The author's husband, the Norwegian captain of a whaling ship, was stationed on a scruffy little Peruvian port surrounded by desert, and here his wife came to live. It seems highly unlikely, she writes, that I was predestined to become the wife of a whaler. For years I had never visualised living in any other confines than civilised European ones: a pretty house, a small car, an impeccably shaved husband in a sensible profession who would keep up-to-date with fashion, art and literature. But everything happened quite differently. . . .