Barrow's Boys

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the map of the world was littered with blanks; of the regions that had been ‘discovered’, there was still plenty to be learned.

John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty in 1816, decided to remedy this situation by sending out expeditions to some of the most inhospitable places on the planet. Some succeeded, others failed catastrophically.

Barrow was obsessed with Africa, and more particularly with discovering the course of the Niger. To this end, he sent the 'hot-tempered, red-bearded, pipe-smoking Clapperton' to Africa, with instructions to make his way to the Niger, find out what had happened to Mungo Park and then move on to Timbuctoo. He succumbed to dysentery. Captain Tuckey’s expedition up the River Congo was struck down by yellow fever. And Lieutenant George Lyon wandered out of the desert a year to the day after his trans-Saharan expedition to find the Niger had set off, the only survivor.

Barrow’s other obsessions were the polar regions and the North-West Passage. Numerous naval officers were sent out to claim these freezing wastes for Britain, among them the great explorers Franklin, Ross and Parry. They endured unimaginable privations, summed up neatly by one of Franklin’s diary entries from October 1821: “There was no tripes de roches [the explorers’ name for rock lichen] so we drank tea and ate some our shoes for supper.” Franklin survived, but died on a subsequent expedition.

In spite of these desperate disasters, progress was made: Gordon Laing became the first European to enter Timbuctoo (although he was murdered before he could get home), James Ross charted large portions of coastline in Antarctica and Richard and John Lander traced the Niger to its mouth. Fleming tells all these remarkable stories with flair and gentle amusement, bringing the heady optimism and sheer bloodymindedness of these very British nineteenth-century men vividly to life.