Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Peter, the Asgaard Ranger I had met at Scott Base, arrived to model his original and much abused
Ranger parka, which he had donated to the Polar Room, and large quantities of wine and sausage
rolls were disgorged from the fridge. It was the centenary of the landing of the
Southern Cross
on
the Antarctic continent, so David put on a special cape (I can't remember why it was special, if I
ever knew) and declaimed from Borchgrevinck's diary until we had drunk the wine and eaten the
sausage rolls. Then we went home.
Roger made me tomato on toast for breakfast as his last gesture of 'NZ Operational Support', as
he referred to himself. On my way out to the airport I found a sausage roll in my pocket. I stopped
off at Canterbury Museum to meet the Antarctic curator and historian Baden Norris. They were
cutting the grass in Hagley Park, and the air smelt sweet. Baden was waiting in the foyer for me
when I arrived. He was a short, middle-aged man with a diffident manner and an encyclopedic
knowledge of Antarctica. I took to him straight away. He had spent six weeks alone at Shackleton's
hut in 1963, making sure American helicopters didn't land too close to the Adélie colony, which
had halved since the first landing.
'I felt I was never alone,' he said. As we walked around his gallery he told me that he had grown
up in Lyttelton. 'Antarctica was always part of my life,' he said, running his fingers through his
grey hair. 'My next-door neighbours were children of people who'd been on the early expeditions.'
He pointed out Spencer-Smith's ecclesiastical stoles, neatly folded in a glass cabinet. 'Ex-
traordinary man,' he commented, more to himself than to me. Spencer-Smith was a member of
the Ross Sea party of Shackleton's
Endurance
expedition, and in his unpublished sledging journal,
which came to light in 1981, a neat pencil hand records the laborious work of depot-laying and
the powerful influence of the continent upon the human spirit. 'All the old questionings seem to
come up for answer in this quiet place,' he wrote, 'but one is able to think more quietly than in
civilisation.' He was a priest, and a polymath (he had 'a long argument' with Stevens about the
essential nature of a preposition), and his spirit was relentlessly cheerful until he died from scurvy
and exhaustion lashed on the back of a sledge. When they had to leave him alone and sick in his
tent for days he had delivered a sermon in French to occupy himself, and on All Souls' Day he
recorded, 'More trips around London this evening.'
∗
I flew to Auckland on a Hawker Siddely, and the man sitting next to me asked where I'd been.
When I told him, he said, 'Oh, my cousin went there.' Everybody in New Zealand knew someone
who had been south, even if it were the milkman's brother. It brought the continent into their sphere
of consciousness, and made it less remote, whereas in Britain and America what I had done was
akin to going to the moon. 'Antarctica does sit in your imagination more if you live in the south
of New Zealand,' someone said. 'Also, on a global scale, New Zealand is involved, for once.' A
friend of Roger's remarked that he needed 'to go for an Oatie', which meant visit the lavatory.
The phrase had evolved from Oates's famous departure from the tent, with which everyone in New
Zealand was familiar. Most revealing of all, a Maori waitress who had sat down at a truckstop to
join me for a mug of tea said, 'You know, when we feel a cold wind on our faces, we know where
it's coming from.'
