I came back from Antarctica with the oddest souvenir: a question that would not let go.

On deck, the polar air had the clean taste of absence. The horizon was a thin, hard line where sea became sky, and time felt less like a sequence than a weather system. I found myself thinking about another voyage into the same latitudes, the Belgian Antarctic expedition aboard the Belgica, and about the man who commanded it, Adrien de Gerlache. I wondered, as Belgians sometimes do when our country appears at the edge of world history, whether he had known all along that he would force his ship to become trapped in the ice, or whether the winter was, in fact, an accident.