Terra Incognita (4 page)

Tucked into a hollow between the spur and an arc of hills, and at first obscured, a hundred buildings huddled on the ice-streaked volcanic rock of Ross Island.

I was prepared for McMurdo, the largest of the three American bases in Antarctica. It did not shock me to find what looked like a small Alaskan mining town with roads, three-storey buildings, the ill-matched architecture of a utilitarian institution and a summer population of more than a thousand people. The lower echelons of other Antarctic communities, none of whom had been anywhere near the place, are fond of parroting diatribes against McMurdo because of its size and sophistication, by implication asserting the superiority of their experience of ‘the real Antarctica'. I liked Mactown from the beginning, as one is drawn to certain anomalous characters in films, and my affection for it never faltered.

After a hundred introductions I was allotted a bedroom in a chocolate brown dormitory block. It was a pleasant room with two beds, two wardrobes, two desks and several sets of drawers, and it shared a shower and toilet with the room next door. I obviously had a roommate, but she was nowhere in evidence.

I duly layered up in my multiplicity of cold-weather garments, but when the wind dropped, the ambient temperature on Ross Island was no colder than a particularly bitter winter's day in London. Although the mean annual temperature at McMurdo is minus 17.7 degrees Celsius, in summer it can rocket to plus eight (it plunges as low as minus fifty in the winter). In those balmy days of summer when I first arrived the temperature hovered around minus five. It is true that if the mercury touches minus five in London the weather is headline news and the trains grind to a standstill – and it feels worse at home because one doesn't stroll around swaddled in three layers of polypropylene, two layers of fleece and an industrial-strength parka. For many of the Americans on station, winters at home are a good deal colder than summers on the edge of Antarctica.

What no one ever quite gets used to, however, is the brutalising effect of the wind. The average windspeed at McMurdo is ten miles per hour (twelve knots). Extremely high winds, common all over Antarctica and terrifyingly swift to arrive, can freeze exposed flesh in seconds. That, effectively, is what constitutes frostbite, not initially a highly dangerous injury but one that can soon become fatal if untreated. A wind racing along at thirty-five miles per hour (56 knots), for example, which is fairly usual, reduces an ambient temperature of minus six degrees Celsius to a windchill factor of minus twenty-eight.

The Crary Lab was a long, wet-cement-coloured building on stilts, the showpiece of American science in Antarctica. It consisted of mysterious enclaves of petri-dishes and microcentrifuge tubes, well-heated offices, antiseptic conference rooms and a lounge presided over by a scrofulous penguin in a glass case. Each lab door bore a number corresponding to the project number of its occupants. These Science or S numbers were the key to many things in McMurdo. The small and unfunded Artists' and Writers' Program, in which I was a participant, dispensed W-numbers (for Writer), and my number was W-002; a textbook writer from the Midwest had got W-001. On some doors, a metal sign had been stuck under the project numbers. Most of these signs were self-explanatory, such as Penguin Cowboys or Sealheads, but some were more gnomic: The Bottom Pickers, I found out later, were investigating the seabed.

The best thing about the Crary was the view from the picture window which ran the length of the lounge. It looked directly over McMurdo Sound at the Transantarctic Mountains. They stuck up like the bones of the planet.

I had been given an office, and its door sign said,
W-002: Wheeler
. It was a windowless room about eight feet square with two modern desks, a set of bookshelves and a blackboard. Around the corner, in the wide corridor, a collection of startlingly ugly Antarctic fish leered out from glass cases under belljars labelled with Latin names. Among them a bright blue plastic fish with yellow protrusions and goggle eyes glared out of its own jar of formaldehyde.

Later that day I was inducted into the intricacies of the Waste Management Program. I learnt that there were eighteen different kinds of waste ranging from Light Metal to Cooking Oil, though for complicated reasons a broken glass did not belong in ‘Glass' nor should a cereal box be thrown in ‘Cardboard'. This explained the behaviour of people I had seen standing in front of a row of bins clutching a small item in one hand and scratching their head with the other. Hazardous Waste constituted an entirely separate department of even more Byzantine complexity. The sprawling piles of rubbish once photographed by Greenpeace were a distant memory. Only veterans could remember the barrel which had been roped off between McMurdo and Scott Base after it allegedly fell off the end of the Geiger counter. The 413-ton nuclear reactor brought to the station in 1961 was a distant memory, as were the noxious brown clouds which used to billow from the high-temperature incinerator every Saturday. Two decades ago, waste was simply left on the frozen sea until the ice melted. This practice was outlawed by the U.S. Antarctic Program in 1980, however, before Greenpeace had entered the fray. Burning too had subsequently been outlawed, and waste was retrograded to the United States to be burnt there, or used as landfill, or recycled. The reactor was removed in 1972.

The American presence in Antarctica, financed and managed by the National Science Foundation, a government agency, and maintained by a private contractor based in Colorado, has outgrown its naval origins. With a budget hovering just below $200 million, the Antarctic programme represents six per cent of the NSF budget. As the U.S. Department of Defense has contracted, so the Navy (more properly, a joint military force) has been withdrawing from Antarctic operations, a process which looks set to continue.

At breakfast one day I sat next to a man with a chipped tooth and a ponytail who was fortifying himself with boiled eggs before setting off to collect meteors from the polar plateau. He had already discovered meteors from the moon, and he reckoned he had some from Mars too. He told me this quietly over his yolky toast, explaining how he could identify whence the rocks came as someone else might recount the story of a film they had watched on television the previous night.

‘By the way,' he said when I got up to leave. ‘Where do you live in the
real
world?'

∗

It happened that the elderly Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, the distinguished head of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, was at the end of a short honorary visit to McMurdo. He had published widely on Antarctica and, like any self-respecting Chilean, had written poetry about his experiences. I sought him out, and we sat in a hut overlooking the frozen Sound, talking about Chile. He was an enthusiastic character who seemed terribly grateful to speak Spanish. The more famous Pinochet was his cousin, and he muttered uncomfortably ‘we are not friends'. In the midst of my grand passion for Antarctica I occasionally looked over my shoulder at Chile, guiltily, as if at a lover I had betrayed. Oscar facilitated a reconciliation, and as I got up to go he touched my arm, and with his fingers resting in the crook of my elbow he said gently, ‘Chile is Chile, my dear. But Antarctica is about much more than ice.'

∗

Many images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration have burnt themselves into the imagination, but the wind-blasted huts constitute the most potent symbol, frozen set-pieces of old socks and tins of Fry's cocoa. I was longing to see the huts. I wanted to pay homage, and I hoped it would help me to understand the most highly charged chapter of the continent's history.

The Heroic Age began at the Sixth International Geographical Congress at London's Imperial Institute in 1895. On 3 August those present passed a resolution ‘that this Congress record its opinion that the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken', and went on to urge scientific societies throughout the world to start planning. Six years later, on a balmy summer's day in 1901 in the middle of a glittering high society yacht week off the south coast of England, a smiling King Edward VII stepped aboard
Discovery
and pinned the insignia of Member of the Victorian Order on the chest of her barely known young captain, Robert Falcon Scott, wishing him Godspeed on his journey to the ice. The period drew to a close little more than two decades later, on 5 January 1922, when Sir Ernest Shackleton clutched his heart and died in the cramped cabin of his last ship,
Quest
, off the lonely island of South Georgia.

Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen and Douglas Mawson: the Big Four. These were the heroes of a generation of children who pored over images of bergs towering above wooden ships and men and dogs straining in front of sledges. Queen Victoria had only been dead six months when
Discovery
steamed away from the Isle of Wight, and the twentieth century hadn't yet gathered momentum; when it did, it would steamroller these and many other dreams.

Scott, as English as overcooked cabbage, led two expeditions, setting out first in 1901 in the specially commissioned
Discovery
and ten years later in the spartan converted whaler
Terra Nova
. During the second expedition he reached the South Pole a month after Amundsen. When he saw the Norwegian flag flapping in the distance Scott wrote in his journal, ‘The worst has happened.' Two men died during the march home, and Scott and his two remaining companions perished in their tent, holed up in a blizzard eleven miles from a supply depot.

Shackleton was an Anglo-Irishman, and he first went south aboard
Discovery
, under Scott's command. On that expedition he sledged to the 81st parallel with Scott, but was eventually invalided home with scurvy. In 1907 Shackleton set out aboard
Nimrod
as leader, at last, of his own expedition, and on that journey he got to within 97 nautical miles of the Pole. It was, at the time, the furthest south ever reached. In 1914 he went again, leading an ambitious expedition in which two ships, the
Endurance
and the
Aurora
, deposited parties of men on opposite sides of the continent. The plan was that one party, led by Shackleton, was to sledge across Antarctica while the other laid depots on the opposite side. It didn't work out like that.
Endurance
was crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea and Shackleton was obliged to embark on an epic struggle to save himself and his men. It was an exceptionally difficult ice year, and on the other side the Ross Sea party also got into severe difficulties. After the First World War, Shackleton left Britain again, this time aboard
Quest
, with the aim of mapping an unknown sector of Antarctic coastline. On the journey out, he died.

Together with Ibsen and Grieg, Roald Amundsen brought his young country out of the shadowy realm of northern mists. He had extensive experience in the north, made the first transit in one vessel of the Northwest Passage, and travelled with Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest polar explorer of all. Amundsen was planning to reach the North Pole, but when he heard that Frederick Cook claimed to have got there, he decided to go south, and set out in 1910 aboard
Fram
– though he didn't tell the crew or the rest of the world his true destination until he reached Madeira, off the north African coast. Until then, only his brother knew. Amundsen and four companions reached ninety degrees south on 14 December 1911 and raised a Norwegian flag on the brick-hard ice at the South Pole.

Mawson was a scientist. A British-born Australian, he first went south with Shackleton, aboard
Nimrod
. Mawson was one of three men to reach the South Magnetic Pole, the south pole of the earth's magnetic field (as opposed to the geographic South Pole, which is the southern point of the earth's rotation). In 1911 he led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, also aboard
Aurora
, and made a legendary one-man journey by walking hundreds of miles back to base after his two companions had died, one of them disappearing down a crevasse with almost all the food and the other going mad from food poisoning. Sixteen years later Mawson led a joint British, Australian and New Zealand expedition, and he ended his career as Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at Adelaide University.

On the
Discovery
expedition Scott's men built a hut on the spur protruding into McMurdo Sound. The spur became known as Hut Point and the hut was primarily used for storage, though they also performed plays in it – larky rituals being
de rigueur
. It was subsequently used as an advance base by other sledging parties.

McMurdo had risen up less than a mile from the Point. The wind was blowing steadily at about 25 miles an hour when I first walked down to the hut, and the exposed flesh between my goggles and balaclava immediately began to feel as if it were burning. I quickly covered every square inch. I was already quite used to sub-zero temperatures, but I only had to take off my gloves and glove liners for five or ten seconds to feel what would happen to me in a high wind if I failed to dress properly. If I tried to take a photograph without my glove liners when the wind was blowing hard, however speedily I went about setting up the shot I almost invariably lost sensation in one or two fingers. I couldn't begin to imagine what the old explorers had suffered when they pushed further south, month after crucifying month. I saw them with fresh eyes then.

When I entered the hut, the stillness came upon me like a benediction. There was a mummified seal, a frozen mutton carcass and stacked tins of Huntley and Palmer biscuits. It was colder than a sepulchre. They used to light a blubber stove, but the heating was always inadequate, according to the diaries. Shackleton wrote later that ‘The discomfort of the hut was a byword of the expedition,' and when he was back there in 1908 he reported that some men preferred to sleep outside in their tents, as it was warmer. In the sixties a New Zealander stepped on a mousetrap that had been brought down by Scott's men to protect the food stores. I wouldn't have fancied a mouse's chances in those temperatures.