Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
permanently headquartered in Cambridge, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS, as it became known)
was hived out all over the country, administration and logistics dwelling under the auspices of the
Overseas Development Agency in London. Mike Richardson, a BAS base commander long before
his days overseeing the South Atlantic at the Foreign Office, was put through his medical examin-
ations during this period by a handlebar-moustached retired army colonel.
'Have you got syphilis?' barked the man, pen poised above the voluminous forms.
'No,' stammered Mike.
'Why not?' snapped the colonel.
The peninsula, the wonky finger sticking out of the top left-hand corner of the continent, has al-
ways been the most contentious part of Antarctica. In 1948 Argentina, Chile and Britain sent war-
ships south, and in the fifties an American Antarctican wrote that the territorial argy-bargy between
the three nations on the peninsula 'was so amusing to an onlooker it rivalled the machinations of
a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta'. During this period the explorer Wally Herbert said 'protest notes
were exchanged like cards in a game of snap.' When the Chileans announced in 1983 that at the
bottom of an inlet off the northern tip of the peninsula, they had discovered two projectile heads
like those used by indigenous peoples of Chile in the sixteenth century, the British and Argentini-
ans voiced suspicions that the objects had been planted there to reinforce Chilean territorial claims.
field claimed portions of the continent for Britain, and in 1908 and 1917 Letters Patent were issued
to the same end. In 1920, when British Antarctic policy had begun to assume a coherent shape, the
Under-Secretary of State at the British Colonial Office formally proposed that Britain should take
over the whole continent for the Empire. Neither he nor anyone else knew what it was that they
would be acquiring, even to the nearest million square miles; but they knew they wanted it.
During the Falklands War in 1982 members of the House of Lords voiced the concern that the
conflict might spread to British Antarctic Territory. As a result, and after years of resource-paring,
in 1983-4 BAS funding rose by more than sixty per cent. The relationship between science and
politics in Antarctica has always been ambiguous. Scientists might well dislike political interven-
tion, but the Falklands experience shows that they have had reason to be thankful for it.
It took four-and-a-half hours to reach the peninsula. The crew had purchased our lunch from the
Stanley bakery, and we tucked into apple turnovers and slabs of malt loaf. Before long, icebergs
appeared in the Southern Ocean, rimmed at the waterline with lurid lime green. I was feeling
vaguely apprehensive, as I didn't really have a clue what was in store. I had been invited to spend
two months with the small British team at Rothera and to travel with some of them on the penin-
sula. It was reputed to be a tightly knit community, and I wondered how they were going to take
to an outsider. At the end of January, the season was already beginning to wind down - scien-
ce parties would be coming in from the field while support staff on base prepared for winter. An
ice-strengthened ship was due to arrive at Rothera at the end of March to resupply the station and
take the summer stragglers - who included me - back up to the Falklands. By then, the polar night
would be upon us.
When the peninsula appeared it was fenced with high mountains, and the ocean lapped on a
narrow strip of rocky shore beneath them. I had never seen Antarctica so thawed. Rothera Station
