A First Rate Tragedy (3 page)

The history of Antarctic exploration is a curious story of bursts of activity succeeded by long periods of apathy and neglect. Man was slow to penetrate the mysteries of Antarctica. Vikings roamed the frozen seas of the Arctic but when Wellington fought at Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the south. It was not until 1820 that a human being first glimpsed the Antarctic mainland. When Scott set out on his first expedition with the
Discovery
in 1901 less was known about it than about the moon before the lunar landing in 1969.

Antarctica is still the least-known of all the continents, the least hospitable and the most dangerous – colder, higher and more isolated than anywhere else on earth. A landmass of some five and a half million square miles, all but two per cent of it is covered by a huge ice sheet with an average thickness of 6,000 feet. Seen from space the ice cap shines like a great white lamp. Over 90 per cent of the world’s snow and ice lies on or around Antarctica. At the Pole itself the sun does not rise above the horizon for six months of the Antarctic winter. On the Polar plateau temperatures as low as -124°F have been recorded. Around the Pole the annual mean
temperature is some -65°F. Hurricane-force winds whip across its surface, driving the snow into thick clotting blizzards. Yet, once tasted, Antarctica has a potent effect. Diary after diary of those who have explored describe a world of spell-binding beauty but also a place of such awesome solitude and melancholy that it can drive people insane.

For centuries Antarctica’s very existence was doubted and debated, although the idea of a southern continent was an ancient one. Aristotle believed that the earth was a sphere and that there must be a counterbalance to the Arctic zones. The Romans tended to agree with the Greeks, but the medieval ecclesiastical mind retreated from ideas it found too disturbing – St Augustine condemned the idea that men could ‘plant their footsteps opposite to our feet’.
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The crossing of the equator by Lopo Gonçalves in the fifteenth century awakened interest in the idea of a lush, rich kingdom to the south. For a while – until Bartholomew Diaz nosed his way around the Cape and east into the Indian Ocean in 1487 to be followed ten years later by Vasco da Gama’s more extended voyages – some believed that the coasts of south-west Africa might be the northern tip of the great southern continent. When attention switched to South America many believed that Antarctica adjoined it, others that Tierra del Fuego was the northern tip of a southern landmass.

Francis Drake disposed of these ideas. His circumnavigation of 1577–80 proved that no southern continent adjoined South America and that ‘the Atlanticke Ocean and the South sea meete in a most large and free scope’.
²
However, the belief in a temperate southern continent spreading northwards persisted for two more centuries, despite strong evidence to the contrary from the buccaneering activities of men like Bartholomew Sharpe and
William Dampier who cheerfully sailed their ships over what, according to the maps, should have been dry land.

The growing enthusiasm for colonial expansion in the eighteenth century meant that governments found exploration strategically too important to leave to merchant adventurers and other freelances. Instead, it became the preserve of national navies. Britain, France and Russia all sent expeditions south. For Britain Captain James Cook led the way. Cook chose ships of shallow draught, similar to the colliers of his native Whitby, capable of plying close inshore and was thus able to conduct the first hydrographic surveys in Antarctica. Science as well as imperialism was becoming a powerful motive in exploration.

Cook’s achievements were extraordinary. On 17 January 1773 his little 460-tonne ship the
Resolution
was the first to cross the Antarctic circle. Clerke, one of his crew, reported how they passed an ice island as high as the body of St Paul’s Cathedral. Cook’s
Voyage towards the South Pole and around the World
, published in 1777, gave the first descriptions of the abundant wildlife of Antarctica – the great whales, soaring albatrosses and graceful petrels. Penetrating the thick ice pack that surrounds Antarctica and retreats and advances with the seasons, Cook crossed the circle three times in all during two Antarctic summers. On the third occasion in January 1774, at latitude 71°10'S, his farthest south, Cook was finally halted by unyielding pack ice.

By now the strain was telling on his shipmates and he turned back with some relief. His brush with this hostile frozen world had convinced him that ‘this ice extended quite to the Pole’ and that ‘no continent was to be found in this ocean but what must lie so far south as to be wholly inaccessible for ice’. His view was decided: ‘Should anyone possess the resolution and the fortitude to elucidate this point by pushing yet further south than I have
done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery, but I make bold to declare that the world will derive no benefit from it.’

Almost half a century and the defeat of Napoleon were to pass before anyone followed Cook. Then, in 1819, William Smith, a native of Blyth in Northumberland, rounded Cape Horn on his way from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso. The storms for which the Horn is notorious chased him southwards among islands with snow-capped mountains. He returned the following year to claim them for Britain, naming them the New South Shetlands. The great colonies of seals had impressed him. His accounts also impressed the sealing industry which funded his return as master and pilot to Edward Bransfield to conduct a proper survey of the islands. Bad weather drove them even further south through a thick fog. When it cleared they were surprised to see land lying away to the south-west and were cheered by the hope that this might indeed be the long-sought southern continent. They were right. What they could see was the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

However, whether they were actually the first to lay eyes on Antarctica became a matter of hot dispute in an age of international rivalry, of claims and counter-claims. Just three days earlier Captain Baron Thaddeus von Bellingshausen of the Imperial Russian Navy, over 3,000 kilometres to the south-east and attempting to circumnavigate Antarctica, had spotted a solid stretch of ice running from east through south to west. Some claim that he was in fact the first human to spy Antarctica, though he did not recognize it as such. Whatever the case he continued his journey, reaching the South Shetland Islands in the happy but misguided belief that he had discovered them.

It was now that British sealers, lured to the islands by the reports of abundant seals and whales, became the explorers of
Antarctica – men like James Weddell, John Biscoe and John Balleny. As Scott himself described admiringly, ‘In the smallest and craziest ships they plunged boldly into stormy ice-strewn seas; again and again they narrowly missed disaster; their vessels were wracked and strained and leaked badly, their crews were worn out with unceasing toil and decimated by scurvy.’
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In 1823 Weddell beat Cook’s record for furthest south by 214 miles.

In 1839 James Clark Ross, dashing British naval officer and first at the Magnetic North Pole, sailed in search of the Magnetic South Pole on the greatest Antarctic expedition of the nineteenth century. While preparing in Tasmania he heard disturbing reports of an American expedition under Lieutenant John Wilkes and of the French explorer Dumont d’Urville. Both were apparently busily engaged in the region where the Magnetic South Pole was thought to lie. It was at the very least embarrassing and Ross, while conceding their unquestionable right to select any point they thought proper, was ‘impressed with the feeling that England had
ever
led the way of discovery’ and decided to ‘avoid all interference with their discoveries’ and select a more easterly route to the south. This was a far more significant decision than he could have guessed. It was to lead to the most remarkable discoveries yet made in Antarctica and to show the way for the land explorations by Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen.

Ross battered through the pack ice in four days into what is now called the Ross Sea. His two ships, the
Erebus
and
Terror
, had been especially reinforced with giant timbers to enable them to forge their way through the ice pack that could crush a more fragile vessel like a nut. On 10 January 1841 came a startled cry from the officer of the watch. On the horizon, perhaps a hundred miles away, was land – a jagged, mighty row of snow-covered peaks – where no land was thought to be. It moved Ross who
wrote a lyrical account of ‘a most enchanting view’, of ‘lofty peaks, perfectly covered with eternal snow’. He began naming the features, calling the impressive northernmost cape after Viscount Adare, MP for Glamorganshire.

Off Cape Adare Ross made another important decision that would affect his successors. He decided to explore the new coast to the south. It was a magical eerie journey of towering mountains and shining glaciers. He carried on with the no doubt politically sensitive and imagination-taxing task of naming feature after feature in this strange new world. He named two mountain ranges, one after the Royal Society and the other after the British Association. Individual mountains in each range were named after illustrious members of the body concerned. Prime Minister Melbourne was also awarded a mountain. A ceremony took place on rocky little Possession Island to claim these new discoveries in the name of young Queen Victoria.

Sailing southward on 28 January 1841, a day of sparkling clarity, Ross sighted two volcanoes which were to become a familiar landmark to Polar explorers and are sited on the island which now bears his name. He called the 12,400-foot active cone Mount Erebus and the 10,900-foot inactive cone Mount Terror. The vastness and remoteness impressed Ross and his men with a sense of awe and of their own insignificance and helplessness. This feeling grew as moving ever south they were confronted by another amazing sight – what Ross called ‘a perpendicular cliff of ice between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top and without any fissures or promontories on its seaward face’. Now known as the Ross Ice Shelf, or Great Ice Barrier, its surface seemed to him to be quite smooth and like an immense plane of frosted silver. He could only conjecture what lay beyond. His path south was
blocked as effectively as if the cliffs of Dover confronted him, he recorded ruefully. Unknowingly, however, he had pointed the way. His explorations had shown that in the Ross Sea the ice cleared more briskly than elsewhere during the Antarctic summer. He had also found Ross Island with its sheltered sound which he named after the senior lieutenant of the
Terror
, Archibald McMurdo.

Ross finally quitted Antarctica in 1843, after setting a new farthest south of 78°10' in February 1842, and silence reigned once again. Clearly the only way to penetrate the continent was to land on the ice. It seemed a risky and unattractive prospect and for the next fifty years attention focused on the Arctic. The
Erebus
and
Terror
would soon sail on their fateful search for the north-west passage with Sir John Franklin, never to return to southern waters.

Thus it was not until towards the close of the nineteenth century that interest in the south gathered pace again. In 1895 a young Norwegian and childhood friend of Amundsen, Carsten Borchgrevink, sailed south with an expedition financed by the inventor of the harpoon gun. The purpose was to search for new whaling grounds. On 24 January 1895, he and his companions became the first human beings to make a confirmed landing on the continent. They landed below Cape Adare, where the relatively sheltered position and the abundant supply of penguins to provide a winter larder and fuel suggested to Borchgrevink that it might be possible to winter in this desolate spot.

It took three years for him to raise sufficient funds. In the meantime there had been another significant development. A Belgian expedition led by Lieutenant Adrien de Gerlache in the sealer
Belgica
had explored Graham Land. The ship had become trapped in the icy fastness of the Bellingshausen Sea, and the crew had experienced a dismal and frightening time – some became
mentally ill while others fell prey to scurvy. In the end the
Belgica
had to be blasted and sawn free of the ice. She was, however, the first ship to winter in Antarctica and the name of her first mate was Roald Amundsen.

Meanwhile, Sir George Newnes, the wealthy publisher of the weekly
Tit-Bits
and the heavier-weight illustrated
Strand Magazine
had become Borchgrevink’s patron and stumped up £35,000 on condition that his venture was called ‘The British Antarctic Expedition’. This was the voyage of the whaler
Southern Cross
which arrived at Cape Adare in February 1899 and left ten men and seventy dogs to an uncertain fate. As the seas began to ice over in March the
Southern Cross
made her escape, leaving behind the first men to attempt to winter in Antarctica. It must have felt like being left on the moon. They did not know what to expect and their unease was heightened by the weird light effects in the sky as the Aurora Australis danced high above them. Anxious but determined, they constructed a wooden hut roofed with canvas and seal-skins and weighted down with sacks of coal and set up meteorological and magnetic observatories.

To be condemned to a sunless southern winter of bitter temperatures and wild storms was an immense test of physical and mental stamina. The men soon became depressed and grew impatient of each other’s company. ‘The silence roars in one’s ears. It is centuries of heaped up solitude,’ wrote Borchgrevink glumly.
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Not all survived. By October one of the party, the naturalist Hanson, had died of an intestinal complaint. When the light returned the remaining men went on sledging expeditions, though they could not venture far because of the barrier of mountains and glaciers around the Cape. When the
Southern Cross
returned in January 1900 she carried the party further south to Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf and here Borchgrevink sledged over ten
miles towards the Pole. He proclaimed: ‘I myself accompanied by Lieutenant Colbeck and the Finn Savio, proceeded southwards reaching 78°50'S, the farthest south ever reached by man.’
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The race for the Pole was on.