The book traces the history of HMS Erebus from its launch from a dockyard in Wales in 1826 to its groundbreaking sighting (along with HMS Terror) of the Antarctic continent in 1841 to its final — and fateful — voyage into the Canadian Arctic as part of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845.

“I started to read about what this little ship had achieved, and the more I read, the more admiring I became of men like James Clark Ross and his crew and what they achieved with Erebus, particularly on their Antarctic journey,” said Palin. “It was four years and an amazing amount of information was gathered that no one had ever known before. These were guys going into the unknown, and I just found the image of this little ship going off down through the icefields of the Antarctic extraordinarily powerful. What they did and what the ship represented inspired me a great deal.”

Palin’s Ottawa appearance capped the two-city Canadian leg of his North American promotional tour for Erebus. On Wednesday night in Toronto, 400 people lined up around the block to see him at The Opera House.  

As he did in Toronto, Palin spoke for more than an hour in Ottawa before fielding audience questions on everything from how he came to write about Erebus (he became intrigued while researching a talk on Joseph Hooker, who was the assistant surgeon and botanist on the ship when it sailed to the Antarctic in 1839) to what he thought about a forensic artist reconstructing the faces of crew members of the Franklin expedition (in a word, brilliant).

Clip: Portraits of the Franklin expedition