Whimpering in my bunk, I am a cowardly maggot compared to Shackleton and his men, who, after their ship was trapped by pack ice in the Weddell Sea, spent seventeen months drifting helplessly through an Antarctic winter, dragging sleds across ice floes, and finally rowing and sailing a tiny lifeboat 870 miles through these same waters to a whaling station on South Georgia Island. And they did it all without patches. Fighting the drowsiness that is a side effect of the drug, I sit on the ship's bridge, watching the rain spatter on the windows and the gray ocean roll by at 12 knots. We have crossed the Antarctic Convergence, the beginning of true polar waters. A few hours later, we sight our first iceberg, a massive floating mesa of ice a half mile square and 200 feet high, big and flat enough to land an F-14.
Penguins appear off the starboard bow, leaping out of the water like tiny porpoises.
First landfall is Deception Island, a volcanic atoll about 40 miles off the Antarctic Peninsula. Its inner caldera is connected to the sea by a channel barely wide enough to accept our ship. Mountain Travel has issued for our shore excursions. We meet our first penguins the next day at Cuverville Island. These comical creatures quickly charm us with their earnest waddling and astonishing indifference to our presence.