Yesterday I went to the local Canada Post office in Riverport, Nova Scotia to buy stamps for mail destined for the United States ($1.20 CDN + 15% tax each). I was disappointed to find no new commemoratives for international delivery, but I was pleased to find a Latin word on a new domestic issue to commemorate the H.M.S. Erebus, a ship that sank in 1848 on the Franklin expedition to find a Northwest Passage across northern Canada. The ship was discovered again last fall; you can learn more about the ship and the stamp itself here. The name Erebus is a Latinized form of the Greek Erebos (meaning “darkness”) considered in early mythology to be an offspring of Chaos, the primordial state of confusion. What a strange name for a ship! It reminds me of the (fictional) French ship, the Acheron, in the film Master and Commander (2003)) based on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels; Acheron is one of the five mythological rivers, the river of pain, in the ancient Greek underworld.
Darkness and pain—no happy ending for either of these ships. A famous Nova Scotian folksinger, Stan Rogers (1949-1983), wrote a song about the Franklin expedition on which the Erebus was lost:
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