A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions

Hobart, June 1841. James Clark Ross has returned from Victoria Land and the great Ice Barrier, but Antarctica has not yet let him go. While the Erebus and the Terror are repaired, he explores Van Diemen's Land with his friend Sir John Franklin, then sails for Sydney and New Zealand.

At the Bay of Islands, he receives the Maori chiefs Pomare and Awara, listens to their grievances, visits the missionaries at Waimate, climbs Puki Nui, and learns from the French corvette Héroïne of the massacre of the crew of the Jean Bart in the Chatham Islands.

Then it is south once more. On New Year's Day 1842, both ships are trapped in the pack. A storm crushes the Terror's rudder in the middle of the ice; later, on a March night, the Erebus and the Terror collide amid the icebergs. There follow a winter in the Falklands, the Fuegians of Cape Horn, and then a third campaign toward almost unknown lands: Joinville Land, glimpsed by Dumont d'Urville in 1838, Paulet Island, and the Gulf of the Admiralty, where the ice closes in around the hulls.

The narrative of a scientific seaman, in which the magnetic needle sits beside the fear of shipwreck: how far can two wooden sailing ships push toward the pole, and return?