What Did Sailors Do For Pleasure on Long Voyages?

The sun is about to disappear for ninety-six days. Two navy ships are frozen solid into the Arctic ice. And tonight, one of your officers is going to walk out in front of you wearing a dress. You are a sailor on His Majesty's Ship Hecla, locked in the ice at the top of the world, in a bay the crew has named Winter Harbour. Yesterday you watched the sun slide along the horizon for what the captain says is the last time until February. The cold here does not sting any more. It aches. It gets into your teeth. And tonight the whole crew is packed together on board, facing a home-made stage. The show is a comedy called Miss in her Teens. The stage manager is a lieutenant. The captain has given himself a part. And somewhere backstage, a grown man in the Royal Navy is being laced into a frock. No heating. No interval. No leaving early, because outside the door is the Arctic. Now, this sounds like a bunch of bored men messing about. It was not. The captain planned this the way he planned the food and the fuel. He wrote down why, and his reason was deadly serious. Ninety-six days of darkness lay ahead of these men. In the whole voyage, one man died. Before we're done, you'll know why a navy captain put a comedy on the same list as food and coal, and why he may well have been right.