Terra Incognita (7 page)

Before the
Resolution
sailed out of Sheerness on 21 June 1772 under Captain Cook, more than half the crew deserted. Cook was under Admiralty instructions to find the great southern land. He had always suspected that there was no such thing, despite the fact that the weight of the scientific establishment at home pressed upon its existence. Joseph Banks, the brilliant naturalist who sailed with Cook, recounts in his logbook that on the
Endeavour
, Cook's other ship on the 1772 voyage, the men were divided into two camps according to their opinion on the existence of Antarctica. They called themselves ‘we Continents' and ‘no Continents'. In 1770 the ‘no's thought they had sailed around what constituted definitive proof – but they were still footling about off New Zealand.

Cook was a Yorkshireman without formal education, and he worked on the Whitby coal-carriers before signing up with the Navy and applying himself to the cutting edge of eighteenth-century science. He was measured and, like Shackleton, always had his finger on the pulse of his men, who were frequently drunk. Cook took care to learn from those who had gone before him, and unlike the crews battling around Antarctica over a century later, Cook's men never got scurvy.

In the end the pack ice stopped him. He wrote that the sea was so ‘pestered' with ice that land was inaccessible. In the
Resolution
he crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first man to do so, and discovered the circumpolarity of the Southern Ocean. In January 1775 he claimed South Georgia, though he wasn't impressed with the island, writing in his journal that the land he had seen was ‘a country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun's rays, but to lie buried under everlasting snow and ice, whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe'. As he sailed away he concluded, ‘There is not the least room for the possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of reach of navigation.' Four years later this great man, only fifty years old, was stabbed to death with an iron dagger by natives in the clear blue waters of Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii.

After Captain Cook, sealers and whalers ushered in the next phase of discovery as they eddied around southern waters in the 1820s. The continent probably wasn't sighted before 1820, and it was almost certainly the Estonian Fabien Bellingshausen who saw it first. Born the year Cook died, and despatched south by Tsar Alexander I, Bellingshausen turned out to be a great explorer, and took up Cook's baton. The British Edward Bransfield and the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer also made early sightings. Palmer was twenty-one when, in 1820, he rang the bell of the
Hero
in thick fog off the coast of the South Shetland Islands. He thought he was hundreds of miles from another ship, and then he heard a bell clanging in reply. It was from Bellingshausen's ship, and the Admiral quickly put on his regalia and formally invited Palmer aboard the
Vostok
.

James Clark Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle and penetrated the sea which now bears his name during a Royal Navy voyage he led between 1839 and 1843. He discovered great swathes of the ice edge. Ross joined up when he was eleven, went off to the Arctic with his uncle to look for the Northwest Passage, the geographical grail of its day, became a scientist and located the North Magnetic Pole. He was said to be the most handsome man in the Navy. When he reached home, after more than four years in the south, he was knighted. He was also married, but only after his father-in-law had extracted a contract from him that there would be no more polar voyages. He settled in a small village near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where he now lies in the churchyard.

In 1898 the
Belgica
expedition became the first to winter in the pack ice. Amundsen was on it, so was Frederick Cook, the man who later claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. Seven nationalities were represented: as T. H. Baughman put it in his book
Before the Heroes Came
, ‘The
Belgica
expedition was a fugue in seven voices.' The ship was not properly equipped for an Antarctic winter. Many of the crew showed signs of scurvy, and each man made his own private journey into despair during the long, dark months of the polar night. When a lieutenant died, it almost broke their spirit.

Carsten Borchgrevinck went south aboard the
Southern Cross
at the turn of the century. Although it was a British expedition, Borchgrevinck was a naturalised Australian whose father was Norwegian, and to the British geographical establishment of the day this was tantamount to playing football for a non-league side. He got along so badly with physicist Louis Bernacchi that the latter refers to Borchgrevinck in his diary as
l'enfant
. Still, the dogs they had brought south proved remarkably successful when harnessed to the sledges, with ground-breaking results for the expedition. Another unsung hero, William Spiers Bruce, led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition in 1902–4. The artist of the voyage, W. G. Burn Murdoch, wrote a book called
From Edinburgh to the Antarctic
, and he ended it with an expression of malaise about the land they left unexplored. ‘And so we returned from the mysteries of the Antarctic, with all its white-bound secrets still unread, as if we had stood before ancient volumes that told of the past and the beginning of all things, and had not opened them to read. Now we go home to the world that is worn down with the feet of many people, to gnaw in our discontent the memory of what we could have done, but did not do.'

We flew over the ice-locked Inexpressible Island, and the cockpit dials showed that 50-knot katabatic
¹
winds were flying down from the Reeves Névé
²
. It was the island where Victor Campbell was stranded for eight months with five men in their summer clothes and two months' rations during the Antarctic winter of 1912. They suffered from a painful condition they called ‘igloo back', their lives so troglodytic and their faces so caked with blubber that they were recognisable only by their voices. Yet they enjoyed concerts on Saturday nights, and issued copies of a newspaper called
The Adélie Mail
.

Victor Campbell was an Old Etonian, a scientist and first officer on the
Terra Nova
on Scott's second expedition. He went to Antarctica partly because his marriage was rocky. Having been conveyed to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf by the
Terra Nova
in January 1911, the intention of the Eastern Party, which consisted of Campbell, three seamen and two officers, was to carry out extensive surveying work, but they failed to find an eastern landing. Initiative being the key to Antarctic science then as now, they went north to Cape Adare instead.

On the way, much to the surprise of both groups, they met Amundsen and the other Norwegians in the Bay of Whales. When the watchman of the
Fram
– clearly a man who liked to hedge his bets – saw the
Terra Nova
sailing past, he brought out his Jarman gun, which he loaded with six bullets, and an English phrasebook from which he quickly learnt to say ‘Hello, how are you this morning?' The encounter was cordial, and they inspected each other's quarters. The British were astonished at the efficiency with which the Norwegians handled their dogs, and Amundsen recorded in his diary that after the visitors left all the Norwegians caught colds.

At Cape Adare, Campbell and his five men waved the ship goodbye and renamed themselves the Northern Party. After a fruitful season the
Terra Nova
picked them up again and dropped them at what became Inexpressible Island, supposedly for six weeks. But when it came to fetch them that time, it failed to get through the pack ice and returned to New Zealand, leaving Campbell and his men marooned in an ice hole for eight months.

Then men got used to a meat and fat diet, though its high acid content meant that some frequently wet themselves. After eight months on the edge of endurance they had to trek 230 miles back to the hut on Ross Island, and when they got there, they learnt that Scott and the others had perished.

Beyond the island, a flash of colour caught my eye. I realised it must be the Italian station, crouched on the edge of Terra Nova Bay. In five minutes the rotor was shuddering to a stop on the helipad in front of the base.

The main building was on stilts, with Prussian blue corrugated metal walls, a Siena orange roof and Beaubourgesque chimneys. From it emerged Mario. He was a dark-haired and olive-skinned man in his late forties, wearing glasses and a permanently hunted expression. He welcomed me, looking anxiously over my shoulder at the helicopter cargo, of which there was very little. We walked in, but he was distracted, so I tried to keep a low profile, not an easy task when thrust among forty Italians eager for new blood. I was introduced to almost everyone at once, and propelled into the Operations Room –
la sala comando
. It was a long narrow room with one continuous window overlooking the helipad and a great sweeping panorama encompassing the whole bay, frozen as far as the Campbell Ice Tongue and metamorphosing beyond that into the beckoning turquoise of open water. Presiding over it all was Mount Melbourne, the 2900-metre volcanic cone named by Ross after the British prime minister. It dominated the Italian presence as completely as Mount Erebus dominated the Americans and the New Zealanders. The operations room was run like a wartime bunker by Gaetano, a wiry lieutenant-colonel aged around thirty who flew about the room, spluttering like a grenade, and gave the impression of constant and almost fatal overwork. He thrust a VHF radio into my hand and barked a few sentences of unintelligibly acronym-laden Italian.

Shortly before supper Mario asked sheepishly if I minded sleeping on the floor of a
laboratorio
. The dorms were full, and the alternative was an isolated outbuilding. I was perfectly happy. The laboratory was a narrow room with a sink, shelves lined with bottles of lurid substances, a smell of formaldehyde and a camp bed. When I opened a cupboard door a deluge of syringes rained down. I tried to disconnect the long rubber tube from the tap, so that I could clean my teeth
in situ
, but the project failed amid geysers of very cold water. At the end of the room there was a window, which was fortunate, as the lab grew unaccountably hot at night.

∗

The accommodation, the kitchen, the
sala comando
and most of the labs and offices were located in the main building, which meant that you didn't have to face whiteouts to get to breakfast. In the evening
cena
was eaten at the civilised time of 8.30 and in this department the Italian nation excelled itself. Not only were wine boxes provided at both lunch and dinner, but the chef, an endlessly cheerful Neapolitan called Ciro who was like a small rubber ball, created unbelievably delicious meals. His kitchen was not resupplied regularly with fresh foods and I never understood how he managed to perform his culinary feats. When I asked him, he said the important thing was to cook
con amore
.

On top of this, an industrial-sized espresso machine in one of the two lounges was permanently connected to the water supply. To me, this was akin to attaining Nirvana. The lounges were furnished with brown Dralon sofas, a fridge containing soft drinks and mineral water (the Italians drink bottled water on the ice, a habit held up by veterans of the British Antarctic Survey as an example of wanton profligacy and the moral turpitude of Foreigners) and a video screen. In a small room next door there was a table football game, hunched over which people regularly worked themselves into a frenzy. After dinner, the Italians enjoyed lounging around in the corridor outside the dining room and jabbering over tiny cups of espresso. Mario often used this period to inform the team of his latest project.

‘I have decided', he said one night, throwing his head back and gulping down a mouthful of espresso, ‘to bring the Pope out to the ice.' He paused to allow for digestion of this information. ‘What do we all think of that?'

‘Well,' said Gaetano, spluttering quietly, ‘I cannot really see His Holiness on a snowmobile.'

There were three women on station, and they used to gather for a cigarette outside the metal shower cubicles in the bathroom.

‘How are you finding our base?' the eldest one asked me during one of these fag breaks. She was a woman of feisty spirits and Chaucerian ribaldry whose role at Terra Nova Bay I was never able to ascertain.

‘Fine!' I said.

‘Look, don't panic if the men seem desperate – you know, for women. They are just talk –' she finished the sentence by imitating the working of a jaw with her fingers and thumb. ‘In this very cold,' she continued, whereupon the other two began laughing, as if they knew what she was going to say, ‘their little
cazzi
become this tiny,' and she held her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. With that, she slapped me on the back with one hand, stubbed a cigarette out in the sink with the other, burst through the swing door and sailed into the corridor.

During the day the base exuded a permanent sense of urgency. It was a summer-only station,
¹
which put everyone under pressure, and besides this, the Italians were a long way from their nearest neighbours. It all contributed to a kind of frontier spirit, as did the fact that the history of the Italian presence in Antarctica was shorter than a decade. They still referred to their presence as
una spedizione
– an expedition. Perhaps Terra Nova Bay recaptured the excitement and energy of American and British bases operating thirty years before the Italians headed south.

∗

I had just divested myself of my cold-weather clothes after a bracing walk around the bay when Gaetano's voice boomed over the tannoy announcing that an
elicottero
was waiting for me, his tone indicating that each minute that elapsed precipitated the base further towards nuclear fission. I rushed to pull on my cold-weather clothes again, jamming the zip of the vermilion parka.