The frozen south

[shewhomust]

I am currently reading Michael Palin's Erebus. I seem not to have posted about how I came by this book, which I had been looking for in charity shops since it first came out: surely this would be a popular Christmas gift, and numerous copies would be discarded not long after? At the point where it came out in paperback, I mentioned to the bookseller at the market that I was losing faith in this theory, and that it looked as if I would have to buy the paperback new; he looked startled, and asked me to repeat the title, before reaching behind his seat to produce, with a flourish, a clean, new, dust-jacketed copy which had only just come into his stock.

I have reached the description of Ross's second voyage into the Antarctic. They have escaped from the ice in which they had been trapped, and are in open water:

The cold was intense. A 11/2 inch rope swelled with ice to at least 1 foot in circumference. When the sea broke over the decks, the men on watch, or the helmsmen at the wheel (there was no covered wheelhouse on either ship) were transformed into moving lumps of ice. One morning, as ice was being chipped away from the bows, a fish was found perfectly frozen to the side of the ship. It was removed with great care, thawed out and, as a sketch was about to be made to record this phenomenon, the ship's cat leapt forward and ate it.

Soon after, the expedition reached the Falkland Islands. Naturalist Joseph Hooker wrote home to his father "Such a wretched place as this you never saw," and I thought of helenraven.