Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I heard that a pair of scientists had to be picked up from their camp further down the coast of
Ross Island and ferried to and from the Adélie colony at Crozier. By this time I had honed the skill
of appearing at judicious moments in the Helo Ops room. Soon I had successfully insinuated my-
self on the flight manifest.
The day before I left for the Crozier pilgrimage I attended the weekly science lecture. It was
about evolutionary biology, and the Catholic priest, appearing for the opposition, sat in the front
row. 'This is what Antarctica looked like for much of its geological history,' intoned the lecturer.
By the time he got down to the palaeontological nitty-gritty the priest had nodded off, effectively
registering his protest.
∗
We set off in a helicopter early in the morning and proceeded up the coast to Cape Bird, where two
Kiwi biologists were waiting next to their small hut. From there, it took us half an hour to reach
Crozier. I saw from the map that we were in James Clark Ross's territory: he had sprayed names
everywhere. Cape Crozier was named after his best friend Francis Crozier, who captained the
Ter-
ror
, one of the two ships Ross took south. Its first lieutenant was Archibald McMurdo.
The pilot pointed across the Sound. In the distance a red dot was stationary in the heavy pack ice.
It was an American icebreaker, trying to cut a channel for a tanker which would refuel McMurdo.
Beneath us crevasse fields streaked the snow like cellulite.
'See those?' said the pilot over the headset. 'You could drive a double-decker bus in there.'
Then, like a handful of ash, fragments of black metal appeared on the snowfields. On 28 Novem-
ber 1979 a 200-ton DC-10 on a sightseeing flight crashed into the lower slopes of Erebus, killing
all 257 aboard. The passengers on Air New Zealand Flight 901 were tourists. Like Americans and
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, every Kiwi can tell you what they were doing when they
heard the news. They could all remember, too, seeing the familiar Maori koru, the airline's logo,
protruding from the snow on the DC-10's tail engine pod. The effect of the disaster on the nation-
al psyche was incalculable. 'The fact that it was in the Antarctic made it particularly obscene,'
someone said. Sixteen years on, I happened to mention to a table of New Zealanders in Wellington
that someone had attended a McMurdo Halloween party in an impressive Mount Erebus costume.
Silence descended like a fog. It was like telling a British gathering that someone had dressed up as
Lockerbie.
We dropped off the biologists and arranged to pick them up two hours later. Having purposefully
inflamed the crew with stories of epic heroism, I experienced no difficulty in persuading them that
we should try to find Cherry's rock shelter. They threw themselves enthusiastically into the search.
'You mean to say that they dragged their sledges over
that?
' asked the pilot, looking at the
gnarled pressure ridges.
'Yes,' I said, keen to maintain his interest. 'They said their necks were frozen into the same
position for hours.' It took three aborted landings and several radio conversations to establish the
exact location of the rock shelter. I had read in
The Worst Journey
that it was two miles from the
emperor colony. As we knew exactly where the emperor colony was, I had assumed that a swift
