Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Everything was so simple in Antarctica. Even the food chain was simple. Phytoplankton, the
primary producers, took light and made matter. Phytoplankton were eaten by krill, and krill were
eaten by everything else.
Bruce, a man of Pickwickian geniality and an alarming orange beard, was showing off his new
electronic weighbridge over which a sub-colony of Adélies were obliged to strut on their passage
to the sea. The parents took it in turns to swim out, swallow a meal and return to regurgitate it
to their offspring. There was a good deal of argument over it all. When a leopard seal began his
late afternoon patrol hundreds of penguins porpoising through the water shot out vertically as if
propelled by a tightly coiled spring. After landing, they shook themselves off as if they hadn't ex-
pected to land quite so soon. The water, reflecting the pearly silver blues of the sky, was thick with
drifting pack, and suddenly the dark arched backs of a large pod of killer whales appeared, pro-
ceeding with rhythmic perfection in front of the cape. It was an identical scene to that of Herbert
Ponting's finest hour, when, not far from this spot, he was apprehended on a floe by eight killer
whales - but not until he had got the shots he wanted. He makes much of this episode in his book.
Ponting was the official photographer on the
Terra Nova
expedition, though he pressurised Scott
to let him be called Camera Artist. Besides the famous stills of Scott writing purposefully at his
desk in the Cape Evans hut and the ship perfectly framed by an ice cave, images now engraved on
the national consciousness, Ponting shot a 'kinematograph', or moving-picture film, and twenty
years later reissued it with a commentary and soundtrack, calling it
Ninety Degrees South
. Teddy
Evans appears at the beginning in front of a creased black curtain in full evening dress and, hands
in pockets, plays with his balls for some minutes while introducing 'Ponto', who slides into view
resembling a large stuffed animal. What follows is a brilliant piece of film.
Ponting was a cold fish. He abandoned his wife, daughter and son to become a photographer,
and never saw any of them again. Scott deplored his commercialism, and Ponting was always
moaning that Scott had got the publicity wrong. In the south he irritated the others by asking them
to pose all the time, like many photographers after him, and in later years never attended reunions.
His prose is stiff and pompous, yet often revealing. 'We felt like boys again,' he wrote, 'and acted,
too, like boys.'
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 re-
cord 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.
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