Terra Incognita (24 page)

Frank Hurley, the other great photographer of the Heroic Age, went south with Shackleton and took the famous picture of the crippled
Endurance
balancing on the ice like a ballerina. As a record of the death of a ship it will never be surpassed. Hurley, an Australian with none of Ponting's pomposity, ran away from home and didn't see the sea until he was fifteen. He met a French opera singer in Cairo and married her ten days later. Besides hundreds of images of Australian troops, Hurley took pictures of monolithic columns in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem with beams of light falling in pools on the flagstones (he called one ‘I am the Light of the World'). He has left fewer remarkable Antarctic landscapes than Ponting; his Antarctica is less frigid and more human. The pack ice in his best picture is like a field of white carnations. In life Shackleton and Scott had found the appropriate photographers, just as in death they had got the Societies they deserved.

∗

By the time the helicopter landed at McMurdo, it was already eight o'clock. I was supposed to be moving over to Scott Base. Many months before I had engaged in a long correspondence with the people who ran the New Zealand Antarctic Programme, and they had invited me to spend a few days at their base while I was on Ross Island. Shortly after arriving in McMurdo for the first time I had walked the two miles over the hill to Scott Base to meet Malcolm Macfarlane, at that time the senior representative of the NZ programme. We had almost collided before, we discovered. Three years previously Malcolm had been working on a cruise liner in the Southern Ocean when a passenger died while the ship was off Cape Horn. I was hanging around in Tierra del Fuego at that time, and in order to get a glimpse of the Horn I had hitched a lift on a supply boat delivering an empty coffin to a cruise ship. The coffin had been covered with a candlewick bedspread, and the sailors played poker on it for most of the trip. When we got to the Horn, where a gale was raging, I had helped lower the coffin into a zodiac, and must have seen Malcolm hanging over the rail in the stern of the ship, assisting the embarkation of the coffin.

I arrived at Scott Base later that evening, and repaired to the bar with Malcolm. A sign on the door said, ‘
Remove boots, jacket and hat or buy the whole bar a drink
.' Someone had to tell me that, as the sign was in Japanese. It was a cunning Kiwi ploy to stitch up passing strangers and force them into buying a round.

There were only thirty or so people on base, so I had a room to myself. It was a small, windowless room with a set of bunk beds, but it was very comfortable. There was a mug on the bedside table bearing the slogan ‘
Party Till You Puke
', a caption which went some way towards summing up the off-duty philosophy of the base. The Kiwis on the ice had a culture all their own. They held three-legged ski races and painted their toenails blue.

It snowed for two days, and scientists paced the corridors. A trio of microbiologists were trying to get to the crater of Erebus to collect high-temperature bacteria. One of them, a tall man with wild eyes which peered over his glasses and down his nose, had hair shooting from his head like the flame of the Olympic torch. He flung his arms around when he spoke.

‘I work', he told me one day, jiggling his left hand and slicing the air with his right forefinger, ‘on bacteria for which the tropics are too cold. They like it best at 105 degrees Celsius. This is a theory of evolution – that life began with these creatures. They form the very roots of the tree of life! That is my belief. A theory of evolution must be like a belief.'

On my third day Bruce, the Pickwickian biologist with the orange beard, turned up from Cape Bird. He got on to the subject of the Husky Hugging Club. Initiation into this august institution had involved stripping naked in front of the base, walking a hundred yards and hugging a husky. The last huskies left Antarctica in 1994 as a result of Antarctic Treaty regulations banning all alien species, although they hadn't been used as working dogs for some years before that. I wondered why humans had not qualified for the same exclusion. Bruce talked fondly of the dogs, while the Americans seemed to have forgotten their existence.

Much of the human culture of Antarctica was caught up in the mystique of ‘the old days', for every nationality. I wondered how many stories I had heard Americans telling about the Biolab which preceded the Crary, and its crappy lounge with the beaten-up sofas and benches where everyone worked next to each other, and about walking past Art DeVries' bench and being offered a bowl of fish soup? It was like some Homeric age in which men larger than ourselves bestrode the continent, replaced now by the etiolated figures of bureaucracy.

The legends were even more vividly drawn in the collective memory of Kiwi veterans. They reached their acme in the exploits of the Asgaard Rangers and their bitter enemies the Vandals. The former were nomadic hydrologists who had been roaming the Asgaard mountains in the Dry Valleys since the late sixties, and the latter were the sedentary scientists of the Lake Vanda camp on the valley floor. One of the Asgaards had just arrived at Scott Base, and he was extremely keen to extol Asgaard virtues and Vandal frailties. Pete was a rogue with a gleam in his eye and an infectiously enthusiastic manner; once he spotted a joke he pursued it like a hound after a hare.

‘Tell me about your work,' I said.

‘We measure water flows', he replied quickly, ‘and compare the rate of glacial advance and retreat here with glacier movement in New Zealand. They move much more slowly here.' He didn't seem very interested in talking about this.

‘What you have to understand,' he said, clearing his throat and leaning over the dining table towards me, ‘is that Vandals are inferior to Asgaards in every way.'

The passage of almost thirty years had not diminished their rivalry. Mock battles continued to be staged, and if the Vandals raised their flag from the bamboo pole at their camp, an Asgaard Ranger would be sure to ski down from the top of the valley and slice it off.

‘Asgaards pride themselves on the theft of as much issue clothing as possible,' said Pete, adding quickly, ‘though of course, we Rangers don't actually need to wear many clothes, as we barely feel the cold.'

‘What else rates highly then?' I asked. ‘I mean, in the Asgaard-versus-Vandal rivalry?'

‘Stealing food from Americans but ratting on Vandals who do the same is highly regarded,' he said, warming now to the theme. ‘I remember hijacking a leg of ham from a helicopter once. We were only talking about that at a reunion last month.'

‘Where do you hold the reunions?' I asked.

‘Strip clubs, usually,' he said.

I could imagine how much the bureaucracy and safety regulations of the contemporary Antarctic programme must have crucified him. The affection with which he recounted his stories made me realise what an important part of his life Antarctica had been. When I commented on that, he paused reflectively.

‘Well, relationships here are especially close,' he said eventually. ‘It's obvious, isn't it – you can't share it with anyone else. I hardly ever talk about Antarctica at home. No one would understand. There's no place like this, and because of that it becomes emotional.'

Some time later I caught sight of Pete strolling around McMurdo wearing his tatty Rangers jacket, and he made me think of an amiable dinosaur tramping the streets of Milton Keynes or the malls of New Jersey.

On the fourth day the Kiwis went into a huddle, and when they came out of it, a camping trip had been arranged. As soon as they asked me along, I sent a message to McMurdo to say I wasn't coming home.

The team consisted of four men and five women. ‘Here,' said Jaqui before we left. She was the base cleaner. ‘Take this.' With that, she bundled a yellow parka into my arms. ‘So you won't feel the odd one out,' she said. The Kiwi women had raised their collective wing and taken me under it. It was like coming home.

We set off in high spirits and a Hägglunds tracked vehicle, bound for an old hut on the ice shelf. The Kiwis had been maintaining the hut for years – it was only a few miles away, but it was off-station, and that was what mattered. We stopped en route at the skiway on the southern side of Hut Point peninsula for a couple of hours downhill skiing. They had fixed a towrope to the back of an old truck, and imported some juggernaut tyres for tubing downhill.

After exhausting ourselves on the slopes we drove on to the hut. Lighting the Preway always constituted something of a drama in Antarctic huts, but once we had done it there was nothing further to do but snuggle around it and sip mulled wine. The hut, in full view of Erebus, was hard by the snowfield used by the New Zealanders for survival training. Besides building igloos, snowholes and snow walls, they had carved a lifesize bar, complete with barstools, draught pumps and glasses.

‘It makes us feel at home,' someone commented.

On the spur of the moment I decided to sleep in an igloo, as the ambient temperature was above zero and the wind had fallen to a whisper. When I woke up next morning sky-blue sunlight was trickling through the bricks and splashing on to the blue-and-yellow sleeping bag. I crawled up the tunnel and watched the plumes of Erebus dissolving into the limpid sky. The sun had warmed the motionless air, the clouds had fled, and nobody else was awake.

I lay down on my parka. Sometimes I lost myself so thoroughly in Antarctica that I felt as if I had fallen off the planet and forgotten who I was. It was as if all my points of reference had dissolved like the Erebus plumes, or I had wandered off into some country of the mind to which I alone had a passport. When I felt it most acutely I had to close my eyes and think about something that was still going on in the inhabited world. It was a device to ensure I didn't lose my grip on reality, like looking up through a periscope on a submarine for reassurance that the world is still there. The image that leapt most readily into my empty mind was that of a beak-nosed nun crouching on a chequered floor in a tiny Byzantine chapel. A single oil-lamp in a niche cast flickering light around the entire biblical cosmogony, and on the chipped fresco at the back a mass of faces were permanently twisted into the tormented screams of the damned.

The nunnery was high on a mountain in the middle of the Greek island of Evia. I had spent several weeks there five years previously staying in a bare room above a courtyard filled with geraniums bursting from terracotta flowerpots. The rims of these flowerpots were regularly whitewashed by the beak-nosed nun. It was an operation modelled on the painting of the Golden Gate bridge, for when she had finished, she started at the beginning again. The Sisters spent at least half their waking hours in the chapel, and services were punctuated by brief hiatuses during which an argument stormed to and fro over which psalm was to be sung.

In the years since I had walked back down the mountain, I often found myself thinking of the nuns. They represented something solid and permanent when everything else seemed to be sliding away like loose scree.

∗

Unlike the United States, New Zealand claims sovereignty over a slice of Antarctica. The Antarctic Treaty neither endorses nor refutes this claim, or indeed the claims of six other nations (Chile, Argentina, Australia, Britain, Norway and France). The Treaty evolved to preserve the fragile balance of ownership and non-ownership and to protect
Terra Incognita
from the depredations of exploitation and warfare. It states that ‘Antarctica shall be used for peaceful measures only . . . in the interests of all humanity', and gives all parties free access to the whole of the continent, fostering science as the legitimate expression of national interest. Initiated during International Geophysical Year and applicable to all territory south of sixty degrees south, the Treaty was signed by twelve nations in 1959 and came into force in 1961. Since then the number of signatories has more than tripled. The accession of India and Brazil in 1983, and China two years later, meant that the Treaty was no longer the exclusive territory of rich, developed nations. The document subsequently expanded. The Protocol on Environmental Protection, signed in Madrid in 1991, imposed a fifty-year moratorium on extracting oil and mining minerals. It has been called Pax Antarctica.

In the early days, everyone wanted some of this unknown land – or at least, they didn't want to be left out. Doris Lessing wrote that to non-Europeans thinking about the Antarctic in the decades before the First World War, ‘there was little Europe, strutting and bossing up there in its little corner, like a pack of schoolboys fighting over a cake.' Just before the Second World War, Hitler decided that Antarctica too was to be part of the great Nazi empire. He ordered several thousand steel-barbed swastikas, loaded them on to planes, put the planes on a ship and sent the whole lot south, telling the pilots to drop their cargo over a vast tract of the icefields. After the war, people were still optimistic that the continent could be made to earn its keep. In 1949 a journalist called Douglas Liversidge went south to visit British bases and witness the relief of Fuchs and his expedition from Stonington Island. In his book
The Last Continent
, published in 1958, Liversidge suggests that Antarctica might provide ‘cheap, large-scale refrigeration of grain, meat and other supplies' – that it might function as a global freezer, in other words. By the late eighties, a coalition of Third World nations led by Malaysia accused Treaty members of ‘modern day colonialism'.

The political situation often belied reality. I observed on my first visit south that the Antarctic can erase national boundaries. An Argentinian arrived for a minor operation at a Chilean base which included a relatively sophisticated medical facility. The man was greeted with slaps on the back and urgent petitions about a forthcoming radio chess tournament. I had never heard that kind of talk in Chile, only spiteful jokes about loud-mouthed neighbours who rolled their ‘r's. The geopolitics of Antarctica – complex, potentially explosive, deadly serious and ice cold – were played out not on the snowfields but in the ring of the international circus of conferences they engendered and the carpeted corridors of capital cities.