Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER TWELVE
One of the Boys
Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.
W. H. Auden, from
Atlantis
DEPOSITED BY
the peerless Myriam at a diminutive airstrip outside Port Stanley, George, John
and I presented our passports to a saturnine individual in a small, bare room while another man
flossed his teeth. Nobody was interested in our luggage - they didn't even look at it, let alone set a
sniffer dog loose among us.
'Can we get on?' George asked the tooth-flosser.
'If you like,' said the man.
The four-engine Dash-7 plane was luxurious after the Hercules that had conveyed me to
McMurdo. It was carrying very little cargo, and there were only eight seats, so I was able to walk
freely around the cabin rather than remaining wedged into a redwebbing seat. We could have played
a game of football, and there was even a toilet.
The pilot waved me up to the jumpseat for take-off. As he revved the engines at the end of the
runway all the long, tired hours in sweaty planes, all the delays and frustrations and wasted days
melted into the long strip of wobbling tarmac. I was going back.
Stanley looked like Toytown from the air, neat and circumscribed and little, with primary colour
roofs, small animals in green fields and a harbourful of Dufy-bright sails. The pilots chatted as we
cleared the isolated farms on outlying islands, and it was odd to hear English accents over the head-
set. The pair of them cracked jokes about farting. It was a clue to what was in store.
The British Antarctic Survey originated in a secret wartime naval operation code-named Tabarin
and launched in 1943 to ward off German cruisers in the South Atlantic. I watched an old film of
Tabarin once. The doctor of the all-male team was a gynaecologist. The operation transferred to the
Colonial Office in 1945 under the name Falkland Islands Dependency Survey, and in 1967 it trans-
mogrified into a research institute within the Natural Environment Research Council. Before being
