The Ice Takes the Ship
A commander learns that his calm is the last cargo he can spend
On the fourteenth of February, the ice closed around our ship as quietly as a hand closing around a coin.
For days we had watched the floes drift together, and I had told the men there was nothing to fear.
I had believed it myself, or had persuaded myself to believe it, which is not always the same thing.
Now the Perseverance sat motionless in a white plain that stretched, unbroken, to every horizon we could see.
The , when I inspected it, was already gripped by ice thick enough to bear the weight of a man.
A leader learns early that his face is read more closely than any instrument aboard the ship.
So I kept my expression as level as the frozen sea, and gave orders in an ordinary voice.
"We shall here," I said, "and go on when the releases us in the spring."
The men nodded, reassured less by my words than by the steadiness with which I spoke them.
Privately, I knew that no vessel of ours had ever survived a full season locked in such ice.
That night I wrote in my journal by the light of a single, lamp.
The pressure of the ice, I noted, made a sound unlike anything I had heard in twenty years at sea.
It groaned and shrieked, as though the floes were alive and quarrelling in a language of their own.
Twice the shuddered, and every man aboard fell silent, listening, until the shuddering passed.
Harding, my , came to my cabin and asked, very simply, whether we would live.
I told him what a commander must always tell a man he trusts: that we would do everything possible.
It was not quite a lie, and not quite the truth, and he understood both halves of it.
The dogs, sensing the change, howled through the long blue dusk that now passed for our afternoon.
I had come south to plant a flag and to write my name across an empty map.
of that kind, I was beginning to see, weighs nothing against a single night of moving ice.
The ship had cost a fortune to build, and had been called by wiser men than I.
But the sea does not read the newspapers, and the ice had never heard our confident speeches.
In the morning the men went about their duties, scrubbing decks that would freeze again within the hour.
Their moved me more than any triumph could have, and I resolved to be worthy of it.
I understood, dimly, that the expedition I had planned was already over, and another had silently begun.
The first had been a race toward glory, drawn in bold lines upon a chart.
The second would be quieter, and harder, and its only prize would be the lives of twenty-eight men.
I closed the journal, lowered the lamp, and listened to the ice deciding what to do with us.