Erebus. Michael Palin

to inspect them.

      Not that the ladies of Hobart were exactly prudish. The contemporary Tasmanian historian Alison Alexander describes how the local rumour mill sought to account for the childlessness of their governor and his wife, leading to some forthright gossip during a meal at which Jane and John Franklin were clearly not present. ‘The ladies when they retired . . . were wondering why Sir John had no family. “Dear me,” said one of them . . . “don’t you know! I always heard his members got frostbitten when he went to the North pole”.’

      Captain Ross, though top of many guest lists, was not one to fritter time away, and made it clear that his most urgent priority was to get an observatory up and running. The Franklins, keen to oblige, had anticipated this and had already assembled stores and materials, from plans sent out from England. The next morning Ross and Franklin selected a suitable spot. A small quarry-working near Government House had revealed a deep bed of sandstone rock, which Ross judged to be the perfect base for the observatory, as sandstone has no magnetic properties that might interfere with the readings. That very afternoon a party of 200 convicts was set to work to dig the foundations.

      Erebus and Terror, meanwhile, were moved upriver to a small, quiet cove away from the main bustle of the harbour and conveniently close to the grounds of Government House. It was later given the name Ross Cove, and it hasn’t changed much.

      I’m there in 2017. It’s June, a couple of months before Erebus and Terror would have been in port, and I’m spending several days in Hobart, staying at the Henry Jones Art Hotel, one of a row of low and harmonious nineteenth-century buildings beside the harbour, with stone-dressed walls and low-pitched red roofs. Set back from the water, the façades look attractive in scale and colour, almost Venetian in the low morning sunlight. The remains of chunky painted lettering on the wall read: ‘H Jones and Co Pty Ltd. IXL Jams’. This was once the factory for one of Hobart’s most successful export businesses. The ‘IXL’ trademark was a play on founder Henry Jones’s motto, ‘I excel at everything.’

      And the business lived up to the motto. Tinned fruits from Tasmania were sent all over the world, exuberantly described and brightly labelled: Choice Cling Peaches, Sliced in Heavy Syrup; Boomerang Brand, Tasmanian Fancy Apples. It was Britain joining the European Union and abandoning Commonwealth trade preferences that did for H. Jones, and the company no longer exists.

      To get to Ross Cove, I walk a half-mile or so by the side of the busy Tasman Highway that links Hobart with the airport. I have to stop and get my camera out to take a shot of some eye-catching street art – two functional junction boxes painted in riotously colourful designs, featuring penguins and seals and albatrosses and long-haired vampy ladies. Antarctic chic. Art is booming in Hobart, stimulated by the huge success of MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, displayed in multi-level caves dramatically excavated out of the cliffs a few miles up the Derwent.

      Peeling off the main road, I cross a car park and scramble down towards a stretch of railway line running parallel with the water. My companion, Alison Alexander, fount of all knowledge on the history of Tasmania, and clutching her handbag, beckons me to follow her onto the track. It’s not used that often, she assures me, as she holds back a wire fence for me to squeeze through. A little way down the railway line, we turn off and cut through a small grove of newly planted trees to the waterside. ‘This is Ross Cove,’ Alison tells me. ‘They chose to moor up here because’ – she turns and points up to a flagpole on some turreted rooftops, which I can just see peeking over the trees – ‘it was the closest they could get to Government House. For unloading everything.’ And for getting Ross and Crozier to their dinners, no doubt.