Terra Incognita (33 page)

I asked Ben about the dogs one day while we were washing up.

‘You can't bond with a snowmobile,' he said. ‘The huskies kept up our morale. The Antarctic would have been far lonelier without them. Our dogs kept us sane, no doubt about it.'

‘Do you miss them?' I asked.

‘Oh yes. You can form relationships with the dogs like you do with two-legged travelling companions. They were my friends. I used to have the same team for two years, and you got to know them so well – I could anticipate when trouble was going to start from a little mannerism, say, or a low growl. I could even tell which one had broken wind.' He turned away from the sink and wiped his hands.

‘I'll never forget going down to say goodbye to them at the end of my tour, just before I got on the ship. Ask any dog-handler if he'd like to take his team with him at that moment, and he wouldn't think twice, I can tell you.' He thought about this for a moment, and continued, ‘The dogs formed a link with the past, too. They gave the base a bit of historical continuity. That's all gone now. In a couple of years there won't even be anyone here who remembers the huskies.'

John Sweeny, who was half Ben's age, was the last dog-handler at BAS. He was the Irishman whom I had met at breakfast on the first day of the conference and who had run along the river with me in Cambridge.

‘How was the trip, John?' someone had asked him over the cornflakes at Girton College.

‘Fine,' John replied.

‘Where have you been?' I enquired.

‘On a skiing holiday,' he said.

I imagined that this holiday had taken place in Sauze d'Oux or Chamonix. Later I found out that he had skied all the way across Greenland, pulling his sledge behind him.

BAS decided that it would be fitting to use dogs in their traditional role of science support to mark their departure from Rothera. As a result, John and another handler had taken two teams on a final seven-week survey around the Milky Way and Uranus Glaciers, and on a shallow-core drilling traverse of central Alexander Island. It was the last dog journey ever in Antarctica. I read John's report of the trip. It ended with a quotation from Helmer Hanssen, Amundsen's dog-handler. ‘Dogs like that, which share man's hard times and strenuous work, cannot be looked upon merely as animals. They are supporters and friends. There is no such thing as making a pet out of a sledge dog; these animals are worth much more than that.'

The transport programme to get them out was called Operation Tabarin in commemoration of the expedition which brought dogs from Greenland to Hope Bay in 1943. John and the dogs travelled, via Brize Norton, to Newry in Maine, and then the younger ones went north to the Inuit village of Inukjuak on Hudson's Bay where they formed a working team. ‘It was a bittersweet experience,' John said as we jogged along the river. ‘I didn't realise until I got up there that the dogs weren't going back.'

One day, while walking around the point with one of the pilots, he stopped in front of a slumbering Weddell seal. ‘You know they used to shoot those guys around here, to feed the dogs,' he said. ‘I saw it. The romance of the huskies is very misleading. More seals were killed than dogs were fed. The seal chop – that was when they sliced them up – was brutal and disgusting, and the smell on the dog spans was foul because the high fat content of their diet had a poor effect on their digestion.'

‘Don't you miss having them around?' I asked.

‘No, I don't! They used to kill each other and snap at us!'

∗

At eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon the men gathered in the dining room for the
smoko
ritual. Al, the cook, would appear with trays of hot sausages, crispy bacon and fresh rolls, or, in the afternoon, his legendary flapjack. He was an ace cook, and so was Dave, the wintering cook. They always made me welcome in the light and airy kitchen, and I used to go in there whenever I could think of an excuse. A cleaver on the wall was inscribed with the words
Queue Here For Haircuts.
Al and Dave were both from the north of England, and Al had been cooking for BAS since the sixties. Six months after I returned from the ice he was awarded the Polar Medal, and he took me with him to Buckingham Palace. A hundred other people were being decorated at the same time, from doughty Bermudan dowagers to Tory Members of Parliament and frail old ladies rewarded for ‘services in Paraguay'. The best dressed man was a chieftain in a black and gold robe, though the flunky announced that he came from Liverpool. Apart from the chieftain, the only man who hadn't hired top hat and tails was a director of Oxfam who looked as if he'd got his suit from the back of one of his shops. The Queen had mugged up and commented to Al that cooking was a very important job.

∗

It was dark by nine o'clock now. Field assistants returned from two months on the ice with their beakers, and they clattered around the base sorting out their equipment. Ground sheets, hoisted up to dry, bestowed upon their storerooms the alluring air of a Bedouin encampment. One of the field assistants was a rangy geography teacher called Neil with a Liverpudlian accent and hair that flopped into his eyes. He used the analogy of a rollercoaster to describe his Antarctic experience. ‘It can be great here,' he said. ‘But it's not really living.'

I had just finished reading Thomas Keneally's Antarctic murder mystery
Victim of the Aurora
, published in 1977. It was narrated by an old man who was once the artist of a five-man team of explorers closely resembling Scott's group. A journalist is murdered on the ice. ‘To me', says the narrator, ‘the world was simple and the lying hadn't begun when I joined the expedition . . . Ever since [the murder and its aftermath] the world has been fuelled and governed by lies. That is my concise history of the twentieth century.' In addition, a refugee found hiding in an ice cave becomes a symbol of the human condition. ‘But you can live, weeping and cursing,' says this character. ‘Oh yeah, it's possible,' and commenting on the fact that he can't quite stand up in his shelter, he adds, ‘I suppose that I'm characteristic of mankind.' The narrator returns to the Antarctic as an old man, and is flown back to the Pole, which makes him feel sick. ‘I suppose I may have been suffering the shock of reaching the Pole, that trigonometrical siren of the Edwardian age, to find it an ice plain without character, staffed by disconsolate young soldiers who would rather be in Vietnam. In other words, the Pole was no longer a mythical place.'

Like me, Keneally visited the Antarctic as a guest of the American programme. ‘The basic futility of Antarctic exploration', he wrote after he had returned, ‘was . . . brought home to me as I saw the nullity of the place, the meaninglessness of most of the geographic data for which men like Scott gave their lives. The Pole itself was a prodigious nothingness, a geographic void. But the wealth of impressions and memories that arose from my Antarctic odyssey will always enrich my writing.'

George reappeared, the loquacious chief builder who had accompanied me south from Brize Norton. He came storming in to our building one day and invited me to his birthday dinner on Saturday evening. I was touched. He was going to be sixty-nine.

‘Are they looking after you all right here?' he asked, adding conspiratorially, ‘if not, come on over, I'll see what I can do.' Quite what he would have been able to do was a baffling question. Later, he showed me round the builders' quarters. ‘I think it's all right for intellectuals to share four to a room,' he said, flinging open the door of a pitroom and speaking as if he had spent years acquiring this knowledge, ‘but for my laddies, two is preferable.'

A blizzard descended on George's birthday, and the outside of the windows appeared to be hung with sheets of muslin. In the evening I fought my way over to the party. They had put tablecloths and candles on the tables, George and his sidekick were wearing ties, and a notice on the blackboard said
‘Guest Star – 9.30: Stripper. 10.30: Haircuts
'. George dispensed sweet sherry, and if anyone swore, he made them apologise to me. John the plumber, who was a vegetarian, told me that on his first day he had been presented with a box of sixty-four microwaveable veggiburgers. Later, I heard rousing choruses of ‘Alouette' in the lounge area behind me, and people began appearing in thermal longjohns with boxer shorts on top. These they referred to obliquely as their ‘drinking outfits'. When I turned round later, George had his trousers round his ankles.

‘I'm the oldest man in Antarctica,' he shouted, which was almost certainly true.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Clowds near the horizon were of a perfect Snow Whiteness and were difficult to be distinguished from the Ice hills whose lofty summits reached the Clowds. The outer or Northern edge of this immence Ice field was compose[d] of loose or broken ice so close packed together that nothing could enter it; about a mile in began the field ice, in one compact solid boddy and seemed to increase in height as you traced it to the South; In this field we counted Ninety Seven Ice Hills or Mountains, many of them vastly large . . .

From Captain Cook's journal, January 1774

F
OSSIL
B
LUFF
lies about 230 miles from Rothera on the east coast of Alexander Island. A group of men from the British Graham Land Expedition were the first to set foot there; they surveyed it roughly in 1936 and found Jurassic fossils, so they called it Fossil Camp. Lancelot Fleming, a member of the expedition who later became Bishop of Norwich, made a cine film which, fifty years later, was put on video with a narration by another member, the redoubtable Duncan Carse. Carse had gone on to be a successful actor, playing Dick Barton in the 1940s BBC radio series. He has a mellifluous voice made for a piece of film which perfectly captures the lost innocence of a golden age. After the expedition he spent some time alone in South Georgia. In a film about that he said, ‘I enjoyed a peace of mind there I've experienced nowhere else. It was an island where I belonged.' He tried to retrace Shackleton's route over the mountains, and had what he described to me as ‘an experience on the astral plane'. In his South Georgia diary he wrote of low cloud hanging in pearly streamers ‘like wraiths of the imagination. But through them and above, the unattainable heights of the Allardyce Range fired the skyline with stupendous beacons of icy luminosity . . . no one had ever seen them before: a thousand years might pass before they showed themselves again.'

The British Graham Land Expedition, led by John Rymill, was a private venture and, like all the best expeditions since Columbus, it was chronically short of cash. They were even obliged to straighten out packing-cases to retrieve nails. They had £3,000 with which to buy a ship and ended up with the
Penola
, a 130-tonne three-masted Brittany fishing schooner which they were able to equip with a de Havilland Fox Moth light aircraft.

Nobody knew much about Graham Land in those days. John Biscoe had named it after Sir James Robert George Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Home Secretary, and it was annexed in 1908 as part of the Falkland Islands Dependency. Fleming's film shows the
Penola
leaving London's St Catherine's dock in 1934 to explore this
terra incognita
. She was away for three years.

They were dogged by bad luck at the beginning but, as Carse put it, ‘It came good at the end.' The expedition made numerous discoveries and surveyed great tracts of unknown territory. At the conclusion of the film Carse declares triumphantly: ‘Graham Land was the Antarctic Peninsula' (it had been thought that it was part of an archipelago), much as Columbus must have declared that there was land west of Iberia. Carse said, ‘We were the expedition that links the Heroic Age – Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson – with BAS of today. We lived and worked on the watershed between too little regard for personal welfare and too great a reliance on impersonal technology. We were the fortunate ones who practised Antarctic exploration at its all-time best.'

Though it achieved more knowledge per pound spent than any other Antarctic expedition, the British Graham Land team never received the recognition it deserved. Colin Bertram, one of the surviving members, told me: ‘People realised that the war was imminent, and they didn't have time to think about us.' Nobody died, which meant the media wasn't interested, and the expedition had nothing to do with the South Pole, always the sexiest part of Antarctica.

After I returned from the ice I took a train through the New Forest in the south of England on the hottest day of the year and looked through cracked albums of sharp black-and-white photographs of the expedition with Alfred Stephenson (known as Steve) who said he remembered taking every one – and he had gone south only twenty years after Scott. In the pre-departure pictures, the men were lined up in baggy trousers, hair slicked-back from pasty morning-after faces. On the deck of the
Penola
, they were taking tea and laughing into the camera as if they were on a college trip. I pointed out a picture of men making dog harnesses, and Steve reeled off the names of the dogs. Barring Amundsen's, it was the most dog-orientated expedition ever. They had to shoot the last eighty of their working dogs because they were unable to feed them on the long voyage home. ‘I still mourn them,' Bertram said sixty years later.

Fleming filmed a man making a canoe out of a barrel and paddling it furiously through the pack ice. He also recorded puppy training on the snowfields, all hands on a storm-washed deck, and three fabulous skiers slaloming down pristine slopes. They were all tall and handsome and looked as wholesome as Greek gods. They were making history, and having the times of their lives. Above all, there was an innocence about them; something untainted. In John Rymill's book
Southern Lights
, they all seem to be indescribably happy all the time. When they were leaving Antarctica, Rymill wrote of ‘a feeling of loss as though a friend had died'. ‘To think', the book ends, ‘that when we return to England one of the first questions we shall be asked – probably by a well-fed businessman whose God is his bank book – will be “Why did you go there?”'