Return to Murmansk

In 1990, Henry Swain sailed his thirty-four foot yacht Callisto to Murmansk. He had been there once before, forty-five years earlier, as an Able Seaman in a Royal Navy warship escorting a Russian convoy. U-boats lay in wait off the Russian coast and the Luftwaffe threatened attack from bases in Norway; almost as dangerous as the enemy was the particular hazard of the arctic--ice. The spray froze on the foc's'le and upper works and every spare man was needed to chip it away to prevent the ship capsizing.Henry Swain tells the story of a summer cruise expertly and with insight. Interwoven with his account there are memories of fear and danger, the ghosts he was trying to lay to rest.