Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
front of me with his pants around his ankles. It was Mike, and he slid to a stop at my feet, arms
flailing.
'Shit!' he said.
The latrine at Camp Mackay was a hole in the sea ice. It was protected by a small windbreaker
and offered a panoramic view of the landscape. On this occasion, a seal had emerged through the
hole and exhaled in his usual manner while Mike was engaged in the task at hand.
Lavatorial stories were part of the fabric of camp life in the south, as they are in all camps. For-
tunately the Incinolet variety of Antarctic outhouse had been abandoned. Like many of their kind,
the Incinolets only accepted solids, but unlike the other types they were powered by electricity,
with the result that if liquid was deposited in error the donor received an electric shock and the
Incinolet shorted out.
We made such good progress with the cleaning up that Ross declared a half day and we took
off on an excursion to Botany Bay and Granite Harbour. John didn't come; he took his work very
seriously. I think he was glad to have us out of the way.
I travelled lying in a trailer behind a snowmobile. It wasn't very comfortable, but I preferred it
to the back of the snowmobile as it was easier to lose yourself when you didn't have to concentrate
on hanging on. We trawled round the sea ice and stopped beneath the cliffs at Granite Harbour,
climbing over pressure ridges to zigzag up a hill coated with spongy black lichen and lash out at
swooping skuas. Glacier ice cascaded down the granite cliffs like ice cream down a cone, and the
boys paused to argue the toss between the conflicting theories of glacial stability and glacial dy-
namism.
Granite Harbour, discovered in January 1902 when the
Discovery
steamed in, was an embay-
ment about eleven miles wide which marked the seaward end of a deep valley between Cape Arch-
er and Cape Roberts, and it was backed by high mountains. Frank Debenham, T. Griffith Taylor,
Tryggve Gran and P.O. Robert Forde, the Second Western Party, set out from Cape Evans on 14
December 1911 to geologise in the area of Granite Harbour, and they built a rock shelter which
they called Granite House, a name they took from a Jules Verne story. They used it as a field kit-
chen, because the blubber stove exuded too many fumes to be kept in a tent. They even sprouted
sea kale in a kitchen garden outside. In 1959 an American party discovered two books in perfect
condition in the shelter. One was by Poe and the other by Verne, and when they opened them they
saw from the flyleaves that Griffith Taylor had owned one and Debenham the other. As both men
were still alive, the Americans sent the topics back.
∗
Everyone gathered in the canvas hut at seven the next morning, the day of our pull-out, lured out of
sleeping bags by John's tactical promise of maple-syrup pancakes. As the stove had been purged
it was very cold, and the hut had been stripped, so it was like sitting down at home for the final
cup of tea on the day you move house. The discussion revolved around the weather and potential
competition for helicopter time, and our spirits rose during our radio schedule with McMurdo as
we heard that a number of other camps were weathered in.
