men. Her hair, braided in two long pigtails, was as yellow as a summery iris. She stared through eyes as blue as the deep sea, from a strong face with high cheekbones. Her lips always seemed parted in a warm smile, revealing a tiny gap in the center of her upper teeth. Tawny skin gave her a robust outdoorsy look.
Maeve was three years shy of thirty, with a master’s degree in zoology. After graduation she took a three year sabbatical to gain field experience studying bird and animal life in the polar regions. After she returned to her home in Australia, she was halfway through her dissertation for a doctorate at the University of Melbourne when she was offered a temporary job as naturalist and expedition leader for passengers of Ruppert & Saunders, a cruise line based in Adelaide and specializing in adventure tours. It was an opportunity to earn enough money to finish her dissertation, so she dropped everything and set sail to the great white continent on board the company’s ship Polar Queen.
This trip there were ninety-one paying passengers on board, and Maeve was one of four naturalists who were to conduct the excursions on shore. Because of the penguin rookery, the historic buildings still standing from the whaling operations, the cemetery and the site of the camp where the Norwegian explorers perished, Seymour Island was considered a historical site and a fragile environment. To reduce visitor impact, the passengers were guided ashore at staggered times and in separate groups for two-hour expeditions. They were also lectured on a code of behavior. They were not to step on lichens or moss, nor step within five meters of any bird or animal life. Nor could they sneak souvenirs, not so much as a small rock. Most of them were Australians, with a few New Zealanders mixed in.
Maeve was scheduled to accompany the first party of twenty-two visitors to the island. She checked off the list of names as the excited travelers stepped down the boarding ladder to a waiting Zodiac, the versatile rubber float craft designed by Jacques Cousteau. As she was about to follow the last passenger, the ship’s first officer, Trevor Haynes, stopped her on the boarding ladder. Quiet and quite handsome in the lady’s eyes, he was uncomfortable mingling with the passengers and rarely made an appearance away from the bridge.
“Tell your people not to be alarmed if they see the ship sailing off,” he told her.
She turned and looked up the steps at him. “Where will you be going?”
“There is a storm brewing a hundred miles out. The captain doesn’t want to risk exposing the passengers to any more rough water than necessary. Nor does he want to disappoint them by cutting short the shore excursions. He intends to steam twenty kilometers up the’ coast and drop off another group at the seal colony, then return in time to pick you up and repeat the process.”
“Putting twice the number ashore in half the time.”
“That’s the idea. That way, we can pack up and leave and be in the relatively calm waters of the Bransfield Strait before the storm strikes here.”
“I wondered why you didn’t drop the anchor.” Maeve liked Haynes. He was the only ship’s officer who wasn’t continually trying to sweet-talk her into his quarters after late-night drinks. “I’ll expect you in two hours,” she said with a wave.
“You have your portable communicator should you encounter a problem.”
She held up the small unit that was attached to her belt. “You’ll be the first to know.”
“Say hello to the penguins for me.”
“I shall.”
As the Zodiac skimmed over water that was as flat and reflective as a mirror, Maeve lectured her little band of intrepid tourists on the history behind their destination. “Seymour Island was first sighted by James Clark Ross in 1842. Forty Norwegian explorers, castaway when their ship was crushed in the ice, perished here in 1859. We’ll visit the site where they lived until the end and then take a short walk to the hallowed ground where they are buried.”
“Are those the buildings they lived in?” asked a lady who must have been pushing eighty, pointing to several structures in a small bay.
“No,” answered Maeve. “What you see are what remains of an abandoned British whaling station. We’ll visit it just before we take a short hike around that rocky point you see to the south, to the penguin rookery.”
“Does anyone live on the island?” asked the same lady.
“The Argentineans have a research station on the northern tip of the island.”
“How far away?”
Maeve smiled condescendingly. “About thirty kilometers.” There’s always one in every group who has the curiosity of a four-year-old, she mused.
They could see the bottom clearly now, naked rock with no growth to be seen anywhere. Their shadow followed them about two fathoms down as they cruised through the bay. No rollers broke on the shoreline, the sea ran smooth right up to the edge, lapping the exposed rock with the slight wash usually found around a small lake. The crewman shut off the outboard motor as the bow of the Zodiac skimmed onto the shore. The only sign of a living thing was a pure white snow petrel that glided through the sky above them like a large snowflake.
Only after she had helped everyone to disembark from the Zodiac and wade ashore onto the pebbled beach in the knee-high rubber boots supplied by the ship did Maeve turn and look at the ship as it gathered way and steamed northward.
The Polar Queen was quite small by cruise ship standards. Her length was only seventy-two meters, with a twenty-five hundred gross rated tonnage. She was built in Bergen, Norway, especially to cruise polar waters. She was as ruggedly constructed as an icebreaker, a function she could perform if the occasion arose. Her superstructure and the broad horizontal stripe below her lower deck were painted glacier white. The rest of her hull was a bright yellow. She could skirt the ice floes and icebergs with the agility of a rabbit due to her bow and stern thrusters. Her comfortable cabins were furnished in the style of a ski chalet, with picture windows facing the sea. Other amenities included a luxurious lounge and dining salon, hosted by a chef who turned out three-star culinary creations, a fitness center and a library filled with books and information on the polar regions. The crew was well trained and numbered twenty more than the passengers.
Maeve felt a tinge of regret she couldn’t quite understand as the yellow-and-white Polar Queen grew smaller in the distance. For a brief moment she experienced the apprehension the lost Norwegian explorers must have felt at seeing their only means of survival disappear. She quickly shook off any feelings of uneasiness and began leading her party of babbling travelers across the gray moonscape to the cemetery.
She allotted them twenty minutes to pick their way among the tombstones, shooting rolls of film of the inscriptions. Then she herded them around a vast pile of giant bleached whale bones near the old station while describing the methods the whalers used to process the whales.
“After the danger and exhilaration of the chase and kill,” she explained, “came the rotten job butchering the huge carcass and rendering the blubber into oil. ‘Cutting in’ and ‘trying out,’ as the old-timers called it.”
Next came the antiquated huts and rendering building. The whaling station was still maintained and monitored on an annual basis by the British and was considered a museum of the past. Furnishings, cooking utensils in the kitchen, along with old books and worn magazines, were still there just as the whalers left them when they finally departed for home.
“Please do not disturb any of the artifacts,” Maeve told the group. “Under international law nothing may be removed.” She took a moment to count heads. Then she said, “Now I’ll lead you into the caves dug by the whalers, where they stored the oil in huge casks before shipping it to England.”
From a box left at the entrance to the caves by expedition leaders from previous cruises, she passed out flashlights. “Is there anyone who suffers from claustrophobia?”
One woman who looked to be in her late seventies raised her hand. “I’m afraid I don’t want to go in there.”
“Anyone else?”
The woman who asked all the questions nodded. “I can’t stand cold, dark places.”
“All right,” said Maeve. “The two of you wait here. I’ll conduct the rest a short distance to the whale-oil storage area. We won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”
She led the chattering group through a long, curving tunnel carved by the whalers to a large storage cavern stacked with huge casks that had been assembled deep inside the rock and later left behind. After they entered she stopped and gestured at a massive rock at the entrance.
“The rock you see here was cut from inside the cavern and acts as a barrier against the cold and to keep competing whalers from pilfering surplus oil that remained after the station closed down for the winter. This rock
