Retiring on a pension after being torpedoed in WWII, Tristan Jones embarks on a test of endurance that will last over two years, nearly killing him more than once. Attempting to sail farther North than anyone ever has, he embarks from Iceland on the Cresswell in the summer of 1959. His only companion? A three-legged, one-eyed Labrador named Nelson. He spends his first winter holed up near an Eskimo village in a Greenland fjord. After a violent snowstorm and without an adequate supply of food, he spends a full week digging himself out of enormous snow drifts until he is able to be seen and rescued. This incident kicks off a series of impossible adventures as he voyages to the treacherous waters of the North Pole. His second winter at sea finds him trapped in an enormous ice pack in the Arctic Ocean. For 366 days he is marooned on the craft. As he faces his loneliness and the possibility of his own death under the dazzling Northern lights, Tristan Jones's incomparable sailing adventure reaches an unimaginable climax. ICE! is a classic tale of adventure, its author acclaimed by Time magazine as "someone Lindbergh would have understood".
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Arthur Jones, pen name Tristan Jones was a prolific English author and mariner. His stories, mostly about sailing, are a combination of both fact and fiction, and it is rather difficult to tell these apart. He was an illegitimate child, and was raised mainly in orphanages. He joined the Royal Navy in 1946, and served for 14 years. After ending his career in the Navy, he bought a sailboat, became a whiskey smuggler, and scraped a living sailing the Mediterranean Sea. After his left leg was amputated in 1982 (a result of health problems and accidents), he resumed sailing and sailed the trimaran Outward Leg from San Diego to London, then across central Europe by river and canal to the Black Sea, and then around south Asia to Thailand. After the amputation of his right leg in 1991 he only returned briefly to sea, and he lived in Phuket, Thailand, he converted to Islam and took on the name 'Ali'.