Bouvetoya Whaling Station, Antarctica, 1904 The Emma sailed for the shores of Bouvetoya Island at the start of the 1904 whaling season with a full complement of sailors, harpooners, boats and oil processing equipment -- enough to slaughter whales and extract their oil for a full year on the Antarctic ice before returning to Norway the following year. Emma's newest skipper and part-owner Sven Nyberg intended to make his first and last voyage as a whaler a profitable one. Sven's brother, Bjorn, had been the Emma's captain for nineteen seasons, but Bjorn had died of a fever during last year's return voyage, which had compelled his brother to assume command on this, the final commercial venture of the Nyberg Brothers Oil Company of Oslo. Upon his return to Norway, Sven fully intended to sell his family's business to the highest bidder.The dawn of this new century was bringing an end to traditional whaling. Magnate Christian Christensen had opened a modern processing facility in Grytviken that would eventually edge out smaller Antarctic whaling concerns like the Nyberg brothers -- men who'd followed methods practiced by Norwegians since the days of the Vikings. Like seal hunting, an activity that had made many a family fortune back in the 1870s, whaling was becoming an unprofitable enterprise. Declining herds and rising competition from British and Scottish whalers -- and recently even the Japanese -- along with giant conglomerates like the Christensen corporation were gradually ending the era of the selfsufficient, independent whaler. Still, Sven Nyberg would try to make the Nyberg Brothers a viable oil company for a little while longer. It was the only way to ensure a profitable sale of his family's interests. To that end Sven had offered Oslo's most experienced whale hunter, Karl Johanssen, a position as first mate, with a five-percent share of the expedition's profits. If successful, the Emma's journey to the South Pole would make Karl a very wealthy man. The offer could not have come at a better time for Karl Johanssen. A whaler since he'd been tw elve years old, Johanssen had weathered twenty-seven seasons on the ice and survived them with all of his limbs, fingers and toes intact -- no mean feat where temperatures could reach 50 degrees below zero. From past voyages with brother Bjorn, Johanssen was also familiar with the Nyberg Brothers'oil processing facility on Bouvetoya Island, one of the world's most remote locations. A few years before, in 1897, Karl Johanssen thought he'd given up the sea for good. Lured to northern California by his brother's promises of wealth, Karl had squandered his meager savings trying to strike it rich in the Alaska gold rush. Forced to return to whaling out of financial desperation, he'd been ready to sign onto one of Christensen's ships for a paltry one-half of one percent share when Sven Nyberg had made his offer. A berth as first mate with a full five-percent share was Karl's lucky second chance at a comfortable retirement. Of course, Karl would work hard for the money. Sven Nyberg was an indifferent seaman, and he'd never spent even a single season on the Antarctic ice. Fortunately, during their long twelve months of backbreaking labor, Sven had been wise enough to defer to Karl's judgment in nearly every situation. Under the harpooner's tutelage, the younger Nyberg brother had learned secrets of the whale hunting trade that it would have taken him years to discover on his own. The result, after a year, was an incredibly successful hunt, with Emma towing over three hundred carcasses into the cove at Bouvetoya Island. There the remains of blues, minkes and sperms would be cut up and the blubber rendered for its oil. It was during the grimy rendering process, when the men were outside for lengths of time attending the huge iron vat dominating the harbor, that the whalers began to see strange lights in the sky, and not the southern lights they were used to seeing. >Over Lykke Peak and the taller, three-thousand-foot Olav Peak that overshadowed the oil processing facility, bursts like distant cannon fire lit the sky, and explosions on the ice could be heard in the distance. Then a strange reddish glow appeared on the horizon, illuminating the ceaseless twilight with the brilliance of a thousand cook fires. The light danced crimson off the ice and tinged the millions of whalebones that littered the beach a sickly hue. Often -- but not always -- the eerie lights were accompanied by tremors deep beneath the ground under their feet. While volcanic activity on the island was not unusual-- sometime in 1896 part of the island had even been destroyed by a volcanic eruption -- the phenomena unsettled the whalers, who were trapped on Bouvetoya until the spring thaw no matter what happened. So after a few days of these strange events, in an effort to calm the whalers'fears and discover the cause of the eerie pyrotechnics, Karl led a group of sailors away from the harbor's ramshackle wooden buildings and onto the glacial ice that covered the fifty-square-mile island.On a vast frozen plain, they recovered a large, metallic object shaped like a coffin built for a giant. The object was embedded in the ice in the middle of a huge crater. Its silvery surface was smooth and bulletshaped, with no visible joints or openings. There were markings etched into the metal -- a strange, alien scrimshaw no whaler in the party could read or even recognize. Though the metal coffin appeared to be hollow, no one could figure out how to open it, or what was inside.Karl Johanssen thought it best to leave the thing where it lay, but in this one instance the skipper overruled him. Captain Nyberg was eager to find another way to make the voyage profitable, so he ordered the sailors to load the object onto a sled and use a dog team to drag it back to camp
