Terra Incognita (38 page)

The builders were with us, which made the trip more entertaining and the lounge friendlier. One day a pair of them pretended to the others that everyone was obliged to participate in iceberg patrol and handed out hard hats emblazoned with the words
BERG ALERT
and broom handles to shove away stray islands of ice. Two chippies fell for it, and dutifully stood on the lower deck wearing the Berg Alert hats, smoking and occasionally glancing around to see if any giant icebergs were bearing down on the ship. When they spotted the others taking photographs of them, the game was up.

The BAS men who were leaving Rothera after two-and-a-half years sniggered into their beer as they imagined the winterers back on base. It was traditional to sabotage winterers upon departure, and on this occasion a trout had been stowed in the ventilation system, a gallon of green food colouring poured into the water tanks and small cubes of stilton cheese balanced on the lattice ceiling of the bar. The winterers had tried to effect proleptic revenge, knowing something horrible lay ahead, and half a mackerel was found in a bunk shortly after we sailed, provoking much discussion about the possible location of the other half, which was, in fact, never found. I discovered a portion of trifle in my left boot.

The Southern Ocean was very still as we sailed up the peninsula. When a penguin broke the surface, the ripples spread into enormous concentric circles until they died far away in the silver-blue water. On one side of the ship serrated mountain ranges sliced through the water, the sheerest faces, ablated of snow, shading the landscape with patches of charcoal engraved with a fine white lattice. The clouds massed into dark purply tornadoes that stormed through the fuzzy peach light of the sky, or sometimes they remained expressionless for days, hanging down to the narrow band of light on one side of the horizon. Icebergs came to seem as normal to us as trees on the side of a road.

We had to pick up ten men from Faraday, a small BAS station on Galindez Island. They were at the end of their tour of duty, and were going home. When we got there, on a Saturday afternoon, most of us went ashore.

The bar at Faraday, a magnificent piece of polished woodwork, was famous in Antarctic history. Two builders had been employed to construct a hardwood extension to the pier, but instead spent the whole winter toiling over this fine bar. The wharf was never finished, and the men were dismissed, though they are remembered daily with pride and gratitude. The current incumbents had alighted on the idea of brewing beer in fire extinguishers, and when we arrived they were busily squirting it out of the syphons.

We remained at Faraday for twenty-four hours, and I was able to roam freely around the station and its few outposts. In a small library tucked away off the famous bar I found a shoebox of replies to a collective advertisement the base commander had placed in a dating magazine back in England (‘Dear boys, Hope you're not too cold down there . . .'). Photographs stuffed between the books revealed the recent Faraday Buddhist Night, when the residents shaved their heads, put on their windies and sat crosslegged and barefoot. A blurred picture of Viking Night showed them careering through the snow in horned helmets brandishing torches.

The station was opened as a geophysical observatory in 1954, and called Base F; it was renamed in 1977 after Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century English chemist and physicist who discovered electro-magnetic induction and introduced the basic principle of the electric motor and dynamo. Along the way he probably believed more wrong theories than any man alive then or now, a gratifying testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Geophysics had remained the main thrust of the science at Faraday, though it was an important meteorological station and collected weather data from British, American and German bases. This information eventually found its way into the World Meteorological Organisation database, and who knows what happened to it then. There was no airstrip at Faraday. It was a very cosy base, and less institutional than Rothera; but it was about to cease operating as a British station and be handed over to the Ukrainians, who badly wanted a base of their own. They renamed it Vernadsky. It seemed like the end of an era.

The Faraday joiner, who had shown me a coffin he had made, unilaterally decided that I should visit Winter Island and propelled me down the wharf and into a small and precarious boat with a four-horsepower Seagull engine. The slipway at Faraday was positioned directly below the sewage pipe, which meant that one was obliged to dodge flying turds while getting in one's boat. We motored past a wooden signpost saying ‘Crown Land' against which a crabeater seal was manifesting signs of disrespect. The hut on Winter Island was opened in 1947 as a wintering station for three meteorologists and a general assistant. Called Wordie House, it was maintained for seven years until Coronation House, now Faraday, was opened, and has been closed ever since, except for the year when a team making for Adelaide Island got caught out by bad ice and bivouacked in Wordie House.

Inside, it was like a set for a fifties film, dotted with blocks of Marmite and tiny tins of gramophone needles ‘each good for eight records'. The shelf of books included
Instructions on How to Play the Bagpipes
, novels by John Buchan, girlie annuals displaying women in swimsuits which looked as if they had been designed for army combat – and, harking back to the old days, Tennyson. One room was dominated by a massive typewriter of the kind that would be presided over in the film by a straight-backed woman wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and ropes of fake pearls. The thick cotton trousers folded over the back of a chair were exactly the same as those sported by the
Bransfield
's third engineer, a Geordie who had come with us.

‘You know you're getting old,' he said, slurping tea out of a blue-rimmed tin mug, ‘when your keks are in a museum.'

That night, in eighty-knot winds and horizontal rain, two bergs converged on the
Bransfield
. When the golden rods of our searchlight beams tunnelled through the darkness and alighted on the bergs, we saw that the ice was scratched with the red ship's paint. The
Bransfield
dragged her anchor, and at one point – black smoke pouring from the funnel and soaked crewmen wrestling with ropes in pools of light on the foredeck – we were only twenty yards off the rocks.

∗

The sun shone during our passage through the Lemaire Channel, and most of us spent the day on the monkey deck. Unclimbed mountains wobbled in the polished surface of the water, and pods of whales fluked among the bergs. We passed the deserted red buildings of an Argentinian base and its Chilean neighbour, the latter sporting a particularly large flag. I thought of my first visit to Antarctica, when I saw it through South American eyes. The Chileans at Marsh were wonderful hosts; they wanted to share it. Everyone addressed me immediately in the familiar ‘
tu
' form, which they hadn't done in real Chile until the ice was broken. Antarctica didn't seem a problem to them. It wasn't so much that they had made their little bit of King George Island home, but that it was home. ‘The water in the bay', they would say, ‘has lapped on our shore.' They had a school, a hospital and a bank on base, they brought their wives and children down with them, and they broadcast Radio Sovereign FM from the weather station. On Friday evenings Radio Sovereign ran a quiz show. The questions were about Antarctica, and all the bases on the island took part, although first they had to find someone who could speak Spanish. While I was there a Chinese contingent arrived to collect their prize, which – I suspected to their chagrin – was a specially baked cake.

Because it was only a three-hour flight from the tip of South America and not permanently ice-covered, King George Island, squatting in the archipelago named the South Shetlands by Scottish sealers, was a popular site for bases. The Russians were there, as were the Poles, the Uruguayans, the Brazilians and the Argentinians as well as the Chileans and the Chinese. I had eaten syrupy balls of undercooked dough at Great Wall, drunk vodka at Bellingshausen and been given a piggy-back across a deep stream by a Brazilian lieutenant commander. Each country transports its culture to the bottom of the world when it sets up in Antarctica – the good and the bad. In Bellingshausen the piles of rubbish, the acres of crusty mud, the puffy-faced men with silver teeth, the ghostly outlines of the metal letters CCCP which had been clumsily jemmied off doors, the abandoned machinery of failed scientific projects, the single inadequate Lada – well, they were Russian all right.

Chile and Argentina base their Antarctic claims on medieval bulls and decrees inherited from Spain, and they have clung to these claims like children to comfort blankets. One of the few things the two nations have ever agreed upon was to take a common line against Britain – twice in the 1940s – by reinforcing the concept of a South America Antarctic (though later they squabbled even about that). General Pinochet flew down to King George Island in 1977 and declared that it was merely a continuation of Chilean territory. Six families were despatched there in 1984 to institute a ‘permanent' settlement. On the other side of the Andes the entire Cabinet took off from Buenos Aires and landed on the ice to prove how very Argentinian that part of Antarctica was.

Other South American republics have also cast their eyes south. The Peruvians named their base Machu Picchu. Much of the scientific data produced by the smaller nations was valuable, but some of it was privately questioned by the larger, richer countries. All programmes are required to submit descriptions of their science projects to an international Antarctic science body, ostensibly so that research can be shared. The Uruguayans once sent in details of an experiment which involved playing loud music to penguins to see how they reacted.

Geopolitics dwelt in the north; on the ice there was only one enemy – the cold. I remember stopping next to a stream between Marsh and Bellingshausen with my Chilean minder and a Russian biologist.

‘We are very proud of this river between us,' said the Russian in Spanish.

‘What's it called?' I asked.

‘Volga,' said the Russian immediately.

‘Mapocho,' said the minder simultaneously, and they both screamed with laughter.

‘En Antártida,'
the minder had said later, ‘
No hay fronteras
' – there are no borders. On the continent it was still as it had been in the forties when Chilean and Argentinian warships arrived at the British base on Stonington Island and the captains delivered official protests about British presence in their territorial waters and followed them up with invitations to dinner and picture shows. ‘Beyond the Polar Circle', said the great French Antarctican Jean Charcot, ‘there are no Frenchmen, no Germans, no English, no Danes; there are only people of the Pole, real men.'

∗

The birds were especially abundant when the whales were churning up krill, and we argued when we tried to identify them. Of petrels alone we recorded morphs, Antarctics, giants, pintados (the zebras of the southern ocean), snowies and Wilson's. Ben was the most authoritative spotter.

‘There!' he said one day, pointing to a bird wheeling around the ship. ‘White-chinned petrel.'

‘I can't see a white chin,' someone piped up. ‘Looks totally brown to me.'

‘You'd have to be holding the bird in your hand to see the white chin,' Ben said. ‘But it's there.'

While it was light, Ben was always out on deck.

‘Well,' he said, when I remarked on this, ‘I'll never see all this again.' It was as if he wanted to drink in the landscape and store it up, like water in a camel's hump, and live off it in the seasons still to come, sitting out his retirement in Sheffield.

What thrilled us most were not birds but whales. We saw humpbacks and minkes and bottlenoses, and one morning a large pod of killers came fluking past our ship.

Whalers played an important part in the discovery of Antarctica, especially after they had bled the Arctic dry. A group of Dundonians set out in 1892, their thoughts fixed on the riches waiting for them in the Southern Ocean. They were sharp in turning their attention to southern waters: the Falklands sector of the Antarctic is the richest whaling ground in the world. But in technique, the Scots had already been beaten by their Norwegian rivals. Their equipment was outmoded and they were looking for the wrong kind of whale: they wanted bone for umbrellas and corsets, but the market wanted oil, not least for munitions.

Before setting out from home I had walked along a salty spit in Dundee to see W. G. Burn-Murdoch's paintings of this expedition in Broughty Castle, a deserted museum with a spiral staircase curling between mildewed floors. The second floor featured a programme from the Royal Terror Theatre on the
Discovery
, advertising the Dishcover Minstrel Troupe. Whaling died out in Dundee before the Great War, and the
Terra Nova
was the last whaler ever built by Dundonians. But in Antarctica the trade took off in the first two decades of the twentieth century after the Norwegian Carl Larsen founded Grytviken on South Georgia and floating whale factories were developed. The industry reached its peak in southern waters in the 1930s. Despite the mystique – an early participant called it ‘the greatest chase which nature yieldeth' – to which a number of writers succumbed, whaling was one of the hardest trades, and it employed the hardest drinkers. It was not unknown for men to break the ship's compass to quaff its alcohol. In the twenties a crewman wrote, ‘There were two kinds of days, bad days and worse, and each lasted twenty-four hours.' Business dropped off dramatically during the Second World War when synthetic glycerin was developed and most of the fleet sunk by German raiders. After a few dying spurts, the last whaling station on South Georgia closed in 1965.