38 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
and then sail us all to a certain death?”
But Buckle wasn’t so sure. A year ear-
lier, when he’d first walked up the gang-
plank, he wondered why Triton had cho-
sen this ship. The Pressure Drop hadn’t
been in service in several years. The hull
was watertight, but there were holes in
the steel superstructure, and the ship-
yard had stripped every functional com-
ponent. The steering system had been
wired in reverse; turn one way and the
ship went the other. “It’s a classic case
of people who have spent a lot of time
on boats thinking they know boats,”
Buckle told me. “I’ve spent a lot of time
on planes, but if Victor said, ‘I want to
buy a 747,’ I wouldn’t go up and say, ‘Yes,
that one is great—buy that one.’ I’d get
a pilot or a flight engineer to do it.”
Buckle’s first officer recalled, “The ship
was fucking breaking apart.”
After the purchase, Buckle and a
small crew of mostly Scottish sailors
spent two months living near a dock
yard in Louisiana, refitting and repair-
ing the ship. “Stu took a huge risk—
not only for himself but for all his
officers,” McCallum told me. “He
handpicked the guys, pulled them off
of very well-paying oil-and-gas jobs,and got them to follow him to bum-
fuck nowhere.” In the evenings, Buckle
and his crew drank beer on the top
deck, and tossed pizza slices to alliga-
tors in the bayou. The ship came with
no manuals, no electrical charts. “It
was just a soul-destroying, slow pro-
cess,” Buckle said.
Now Buckle was steering the Pres-
sure Drop into the Southern Ocean, the
site of the most reliably violent seas in
the world. After a few nights, Erlend
Currie, a sailor from the Orkney Islands,
shoved a life jacket under the far side of
his bunk, so that the mattress would formThe Pressure Drop, anchored in the Svalbard archipelago. The least-known region of the seafloor lies under the Arctic Ocean.