Terra Incognita (22 page)

∗

Over the last two days a battalion of jobs presented themselves for attention. John dispensed tasks from long lists inscribed in a red spiral-bound notebook.

‘When I get on the last helicopter,' he told me, ‘I like to look back and see it looking just as it did the day we landed.'

I packed up the foodboxes, and took the others mugs of Lipton's Hot Spiced Cider. All camps had a suspicious proliferation of this. It came in teabags, and the packet proclaimed ‘Contains No Apple Juice', as if this were a selling point. As I carried a mug across the ice a tall figure dived in front of me with his pants around his ankles. It was Mike, and he slid to a stop at my feet, arms flailing.

‘Shit!' he said.

The latrine at Camp Mackay was a hole in the sea ice. It was protected by a small windbreaker and offered a panoramic view of the landscape. On this occasion, a seal had emerged through the hole and exhaled in his usual manner while Mike was engaged in the task at hand.

Lavatorial stories were part of the fabric of camp life in the south, as they are in all camps. Fortunately the Incinolet variety of Antarctic outhouse had been abandoned. Like many of their kind, the Incinolets only accepted solids, but unlike the other types they were powered by electricity, with the result that if liquid was deposited in error the donor received an electric shock and the Incinolet shorted out.

We made such good progress with the cleaning up that Ross declared a half day and we took off on an excursion to Botany Bay and Granite Harbour. John didn't come; he took his work very seriously. I think he was glad to have us out of the way.

I travelled lying in a trailer behind a snowmobile. It wasn't very comfortable, but I preferred it to the back of the snowmobile as it was easier to lose yourself when you didn't have to concentrate on hanging on. We trawled round the sea ice and stopped beneath the cliffs at Granite Harbour, climbing over pressure ridges to zigzag up a hill coated with spongy black lichen and lash out at swooping skuas. Glacier ice cascaded down the granite cliffs like ice cream down a cone, and the boys paused to argue the toss between the conflicting theories of glacial stability and glacial dynamism.

Granite Harbour, discovered in January 1902 when the
Discovery
steamed in, was an embayment about eleven miles wide which marked the seaward end of a deep valley between Cape Archer and Cape Roberts, and it was backed by high mountains. Frank Debenham, T. Griffith Taylor, Tryggve Gran and P.O. Robert Forde, the Second Western Party, set out from Cape Evans on 14 December 1911 to geologise in the area of Granite Harbour, and they built a rock shelter which they called Granite House, a name they took from a Jules Verne story. They used it as a field kitchen, because the blubber stove exuded too many fumes to be kept in a tent. They even sprouted sea kale in a kitchen garden outside. In 1959 an American party discovered two books in perfect condition in the shelter. One was by Poe and the other by Verne, and when they opened them they saw from the flyleaves that Griffith Taylor had owned one and Debenham the other. As both men were still alive, the Americans sent the books back.

∗

Everyone gathered in the canvas hut at seven the next morning, the day of our pull-out, lured out of sleeping bags by John's tactical promise of maple-syrup pancakes. As the stove had been purged it was very cold, and the hut had been stripped, so it was like sitting down at home for the final cup of tea on the day you move house. The discussion revolved around the weather and potential competition for helicopter time, and our spirits rose during our radio schedule with McMurdo as we heard that a number of other camps were weathered in.

I was sent back on the first trip, wedged between Ross and three plastic trash sacks. I couldn't see anything at all, and teabags leaked on my shoulder.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the south.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, from
The Worst Journey in the World

I
N
1911, in the heart of the polar winter, the saintly Bill Wilson, Scott's right-hand man, pulled a sledge from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier with Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard in order to collect emperor penguin eggs. No human being had yet seen such eggs. The temperature dropped to minus seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit, the tent blew away, and when they finally got back to the hut after five weeks the others had to use tin openers to get their clothes off. ‘I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain,' wrote Cherry-Garrard.

When three eggs reached England, the men in starched collars labouring in the Gothic scientific institutions sniffed and said that the Crozier trip ‘had not added greatly to our knowledge of penguin embryology'. In
The Worst Journey in the World
, a book which deals with the whole expedition, though the title refers to the march to Crozier, Cherry-Garrard artlessly turns the journey into the quest for truth and the penguin eggs into a symbol of its spiritual goal. It is the archetypal transmogrification of failure on a human plane into success on a higher one. He said this:

Cherry wrote the book after he had been invalided home from the Western Front, and by then the war had shattered illusions like so many eggshells. ‘Never such innocence, never before or since,' Philip Larkin wrote of 1914. For Cherry, the trek to Crozier became a one-way journey out of prelapsarian innocence. Nobody needed to believe the mythical elevation more than he did. His two companions, Wilson and Bowers, had gone on to die with Scott, and he tortured himself with the thought that he might have saved them had he taken the dogs further before the next winter closed in.

For Cherry, as for the dying Scott, the whole business became an apotheosis. He ends the book like this:

His prose is divine, its mournful echoing cadences reminiscent of a great badly-lit railway station where people are saying goodbye. Among the youngest of Scott's men, Cherry was a typical Edwardian landed gentleman, a classicist and a rower, and he was very popular in the south. Despite shockingly bad eyesight, besides being one of the best sledgers, he was the editor of the
South Polar Times
and Wilson's indefatigable zoological assistant. The transmogrification he effected did not keep his demons at bay, and he spent a large part of his later years suffering from depression.

Shortly after I had returned from Chile, I found a battered copy of
The Worst Journey
in a secondhand bookshop. Knowing almost nothing about Antarctica, I lay in the hammock on my roof for an hour's respite after a murderously frustrating morning in front of the word processor. With a duvet over me, I grasped the book in one hand so that it hovered in mid-air above my face. I had been invited to a birthday party that night, and in a burst of organisational zeal I had already ironed my frock, which was hanging, ready for duty, from the picture rail in my bedroom. But I never went to the party. I closed the book at four in the morning – by then inside on the sofa, though still under the duvet. ‘This journey had beggared our language,' Cherry wrote, but he had searched within himself and produced a masterpiece.

The Worst Journey
has slipped the shackles of its period and entered the immortal zone. It has influenced countless people, and pops up unexpectedly in volumes of memoirs and essays by writers from Nancy Mitford to Paul Theroux. George Bernard Shaw, a friend of Cherry's, had cast his eye over an early draft, and in his biography of Shaw, Michael Holroyd wrote, ‘In Shaw's imagination the appalling conditions of the Antarctic became a metaphor for the moral climate of Britain between the wars, and Cherry-Garrard's survival a triumph of human will over social adversity.'

Cherry, Wilson and Bowers had built a rock shelter they called an igloo near the Cape Crozier emperor penguin colony. This was where the tent had blown away. I had an overpowering desire to lie in what was left of their shelter. There, I thought, I could pay homage.

I heard that a pair of scientists had to be picked up from their camp further down the coast of Ross Island and ferried to and from the Adélie colony at Crozier. By this time I had honed the skill of appearing at judicious moments in the Helo Ops room. Soon I had successfully insinuated myself on the flight manifest.

The day before I left for the Crozier pilgrimage I attended the weekly science lecture. It was about evolutionary biology, and the Catholic priest, appearing for the opposition, sat in the front row. ‘This is what Antarctica looked like for much of its geological history,' intoned the lecturer. By the time he got down to the palaeontological nitty-gritty the priest had nodded off, effectively registering his protest.

∗

We set off in a helicopter early in the morning and proceeded up the coast to Cape Bird, where two Kiwi biologists were waiting next to their small hut. From there, it took us half an hour to reach Crozier. I saw from the map that we were in James Clark Ross's territory: he had sprayed names everywhere. Cape Crozier was named after his best friend Francis Crozier, who captained the
Terror
, one of the two ships Ross took south. Its first lieutenant was Archibald McMurdo.

The pilot pointed across the Sound. In the distance a red dot was stationary in the heavy pack ice. It was an American icebreaker, trying to cut a channel for a tanker which would refuel McMurdo. Beneath us crevasse fields streaked the snow like cellulite.

‘See those?' said the pilot over the headset. ‘You could drive a double-decker bus in there.'

Then, like a handful of ash, fragments of black metal appeared on the snowfields. On 28 November 1979 a 200-ton DC-10 on a sightseeing flight crashed into the lower slopes of Erebus, killing all 257 aboard. The passengers on Air New Zealand Flight 901 were tourists. Like Americans and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, every Kiwi can tell you what they were doing when they heard the news. They could all remember, too, seeing the familiar Maori koru, the airline's logo, protruding from the snow on the DC-10's tail engine pod. The effect of the disaster on the national psyche was incalculable. ‘The fact that it was in the Antarctic made it particularly obscene,' someone said. Sixteen years on, I happened to mention to a table of New Zealanders in Wellington that someone had attended a McMurdo Halloween party in an impressive Mount Erebus costume. Silence descended like a fog. It was like telling a British gathering that someone had dressed up as Lockerbie.

We dropped off the biologists and arranged to pick them up two hours later. Having purposefully inflamed the crew with stories of epic heroism, I experienced no difficulty in persuading them that we should try to find Cherry's rock shelter. They threw themselves enthusiastically into the search.

‘You mean to say that they dragged their sledges over
that?
' asked the pilot, looking at the gnarled pressure ridges.

‘Yes,' I said, keen to maintain his interest. ‘They said their necks were frozen into the same position for hours.' It took three aborted landings and several radio conversations to establish the exact location of the rock shelter. I had read in
The Worst Journey
that it was two miles from the emperor colony. As we knew exactly where the emperor colony was, I had assumed that a swift aerial sweep within a two-mile radius would reveal the shelter. I didn't know that the colony had shifted four miles since Cherry manhauled to it.

We got out and looked over the pressure ridges from the top of a hill.

‘Look at that,' said the crewman. ‘Forty miles of crevasse fields and cracked, craggy ice – we could never land on most of that, and they pulled their sledges all this goddam way. Damn sure I wouldn't do it.'

When I spotted the remains of the shelter, my heart contracted. It was as if they were going to appear from behind a rock, their necks frozen, smiling through cracked lips. As the ground came up to meet us, my eyes filled with tears. I pulled down my goggles. I hadn't realised how close we had become, these dead explorers and I.

‘Can you believe those suckers built a shelter in such an exposed saddle?' said the crewman over the headset as the blades whirred to a stop and the wind buffeted the helicopter like a rocking chair.