As a whaler, my father was gone most of my childhood. I have few memories of him besides a few carved whale teeth, one into the shape of a penguin with a top hat and cane. And probably the most important the pictures he brought home of life on South Georgia and the fantastical images that showed the processing of these giant dead creatures. Photographs of whalers and their long deadly looking knife blades and the imagining of living in such a small community with all that oil, smoke and blood and no running water caught my imagination.

As a Norwegian girl, snow, the sea and figuring out what lay beyond the horizon seemed a normal part of life. Exploration seemed part of our genetic makeup for someone brought up hearing, and later reading to my own son, stories of the Vikings who traveled from Russia to the Middle-East and America. And then stories of Nansen and his MS Fram exploration of the North Pole and of course Amundsen who ‘borrowed’ that same ship for his unannounced and somewhat unwelcome trip to command the first team to the South Pole. Excitement, heroism and soap-opera drama seemed part of their world.

Later, when the International Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1989-1990 received so much publicity I thought again of what choosing such a challenging job would be like. I discovered Ernest Shackleton’s voyage of The Endurance and was hooked for life on dreams of life around the Southern limits of our world. For me that included South Georgia, as this was the usual staging place for the European explorers such as Shackleton and Amundsen. And maybe Scott should be included as well. His public relations machine certainly has him remembered fondly, although posthumously. Being a snob I never paid much attention to the Australian explorers until I read Mawson’s accounts. He changed my mind. He kept detailed journals and perhaps a little more objective accounts than some of the other explorers and certainly more objective than a few of the hero worshiping authors writing about the journeys of Scott or Amundsen. Although evaluating honesty and objectivity in a writer from one-hundred years away isn’t easy. And it’s strange to think of a man like Mawson, who was a young man in his prime at the time so long ago of his trips to the Antarctic continent, that he died three years after I was born.

The final influence on my interest in the South Atlantic Ocean was reading the books of Patrick O’Brian. He wrote twenty one historical fiction books about Jack Aubrey, a sea captain who sometimes ran into trouble hauling on frozen ropes around the 1800’s, at the start of the whaling industry. One of his stories had the ship in trouble barely surviving an encounter with an iceberg and ending up on here shore of Desolation Island finally rescued when a whaling ship came by and loaned them the use of their forge to fix their rudder. The accounts of the conditions of sailing ships two centuries ago gives me chills and makes me want to order room service, STAT.

But here I am, on my way to Ushuaia Argentina, as thestaging point for my three week cruise to places I have often visited in my dreams.