At last the lines were freed and the sails stowed away against the yards, but it was too late. With a jolt and a crunch the Shenandoah ploughed her bow into the ice. Peering over the side, Gus saw that it was not a solid field, as it had appeared from a distance, but was made up of individual floes which jostled against each other, sending up showers of ice and debris. Shenandoah was no longer moving forward, but the ice threatened to encircle her. The only way out was backwards.

Captain Waddell was on deck by now and Gus heard the command to fire the boilers and get up steam. There was a wait, while everyone could hear the floes grinding against the hull, then the first smoke issued from the funnel amidships. A boat was lowered, with one of the lieutenants in charge and men armed with grappling hooks. The screw began to turn and they pushed and pulled the ice floes aside, so that they did not foul it. Inch by inch, the ship backed out of danger.

Gus, heaving a sigh of relief, retreated to the galley and the warmth of the big cooking range.

It was four months since the Shenandoah left Melbourne. In that time they had sailed steadily northwards through the Pacific. There had been an idyllic interlude on Ascension Island, where the king of the island had made his many wives and daughters available for the entertainment of the crew. Gus could have joined in, but the prospect still filled him with alarm. Instead, he taught himself to swim in the lagoon and saw shoals of vividly coloured fish beneath him. It seemed like paradise on earth and he wondered if perhaps his father had found himself on such an island and decided to stay there.

All too soon they were ordered back on board and the voyage resumed. From then on there had been days and weeks where they had not seen a sail and the monotony of shipboard life had begun to bite. There was much speculation among the crew about their final destination, but the general consensus was that their mission was to capture and destroy as much of the US whaling fleet as possible. That was what had brought them now to the Sea of Okhotsk, between the frozen waste of the Kamchatka peninsula and Siberia. This much Gus had gleaned from peering at charts over Midshipman Mason’s shoulder.