Barrow’s Boys

Barrow’s Boys – Fergus Fleming.

Barrow is John Barrow, desk explorer supremo, Second Secretary to the Admiralty in a 19th Century Britain.

The threat of Napoleon had retreated and the British Navy had a manpower issue.  The jack-tar could be thrown back onto the streets, but the officers had to have something to do.

1 in 4 of what was left of the Navy were officers.  The vast majority were on half pay.

The answer for John Barrow was to fill in the blanks on the map and claim them for the British Empire before foreigners did.  He was most concerned about johnny-foreigner planting a flag where a Union Jack should be.

Science was the convenient cover-story for most of it (still is).  Much of the science was conducted by those who were scientists in name only.

Often it seemed these expeditions were sent out for the express purpose of just naming bits of land after supporters and family.  Even instances of extra islands being drawn on the map so everyone got an island named after them was employed.  Other explorers were left to work out the details of the actual existence.

Naval officers saw all this as a ready means of promotion, without the traditional means, neatly encapsulated in the toast “For a  bloody war or a sickly season” the young officers were forestalled in ambition.

Barrow though had agenda’s.  He seemed to have a pretty fixed idea of what the blanks in the map should look like and if his explorers returned with different ideas their future was not as rosy as might be expected.

Given his fixed ideas of what was at the North Pole and where the NW passage should be were wrong considerable tension ensued.

Some of his best explorers were sidelined or mothballed and some of the worst were sent out again and again to repeat past folly.  Qualification was by patronage although every now and then someone that knew what they were doing seemed to have accidently been sent.

If Barrow did not start out with the wrong impression, more often than not he would soon form one based on some flimsy report from an expedition.

Barrow was one of the original leading lights of what was to become the Royal Geographical Society and would use its publications to pour scorn on those he disagreed with.  He never seemed to run out of targets.

Barrow’s Boys is brimmed with research and Fergus Fleming never seems short of an esoteric quote.  The book is easy reading and runs at a good pace, always engaging, oft darkly funny.

Ill-equipped explorers with barely the first idea of privations they are letting themselves in for are recounted.  Most were not helped by the penny pinching that went on and the fact many signed up not for pay, but for the hope of future promotions.  Some of the African adventurers seemed to have set out more in the spirit of a day hike with a picnic (as long as the locals provided the picnic, failing that you could always eat your shoes.).

Throughout you shake your head at the absurdity of some of this but these were brave men pushing the boundaries of the known world.  The fact they were flawed and many doomed to failure makes their efforts no less remarkable just more human.

A good read if you want to have a peak behind the Boy’s Own adventure stories.