Hammond Innes · 1991 · survival

Hammond Innes's 1991 novel. Notes found on the body of a glaciologist describe an old wooden ship locked in the Antarctic ice, seen from the air and never seen again. A wood specialist is recruited for the expedition sent to find her aboard the Isvik - a voyage south from Tierra del Fuego into the pack, and into the buried politics of Argentina's dirty war.

1. 1
   Punta Arenas

   At Punta Arenas on the Magellan Strait, the expedition assembles around the ice-strengthened Isvik and her mismatched crew, on the strength of a dead glaciologist's notes describing a sailing ship frozen into the Antarctic ice.

2. 2
   Ushuaia

   From Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, the last port before the Southern Ocean, they clear for the Drake Passage - the crew already uneasy with each other, and nobody entirely certain what the voyage is really for.

3. 3
   The Weddell Sea

   Deep in the Weddell pack the ship is found, iced in and intact, with what is aboard her preserved by the cold - and the expedition learns why some of its members came so far to reach a wreck nobody else believed in.