Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
landed on the ice, and I was winched aboard on a crane. The crew, who had just been granted 'ice
liberty', were setting up goalposts on the ice, and soon an enthusiastic game of football was un-
der way. I had watched Scott's men doing exactly the same thing not far from here in Ponting's
moving-picture film. Describing ice liberty on the Japanese 1911-12 expedition, a seaman wrote,
'We were like little birds let out of the cage.'
I loitered around the decks. The crew were unenthusiastic about the south. It had been a long
trip, the ship was dry, and they had expected to be home for Christmas. They showed me pho-
tographs of initiation ceremonies on the dateline, and when I asked them what it was like in the
north, they said the ice was dirty up there.
The Captain had written a book on Soviet Maritime History. 'Are you more interested in the
south?' I asked hopefully as we sat in his private quarters sipping Coca-Cola. He had a drawing of
a polar bear by Nansen on the wall.
'No,' he said. 'I am bipolar.'
In the wardroom an engineer talked about icebreakers over a bowl of spaghetti. He had previ-
ously referred to scientists as 'customers'.
'Icebreakers have smooth bottoms, so they roll more,' he said. 'You can tell she feels at home
when she hits the ice. The more effective an icebreaker you make it, the worse ride it gives you in
open seas. So icebreaker design is all about compromise.'
It was a sunny evening, and the brash ice in the trail behind us sparkled. The crew milled around,
and a pod of killer whales obligingly popped their heads through a hole, revealing flashes of their
shiny pebble-grey underside. Skuas landed on the floes, their spindly legs slithering, and behind
us, in the distance, the tanker struggled along in the channel we had broken like an elderly relation
taken out for an airing.
I sat in the Captain's chair on the bridge, poring over charts with the officers. Finally, at about
nine o'clock, the
Polar Sea
began to break ice. The writing in my journal gets very shaky at this
point. It was as if a mysterious power had breathed life into the ship. The vibrations made our
ears pop, and the officers laid bets on whether particular seals escaped, running out to look behind.
'You always expect them to burst like a pimple,' someone said. I went on deck to watch jagged
chunks of ice with opaque white crusts and translucent blue bellies being squeezed upwards as the
ship moved implacably on. Teddy Evans wrote about the noise of the
Terra Nova
breaking ice.
'The memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the voices that call,' he wrote.
'I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances, and the lure of
the little voices I know then at its strongest . . . It is surely that which called Scott away, when he
had everything man wants . . .'
∗
The next morning, we woke up near Cape Evans. It had been like sleeping on top of a washing
machine. I wandered out on deck to another spectacular day, and the water in our wide trail was as
blue and calm as a field of mulberries.
There was another Evans, besides the one who commanded Scott's
Terra Nova
, but he did not
have a cape, despite the fact that his sacrifice was greater. Petty Officer Edgar 'Taff' Evans went
