Terra Incognita (35 page)

Coleridge conceived
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
as he walked over the green hills of the south west of England between 1797 and 1798 and watched the moon rise over the sea. He had never been abroad; he saw the ice with his inner eye. Many writers have tried to transform a voyage to Antarctica into a spiritual journey, but it was Coleridge who made me believe the analogy worked. The Mariner travels beyond the boundaries of knowable knowledge, on to the wide, wide sea of the spirit, and into the wondrous cold, the isolation of the human condition – ‘And never a saint took pity on/My soul in agony'. My own Antarctic journey offered a glimpse of the bounties beyond knowable knowledge, not the torments; but I had made the trip to cold, dark desperation before. That terrible experience of misery and depression was not part of my Antarctic journey, though I carried the memory of it with me, and it made the peace I grasped on the ice more profound.

When it snowed, refuelling was such a thoroughly unpleasant business that a rigorously democratic roster was established. The brown slopes of the moraine were then like leaves stained with dye, and the light covering of powder revealed the different texture of each one. One snowy day, the plane brought mail. A quixotic friend of mine sent me an old brass whistle, and as the boys had picked up the phrase ‘It's a testosterone thing' from me, my gift immediately became the testosterone whistle, and I was instructed to blow it when the level got too high.

Although the temperature rarely fell below minus three, a system brought high winds and persistent snowfall, and we were trapped in the hut. Ben entertained us with stories of the old days, mostly involving dogs.

‘All the dogs just disappeared in front of my eyes – zip! zip! zip!' he said at the end of a long and colourful story about a thousand-mile sledging journey. ‘I crawled to the edge of the crevasse, looked down into the gloom, and there they were, swinging in their harnesses, with Dot, the leader, hanging forty feet down on the end of the trace!'

‘What happened?' we all said at once.

‘My partner lowered me down into the crevasse, and I un-clipped the dogs from the trace one by one and hoisted them all out. I had been leading, so it was technically my fault – but the dogs never held it against me.'

After two days of total cloud cover, plus rain and snow, incarceration began to induce cabin fever. We decided to found a cult and broadcast Churchillian speeches over the Sound. In a fit of domesticity I asked whether anyone minded if I washed the shelves down, and Steve said, ‘It's your hut as much as anybody else's.' The men at the Bluff had made me feel part of the team, something that no one at Rothera had even attempted.

After four days the weather cleared, and we walked up to the penitentes, a snowfield of sculpted ice cones named after their resemblance to monks in prayer. Their smooth, biomorphic shapes and the simplicity of their curves and swellings and tapering gradients reminded me of Barbara Hepworth sculptures. They conveyed the same sense of the eternal, too; or, at least, of serenity. It was a Cornish landscape which inspired Hepworth. I looked out over the Sound, groping in vain for signs of the Cornwall of my childhood.

Agreeable though life was at the Bluff, after two weeks I was beginning to wish I could see a different peninsular landscape. It seemed too far to come to sit in the same place for two months. I asked the Rothera base commander over the radio if I could hitch a lift on a plane refuelling at the Bluff on its way to a field camp further south. Three days later, I stumbled into the hut from my tiny room as usual to find that the boys were taking it in turns to hit a tuning fork against a bunk leg and then press it on their teeth.

‘By the way,' Ian remembered after I had made coffee. ‘You were mentioned on the early morning sched. You're going to Ski Hi this afternoon.'

∗

The Sky Hi nunataks were 220 miles from the Bluff, north east of the Merrick Mountains on the West Antarctic ice sheet. They were too far south to be described as on the peninsula at all – so I was back in what I had come to think of as the proper Antarctica. These rocky extrusions, ablated of snow, disappeared as soon as low cloud descended over the ice sheet. They were first surveyed by Americans in the early sixties and named after a camp which later changed its name to Eights Station. Now a small team of BAS scientists and technicians were studying that portion of ice sheet with aerial radar equipment and, as a result, a rudimentary camp had been established not far from the nunataks. It consisted of no more than a couple of fuel lines, half a dozen pyramid tents and a weatherhaven.

When we landed, a furious wind was whipping over the ice sheet and it was very cold. The tops of the tents were snowy, like mountain peaks. Vasco was there. He was a small, striking field assistant with flaming eyes and a big heart. The nickname – after Vasco da Gama – had been bestowed upon him when he sailed south, as he had spent the entire voyage from Grimsby on the bridge with the first officer, learning to use a sextant.

‘Welcome to hell on earth,' he said. Neil, the rangy Liverpudlian geography teacher, was there too, and he took me to the weather-haven and made me a cup of tea. It was an arched tent, twelve feet long and six feet wide, with board flooring and a permanently lit tilley lamp hanging from the ceiling. An array of dripping gloves and hats also dangled from an overhead network of string.

‘It gets a bit crowded in here,' Neil said. ‘You'll have to fight for a space in the evenings.'

‘How many people are here?' I asked, warming my hands over one of the two primuses.

‘Ten, with you,' he replied, totting them up on his fingers. ‘Two scientists who've just arrived from a more remote camp and are waiting to go back to Rothera, the five guys on the radar survey team, and Vasco and I. We aren't really sure what we're doing here.'

‘I think we're supposed to be packing up the camp,' said Vasco, who had followed us in. He was shovelling snow into the small pond in the middle of the floor. When the snow had absorbed all the water, he shovelled it out again.

The radio was on a jerry can and one end of the weatherhaven was entirely occupied by half-empty tins and jars, their contents granite-hard, dribbling packets of soup, plastic mugs and a red plastic sack in which everyone took it in turns to collect ice.

‘Don't you ever turn these primuses off?' I asked, as there was no saucepan sitting on them.

‘We leave them on to heat the air,' said Neil. ‘It's seventeen or eighteen below most days – sometimes much colder. You'll notice the difference between this and the Bluff. You're further south, and the ice sheet is far more exposed than the peninsula.'

I was sharing the furthest pyramid tent with Keith, an electronics engineer on the radar project. Although an American Scott tent and a British pyramid tent are, to all intents and purposes, the same, the entrance to a pyramid is two feet off the ground, making entry and exit harder and reflecting the higher levels of snow accumulation in the ‘British sector' on the peninsula. When I looked at my photographs later I realised that the Scott tents used by the Americans are less steeply angled, for the same reason. Most amazing of all, I had begun to find these details interesting.

I laid my sleep kit down one side of the tent. Our territory was divided by a pot box, a food box and a geophysics box, and on top of these stood a primus, a tilley lamp, a radio, a compact disc Walkman, a James Clavell novel and a tube of Extra Strong mints. An open tin of peaches with feathers stuck to the lid was wedged between Keith's airbed and the primus, as well as a tin half full of Dutch camping butter (1988) and numerous discarded wrappers of Cadbury's Milk Chocolate. It was clear that the acquisition of a tent-mate was not the best thing that had ever happened to Keith. On the first night, he stayed in the weatherhaven until everyone else had retired to their tents, delaying the moment at which he was obliged to join me.

‘Hello,' I said as I heard him fighting his way through the tent flaps.

‘Hello,' he replied, in a kind of disappointed way, as if he had nourished hopes that I might have dematerialised. I had hatched a cunning plan, however. I could see from the tent that Keith was a gadget man. He had installed – for example – a digital thermometer which took the temperature inside and outside of the tent at the same time. The only way to deal with a gadget man is to feign interest in his equipment.

‘This is useful,' I lied, pointing at the double display on the thermometer. ‘How does it work, exactly?'

Keith cleared his throat. I had won.

The reason Keith had enjoyed a tent to himself before my arrival soon became clear. He could have snored for England. I didn't mind. Being able to sleep anywhere at any time and in any circumstances was part of the job description, as far as I was concerned. When Keith was awake I enjoyed his company, once he thawed out a bit. And he made me tea in the morning.

‘Here's breakfast,' he used to say, handing me half a bar of Cadbury's. If it was windy, we had to shout at one another. On the second day I was granted earphone rights to the cd player, and I dipped in and out of Keith's extensive and catholic collection. Getting dressed was hellish though, and made harder by the gloating presence of the thermometer, which informed us irrefutably that outside it was minus twenty-five. I began plotting its destruction. On really bad days, when the plane carrying the radar equipment couldn't fly, some people never left their tent, except to go to the toilet, and even this was an ordeal as it involved sliding down an ice chute into an underground ice chamber and climbing on to an empty fuel drum.

While trapped inside for days, everyone ran out of books and started reading the backs of food cartons. People said that in the field they had learnt how to mix up the porridge oats in Dutch and Swahili. There was a long established tradition of this. Gunnar Anderssen, marooned at Hope Bay in 1902, wrote that his party had no books, and to delight the eye with the printed word they got out their tins of condensed milk and read the labels. On the whole, we couldn't really enjoy anything much at Ski Hi, or even do any serious thinking. Existing, as opposed to freezing, seemed to take up all our energy.

We rarely took off our windies, the fluorescent orange ventile over-the-head windcheaters and enormous trousers worn by Scott and every subsequent Briton in Antarctica. They suited what was often referred to in the weatherhaven as ‘the Antarctic experience'. The boys used the adjective ‘gnarly' all the time: it meant living what they perceived to be the ‘authentic' way in Antarctica, eschewing the comforts of base for the derring-do they associated with the old days. Almost all the men became coarser and more consciously macho in the field. It was as if they had reverted to a basic level of mental existence as well as a physical one. Fancying yourself as a bit of a polar hero is harmless enough, but so much cultural baggage came along with it. They were committed to a grim type of schoolboy humour. When a field assistant shat in his overalls by mistake, he recounted what had happened over the radio and it became the story of the day on base; terribly funny, everyone agreed. If someone left a camera around, you could be sure it would be used for a few shots of someone else with a cigar up his bum, to edify the owner's mother when the film was sent home to be developed. When the air unit left for the season they scrawled a final message on the operations board: ‘Shaggin' in the U.K.' A man who had recenty left the ice after two-and-a-half years sent down a photograph of himself
in flagrante
. Before the ship arrived to take us out, a list went up asking if anyone required vegetarian food on board: someone wrote ‘
Fuck Off
' next to his name. And so it went on. As Jennie Darlington wrote in the fifties, ‘It was like living in a male locker room.'

Why such a brittle mask? I wondered. The British attitude had evolved from a culture in which no one grew up. In their emotional lives, the officers of Scott's day and the generation which followed lived in a prep school world in which boys died heroically in each other's arms while the whole school sobbed. How many times had I heard the latterday men of the Antarctic expressing regrets for the demise of the days when boys could be boys and girls weren't there? Alastair Fothergill, the man who had spent a lot of time in the south producing his award-winning
Life in the Freezer
television series, was very perceptive on this subject. ‘The Antarctic brings out national characteristics, it really does. The British attitude – though it's changing – is still rooted in a very outdated vision of the explorer.' As I sat opposite him in his overheated office at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, Fothergill had continued, ‘It's inevitably a very male place. For a long time it was a playground. It's about keeping people out, and that's a male thing. I get a bit sick when they moan about the tourists.'

The irony was that, despite the collective fantasy of macho polar endeavour, both Vasco and Neil, among the few who viewed it with an objective eye, said that they found camping in Scotland tougher than in Antarctica. It rained more in Scotland, the tents were smaller, the grass was damper, there were midges, you had to look further for water and, hell – food and fuel were unlimited on the ice. As for Scott himself, I felt sure he would have been on my side. That was a further irony, given that the majority of my companions identified with him. As an early biographer wrote, ‘In some ways, Scott's sensibility was more like a woman's than a man's.'

∗

I got into the habit of ‘doing the weather'. This involved marching out on to the ice sheet and having a good look around. When the pilots wanted hourlies, it was tempting to poke your head out of the weatherhaven for ten seconds and hazard a few guesses, working on the assumption that nothing much had changed since last time. I felt feeble even thinking about doing this until I saw everyone else at it. It even had a name: Giving Tent Weather.