The Nightmare Voyage of the Diana: from the journal of the ship's surgeon Charles Edward Smith

by Charles Edward Smith

Men were still dying as the ship crept into Ronas Voe in Shetland. "The miserable, scurvy-stricken, dysentery-worn men who looked over the bulwarks were a spectacle, once seen, never to be forgotten", reported The Scotsman. The ghastly vessel was "battered and ice-crushed, sails and cordage blown away, boats and spars cut up for fuel in the awful Arctic winter, the main deck a charnel-house not to be described".

The whale-ship Diana left Lerwick in early May, 1866, bound for the Greenland whaling. Thirteen of the crew would perish after the ship was trapped overwinter in the Arctic ice. The toll included nine Shetlanders, two of whom died as the ship arrived in Ronas Voe and three more in the next few days.

The journal of the ship's surgeon, Charles Edward Smith, is an astonishing record of endurance against the odds, written as the ship was battered and crushed by the "nips" with the crew wasting from starvation and the hideous effects of scurvy. "If the ship is in trouble in the nips, and expected to be stove in at any minute, how can I sit down to this log with my heart in my mouth and a horrible death staring us in the face?". Yet write it he did, scribbling "this poor log", he tells us, with a "pen that trembles in my hand". No wonder.

183 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2014

About the author

Charles Edward Smith was a surgeon on the whale-ship Diana which in 1866-67 became trapped in arctic ice. Smith's son, Charles Edward Smith Harris, later compiled father's diaries from these experiences into a book "From the Deep of the Sea", published in 1922.