Antarctica

Almost a year ago since I last updated this blog. It's summer once again and therefore I am on a reading binge again. This time part of my reading is purposeful. In February I will be going on a month long boat trip to Antarctica and half my reading is centered around this. I have collected a little pile of suitable books, some from the library some I have bought. I started with Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica (London: Granta Books, 1997). She visited Antarctica via South America, a much shorter trip than I will make and on a larger boat (with more passengers). Our thirty day sea journey starts from Bluff, on a Russian research ship, with only 48 passengers, plus Russian crew and plus New Zealand naturalist guides.

Diski's reasons for the trip closely match mine. She writes:

I didn’t plan this journey as a pilgrimage of any kind, just a hopeful voyage into whiteness. My motives were as indistinct as the landscape I was wishing to travel to. There was imply an irrational desire to be at the bottom of the world in a land of ice and snow. (p. 125)

Yet, there are some specific things I am hoping to get out of this journey. First of all, we will stop at the Auckland Islands, which I have wished to visit for some years, ever since I came across the book Wake of the Invercauld by a Canadian woman Madelene Ferguson Allen, the great-granddaughter of a man who was shipwrecked on the Auckland islands in 1863. This beautifully illustrated book tells the parallel stories of Madelene's own journey (with a group of family members) to the Auckland Islands to try and retrace her forefather's steps, and the story of her great-grandfather through excerpts from his journal. The Southland Museum in Invercargill has a display about the Auckland islands and includes the story of another wreck, that of the Grafton.

The Auckland Islands are desolate, rain soaked and cold and home to some amazing wildlife, and a great many birds, among them the royal albatross. Also quite strange plant life, adapted to the harsh environment. I don't consider myself either a bird watcher or a botanist, but I love to see albatrosses and I do feel a strange attraction to bleak places. They don't come much bleaker than the Auckland Islands.

The second reason why I am keen on this trip is my desire to be among icebergs. Having read Diski, I am looking forward to it even more, because she reassured me that photos, films and other representations do not dull the amazing experience. She wrote in Skating to Antarctica:


Then in the evening the first iceberg floated by. The iceberg emerged before my lazy gaze at the window, like a mirage, a dream appearance, a matt white edifice ghostly in the misty grey light and falling snow. A sudden, smoothly gliding event in the great empty sea under the great empty sky. I blinked at it. There was none of the disappointing familiarity of something seen too often on TV or in picture books. This startled with its brand-new reality, with its quality of not-like-anything-else. (p. 218)

At the moment I am reading The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest men on the Scott expedition of the Terra Nova 1910-1913, the one where Scott and his crew died on the way back from the pole, after Amundsen got there first. The Cherry-Garrard book is quite an amazing story of amateurism and blundering about and cheerful perseverance. Authors who have described this expedition in these terms have been severely criticised by admirers of Scott. But the question remains why Amundsen seemingly almost effortlessly reached the pole and returned a month before Scott, without loss of life and with dog teams still alive and functioning. And yet, Scott is the more famous and the more admired, at least in the English speaking world. Some light is shed on this conundrum by Francis Spufford's cultural history of our fascination with polar exploration and with the sublime, titled I May Be Some Time (Faber and Faber Paperback, 1997).

Cherry-Garrard's story is one of cheerful endurance. The men are 'bricks' about frost bite and hunger, hold sing-alongs and tell stories. This had become a tradition of naval explorers and seems to have been first recorded by Sir William Parry, who explored the Arctic in the 1820s, after first serving under Ross. Spufford has this to say about it:

While darkness grew, and the thermometer dropped, the crews of his Hecla and Fury did calisthenics, danced to a barrel-organ, read a shipboard newspaper, and watched amateur theatricals. As well as being adopted by the Admiralty as a standard morale-boosting ploy, this image of tenacious jollity proved irresistible to the public. Strangely snug, paradoxically homely, it seemingly made parlour games a way of defying the elements. (p. 50)

The boat I will be travelling on is well protected against the elements and the thermal gear we, as passengers, will be wearing will not give us the chance to have to endure the cold these explorers endured. So I hope we will not have to resort to parlour games and jollity. Although I would not be adverse to a game of bridge.

Several of the expeditions were accompanied by professional photographers, the most famous of whom are Frank Hurley, who took amazing pictures of the famous Endurance expedition with Shackleton (the web link tells the story, accompanied by Hurley's photos). There's also a series of Hurley photos on Flickr. Scott's expedition was accompanied by Ponting, who took wonderful pictures, of which this is one of the more famous ones:



Wilson created amazing water colours
during Scott's polar expedition. I have purchased a book with photographs by Hurley and a book with Ponting's photographs. Both reissued about five years ago, with accompanying stories and extra photos. I won't be attempting too many photos myself, with such an amazing record. But I will take a few 'snaps' to prove I was really there.