Barrow鈥檚 Boys by Fergus Fleming, Granta, 拢20.00, ISBN 186207173X
IN the first half of the 19th century, British explorers set out to fill the gaps in their maps of the globe. They searched for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, the shores of Antarctica, and for the course of the Rivers Niger and Timbuktu. Most of this intrepid band were sent by one man: John Barrow, the Second Secretary at the Admiralty between 1804 and 1845.
Barrow was the father of global exploration. No campaign of exploration so captured the public鈥檚 imagination until NASA set off for the Moon. But he was a man of obsessions, vendettas, a tenuous grasp of geography and a penchant for sending men on ill-conceived journeys. His 鈥渂oys鈥� died trying to prove that the Arctic was an open ocean with a rocky pinnacle at the North Pole, to show that the River Niger in West Africa crossed the Sahara and flowed into the Nile, or that the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific was navigable.
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Luckily for him, Barrow was a spin doctor of distinction. When John Franklin staggered home after most of his crew starved to death seeking the Northwest Passage, Barrow repackaged him as 鈥渢he man who ate his boots鈥�. This was true, but others in his party had tasted human flesh.
Barrow edited his boys鈥� journals to hush up this excursion into cannibalism and other disasters and scandals such as their duels over Indian girls and the purchase of slaves. And he used his unsigned column in The Quarterly Review to pursue feuds against those he fell out with, such as the Arctic captain John Ross.
Fergus Fleming鈥檚 Barrow鈥檚 Boys is a rollicking good read. You鈥檒l discover unsung heroes too, such as Richard Lander. He was the manservant who discovered the true course of the Niger in double-quick time once his master, Hugh Clapperton, who had been crippled by ill-fitting new boots, died on him.
Some of the gruesome tales are worthy of Rider Haggard. On a journey to Lake Chad, Walter Oudney tramped for days on a road so thick with the skeletons of dead slaves 鈥渢hat the party moved with an audible crunching sound鈥� In places the skeletons lay in drifts 100 feet deep鈥�. In the Arctic, men lived for weeks on lichen.
There is a little scientific discovery. Barrow鈥檚 boys found that, contrary to popular belief at the time, the aurora borealis is silent. And that Africans were practising vaccination, 鈥渂y inserting into the flesh the sharp point of a dagger charged with the disease鈥� long before Europeans got round to the idea.
But in the final pages we return to the macabre with the insanity of Barrow鈥檚 last act before retirement: sending Franklin, who was then 60 years old, off on a final attempt to find the Northwest Passage. The story of the eventual discovery of the remains of Franklin鈥檚 expedition, cut down by disease and sustained only by cannibalism, is a brutal epitaph to the Admiralty puppetmaster, for whom, as Fleming concludes, 鈥渆very single goal had proved worthless in the finding鈥�. Barrow鈥檚 hoped-for gateways to African trade, via Timbuktu and the course of the Niger, proved to be mirages. And he never found his Northwest Passage whose pursuit, says Fleming, has become 鈥渁n eternal symbol of futility鈥�.
鈥淧erhaps no man in the history of exploration has expended so much money and so many lives in pursuit of so desperately pointless a dream.鈥� But what a marvellous madness.