As the days stretched on, the view from Cook’s soot-blackened porthole hardly changed. The same distant icebergs remained more or less in the same positions relative to the ship, as stable and reliable as the church steeples of neighboring towns. Yet this reliability was an illusion. The whole pack was moving erratically at the rate of several miles a day. The Belgica was no longer sailing, but she was still roaming the ocean on a course beyond her control. “There has been no fixed point to indicate our drift, and we cannot see that we pass through the water because the entire horizon, the
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