The 37th Parallel. Expedition Report. And a Dream. The expedition to the phantom reefs of the South Pacific has entered the home stretch. There are 75 miles left to the last reported coordinates of Maria-Teresa Reef.
From the first mate’s notes, 11 December. Morning. We have just entered the 37th parallel! Maria-Teresa Reef, at the coordinates given by Jules Verne, is 5 miles away. On watch in the cockpit, drinking tea from a thermos. The radar is on. The sky is darkening, and the swell is close to 5 metres. I’m getting anxious too. This is the main phantom reef on our route. We have already passed the points marked as Wachusett Reef, Reef 1957, and Ernest Legouvé Reef at both of its reported locations; we recorded each passage on video and in photographs and took screenshots of the chart. There are no reefs in this area. We even passed within two miles of Jules Verne’s imaginary, mysterious Lincoln Island! Who would have thought that one day I would find myself in these godforsaken waters, where you could invent islands by the dozen because no one would ever come to check.
And now the instruments show the name Maria-Teresa Reef; it is less than a mile away...
Only six months ago, I thought we weren’t crazy enough to add tens of thousands of miles to our voyage across an empty ocean. After all, the chances of cartographic phantoms existing in our less-than-romantic age are close to zero. Otherwise the island would already have been found and described, because everything in the ocean belongs to someone, people live everywhere, there are gendarmeries—or at least lighthouses. Or at least pieces of rubbish on an uninhabited island.
And yet here we are. The captain pokes his head out of the hatch with the video camera. “The 37th parallel!” I begin telling the camera, and suddenly I’m crying.
Everything best in me, everything genuine and impetuous, began at the very moment when, at the age of eight, I opened the book In Search of the Castaways. And now I’m over forty, swallowing my tears as I sit under sail, wrapped in my foul-weather gear, at 37 degrees south latitude. And our young sailors have just put on the first episode of the film about the search for Captain Grant. To Isaac Dunayevsky’s fantastic overture, we enter the place where Captain Grant was rescued almost 155 years ago.
I wish everyone a dream that gives them goosebumps. How many times, as a girl, did I search for this point on the map! How many times did I trace the route of the Duncan that had so enchanted me: Patagonia, Cape Horn, the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, two degrees south of the Cape of Good Hope, Amsterdam Island, Victoria in Australia, New Zealand. And finally Tabor Island, whose double name was the reason my heroes’ journey proved so long. And now we are at the coordinates given by Jules Verne: 153 degrees west longitude and 37 degrees 11 minutes south latitude. Quick, I take a screenshot. Made it! There is nothing around us but ocean. We set a course for the revised coordinates of Maria-Teresa published in the last century in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. As a child, I kept a bookmark on that page as proof that the world of distant voyages and uninhabited islands truly existed.
After the coordinates from the Soviet encyclopedia, where there is no island either, Lady Mary continues along the 37th parallel towards the position shown on modern British nautical charts, which patiently continue to mark the reef we are looking for at 36°50′ S, 136°39′ W.
Today is 19 December 2018. After covering about 800 miles along the 37th parallel, Lady Mary is approaching the final point. Tomorrow we will set a course for Point NEMO. It is known as the Pacific Pole of Inaccessibility. It is one of the most inaccessible places on the planet, farther from any land than any other point. Its coordinates are 48°52′6″ south latitude and 123°23′6″ west longitude. Oh, yes—we weren’t the ones who named it after Captain Nemo. That was done by other admirers of Jules Verne. Insert laughing emoji here.
Now for more down-to-earth matters. Or rather, matters at sea. The ocean is deserted. Petrels still loom in the distance, and yesterday an albatross with a wingspan of more than 2 metres flew in. It settled on the water not far from the stern and immediately lost all interest in us. In between working the sails, the captain and I debate things and hatch grandiose plans. His latest proposal is to head north, freeze into the ice like Nansen aboard Fram, and drift along his route towards the Pole. Or else turn our Gingerbread House into a museum, though it is practically a museum already. Nastya laughs and says there’s no guarantee that, while trying to freeze into the ice like Fram, we won’t end up frozen in like Svyataya Maria, whose inspiration was Georgy Brusilov’s Svyataya Anna. The expedition disappeared in 1914.
While we were joking, our young sailor Lada set out to make a stew, but because there were no carrots, she ended up cooking borscht for the whole family. The child is seven and a half. She replaced the carrots and tomatoes with tinned beans and beetroot. The borscht made by our young sailor was so delicious that we polished off a full pot in one sitting.
The temperature outside has remained steady throughout the past week because we are not heading farther south, but sailing along the 37th parallel. Incidentally, if there were an island here, it would hardly be tropical as it is in Jules Verne. Summer is approaching its midpoint, yet the daytime temperature is 17°C. At night it is 10–12°C. A bit chilly for banana palms. Not warm at all, in fact. We hardly ever switch on the heater, saving it for the colder latitudes. Yesterday we heated some water and had a proper bath day. We went to bed clean and happy. Wishing joy to everyone! And thank you for your support, friends!
Tomorrow we’ll write about the captain’s ingenious invention for storing bananas, as well as our provisions and culinary experiments aboard. And also about the after-effects of ciguatera poisoning, which are still making themselves felt.