I read this book: The Survivors

I just fin­ished a book that I must rec­comend. It is called The Sur­vivors. I feel so down since I fin­ished this book. It is the essence of every­thing I love about books lately. Adven­ture, suspense…

I bought The Sur­vivors along with Ren­dezvous with Rama, another gem from Coun­ter­point. I mean, it was on the vin­tage paper­back shelf. I paid $1 for this book. I bought it solely on the cover. Per­haps my great­est find at a used bookstore.

I am deeply obsessed with polar regions for the same rea­son I’m obsessed with the ocean and outer space. It’s the unknown, it can­not be con­tained. We can­not really grasp it, even with our thoughts. It is the sub­lime. It is beau­ti­ful and bleak.

Polar regions have incred­i­ble occur­rences that only hap­pen at the poles. Auro­ras? High con­cen­tra­tion of mete­orites? Yeah! Talk about feel­ing small. The thought of it all over­whelms me.

The Sur­vivors fol­lows the story of Dun­can Craig, who left his job in Lon­don in search of some­thing new. He trav­els to South Africa where he thinks he will be able to find work. The work he finds is far dif­fer­ent than he imag­ines. He becomes a skip­per of a catcher in a whal­ing fleet. The cir­cum­stances in which he becomes employed are sketchy. There is a lot of unrest in the fleet and spec­u­la­tion of mur­der and wrong doing. There is a rush to get out into the Atlantic and sort out all the trouble.

As the story begins to become monot­o­nous, Craig goes into the floes in res­cue of another catcher whose hull was cracked from the ice. This sim­ple res­cue esca­lates and many ships go down, includ­ing the large fac­tory ship The South­ern Cross. With over 500 men on the ice, they must fig­ure out how to sur­vive with­out freez­ing to death or being crushed by the ice­bergs mov­ing through the floes. Whoa! You begin to get an idea of what it would be like to be stranded on the ice, how small we are in the scheme of things, how lit­tle con­trol we actu­ally have.

And this is the real deal. While research­ing this post I came across this blurb about the author: “Ham­mond Innes was a writer who made a point of research­ing the mate­r­ial for his adven­tures in great depth. If he was writ­ing about oil-rigs then he spent time on an oil-rig; if about the Antarc­tic then he spent time in the frozen South.“¹ Ham­mond Innes had per­sonal con­tact with the forces of the Antarc­tic. He wit­nessed the mag­ni­tude of the ice. I can’t imag­ine any­thing more per­fect. This book is “a rous­ing adven­ture yarn of derring-do on the Antarc­tic” writ­ten by an author who expe­ri­enced it first hand.

1 Asto