ABOARD THE DISCOVERY, Antarctica - Capt. Derrick Kemp watched from the bridge of the Discovery as the cruise ship backed from the harbor in Argentina at the tip of South America and turned toward Antarctica.

‘‘So, the adventure begins,’’ Kemp said to a small group of onlookers.

It was 10:30 p.m., the daylight just beginning to dim, when the ship left Ushuaia (pronounced ooo-swi-uh), the southernmost city in the world. Some five hours later, we got our first taste of the captain’s prediction.

The lamp between the beds in my cabin slid off the nightstand and two bottles of water flew from the dresser. The door swung open on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and the contents dumped into the sink. A cacophony of similar crashes came from the adjoining staterooms as a storm beat against the windows.

I fumbled in the dark, belatedly, for my seasickness patch.

The ship was still rolling when a few brave passengers showed up for breakfast that morning. Wobbling through the buffet line, I took my hand off the tray to grab a croissant and everything went airborne. Coffee, juice, two eggs over-easy oozed amid the smashed china. The patch did its job.

Welcome to Drake Passage, which runs 400 miles from Cape Horn to the Antarctic Peninsula and is reputed to be navigation’s nastiest stretch of open ocean. The passage is part of the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica, its waters whipped by winds that swirl around the continent.

‘‘There is no land mass to block the wind, so it’s like a whirlwind going round and round,’’ Kemp explained later. ‘‘We had winds up to 50 knots and swells up to 25 feet that night. That’s gale to strong gale; 8 to 10 on the Beaufort wind scale - 11 is catastrophic.’’

If the devil lived in the ocean, hell would be Drake Passage.

But the weather changes by the hour in Antarctica. By afternoon, blue skies shone over deeper blue seas. We spent the next few days visiting penguin rookeries ashore or sightseeing from the ship’s decks, watching the passing parade of icebergs in fantastical forms. Like gliding through a Dali landscape.

Even the captain was impressed, coming out from his berth on the bridge to snap a photo or two. ‘‘I promised you a show, didn’t I?’’ he said.

With glistening glaciers hanging from rugged mountains and floating ‘‘bergy bits’’ that glow Windex blue as if they’re illuminated from within, Antarctica is an otherworldly place, like visiting some frozen outpost of the solar system. Greenery is limited to patches of moss on dark pebble beaches.

But it is not lifeless. Humpback whales break the surface of the water, seals bask like furry sausages on the moving icebergs and seabirds swoop in the wake of the ship. I watched a black-browed albatross soar and circle for more than an hour without flapping its wings once, a model of aerodynamic efficiency.

Inhospitable in winter, Antarctica warms up during its summer, from December through March, when the sun sometimes shines around the clock. The temperature reached 68 degrees while I was there in January; back home it was winter and single digits. The ship’s two outdoor hot tubs were full, including one guy in a thong who was old enough to know better.

Peter Carey, the research scientist who led the lecture series and offshore excursions on the Discovery, has been to Antarctica 53 times on five ships and understands why it is growing as a tourist destination, drawing some 20,000 visitors this season.

‘‘It’s so different than any other place on the planet,’’ he said. ‘‘It just knocks peoples’ socks off.’’

For centuries, explorers from Sir Francis Drake to Sir Ernest Shackleton have been drawn to the world’s coldest, windiest continent. Shackleton arrived in 1914 aboard the Endurance, which was crushed by ice, forcing him and his men into a grueling land-and-sea odyssey worthy of Ulysses.

I arrived on the Love Boat.

The Discovery was known as the Island Princess when it was one of two ships used as settings for the venerable ABC series about romance on the high seas. Gerry Herrod, a British entrepreneur, wasn’t looking for love, just a profit, when he bought the Princess in 2001.

Herrod, who had owned four cruise ships, planned to ‘‘flip’’ the Island Princess in a quick sale. But the boat was delivered to him in Malta on Sept. 11, the day a terrorist act on the other side of the Atlantic flattened the tourism market.

‘‘I lost $5 million that day,’’ said Herrod, who was aboard the Discovery during its stop in Ushuaia. ‘‘I couldn’t sell it. I had to get back into the cruise business. We spent twice as much on the ship as we paid for it - about $30 million’’ in renovations.

‘‘We did the whole ship - new decks, new cabins,’’ he added.

Today, the renovated Discovery holds 650 passengers, but prefers to sail with about 500 to simplify shore excursions in the 12-passenger inflatable Zodiacs. Cabins are comfy and come in various configurations. There’s a small casino (that was largely empty), a theater lounge for daily lectures and nightly live shows, and two pools, one under a retractable roof that was innovative when the ship was built in 1971.

The menu onboard was varied, the offerings plentiful. As a gentleman behind me in the et line at lunch said: ‘‘The food is good, not memorable. Better than I get at home.’’ The Filipino crew delivered impeccable dining and housekeeping service with a smile.

The cabin brochure rates for the 13-night Antarctic Peninsula exploration range from $3,595 to $5,295 per person, based on double occupancy. That includes three nights in a first-class hotel in Buenos Aires, wines with dinner during the cruise and a complimentary parka that is bright red so the crew can keep an eye on you during shore excursions. The cruise line also can arrange air fares for about $645 round-trip from most American cities.

Herrod noted that the Discovery, which he plans to sell later this year, is modest in size and amenities when compared to some of the mega-ships cruising Antarctica these days.

‘‘We try to make it more personal; we don’t have all the gadgets,’’ he said. ‘‘Our crew gets to know the passengers; they become very friendly. You can’t get to know the passengers when there’s 3,500 of them.

‘‘The big ships are all right if you’re 20 and want to gamble and dance all night. Our clients are older, more inquisitive. They want to see interesting places, not sit in casinos.’’

There are no cities in Antarctica, only research stations maintained by various nations. No country owns Antartica, but seven nations claim slices of the continent. The research scientists used to jealously guard the remote continent, viewing tourists as amusing, but messy. Kind of like the penguins.

Lars-Eric Linblad began taking tourists to Antarctica on the Linblad Explorer in 1969, establishing a model that is still followed for visiting the fragile ecosystem without trampling it. By 1994, the number of tourists outnumbered scientists, and those numbers have been growing since.

Carey, the research scientist on the Discovery, said the 32 cruise ships slated to visit this tourist season will help spread knowledge about the continent without doing it great harm. ‘‘The impact still is very slight,’’ he said. ‘‘Everybody is briefed about not stepping on the moss and not harassing the penguins.’’

There are three kinds of cruise ships arriving:

Small ships with 100 or so passengers who go on a dozen or more shore visits.

The Discovery and the upscale Marco Polo, which bring about 500 passengers each and offer two or three shore trips.

The large lines with thousands of passengers that offer no shore excursions.

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (www.iaato.org) includes 69 outfitters who offer Antarctica expeditions. The group has established restrictions for tourist visits, including no more than 100 ashore at a site at one time.

Carey said it used to be that most visitors to Antarctica were wealthy older folks with time on their hands. That still would describe many of those aboard the Discovery.

‘‘But it’s getting younger,’’ Carey said. ‘‘And it’s no longer the hard-core nature buffs who spend 18 hours out on deck watching birds.

‘‘It’s a destination that people see as safer in these times, and they don’t have to suffer like Shackleton to see it.’’

Our first chance to go ashore was aborted - by another of Antarctica’s awesome displays of nature’s force.

The Discovery sat in Hope Bay, and from its deck I could see the gray hillsides along the shore, with thousands of black-and-white specks standing amid islands of pink. The specks were Adelie penguins - 100,000 nesting pairs with two chicks each. The pink was guano - penguin poop.

As the first Zodiac was being loaded, I awaited my turn on a leather chair in the ship’s library, the large windows looking out on a glacier that hung to the water’s edge on the side of the bay opposite the penguin colony. Suddenly, the front of the ice broke free; a chunk the length of a football field plummeted with a thunderous roar into the water. The resulting wave rocked the cruise ship.

The Zodiac passengers had reached shore and unloaded when the wave hit, lifting the empty boat and depositing it on the beach. Captain Kemp, watching from the bridge wing, ordered the crew to get everybody back onboard.

Carey came on the ship’s speakers and said: ‘‘Freshly calved ice is filling Hope Bay. It’s very important that we be on the other side of that tongue of ice.’’

As we sped out of Hope Bay, I looked back and saw that the spot where the ship sat was now a solid pack of ice. Carey said of the experience: ‘‘That was the biggest calving event I’ve seen in Antarctica. It was certainly several apartment buildings’ worth. The penguins immediately turned and scampered uphill. The issue was that we didn’t want to be stuck on the inside of the bay. The other concern was getting the Zodiac back to the ship.’’

We later visited a gentoo penguin colony at Paradise Harbor near the Chilean research station, and chinstrap penguins on the rocky outcroppings of Half Moon Island. The first site also featured a young female elephant seal dozing near the water, while the second had three Antarctic fur seals.

The seals barely stirred to see what was up, but the penguins provided enough material for a sitcom.

The penguins build their nests of gathered rocks, and they routinely steal stones from their neighbor’s pile. One penguin would be bent over snatching a rock from a nearby nest while the one behind her would be returning the favor. If a penguin decides to go for a swim, it has to waddle among the maze of nests. The birds are territorial and nip anything they can reach without getting up. The meandering penguin faces a gauntlet of sharp beaks. The fluffy gray chicks have beer bellies that sag to their feet.

Penguins, by the way, are found only in the Southern Hemisphere, while polar bears inhabit only the North. Seems like the South won this one.

While they squawked among themselves, the penguins seemed uninterested in the strangers in red parkas who stooped, knelt, bent and stretched to get yet another photo angle. Carey had instructed us in Penguin 101 that the birds have the right of way when they go for a walk.

‘‘The beauty of Antarctica is, if you stay in one place, the wildlife will come to you,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a wonderful thing to have a penguin come up and check you out.’’

P.S. - The Drake Passage was a lamb on the way back.

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IF YOU GO:

GETTING THERE: Discovery’s 13-night Antarctica Peninsula exploration includes three nights in Buenos Aires, two going down and one coming back. The line books first-class hotels in Buenos Aires, which is billed as ‘‘the Paris of South America’’ and has some stunning architecture. The activities available include dinner and a tango show. From Buenos Aires, it is a three-hour flight to Ushuaia, where you board the ship. Sea conditions across the Drake Passage can be rough; motion-sickness medication is recommended.

DISCOVERY WORLD CRUISES: The line offers expeditions to Antarctica, South America, Polynesia and New Zealand in 2005, with itineraries from 13 to 25 nights. For more information, consult a travel agent, call 1-866-623-2689 or visit www.discoveryworldcruises.com. The line has been purchased by All Leisure Group of the United Kingdom, which offers cruises under the name Voyages of Discovery.