Terra Incognita (2 page)

Standing on the edge of the icefield in a wind strong enough to lean on, squinting in the buttery light, it was as if I were seeing the earth for the very first time. I felt less homeless than I have ever felt anywhere, and I knew immediately that I had to return. I sensed that the icefields had something to teach me.

After consorting with Russians, Chinese, Uruguayans and Poles on King George Island and observing how the continent blunts the edges of nationality, I realised that I had found the perfect
tabula rasa
. When I left, wedged into position on the same decrepit Hercules, I wrote
Terra Incognita
on the cover of a virgin notebook.

∗

I discovered that the ancient Greeks had sensed it was there because something had to balance the white bit at the top of the globe. Medieval cartographers had a stab at mapping it and called it
Terra Australis Incognita
, the Unknown Southern Land. For centuries, it seemed, everyone thought it was rich, fertile and populous and that finding it would be like winning the National Lottery. It was Captain Cook, the greatest explorer of all time, who sent the message back to the naval hydrographers fidgeting through the long reign of George III to say no, down here there are no golden fields or burgeoning trees or tall people with flaxen hair. Down here there is only cold hell.

After that most people forgot about it for a while, and when all the other white spaces on the map had been coloured in, they came back to it. The British were especially keen on Antarctica, as they had done Africa and spent much of the nineteenth century fretting over the Arctic. By the time the twentieth century rolled around they were fully engaged in the great quest for the south. For these British people the quest culminated in the central Antarctic myth, that of Captain Scott, a man woven into the fabric of our national culture as tightly as the pattern in a carpet.

Once I had glimpsed it, the Antarctic lodged in my mind's eye and rose unbidden on every horizon. I forced my friends to sit in empty cinemas whenever Charles Frend's 1948 film
Scott of the Antarctic
resurfaced, and we watched John Mills striding across a psychedelic backdrop which made the continent look like a seventies album cover. Shaw had used Antarctica as a metaphor, T. S. Eliot recycled Antarctic material in
The Waste Land
, and I found it in Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Vaclav Havel, Doris Lessing and Thomas Keneally. When I went to the National Theatre to get away from its blinding light I found that Tony Kushner had set a whole scene of his epic
Angels in America
down there. All places are more than the sum of their physical components, and I saw that Antarctica existed most vividly in the mind. It was a metaphorical landscape, and in an increasingly grubby world it had been romanticised to fulfil a human need for sanctuary. Mythical for centuries, so it remained.

It took two years to organise the journey. During that period I was accepted as the first foreigner on the American National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists' and Writers' Program. The two years unravelled in a seamless roll of letters, interviews, meetings, conferences on two continents, endless hand-to-mouth freelance work, exhaustive medicals and long walks through the bowels of the Foreign Office in London to get to Polar Regions, which was a long way from anywhere else in the building and the temperature dropped as I approached it. Nobody knows what my dentist and I went through to satisfy the punitive requirements of the U.S. Navy. My tattoo was logged in the Disabilities and Disfigurements section of the British Antarctic Survey's medical records. Three weeks before departure I had to undergo various unpleasant tests to produce documentation that my heart murmur was not one of the uncommon kind likely to stage a rebellion on the ice. The cardiologist in Harley Street who applied himself to this task was Brazilian, and I had made an appointment to collect the results at eight o'clock on the morning after Brazil won the World Cup. I sat taut with tension on the steps outside his elegant practice, clinging helplessly to my dream until he fell at my feet out of the back of a taxi, his tie unknotted, shouting, ‘You have the best heart I have ever seen.'

At the British Antarctic Survey pre-deployment conference in Cambridge I was woken each morning by the padding footsteps of a dog-handler in the chilly corridors of Girton College, and the padder and I went running along the river Cam together. On the last night I sat in candlelight under dour oil portraits of tweed-skirted Victorian scholars in the Great Hall, listening to Barry Heywood, the head of BAS, telling us in hushed tones that we were about to experience the time of our lives.

The very next day I picked up the telephone in an institutional room in the vast Xerox Document University in Leesburg, Virginia, at the American Antarctic Program's pre-deployment conference, and a computer-generated voice said, ‘Good morning, this is your wake-up call'. Through it all, my dream sustained me.

I sat in Scott's cabin aboard
Discovery
in Dundee and stood in pouring rain on the Eastern Commercial Docks in Grimsby among excitable relatives waiting for the
James Clark Ross
to arrive at the end of its long journey from Antarctica. Week after week Shirley, the obliging information assistant at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, unlocked the dust-encrusted basement so I could get at the fiction section, which was hidden behind dented tins of film spools and cardboard boxes of redundant dogfood. At the same institute I worked my way through blubber-splashed pages of leather notebooks inscribed by the men who gave Antarctica a history: reading them all was like looking at an object through the different angles of a glass prism. On assignment in India, I escaped to find the headquarters of the Indian Antarctic Programme in the asphyxiating concrete heartland of New Delhi, and when I walked up to its ramshackle eighth-floor offices, the air-conditioning had just sighed to a stop and a tall secretary in an orange sari was fanning herself in front of a photograph of a pristine snowscape. I drank warm beer outside railway stations in the south of England, waiting to be collected by veteran explorers, long since retired, and later, in their neat homes, liver-spotted hands turned the stiff black pages of cracked photograph albums. In Hampshire I was entertained by Zaz Bergel, granddaughter of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer's Antarctic explorer, and when I put on my coat to leave she said, ‘Grandfather was much happier there than anywhere else.'

As for the profound appeal of ice on the imagination, I had only to think of the chilly opening line of Garcia Marquez's novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'

There were psychological preparations too, though these were more difficult. In the Foreword to a seminal book about the opening up of the continent I read: ‘Some of the most prominent challenges of polar living fall into the provinces of mind and emotion, rather than muscle and matter.' A man with many years experience on the ice wrote in the same book: ‘The Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on personality and character and few men are the same after a stay there.' I wasn't afraid of loneliness; I had learnt that it doesn't arrive on the coat-tails of isolation. All the same, I was apprehensive about where Antarctica would take me, and about seeing my life
sub specie
. Robert Swan, who walked to both Poles, told me that going to either is like watching a child's magic slate wipe away your life as you knew it.

In an academic book on Antarctic psychology I read, ‘It is intuitive that life in a confined environment is an adverse experience and may lead to human dysfunction.' A scientist who went south with both Scott and Shackleton coined the phrase ‘polar madness', and Admiral Byrd packed two coffins and twelve straitjackets when he led one of the earliest U.S. Antarctic expeditions. Soon I was familiar with the folklore: the base commander who torched all the buildings in camp, the man who started talking with a lisp, the chef who set to with a meat-cleaver, the Soviet who killed a colleague with an ice axe during a game of chess (to ensure it didn't happen again, the authorities banned chess). One of the earliest behavioural findings in Antarctica was Mullin's discovery of spontaneous trance states, and papers had been written on alterations in consciousness induced by exposure to Antarctic isolation. At the same time it had melted frozen hearts. ‘At the bottom of this planet', wrote Admiral Byrd, the first man to fly over the South Pole, ‘is an enchanted continent in the sky, pale like a sleeping princess. Sinister and beautiful, she lies in frozen slumber.' ‘There, if anywhere,' said another explorer, ‘is life worthwhile.'

The people lighting my way had one thing in common. They were all men. It was male territory all right – it was like a gentleman's club, an extension of boarding school and the army. Only the U.S. programme even approaches normality in its ratio of men to women. Alastair Fothergill, who produced the
Life in the Freezer
television series and wrote the accompanying book, told me that for British men, going south was still like going to the pub. I had tea with Sir Edmund Hillary in New Zealand. ‘My experience has been', he said between mouthfuls of chocolate cake, ‘that the scientific community in the Antarctic regard it as their property and bitterly resent any outsiders venturing there.' Men had been quarrelling over Antarctica since it emerged from the southern mists, perceiving it as another trophy, a particularly meaty beast to be clubbed to death outside the cave. Mike Stroud, who played a Boswellian role to Ranulph Fiennes's Johnson when the pair of them attempted an ambitious trek across the continent, was more honest with me than most of the Frozen Beards. ‘Sometimes I think I didn't have time to stop and appreciate it,' he said. ‘I walked across, but most of the time I was miserable.'

∗

The Antarctic continent is shaped roughly like a cross-section of the human brain, with a grossly misplaced finger tapering towards South America (this is usually shown coming out on the left at the top, depending which way round the map is drawn). More than ninety-nine per cent
¹
of this landmass is permanently covered with ice formed by thousands of years of tightly compacted snowfalls. The other 0.4 per cent consists of exposed rock. Like glutinous white icing flowing off a wedding cake, the layer of ice on the surface of Antarctica is slowly but persistently rolling towards the coast, forcing its way between mountains, turning itself into glaciers split by crevasses and inching its way into a floating ice shelf or collapsing into the Southern Ocean. As a result, ice shelves surround the jagged Antarctic coastline. One of them, the Ross Ice Shelf, is larger than France.

The continent consists, broadly speaking, of two geological zones divided by the Transantarctic mountain chain. Greater Antarctica (also known as East Antarctica) is generally thought to be one stable plate. Lesser Antarctica (or West), on the other hand, consists of a lot of smaller, unstable plates – that's why all the volcanoes are in it. Besides the Transantarctics slicing down the middle, mountains form a ring around much of the continent. Beyond these coastal heights, in the interior, topography tends to disappear into thousands of miles of apparently flat ice – the enormous polar plateau. Mountain ranges as high as the Appalachians are hiding under this flat ice. The South Pole, the axis of the earth's rotation, is located in Greater Antarctica, on the polar plateau.

For much of the year, Antarctica enjoys total darkness or total daylight. The cusps between the two are short and exciting: it might be eight weeks from the moment the sun makes it first appearance over the horizon to the day it never sets. The summer season, broadly speaking, runs from mid-October to late February.

One of Antarctica's most salient characteristics is that of scale. The continent, one tenth of the earth's land surface, is considerably larger than Europe and one-and-a-half times the size of the United States. It has ninety per cent of the world's ice, and at its deepest, the ice layer is over 15,000 feet thick, pushing the land under it far below sea level. Thousands of cubic miles of ice break off the Antarctic coast each year. It is, on average, three times higher than any other continent. It never rains and rarely snows on most of it, so Antarctica is the driest desert in the world.

Into this land of superlatives I plunged. My plan was to fly in from New Zealand with the Americans in November, just as the austral summer was under way. Their main base is on one of the many hundreds of islands scattered around the Antarctic coast, and from there I could travel to a variety of field camps on the continent itself, perhaps make the Pole for Christmas, and later hook up with the New Zealanders, who were based nearby, and the Italians in Victoria Land only a couple of hundred miles away. At the end of January I was going to make my way over to the British Antarcticans, all working on the peninsula, the finger tapering off towards South America. As this was on the other side of the continent, I was obliged to travel back to New Zealand on an American military plane and take a fiendishly roundabout route to the Falklands (so diabolical was it that I ended up back in my own flat in London in the middle) in order to catch a lift on the British Antarctic Survey Dash-7 plane down to the Antarctic Peninsula. I was going to travel with my compatriots for two months, by which time night would have begun its swift descent, and then sail up the peninsula in an ice-strengthened ship and arrive in the Falklands in early April.

In my grandmother's youth a restless spirit would probably have got her as far as Spain, then as exotic as Xanadu. The world has shrunk, and I was able, now, to go to its uttermost part.

By the end of the beginning I understood something, at least. I understood that Scott was right when he endorsed Nansen's exhausted remark, ‘The worst part of a polar expedition is over when the preparation has ended and the journey begun.'