Southtrap

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Erebus and Terror. The gates of hell. Darkness. Fear. That is what the words meant.

I shivered. The banner which bore these names bellied in the soggy, warm wind from the ship's gangway to which one end had been tied. Then it thumped against her plating, a dull sound like a boxer's punch that hasn't landed square.

'Erebus-Terror Cruise to Prince Edward Island and the Sub-Antarctic Regions.'

The banner had been a tourist winner all right, ever since Captain Prestrud had brought the Quest into the Cape Town docks ten days before. I wondered whose imaginative brain in Orbit Travels had conjured up the gimmick. We could have filled the Quest's passenger accommodation three times over from the demand it had brought.

Nevertheless, it went against my seaman's grain to dredge up the names of two great ships from their graves — unknown graves in the frozen wastes of the North-West Passage — and exploit them the way the travel agency had done. When ships die, they die. True, HMS Erebus and Terror had sailed the way we were going to sail — first to Prince Edward and Marion Islands, 2300 kilometres from the Cape and a fifth of the way to Australia, — then on eastwards to the Crozets Group, next Kerguelen, and finally New Zealand. That had been in the middle of the last century. They had been under the command of the great polar explorer, Sir James Clark Ross. They had broken open the way to the South Pole and Ross had put a ship's keel where none had ever dared before.

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