Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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, window-
less 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
