Terra Incognita (6 page)

Trapped in my office for four hours, waiting for a call, I had my first lesson in the logistics of Antarctic travel. Part of the journey was about learning to keep still.

When the telephone rang, a Kiwi pilot introduced himself. He was very sorry but he couldn't possibly take me as the helicopter was already overloaded. He had no idea when there would be another trip, if ever.

Ten minutes later, as I was still sprawled miserably in my swivel chair, the telephone rang again. Another Italian was gabbling. Mario, I established, had ordered Claudio off the flight so that I could take his place. ‘You come to Scott Base immediately!' I heard this unknown voice demanding) and I began pulling on my cold-weather clothes.

Scott Base has been called a suburb of McMurdo, so close that a shuttle bus runs between the two stations and Americans make daily raids on the tiny shop run by the New Zealanders. It was usually possible to catch a lift, and this I did. Scott Base was probably about one twenty-fifth of the size of its neighbour, at first sight a neat collection of pale green buildings overlooking the frozen shore and a bank of pressure ridges strewn with Weddell seals. I found the entrance and stood redundantly in the lobby, waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

A tall, athletic figure burst through a door.

‘Are you our passenger?' he asked brightly, and as I nodded he stretched out his hand. ‘I'm Ben, the co-pilot. Pleased to meet you. You must be a very important person.'

I wondered, as I shook his gloved hand, how such erroneous information had made its way into the system, and what the consequences might be when everyone found out that I wasn't important at all, but this was no time for petty worries. Within ten minutes I was reaping the fruits of the misconception, wedged into the back of a smart orange-and-white Squirrel helicopter emblazoned with the ItaliAntartide logo next to several bulging cardboard boxes and three ice axes. On the other side, a mechanic was fixing me a headset.

With only a very shaky idea about where I was going and with whom I was travelling, and no idea about when I might return, if ever, we took off over the frozen Sound towards the Transantarctics, the sky a brilliant blue and sunlight flashing off distant glaciers. I caught a glimpse, in those first few moments, of what I might learn in Antarctica. The world seemed freshly made, and the future cast all its terrors away on to the timeless snowfields. First, however, I had to learn about Antarctic weather systems.

The Italian Antarctic programme leased three Squirrels, four pilots and an air mechanic from a New Zealand company, and the five non-Italian-speaking Kiwis spent the austral summer at Terra Nova Bay supporting the science programme. Two of them were already there. The other three, my companions, were looking worried. After we had travelled about fifty miles a low bank of cloud appeared on the horizon ahead. Over the headset I heard them weighing up our options. The weather reports sounded gloomy, and we hadn't even reached the refuelling depot yet. The pilot decided to return to Scott Base.

Back we trooped into the pale green buildings, disrobing in the boot room and settling in the galley to drink tea until the weather changed. As far as I knew, they might have been talking about minutes or months. The Squirrel team used Scott as their base on that part of the continent, and they had metaphorically put their feet up. Embarrassed about walking into a base and drinking tea without having the smallest idea who lived in it, I introduced myself to a very nice man in a Batman t-shirt who immediately invited me to stay for dinner. During our meal I was horrified to meet the displaced Claudio, but he was beaming like the Cheshire Cat. I began to think that perhaps I had done him a favour.

At seven o'clock in the evening the pilot proclaimed that the flight was off for the day. The Squirrel had to be flown back to McMurdo, there being no tiedown facilities for overnight parking at Scott Base, so I hitched a lift home in it. All three of the crew came on the five-minute flight, so I offered them a drink before they headed back, leaving my bag strapped deep in the net on the side of the helicopter as I hadn't the heart to ask them to retrieve it. The plan was that, after our drink, they would return to Scott Base and telephone me in the morning, when they had weather information, with a revised departure time.

The Southern Exposure was a regular American bar with a shuffleboard, a popcorn machine, a video screen and no windows, so it was dark all the time, neatly reversing the environment outside the door. Knots of scientists sat around marking frustrated time while they waited to get into the field and start work, delayed by weather, or a broken plane, or both. When dancing broke out, I noticed Trotsky wobbling around on the floor. Everyone said he was one of the most brilliant scientists of his generation, and in line for a Nobel Prize. When I ran into him at the popcorn machine, he was yawning.

‘I keep waking up at five o'clock,' he complained. ‘I've got this new alarm clock, and I can't work out how to use it.'

At midnight we were still in the Southern Exposure. I hadn't even changed out of my cold-weather clothes, though several layers had been peeled off, and I was traipsing about in my huge boots like Gulliver. One drink had slid seamlessly into another, and to make matters worse, or better, the blond Texan seismic geologist had appeared halfway through the evening. Most New Zealanders are game for a party at any given moment, and these three were no exception, not least because there was no bar at Terra Nova Bay and so this might be the last one they'd see for a couple of months. They obviously felt that it operated on the principle of the camel's hump. As for Seismic Man, I had never met a more natural party animal.

We left at twelve-thirty, but only because the bar closed, and staggered off to consume several vats of coffee and numerous slices of toast in the galley. After this the Kiwis were finally induced to walk back to Scott Base, leaving Seismic Man and me to fritter away what was left of the evening.

∗

The telephone rang at some brutally early hour. We were leaving in ten minutes. I slammed down the handset, used my absent roommate's toothbrush (mine was strapped to the side of the helicopter) and layered up hastily once again. As I careered over to the helipad I saw Seismic Man running down the hill.

‘I heard them starting the helo,' he said. ‘I came to say goodbye.'

As I climbed into the back of the Squirrel it occurred to me that I probably ought to tell someone that I was leaving. I wriggled out and ran up the steps to the National Science Foundation Chalet, the administrative centre of the base. It had a sign on the door saying it was closed for Thanksgiving, so I took a pencil out of my pocket and scribbled a note on the sign. It said, ‘Gone to Terra Nova Bay in a Squirrel. W-002.'

CHAPTER TWO

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven

That seemed as though ice burned and was but more ice,

And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

So wild that every casual thought of this and that

Vanished.

W. B. Yeats, from
The Cold Heaven

I
PULLED OUT THE MAP
from my pocket and unfolded it as we flew along McMurdo Sound. The Pole was at the top, so on paper we were going down in order to travel north. Scott and Shackleton had obviously sent science teams out all over this area, as the names they had bestowed clung to the landscape like flies to flypaper. It made it all seem so English.

We landed on a cape first sledged during Shackleton's
Nimrod
expedition. The party named it Cape Roberts after William C. Roberts, their cook. The large-grained surface snow was glittering like millions of tiny mirrors, and two bearded and grizzled figures emerged from a Scott tent among clusters of black volcanic rocks. This modest camp was the embryonic heart of one of the most ambitious cooperative projects ever conceived in Antarctica. To investigate the late Cretaceous to mid-Cenozoic history of the Ross Sea region, geologists from five countries were proposing to drill offshore rock cores which would yield information on millions of years of tectonic and climatic change. We went into the hut for a cup of tea.

The others chatted; the two beards couldn't stop talking. William Roberts kept coming into my mind. I wondered what had brought him to the bottom of the world. As a cook, it could hardly have been a career move. At the turn of the century a great number of men had signed up to go south. Many did it for money. Carsten Borchgrevinck, who stood on the cusp of the Heroic Age and whose expedition was the first to winter on the continent, wrote in 1900, ‘The Antarctic may be another Klondike . . . there are fish – fisheries might be established . . . here is quartz in which metals are to be seen.' Some British explorers claimed to be motivated by national rivalry, and an entrenched belief that it was Britain's right to be first. Others had demons to escape; but they probably found them waiting on the ice. Scott's geologist on the
Terra Nova
, Frank Debenham, wrote, ‘Man strives for complete knowledge of his world just as a small boy climbs an apple tree even if there is no apple at the top.'

In addition, after all those long, hard centuries, it was widely believed that man had attained the most alluring geographical goal on earth. He had reached the North Pole. Just as people tired of the moon after 1969, in 1909 eyes sated on the north turned in another direction. They looked south.

As Scott noted in his diary, the bloated body of Arctic literature contrasted sharply with the skeletal material on its southern counterpart. At the beginning of the Heroic Age an editorial in the
Daily Express
commented, ‘The South Pole has never caught the popular imagination as its northern fellow has done . . . it is inconveniently distant from any European base, so its environment remains a kind of silence and mist and vague terrors.' Arctic discovery dated as far back as the late Norsemen who performed epic feats of discovery in Greenland and beyond, and by the nineteenth century the far north constituted another space on a map to be painted with the queasy colours of British imperialism. The loss of Sir John Franklin's fleet as it searched for the elusive Northwest Passage in 1847 had ignited the imagination of the nation and stoked the ideal represented by glorious death in remote spots in the service of the motherland. It spawned a whole colony of art, too, notably Edwin Landseer's famous ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes', depicting a pair of polar bears gnawing at the remains of a sailing ship, and Frederick Church's ‘Icebergs'.

Until Captain James Cook set out on his second voyage in 1772, Antarctica had been little more than a shadow crouching on the white horizon of the European imagination. Seafarers had charted sub-Antarctic islands which they surmised were the great southern land, but nobody really had the first practical idea what, if anything, was down there. Before Cook, it was a myth. It had always been a myth. The ancient Greeks looked at the winds and the oceans and
sensed
that it was there. Conceiving as they did of a balance in nature, they decided that the
arktos
, the bear in the north, must therefore be balanced by an
anti arktos
in the south. Simple!

In
AD
150 Ptolemy drew a continent on his map called
Terra Australis Incognita
, the Unknown Southern Land, and the existence of an Antarctica became fixed in the collective geographic mind. The fires Magellan saw burning on Tierra del Fuego in 1520 fuelled the notion of a great land still further to the south. If people lived that far down, why not further? When Drake got round Cape Horn in 1578 he declared there was nothing beyond it, because he could see the union of the Pacific and the Atlantic. None the less, Plancius's Planisphere, published in 1592, shows both the continent and
circulus antarcticus
. Plancius, Mercator and the other medieval cartographers struggling to make sense of it all interpreted medieval theory in the light of Spanish and Portuguese voyages. They decided, on at best flimsy evidence, that this land must be very big, mightily hard of access – and populated.

From the sixteenth century on, at least until Cook's second voyage, cartographers were kept busy lopping off bits of Antarctica which didn't exist, like pruning an unruly tree. One cartographer, Oronce Fine, gave the continent the snappy name
Terra australis nuper inventa sed non plene examinata
(the lately discovered but not completely explored southern land). This failed to catch on. The ghostly image of a fertile, wealthy Shangri-La was finally laid to rest by Cook in the latter part of the eighteenth century. His second voyage made all the Antarctic exploration which had gone before him look insignificant. He discovered that there could be no people there after all; it was too cold. The myth died. They were hoping for fertility and riches, the land of their dreams, and all they got was an interminable icescape.

∗

We landed again shortly after leaving the two beards. The Kiwis refuelled the Squirrel from a drum line, eyed beadily by a line of skuas, the ugly brown migratory gulls ubiquitous around the coast of Antarctica in summer. The fuel cache was located on the edge of the continent itself, a hundred miles along the Sound from McMurdo. In the background the faces of the Transantarctic mountains zigzagged downwards in gradations of creamy blue. The sky was mottled with cirro-stratus like fishscales, and shafts of sunlight fell on the creased surface of an ice tongue, a massive projection fed by two glaciers. Beyond it ink-dark seals lay around their holes. On one side mountains sank into glacier snouts, and on the other the sea ice had melted into a berg-studded occean which rippled lightly, like a wheatfield touched by the wind.

‘Look,' said Ben, disengaging the fuel pump and pointing at a field of crevasses on the side of a mountain. Each rift was miles long, and no doubt miles deep. So often it is the landscapes most inimical to life that are the most seductive. In this respect they are like boyfriends. It doesn't seem fair.