Terra Incognita (25 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I don't really mind science – I just seem to feel better when it's not around.

Observed on latrine wall,

Central West Antarctica deep field camp

R
ESUMING THE QUEST
for Seismic Man and his group, I wheedled my way on to a fuel flight to Central West Antarctica, and after a series of false starts I was transported to the skiway with four members of a science project staging at CWA en route to Ice Stream B. The West Antarctic ice streams – fast-flowing currents of ice up to 50 miles wide and 310 miles long – are cited as evidence of possible glacial retreat and the much-touted imminent rise in global sea levels. The project leader pulled out
The Road to Oxiana
, the greatest travel book ever written and one which lies so close to my heart that it gave me a shock to see it there, as if the paraphernalia of home had followed me. He was a beatific man in his mid-fifties with a round, mottled face like a moon, and his name was Hermann. Ten years previously, he had climbed out of a crashed plane in Antarctica.

Later, when we were airborne, the scientists retreated into the hoods of their parkas, jamming unwieldily booted feet among the trellis of rollers, survival bags and naked machinery. I loitered on the flight deck for a while, but I couldn't see much. It grew colder.

The previous evening, in the galley at McMurdo, I had run into a mountaineer from a science group which had recently pulled out of CWA.

‘Hey!' he had said when I told him I was on my way there. ‘You can sublease the igloo I built just outside camp. It's the coolest igloo on the West Antarctic ice sheet.'

When we landed at eighty-two degrees south, the back flap lifted and light flooded into the plane. Tornadoes of powder snow were careering over the blanched wasteland like spectral spinning tops. There were no topographical features, just an ice sheet, boundless and burnished. Lesser (or West) Antarctica is a hypothesised rift system – a jumble of unstable plates – separated from the stable shield of Greater (or East) Antarctica by the Transantarctic Mountains. On top, most of Lesser Antarctica consists of the world's only marine-based ice sheet. This means that the bottom of the ice is far below sea level, and if it all melted, the western half of Antarctica would consist of a group of islands. The assemblage of plates which make up Lesser Antarctica have been moving both relative to one another and to the east for something like 230 million years, whereas Greater Antarctica, home of the polar plateau, has existed relatively intact for many hundreds of millions of years. In Gondwanaland, the prehistoric supercontinent, what we now know as South America and the Antipodes were glued to Antarctica. Gondwanaland started to break up early in the Jurassic Period – say 175 million years ago – and geologists like to speculate on the relationship of Antarctica to still earlier super-continents. Most exciting of all, Antarctica once had its own dinosaurs.

The crewmen began rolling pallets off the back of the plane. We walked down after them, and the wind stung our faces. The engines roared behind us as we struggled to pull our balaclavas down around our goggles.

In the sepulchral light ahead I could see a scattering of Jamesways, a row of sledges, half a dozen tents, and Lars, the shaggy-haired Norwegian-American from Survival School. He was looking even shaggier, and proffering a mug of cocoa. We hugged one another. Lars led the way into the first Jamesway, where half a dozen weatherbeaten individuals were slumped around folding formica tables.

‘Welcome, Woo!' somebody shouted. I had brought them cookies and a stack of magazines, and as I handed these over we all talked at once; a lot seemed to have happened in two months.

‘Guess what?' said Lars. ‘We saw a bird.'

The CWA field camp was probably the largest on the continent. Fifty people were based here for most of the summer season, working on four separate geological projects. Often small groups temporarily left camp, travelled over the ice sheet on snowmobiles or tracked vehicles, pitched their tents for a few days and tried to find out what the earth looked like under that particular bit of ice. They were creating a relief map of Antarctica without its white blanket.

Seeing Seismic Man's lightweight parka hanging on a hook in the Jamesway, I suspected he was away working at one of these small satellite camps. I was thinking about this, just as Lars produced another round of cocoa, when a familiar figure flew through the door of, the Jamesway and clattered to a standstill beside me. It was José, the diminutive Mexican-American biker who grinned like a satyr and with whom I had failed to get to CWA on my first attempt. He had made it here a week before me. In one long exhalation of breath he said that he had heard I'd come, that he and two others were about to set off to strike a satellite camp thirty miles away, that it would take about twenty-four hours and they wouldn't be sleeping, that I could go too if I wanted . . . and then he trailed off, like his bike running out of fuel.

Having trekked halfway across the continent to find Seismic Man, I left immediately without seeing him at all. It was the idea of the quest that had appealed to me. Feeling vaguely irritated about this, as if the whole expedition had been someone else's idea, I climbed into the back of a tracked vehicle and shook hands with a tall loose-limbed Alaskan in the driver's seat.

‘They call me Too-Tall Dave,' he said as he pumped my hand, crushing a few unimportant bones. ‘Pleased to meet you.'

The man next to him – a medical corpsman on loan from the Navy – looked as if he had just got up. His name was Chuck, and apparently he had forgotten the American president's name one day and asked Too-Tall Dave to remind him. José and I spread out over the two bench seats in the back of the vehicle. It was a temperamental Tucker which only liked travelling between eight and ten miles an hour, and we were towing a flat, open trailer and a sledge loaded with survival gear. As we were following a flagged route to the small camp you couldn't really call what Too Tall was doing driving: it was more a question of stabilising the steering wheel with his elbow and looking at the dash every so often to make sure he was maintaining the correct rpm to keep the water and oil at a stable temperature. It was very warm in the Tucker. The ice was dappled with watery sunlight, and the sky pale, streaky blue.

‘This', said José, ‘is what travelling in a covered wagon across the United States must have been like.'

After five hours, we reached a weatherhaven and a Scott tent.

‘Is this it?' I asked.

‘Yep,' said Too Tall, swinging nimbly out of the Tucker.

When I saw the tent, its flap still open, sunlit against the white prairies, an image flashed across my mind, and after a moment I recognised it as J. C. Dollman's painting of Titus Oates staggering off to die, arms outstretched and wearing a blue bobble hat. The lone tent in the background of the picture was identical to the one I was looking at, except that Dollman painted something which looked like a Land Rover parked outside. The painting was called ‘A Very Gallant Gentleman', and the previous summer I had gone to see it at the Cavalry Club in London's Piccadilly. The Patron of my expedition, Jeremy Lewis, came along in an attempt to expiate his guilt at fulfilling none of the duties performed by more experienced Patrons such as the Duke of Edinburgh or the manufacturers of Kendal's Mint Cake. Jeremy said he thought Oates was probably wearing a tweed jacket under his parka with a copy of the
Symposium
in the pocket.

In its clumsy way the picture captures the most luminous moment in Antarctic history – when a desperately weak Oates announced that he might be some time and, without putting on his boots, crawled out of the tent. The episode has inculcated itself so effectively into the national psyche that the phrase, ‘the Captain Oates Defence' is now bandied around the financial press when a senior figure leaves a troubled company to save his colleagues. At the time, Oates's deed unleashed a good deal of excruciating sentiment disguised as art. I was especially taken by two stanzas of ‘
Omen Pugnae
', a poem by Hugh Macnaghten, vice-provost of Eton College, Oates's school, published in 1924.

In the
Daily Telegraph
, on 8 April 1995, Beryl Bainbridge took a more robust approach, suggesting that Andrew Lloyd Webber might like to stage a musical of Scott's expedition including a number sung by Oates, ‘I'm just stepping outside and may be some time'.

Oates was in charge of the ponies on the
Terra Nova
expedition. They were a bunch of old crocks from Siberia and a disaster from the start. He had not selected them himself, and described his charges and the dogs on board the ship as ‘the most unsuitable scrap-heap crowd of unfit animals'. Nicknamed Titus after the seventeenth-century intriguer, Lawrence Oates was the only expedition member from the army, and consequently he was also known as ‘the Soldier'. He had money, and his father had written ‘gentleman' in the Paternal Occupation box on the infant's birth certificate. As a young man Titus was Lord of the Manor at Gestingthorpe in Essex, and the whole village celebrated feudal-style when he returned from the Boer War a wounded hero. He was reserved, measured and a cheerful pessimist, the archetypal Action Man whose only pin-up above his bunk was a portrait of Napoleon. In many ways he was the polar opposite of Scott. He received a toy gun for Christmas in the south, and went around shooting people with it
for the rest of the evening
, asking them to fall down when hit. His creed was ‘Down with Science, Sentiment and the Fair Sex', and he once confided to Wilson that his mother was the only woman he had ever loved.

He was a popular officer. I read a pile of letters sent to his mother after the news had broken. One said, ‘Dear old Titus took my brother's place when he died in the Transvaal and I loved Titus as a brother and now he is gone. What it must mean to you God alone knows.' Indeed. She burnt his diaries, though his sister, alerted to the imminent conflagration, stayed up all night to copy out as many of the handwritten pages as she could.

He was a stereotypical upper-class twit, in many ways, and twits were no different then than they are now. Despite that, I liked him. His no-nonsense approach appealed to me, and so did his fierce opposition to prevarication or cant.

∗

I packed up the contents of the weatherhaven while Jose and Too Tall set about dismantling it from the outside. Fortunately the wind had dropped, but it was bitterly cold.

‘Why didn't the beakers do this themselves?' asked Too Tall irritably. ‘Next time they'll be asking us to wipe their butts.'

By the time we had finished loading the gear on to the trailer it was six o'clock in the morning. We squatted in a banana sledge we had forgotten to pack up, and opened three cartons of orange juice and a large bag of trail-mix.

As we rearranged our own gear in the back of the Tucker afterwards I noticed that fuel had leaked all over my sleeping bag, not for the first time or the last. I wasn't the only one in Antarctica who smelt like an oil rig.

I drove for the first three hours on the way back to camp. It was a mesmerising occupation, and as I wandered into a reverie or stared blankly out at the ice sheet, the needle crept up on the rev. counter dial.

‘Less gas!' Too Tall would then say, delivering a karate chop on my shoulder from the bench in the back. The monotony was broken by the appearance of a bottle of bourbon. José set up a Walkman with a pair of speakers.

‘We need tortured blues,' said Too Tall. He was right. It was the perfect accompaniment to the inescapable monotony of the landscape and the hypnotic rhythm of the Tucker.

I got accused of picking all the cashews out of the trail-mix, a crime of which I was indeed guilty. Everyone started talking.

‘Are you married?' José asked me.

‘No,' I said. ‘Are you?'

‘No.' There was a pause, which something was waiting to fill.

‘Go on José, tell her!' said Chuck.

José cleared his throat.

‘Actually, I married my Harley Davidson,' he said.

I choked on the last cashew.

‘Oh, really?' I said, in an English kind of way. ‘Who performed the, er – ceremony?'

‘Owner of my local bike shop. He does it a lot.'

This information was almost more than the human spirit could bear. Fortunately an empty fuel drum chose that moment to fall off our trailer and roll over the ice sheet, and after we had dealt with that, the topic was forgotten.

A fresh one, however, was looming.

‘You know that Captain Scott,' said Too Tall in my direction as the bourbon went round again. ‘Was he a bit of a dude, or what?'

I had just begun to grapple with a reply to this weighty question when Chuck, his face puckered in concentration, chipped in with ‘Hey, is that the guy they named Scott's hut after?'

‘No,' I said, quickly grasping the opportunity to divert the conversation away from the dude issue. ‘That was Mr Hut.'

It took us eight hours to get back, and then I had to put up my tent. It was snowing lightly, and I was too tired to dig out the igloo. I chose a place at the back of camp, facing the horizon. My metal tent pegs weren't deep enough, so I hijacked a bunch of bamboo flagpoles, and after the bottle-green and maroon tent was up I collapsed into a deep sleep.