There's something about the overwhelming emptiness and terrifying beauty of the polar regions that never fails to attract. They are the most powerful symbols we have left of a world where human-made laws and values count for nothing; no one conquers the frozen wastelands--they merely learn to live by the rules nature dictates. It is easy to see how for a long time the lives of the polar explorers were shrouded in quasi-mystical and heroic terms. This all changed in the 1970s with the publication of Roland Huntford's magnificent biography of Scott and Amundsen, now called The Last Place on Earth, in which he systematically and methodically revealed the levels of incompetence and arrogance with which Scott's expedition was riddled. In Barrow's Boys Fergus Fleming takes us on an incisive and witty journey through the landmark years of British exploration from 1816 to 1850, marveling at both the bravery and the stupidity involved. Fleming is a historian first and foremost, so he begins by placing exploration in its context. It wasn't some high-minded idealism or wacky sense of adventure, as is often suggested, that placed Britain at the forefront of discovery, but economics and self-interest. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, the British Navy was too large for its peacetime needs. Officers were laid off and advancement was slow, so the Navy needed to find itself a role. Charting the unmapped areas of the world seemed as good an idea as any.
Step forward John Barrow. Barrow was only the Second Secretary at the Admiralty--not normally a position of great influence--yet he was a skilled politician, and he managed to carve out a niche for himself by organizing expedition after expedition. He started inauspiciously by sending Captain James Tuckey off on an ill-fated jaunt up the Congo in search of "Timbuctoo," which was at that time imagined as some African El Dorado, and he ended in failure with the loss of Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage. In between he courted triumph and tragedy; Ross discovered Antarctica, Parry opened up the Arctic with his attempt on the Pole, and Captain Bremer failed to establish northern Australia as the new Singapore.
Fleming has a great feel for the telling detail. He doesn't get lost in endless minutiae that distract from the narrative, but he never fails to remind us of the surrealism of British 19th-century exploration--cocked hats and reindeer-drawn sledges in the Arctic, frock coats in the Sahara. When put like this, it makes it all too easy to see how Scott could have been allowed to botch his journey to the South Pole quite so catastrophically. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
From Library Journal
With no enemy to fight after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the British Navy was drastically reduced. Ships were laid up and crews discharged; thousands of officers lingered on the beach on half pay with nothing to do. John Barrow, second secretary of the Royal Navy, was also an enthusiastic supporter of travel and exploration and a writer for the geographical press. He had the brilliant idea of using some of the idle ships and men to explore the world, which in the early 19th century had not been adequately mapped. What was at the North Pole? Was there a Northwest Passage? What lay at the heart of Africa? From 1816 to 1857, Barrow organized 30 expeditions; many were unsuccessful, but they did fill in some blank areas of the globe. In his extensively researched effort, Fleming follows each exploring party. The result will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in true adventure; Fleming has saved John Barrow from undeserved neglect. For all public and academic libraries.
-Stanley Itkin, Hillside P.L., NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The literature of exploration flowered after the Napoleonic Wars as such British captains as Parry, Ross, and Franklin published their journals. Fleming has not only reshaped the material but also given it fine coherence by revolving the story of British exploration from 1815 to 1850 around the bureaucrat who directed it. For most of those years, John Barrow was in harness as second secretary of the Admiralty, deciding where expeditions would go and who would lead them. Fleming's fields of narrative are the Arctic, Antarctic, and Niger River, blank areas of the map to which Barrow sent a variety of outsize and often eccentric characters. Many of them merit a book (as has Franklin and his 1845 expedition's disappearance, in Iceblink by Scott Cookman ), so Fleming excels by fitting so much material into a vibrant volume that never flags. As to Barrow, Fleming rates him intelligent but churlish, more apt to question expenses than to praise discoveries. This well-conceived rendering of exploration epics will surely ride the high tide of interest in adventure. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
Enthralling survey of the 19th century's Golden Age of British exploration, when, coerced and sometimes cursed by the powerful navy bureaucrat John Barrow, Englishmen and the occasional mad dog endured the noonday suns of Antarctica, Timbuktu, and the frozen Canadian north. Newcomer Fleming, a former Time-Life Books editor, traces England's courageous, bumbling and frequently tragic urge to explore the world to the will of Barrow, who, as Second Secretary of the Admiralty for the first half of the 19th century, gazed at the blank spaces on his charts and commissioned unemployed navy personnel to fill them in. After personally selecting lonely St. Helena as Napoleon's final home, Barrow, himself a world traveler who had visited China and South Africa as a youth, became obsessed with West Africa's River Niger and the mythical treasure city of Timbuktu. He also wanted to map a legendary sea passage through Canada's Arctic Circle and determine if there was, in fact, such a place as Antarctica. A sarcastic, opinionated snob, Barrow ignored the advice of whalers and experienced seamen who were not naval officers, and sent such immortals as William Parry, John and nephew James Ross, the hapless John Franklin and other navymen eager for money and fame on ill-equipped, badly planned expeditions that typically ended in failure (John Ross mistook an open channel for a bay), disaster (James Ross and his crew spent four years marooned on ice) and starvation (before perishing in the Arctic, Franklin was briefly famous as ``the man who ate his boots''), if not disease and death. Those who survived found themselves shunned by Barrow when their findings disproved his pet theories, which were, more often than not, wrong. In a series of short, witty, breathlessly thrilling chapters, Fleming deftly summarizes each adventure, celebrating every dramatic, ironic, and tragic moment. Top-drawer historical fiction. (First printing of 40,000) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
