In 1829, the sealing ship Antarctic making its way from Nantucket to the South Shetlands, stopped at the Cape Verde Islands, where the crew took on board casks of salt to preserve seal skins. As the ship continued southwards, it became apparent that they had also taken on board plague, with devastating consequences for the crew. Three years later, when Antarctic's captain Benjamin Morrell recalled this episode in his long career as an Antarctic sealer-explorer, he speculated on what would have happened had the plague not run its course and the crew recovered. He imagined ‘the gallant little Antarctic left to the mercy of the winds and waves, without a hand to guide the helm or to tend the braces, and keep the sails trimmed to the breeze. The prospect was gloomy in the extreme’.

Gloomy in the extreme, to read Antarctic historiography is to enter into the labourless maritime scene imagined by Morrell. By and large ships sail to, into, around and out of Antarctica without the active involvement of workers, who have been erased from the scene by assumptions that have been as devastating to them as Morrell's plague. Although the work of Gurney and Martin makes some redress, the assumption persists that the ships were sailed, if they were sailed at all, not by the sailors but by their captains and officers. This is an understandable consequence of approaching Antarctic history almost exclusively from the rhetoric and records of the masters, but it is grotesquely far from reality.