Descent into the maelstrom

Twenty-seven men stand on ice, squinting into the glare. The ice is very wide and very long, but no-one mistakes it for land. A metre under their feet is the sea, and the sea moves, even when it’s still. They know they’re standing on the sea, and the sea is very deep.

They stare up at a figure on a wooden tower. He’s not tall but he’s solid. His shoulders bulk and hunch, like a bull with a scholarly stoop. He stands with legs braced, chin forward, peering through binoculars. Five minutes ago, trying not too obviously to rush, he climbed a three-runged wooden ladder to a square wooden platform, raised off the ice on low wooden stilts, and then a four-runged ladder to a smaller platform on top of a wooden column.

The tower isn’t high but on ice any height gives advantage, and the man has a line of sight southeast over snow hummocks and white ridges and sastrugi. On a clear day, if the tower were tall enough, he might see all the way over ice shelves and mountain ridges and snow planes to the South Pole, but for perhaps the first time in his life he isn’t looking to the horizon, he is looking just 3km to a black ship. The men on the ice watch the man on the platform as he watches.

The lines of the ship’s stern are still clean but most of her is underwater. There’s disorder on its her decks — ropes, spars, tools, someone’s thigh boot — and it has lost she’s lost her masts. She lists to the left, as some of the men would say, or to port, as the others would. It’s a little after 5pm and the southern summer sun bobs several fingers’ width above the horizon so it’s warm on the ice, perhaps as hot as 0°C. Some men have been working and as they stop to watch the watcher on the tower, sweat runs down their spines and chests, then freezes. There’s a light breeze from the south, but the term “windchill” won’t be invented for another 25 years.

The man is very still as he watches. It’s a very still scene: still men watching a still man who watches a ship frozen in mid-roll. Then, on invisible wires, her stern rises. She holds like that, stern high and black above the ice, then the whiteness seems to part and the black ship slides into it, and disappears.

The men are silent and the man on the tower can feel the weight of their watching. He knows the next words he says will matter. He looks again through the binoculars, but already the ice has closed. It’s his job now to offer the story of what this moment means, and so determine what will happen next. His own heart is pulling silently apart but there isn’t time for that. This is one of the moments of life when what is solid suddenly cracks and splits and opens, and it matters very much which way he jumps.

He has been preparing. He spent last night in his cramped tent reading the poems of Robert Browning for inspiration, though just half an hour ago he was reading Eothen by Alexander Kinglake, that great breezy Victorian tale of exploration in the dusty Levant. Tennyson might be fit to the moment, or maybe his favourite Browning, but perhaps Kinglake — serious but not self-serious, optimistic and funny, more interested in a good story than fact — is closer to his character.

(“A story may be false as a fact,” said Kinglake, “but perfectly true as an illustration.”)

The watching men know he has a habit of reciting dramatic lines at every opportunity, whether there’s an opportunity or not. Usually it’s annoying but now they’re ready. They’re as far away from the world as any human will be again until humans go into space. They are in space, adrift in space, alone and facing extinction in the cold, expanding, measureless reaches of a great and terrifying blankness, and there is no-one to rescue them. They are human beings, alone in the universe, infinitely weak and immeasurably strong, and they need to be led.

Shackleton lowers the binoculars and makes himself meet the gaze of the upturned faces. He says: “Well, boys, she’s gone.”

And then: “So now we’ll go home.”

• Bristow-Bovey will be talking to Michele Magwood about his book on Monday July 17 at Love Books in Melville.