food, definitely. And the issue is that they're planning at quite short notice. So the tins have to be made really, really quickly. And the suppliers, even Gold, 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

That can't be bad lead in your food. There's gonna be no side effects from that.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

That's all, I imagine, there in the hole.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Just relax in the Terror.

[Greg Jenner]

So Stephen Goldner is the provisions officer who just sort of basically just sold us 8,000 tins of meat and then goes, it's probably fine. Okay, that's great.

[Stu Goldsmith]

I mean, he's probably working under the basis that it's not gonna come back to him if there's something wrong. I wonder if that was a concern. And 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 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?

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yes.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Very leady.

[Greg 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?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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 want 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. 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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. Perfect.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And that's only one of the reasons I've never been asked to be quartermaster.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Be made of beeswax, you could probably eat it. It's better than eating boots, right? It's probably edible.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, fair enough.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

No. Well, sort. Fray bentos is about 1880. It's a little bit later, but it would.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, my God, you're good.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

And to salted fruit.

[Greg Jenner]

And to find a scurvy, it's gonna be citrus fruits.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Is it citrus fruits? There's lime juice and lemon juice. 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Those 8,000 tins are gonna weigh a hell of a lot.

[Greg Jenner]

Right? 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 steam with sail and steam powered ships. So they're designed to sort of plow 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 off for the job, but took it anyway. And off we go with our lovely voyage. Talk us through it.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

So we stop at Ory for some fresh water, and then we finally sail on to Greenland where we go to Disco Bay, call up, bring in some fresh.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Is this drag show happening or what? We're at Disco Bay in Greenland. How are we spelling disco with a K?

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, you've ruined it.

[Stu Goldsmith]

It's even cooler. It's more kind of 80s d I.

[Greg Jenner]

S, k O. Yeah.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Oh.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, let's put a downer on it.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

And Franklin tells them that there's going to be no swearing and no drinking on the expedition. No drunkenness.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Stu Goldsmith]

How to motivate your crew. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Another mutiny, perhaps they get food, they get water, off they go, they come to Greenland and then what? What?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

I did think the BBC drama that I saw had certain elements to it which A, didn't seem pretty provable and B, how would you find out anyway?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, you mean the famous snooker scene?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yeah, 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?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Okay.

[Stu Goldsmith]

So we just don't know.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, we do have a sighting in July 1845. There's two whaling ships, Prince of Wales and Enterprise. Both better names.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Good days. They spot the expedition in Baffin Bay where their whole up waiting for slightly better weather to continue. And that is the last time that any Europeans see the ships or the crew.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Wow. And up to now, like have we.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Up until very recently?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yeah, gotcha.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Okay.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Spoilers. There's stuff coming.

[Greg Jenner]

We'll come to stuff later.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 cans, but it's got a can inside it because you use a metal box or a wooden box.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Very lower.

[Greg Jenner]

Low, isn't it?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I mean, what we don't know they banish. 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.

[Greg Jenner]

So this is Sir John's wife?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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. 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. They've actually successfully gone sitting pretty on.

[Stu Goldsmith]

A big pile of cash and whale meat, all hiding from their wives.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

The the Admiralty also agree 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 fates.

[Greg Jenner]

You get double the money to assist.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

But only to help happen. Yeah, double the money if they're alive and you help for 10k if you happen to know what happened.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

That was normal?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

That was completely normal. So even with no word back after three years, the chances are that it could still be alive in the Arctic and they weren't going to put all their resources and money into finding them if they were just happily safe.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

So they set out in 1845.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

The Prince of Wales. 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

We each need a plan of some.

[Greg Jenner]

Kind 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?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 Beechey 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 45 to 46. But they still didn't know what had happened to them or to the rest of the crews after that.

[Greg 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, but there was no cairn, there was no. Yeah. No information on the men and someone buried them. So those people are alive.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yes, at that stage, they were definitely alive sometime in 1846.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, I see what you mean. Yes.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

They just sent letters home.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 sight nine years, traces of them. Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

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 Rae?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yeah. So the main work done in the 1850s, trying to look for Franklin is this Scottish explorer, John Rae. 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And did they tin each other?

[Greg Jenner]

Well, that's the thing the kettle is for. It's A boy boiling meat, Right?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Cooking each other in a kettle.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Think like fish kettle.

[Stu Goldsmith]

I don't know what that is.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, I see. Not a kettle kettle as I understand it, but like a boiling thing. They found a cauldron, effectively with human body parts in it. Yeah, but I mean, that seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

It's not great, is it?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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, cannibalized them. So you can't say it was all of them cannibalizing.

[Greg 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, that's a very difficult thing for people to hear. Is that the last word on the, on the expedition then, Vanessa? I mean, you know, Nine years it's been missing. A report has been issued. The public has scandalized the Admiralty, presumably in the. Well, do they get chastised and criticized or is this bad luck?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

It's just bad luck. It's another one of the expeditions. Most of them had failed at this point, but, 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. Crowdfunds.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, in order to find, like to prove that there wasn't cannibalism, effectively.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Okay, yes, okay, yes. So she's, she sends out an expedition. In 1857, it sails out of Aberdeen and that one finds some certainty. In 1859 it discovers the cairn, the one I mentioned. It has a note inside it which is the last written note of the expedition. It's known as the Victory Point note and it is in King William island, as John Rainey had suggested. The Victory Point note is actually two separate notes. So it's one note that's written in May 1847 that says everything's well and then there's one written in April 1848 that says, no, everything's really bad now. So there 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 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 one. 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.

[Greg Jenner]

So the survivors of the ship went overland and then just succumbed to cold.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Dehydration, cold, starvation, scurvy. There are 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

That is a drag show.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

That's super bleak. So was there any proof, yay or nay on the cannibalism besides that when she, when she found the, the note in the can, was there? Did it end? And no matter what anyone says, we definitely didn't eat Tony There was almost.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Certainly cannibalism of some of the members. Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. How far? Just remind me, how far did they get in terms of the Northwest Passage?

[Greg Jenner]

King William Island.

[Stu Goldsmith]

King William. Whereabouts is that?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

This is not helpful for a podcast.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Sorry.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

About halfway. Maybe a third of the way.

[Stu Goldsmith]

A third of the way, yeah. So into Baffin Bay and then into the belly of the beast and one.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

They just asked for more food and fatter savings.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

They took the opposite approach. It's Rol 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

So 1906, it finally gets there.

[Greg 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, but not for a large boat. Oh, of course, of course. So the whole point of it is.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Still you can't trade in a small kayak to China, so.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Well, no. Unless.

[Greg Jenner]

Have you got any porcelain? What is saffron? What?

[Stu Goldsmith]

So small.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Musk probably would be the best.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Plutonium.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. Something really. Oh, too heavy. At what point does trade happen via that route, if ever?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Well, the Cargo ships are 2008, so it's late 2008. We invented planes and then it didn't matter so much.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

So 1497, John Cabot had charged. 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 pointless.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Well, tune in next week.

[Greg 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. So.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 testim, 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 fire died.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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, yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

That's actually part of the problem is that the levels of lead recorded in the hair over time don't quite match with when they should have been eating the tins. So maybe it wasn't that. So even that is in dispute. And a lot of hope was pinned on finding the boats, because if we get the boats, then we'll get the answers. They were declared a National Historic Site for Canada in 1992, and that's before they were found. So they were a historic site and no one knew where they were, which I think is quite fun. And it's again, with indigenous tests 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg 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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Funny, that became a department department store, did it? Yeah, Hudson's Bay Company.

[Stu Goldsmith]

But that's not the actual Hudson's Bay Company. She's giving me a look, everyone. Is it really?

[Helena Bonham Carter]

I believe it takes its roots from there. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Stu Goldsmith]

So the. Wow, guys, we're going to retail. Golly.

[Greg Jenner]

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.

[Stu Goldsmith]

With our various drag outfits.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly for two minutes while Professor Dot 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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 horizons, same companions, 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 send people out to do science. They can take the weather measurements, they can draw, you know, draw up maps and things like that. But it's not enough. We also need arts and crafts. So you're going to have some men who are going to be painting, they're going to be sketching they're going to be whittling, they're going to be singing. But these ships also put on, for example, extravagant theatrical productions with full sets, costumes, and brand new musical songs. Now, Sissy, that mission, they also produce what we call zines. So amateur magazines that would have satirical plays and poems and drawings and cartoons 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 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. 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 like to emphasize 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.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Chief morale Officer.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

Let's not kill Stu. He's full of ideas. Yeah. I mean, it's extraordinary and a really important point, isn't it? The idea of a team leader is someone who has to be able to get people through the boring Tuesdays as well as through the storms and the hurricanes. Yeah, really interesting.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yes. And if you're, 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 anyone.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know? Now, this is our quickfire quiz for Stu to see how much he's learned.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg Jenner]

You've got extensive notes there.

[Stu Goldsmith]

They are pretty extensive. And there are 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.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

I think I've done eight pages.

[Greg Jenner]

Got ten questions for you.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

You're always very good at this.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Question one. Stu.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Yep.

[Greg Jenner]

Question one. Giovanni di Verrazzano thought he had found the northwest passage in 1523. But where was he actually?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Where was he actually?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, he was 3,000 miles away in 1523. Home of Blackbeard.

[Stu Goldsmith]

He was in Bristol. No, sorry, you just said home of Blackbeard. That's a different question.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, later. Home of Blackbeard.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, later. Home of Blackbeard. He was in the Caribbean.

[Greg Jenner]

North Carolina. North Carolina.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Carolina.

[Greg Jenner]

Sorry.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Where's that one? I've written it down somewhere.

[Greg Jenner]

That's back on page one of the notes.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, God. No, it is. It is. I can literally see it now.

[Greg Jenner]

Question 2. Why did Henry Hudson's crew stage a mutiny against him in 1610?

[Stu Goldsmith]

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

[Greg Jenner]

That's just what they said. Yeah. Yeah, that's correct. Question 3. Which island did Captain Cook encounter when seeking the Northwest Passage? And that is where he died.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Hawaii.

[Greg Jenner]

It was Hawaii. Question 4.

[Stu Goldsmith]

What.

[Greg Jenner]

What were the names of Franklin Expedition's two ships?

[Stu Goldsmith]

The Erebus or. Erebus and the Terror.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. Terrible names for ships. Question 5. How were Indigenous communities able to traverse the Northwest Passage? And also later Amundsen Sleds.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And Mostly sleds.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And small.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Small boats.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Small boats with skin. Yeah. Animal skins. That's right. Question 6. Who was the first woman to be awarded the Royal Geographical Society's founder's medal in 1860?

[Stu Goldsmith]

That was Lady Franklin.

[Greg Jenner]

It was Lady Jane Franklin. Question 7. What supplies might have contributed to the Franklin crew's eventual death?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Well, sort of lead. Lead in the tins. Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Contamination. That's right.

[Stu Goldsmith]

From lead in the tins.

[Greg Jenner]

That's right. Question 8. What was the victory point note?

[Stu Goldsmith]

It was left in a cairn.

[Greg Jenner]

Yep.

[Stu Goldsmith]

And it. I'm gonna refer to my notes. So I did write it down. The victory point note was 1859. It was left in a cairn. And it. Yep, that's what that was on King William Island.

[Greg Jenner]

It was. And it was Franklin's death being reported. But I'll let you have that. Question nine. Which famous. No. Denounced the Inuit reports of cannibalism on the Franklin expedition?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Dickens.

[Greg Jenner]

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

[Stu Goldsmith]

Amundsen.

[Greg Jenner]

Nine out of ten. Very good, Stewart.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Oh, no. But it fell apart, the beginning. You threw me with the Blackbeard thing. Can you chuck me another question and we can cut that first one out? I won't look them up. I'm put on the floor. Hit me with any question off the.

[Greg Jenner]

Top of my head.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Go on.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. What was the original name of John Cabot?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Ah. Joan Venezia Ciboti. Ciboti. Ciabotti.

[Greg Jenner]

Ciabatti. Ciabatti.

[Stu Goldsmith]

One of the Venetian version of John Cabot. Joan Ciabotti.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, there we go. Come on, we'll have it. Zuan Ciabotto.

[Stu Goldsmith]

Gibboto. Yeah, I meant Giovotto.

[Greg Jenner]

10 out of 11. Stuart mix.

[Stu Goldsmith]

10 out of 11. The legacy continues.

[Greg 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?

[Stu Goldsmith]

Really, I've enjoyed it enormously.

[Greg 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 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 youo're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear these episodes first because they come out a month earlier on BBC Sounds. Switch on your notifications, otherwise you won't be told. Just like to say a huge thank thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the incredible Dr. Vanessa Heggie from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Vanessa.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

Thank you for inviting me.

[Greg Jenner]

Pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we have the Stupendous Stu Goldsmith. Thank you, Stu.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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.

[Greg 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 tinned food and scrub my kettle. Bye. This episode of youf're Dead to Me was researched by Matt Ryan. It was written by Matt Ryan, Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollends. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagus. And our executive editor was James Cook. You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio.

[Stu Goldsmith]

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, the 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 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.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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

[Greg Jenner]

Heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage.

[Stu Goldsmith]

From World War II.

[Helena Bonham Carter]

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