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operator.’
    â€˜You’ve got them lined up, have you?’
    â€˜Yes, I think so. Four of them anyway. The hardest to find will be a deckhand with actual experience of working with sledges on ice. A man who is available and has a great deal of experience on North Polar sea ice is, in my view, too old; also he has a wife and three kids and his fee is commensurate with his family responsibilities. There was an Irishman who had done all sorts of things, half of which I didn’t really believe, and an Australian who ran a radio shop in Perth and had worked for a year at the Australian Antarctic base largely as stand-in radio operator. He claimed to have done quite a lot of sailing and to have been a member of the reserve crew for one of the America’s Cup contenders when the race was run in Perth. Unfortunately he recently married a veterinary graduate and didn’t want to leave his wife. She had sailed the coast of Western Australia in her father’s boat, so I suggested he bring her along. A vet isn’t quite the same as having a doctor on board, but at least she would have been able to stitch up wounds, set bones and dish out the right pills. But in the end she said, No, it would ruin her chances of becoming a partner in the firm she had recently joined. A pity. They sounded ideal, particularly as he says he’s a ham radio enthusiast. The others …’ She gave a dismissive little shrug. ‘It’s not easy trying to get crew when you still haven’t solved the financial problem. They’ve got to be the right people. They’ve got to have the right temperament as well as the experience. And we do need somebody to handle the radio side. It’s our lifeline to the outside world.’ She glanced at Ward, adding quickly, as though afraid she might have discouraged him, ‘I’ve still got feelers out, of course, and I am sure, once I have the boat, and support for the expedition is guaranteed, I will be able to attract the right people.’ Her eyes looked nervously round the table. ‘Anyway, that’s the crew situation at the moment.’
    The Admiral nodded and turned to his Director. ‘You agree, Victor? We give moral support.’
    Wellington hesitated, his eyes searching his Chairman’s face. ‘The one thing the Museum lacks, apart from money, of course, is a full-size ship to complement our superb building. Something like the Cutty Sark here, so that visitors can walk straight from historical exhibits on to the deck of the real thing. It’s something that the Friends of the Museum, and quite a few of the staff, have been pressing for over the years. If this Blackwall frigate really exists, if there really is a ship like that down there in the ice …’ His eyes gleamed and his voice changed, taking on a sudden note of almost boyish enthusiasm as he told Ward what it was that made this particular type of frigate so special.
    Apparently they were not naval vessels at all, but large East Indiamen built at Blackwall on the Thames just downstream of the Navy Yard. By then the Company, and also the Dutch, needed faster vessels, ships that could outrun or fight off any attacker, so they began building to the lines of the naval frigates and the first of the Blackwall-built vessels was the Seringapatam . ‘This was in’ 1837, in the last days of the East India Company, so not many of them were built.’ That first vessel had been of 818 tons, almost half the size of the largest they ever built, which was 183 feet long with a beam of 40 feet and a tonnage of around 1,400. The Andros , he thought, was about 1,000 tons. ‘Most of these ships were later used as emigrant transports; they also went south round the Horn for the Californian and Australian gold rushes.’
    While he was talking I had become increasingly conscious of the sound of voices from beyond the door that led for’ard to the officers’ galley and