Terra Incognita (5 page)

Of course, the Heroic Age didn't suddenly appear on the global landscape like a meteor. It grew organically out of what had gone before. Nineteenth-century explorers had been gobbled up by Victorians hungry for role models embodying the aspirations of the age. Peter Fleming wrote in
Bayonets to Lhasa
, his book about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, ‘By the end of the nineteenth century there were few major enigmas left on the African continent. Save for Antarctica, whose austere secrets were already arousing the competitive instincts of explorers, Tibet was the only region of the world to which access was all but impossible for white men . . .' But Tibet was small beer. Press attention shifted from the Dark Continent to the Arctic and thence to Antarctica, and the conquest of the last white spaces became a metaphor for the triumph of imperialism. The cultural vacuum of Antarctica provided the perfect
tabula rasa
on which to play out a vision. At Scott's farewell dinner Leonard Darwin, President of the Royal Geographical Society, said in his speech: ‘Scott is going to prove once again that the manhood of our nation is not dead and that the characteristics of our ancestors who won the Empire still flourish among us.'

∗

Twenty-four-hour daylight proved irredeemably desynchronising, and watching Mount Discovery glittering away busily in the small hours was like stealing a march on time.

Although McMurdo had two bars, as well as a Coffee Shop where temperate people sipped cappuccino, the best place to go drinking was an unofficial nightspot on the gloomy top floor of a dorm. It was known as the Corner Bar, and any reprobate who arrived on the ice was ineluctably drawn towards it like an iron filing to a magnet. It was not advertised, it was not even spoken of very often, and some people spent whole seasons on base without knowing of its existence. Yet anyone with lowlife inclinations appeared at the Corner Bar within forty-eight hours of arrival.

The Corner Bar was the creation of four enterprising support staff who had turned their two-bedroom-plus-connecting-shared-bathroom configuration of rooms into a communal lounge bar and four-bed bedroom. No money ever changed hands there. The bar, presided over by a hyperactive carpenter called Mike, ran on goodwill, and customers contributed bottles, or cash, or sent care parcels from New Zealand at the end of their tour. As the curtains were never drawn back the room was as Stygian and smoky as a shooting gallery. The Corner Bar kept erratic hours, but its schedule was simple: if the door was shut, then so was the bar. It was equipped with a large, low, smoked-plexiglass table and bar paraphernalia ranging from a huge Budweiser clock to a lifesized model penguin with the concentric circles of a shooting target painted on its chest. There was constant through-traffic, and new faces would loom out of the smoke among the hard-core movers and shakers. It was a great place.

I met a seismic geologist from Texas in the Corner Bar. He had blond hair, come-to-bed eyes and been-to-bed clothes, and one night he said to me, ‘Being in McMurdo, I feel I've come halfway round the world to find the outskirts of Austin.' I often heard people expressing disappointment at finding modern conveniences on Antarctic stations. I never felt sorry or guilty or upset about it; I perceived bases as the tiniest fragments of human life on a vast, unspoiled white continent. It would be like getting upset about a couple of specks of dust on the Bayeux tapestry or one inharmonious note in a Mozart sonata.

Before moving out of McMurdo and into a field camp I was required to attend Survival School, a training course which would equip me to handle tents, stoves and radios, and enable me to swing nimbly out of a crevasse or come to a halt should I slide uncontrollably down an ice hill. ‘Survival School' sounded more like a group therapy class you might come across on the Upper East Side or in Islington. People called it Happy Camper School, and as Americans are not strong on irony I thought the nickname was promising.

First, I was obliged to attend a snowcraft lecture. It took place in the Crary lounge, and the teacher, a field leader called Bill with eyes the colour of cornflower hearts, produced a fistful of frozen sausages from a glove to illustrate the danger of frostbitten fingers.

The Berg Field Center managed the practical aspects of life off base, and in it tents languished in various states of undress, stoves lay dismantled and sleeping bags were stacked in neat rows and categorised according to temperature requirements, the ones at the bottom marked ‘
Snowy Owl. Minus Fifty
.' Ice axes stood menacingly in close-ranked battalions between small armies of harnesses, ropes, thermarests, neoprene waterbottles and first aid kits. A large poster hijacked from colleagues in the Arctic warned of the dangers of polar bears. It was at the Berg Field Center one mild, sunny morning, the ambient temperature minus twelve degrees Celsius, that fourteen of us loaded up a tracked vehicle in preparation for Survival School. There were two instructors, one of whom was Frozen-Sausage Bill, and eleven pupils besides me – three navy personnel and eight scientists. Everyone was in high spirits.

We headed out a few miles, on to the ice shelf. By the time we embarked on the first session, at the foot of a snowhill, a band of cloud had descended and visibility had shrunk to thirty feet. The morning culminated in techniques for self-arrest while sliding down a snowhill supine and upside down. To do this, you plunge your ice axe into the snow at your side with the adze pointing towards the sky, twist your legs over, roll and pivot yourself round the axe until you are lying face down, head at the top, with the weight of your body over the axe, knees in and bum up.

Afterwards, we trooped off for lunch. They had put a small hut on the ice to facilitate happy campers, and in it Bill discoursed on the niceties of stoves as the rest of us concentrated on trail-mix, expedition cheese, crackers and chocolate and sucked on cartons of cranberry juice. Between bouts of eating we mastered pumping and priming and nodded gravely about the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning. When we had finished, we walked across the ice shelf towards Mount Erebus to learn how to build igloos.

Erebus is an active volcano, and to those who love the south it is more perfect than Fuji, even Hockney's Fuji. The most recent measurement of its height, generally agreed to be the most accurate, is 3793 metres. It is the Eiffel Tower of the continent. Named after the ship in which James Clark Ross fought through the pack ice to almost 79 degrees south in the sea now named after him, on one side Erebus overlooks the Ross Ice Shelf. Called the Barrier by the early explorers and formed by ice flowing off the continent, this shelf consists of a roughly triangular slab of floating ice the size of France which is glued to the continent on two sides. The third side meets the ocean. During the summer months, when the thinner sea ice breaks up, the edge of the ice shelf crumbles off as bergs. This is what Edwin Mickleburgh wrote about the ice shelf in
Beyond the Frozen Sea.
‘The ice shelf is a region of unearthly desolation, a place of strange forebodings stirred by the loss of horizons into an endless encirclement of the ice invading the explorer's mind.' The helicopter pilots called it ‘The Big White'.

During the course of the afternoon we engaged ourselves enthusiastically in building a snow mound, sawing ice bricks, constructing a wall and digging a trench. Frozen Sausage showed us how to spiral bricks into an igloo; this was very difficult. After we had accomplished these tasks we put up the tents and the instructors handed us a radio and went off to stay in the hut half a mile away. I shared a Scott tent with a scientist sporting a beard like Trotsky's (it seemed dangerous, with so many ice axes about), and we ate our dehydrated dinners sitting on our snow-brick wall. It was Thanksgiving Day, and, gathered chummily around the two stoves, we toasted it with more cranberry juice, though not being American I felt like an imposter at a Masonic ceremony. One of the navy men, a chief petty officer, was about to embark upon a mission to recover a radioisotope thermoelectric generator powering an automatic weather station at a remote spot on the polar plateau. A number of small RTGs had been working nicely in Antarctica before anyone began to worry about the environmental impact of radioactivity. All the others had been removed, but the last one was so inaccessible that no one had got round to going to find it. The RTG hadn't been seen for ten years, and whether this man and his team would ever find it was clearly a matter of conjecture. He didn't seem to be worried, anyway.

We had an English accent competition, easily won by an amiable Norwegian-American graduate student called Lars who was subsequently disqualified when he revealed that he had lived in Britain for five years. Lars had opted to sleep in the covered snow trench we had built – a terrible mistake, as it turned out, because it rained ice on him all night. He planted a Norwegian flag outside and called the trench Framheim after Amundsen's base camp. Late in the night Lars and I strapped on cross-country skis and headed out over the ice shelf. He reminded me of a big shaggy dog.

When we awoke next morning, great snowdrifts had formed around the tents. I had forgotten to stow my waterbottle in my sleeping bag, and the water had frozen. Everything had frozen. But it didn't matter. Trotsky was labouring over some feeble joke while rehydrating sachets of oatmeal when Frozen Sausage and Mike reappeared. They were talking about ‘scenario training', so after despatching the oatmeal we struck camp and headed off.

A handful of new recruits were waiting in the hut. ‘Right,' said Mike as we arranged crates in a circle and sat on them. ‘Go round the circle, introduce yourself and say something personal, like whether you prefer blondes.'

This was a difficult question. I began compiling a mental list of ex-boyfriends to see if it revealed a predilection for a particular hair colour. Once I got back to 1990 I became muddled as to who came where, so I had to fish out a pen and straighten the wrapper of a granola bar, and write a column of names next to a column of dates, with a third column for hair colour. In some instances I seemed to have an extremely hazy recollection of hair, and of course there was the boxer in 1989 who was totally bald, so he had to be struck off the list altogether. I was engrossed in this important task when Mike called my name.

‘Um,' I stammered, ‘can't seem to find any evidence of a preference for blonds . . .' I pulled myself together. ‘No beards though.' Everyone looked at me, hatchet-faced.

Scenario training involved responding to a simulated plane crash outside the hut. We were asked to list our skills, so that roles could be allocated. Between them, the navy men had almost every known skill covered, and they suggested helpfully that my role could be to write the bestselling book of the disaster after the event. In the end I was consigned to communications. Having rigged up the HF antenna from bamboo poles in the snow and headed off a short burst of machine-gun fire, I found the Field Operations Communications Center on the airwaves and checked in our party, disguising my English accent in case I said the wrong thing. ‘Reading you loud and clear, Sara', came the crackling reply. Trotsky and the others were busy stretchering a supine Bill into the hut, so I strolled about – no doubt in gross dereliction of duty – and enjoyed the scenery. It was a clear morning and I could pick out Mount Discovery and Mount Morning as well as White Island, Black Island and Minna Bluff. It was all starting to look familiar.

∗

Back at base, a series of urgent messages were waiting. I had been invited to the Italian station at Terra Nova Bay a couple of hundred miles away, and a helicopter would be leaving the next day. Although I had liaised with the head of the Italian Antarctic programme, Mario Zuccelli, from London, and he had invited me to Terra Nova Bay, I hadn't been expecting the visit to materialise yet; I had scarcely expected it to materialise at all. It was embarrassing to run away from my American hosts the minute I was qualified to do so and before I had been anywhere with them.

For the rest of the day I occupied myself by climbing Observation Hill overlooking McMurdo. The team Scott left behind at the hut had put a jarrah wood cross on top as a memorial to the five men who died on the trek back from the Pole. Just before the
Terra Nova
left Antarctica they had inscribed it with the last line of Tennyson's
Ulysses
: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' They got the idea for the quotation from Nansen, who had used it to pay homage to Amundsen's voyage through the Northwest Passage. Tennyson was their poet, though Browning came a close second, and once they even held a competition to decide between them. It was difficult to imagine members of a contemporary expedition sitting round arguing over the merits of Auden and Yeats.

The disparate buildings of the station were spread out in the hollow below Observation Hill, adding a pattern of dull colour to the icescape around it. My eye followed the coastline of Ross Island. In places, especially where it had been engulfed by a glacier, it was difficult to distinguish where the island ended and the frozen sea began. The topography of the island was powerful and muscular, bulging with volcanic unrest, and it was a relief to turn away to hundreds of miles of flat, frozen sea. Beyond the sea, the mountains on the fringe of the continent were too distant, and too perfect, to seem threatening. They were frosty sentinels, unassailable and infinitely desirable; a tease. Although I hadn't yet experienced anything of ‘the real Antarctica', already I had a profound sense that I was in the right place. To start with, the relief of actually getting there was incalculable after the interminable preparations. But it was more than that. In some bizarre way I had an atavistic sense that I had come home. I couldn't imagine what this meant; but I didn't seek to understand it then. I had only just arrived.

The next morning I carried a packed bag and a set of cold-weather clothes to my office and attempted to locate my helicopter by means of the station telephone network. The machine, it emerged, had already flown to Scott Base, the New Zealand station two miles from McMurdo. As these bases are linked by telephone I was able to track down an Italian climatologist called Claudio who announced that they were delighted I was joining them on the journey to Terra Nova Bay. He would call me, he said cheerfully, when departure was imminent. We hung up.