Wood preservation specialist Peter Kettil joins a madcap expedition to Antarctica searching for a ghost ship, a 200-year-old vessel locked in ice. The expedition is funded by enigmatic Scotsman Iain Ward, a man of accents, disguises, and secrets. But it takes the pair almost two hundred pages to set sail: first, they drive north from Lima into the Peruvian Andes during el niño to meet a navigator who may have the coordinates of the lost ship.

It’s a dangerous drive, with endless narrative exposition, flaring tempers, distorted insights into a convoluted family tree, and plenty of scenic realism.

“Corrugated iron, cardboard, paper and sand were in constant motion as a wind came in gusts off the Pacific. We found a solitary gasolene pump and got the owner of it up from his couch of rags in a kennel-like shelter of tin and packing cases that rattled and moaned in the fitful wind. Fish oil chimneys and workers’ shacks, fish boats lying at the quays, trucks and oil tankers as dirty as the town; only the central square showed a glimmer of respectability, with a hotel and flowers; but still the all-pervading stink, and there were pelicans scavenging in the blackened sand between the shacks.” (117)

One hundred and seventy pages in, we encounter Isvik - the schooner which carries the crew to their reckoning. There is much work to be done preparing for the quest into the Weddell Sea and here Hammond Innes excels. His nautical scenes are extraordinary: his vocabulary so specific, the descriptions so casually real, yet the sense not lost on landlubber readers.

“Iain would be at the mast paying the halyard out on the winch, I would be hauling down on the rope rove through the lead cringle, running it through the quick clamp and cleating it down, while Iris did the same for the luff cringle and then worked aft along the boom, flaking the sail down and tying it into position with the reefing pennants.” (196)

But it’s all too late. The transposing of Ward’s thick Scottish accent in the early scenes is distracting, and his buffoonish behaviour makes him hard to take seriously later. The overt probing into the sexual activity of expedition leader Iris Sunderby undermines her managerial role; in fact, the lewd male gaze of the narrator reduces all female characters to little more than their sexual effect.

Hammond Innes was a childhood hero of mine, but Isvik (1991) is far from his best writing.

For readers new to Innes, far better places to start are The Wreck of the Mary Deare and Campbell’s Kingdom.