It took ten days to load up with provisions in readiness for the coming voyage. During that time I would find a quiet corner and read the through the great quantity of books that had been deposited on board ship to entertain those sailors that were not toiling away above or bellow deck. This was the first ship that I had been on and I was old enough to get a job as a cabin boy but young enough to still have a sense of fun. I would go tearing round the ship yard with all the boys whose fathers earned a living loading and unloading the never ending shortage of boats. We would run up the piles of sand that had been deposited on the quay side ready to be taken to faraway distant lands to the North and slide down on an old tea tray to the consistent hatred and occasional chase from the dock workers.

We set off on the 12th May. Our target was to go further than any ship had ever gone before. The more we sailed South the colder it became until it was nearly unbearable. I would retreat under the deck at every opportunity that I could. We would usually sail with the coast in sight, so it was of great surprise to me when I woke up one morning and it had gone, I asked the Purser about this when I had finished my morning shift. “No one that goes there comes back alive, it looks like a big sore on the earth, nothing lives there or could live ,there are no plants ,no animals, no bacteria even the sea around it is lifeless. Its cursed. Some sailors sailed too close and they died the ones that survived managed to bring the ship back to port, they all died within a month of reaching dry land.” I was enraptured and enthralled I wanted to hear more about this strange land and plagued him with questions about it for the next three days. On the evening of my fourth day at sea something was to happen which would send me cowering and shivering every time it was mentioned for the next forty-three years.