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signed a petition protesting that it would 'jeopardise our physical condition and mental balance'.
Poor lambs. Even Harry wasn't wild about the idea. 'It's no place for a woman,' he said. But in the
end Jennie had to go, since Ronne insisted on taking Jackie, and the dissenters reckoned two were
better than one. So they went. One man commented, 'The Admiral [Byrd] took along Guernseys.
One had a calf. We might do better.'
Jennie had never been further south than Florida, and she was twenty-two when the ship set sail.
She packed nail polish, but it froze. 'To him Antarctica symbolised a haven,' Jennie wrote of her
husband, 'a place of high ideals and that inner peace men find only in an all-male atmosphere in
primitive surroundings.' She was accepted in the end, and she learnt to drive the dogs, but prob-
ably only because - some good exploring notwithstanding - the expedition turned into a disaster.
Relations with the British team camped nearby were strained. (An Englishman who had been in
the field for several months and was unaware of Jennie's presence mistook her for a mirage and
ran away.) The social fabric of the American team disintegrated into violence, and Harry was re-
lieved of his responsibilities while forced to remain on the ice. Jennie and Jackie watched the men
quarrelling, fighting, flouting safety measures, sinking into despair and allowing their personalities
to take precedence over the aims of the expedition, and still, in
Man and the Conquest of the Pole,
published in 1964, P. E. Victor wrote of the Ronne saga, 'The expedition ran into all the difficulties
ordinarily caused by the presence of women in such circumstances.' Even this was not quite as
imaginative as the efforts of Abraham Cowley, who was caught in a storm in the Southern Ocean
in the
Batchelor's Delight
in the 1680s. He concluded in his journal that
talking
about women had
caused the storm.
The only other book written by a woman in the early years includes whale recipes and detailed
instructions on how to knit bootees for penguins in order to protect polished floors. In the fifties
Nan Brown spent two-and-a-half years on South Georgia with her husband, who was a radio op-
erator. The Norwegians took her whaling, and she brought out her knitting on deck. She called
her book
Antarctic Housewife
. Nan and Jennie Darlington were both pregnant when they left the
ice (nothing else to do but procreate and knit), but the first child born in the vicinity of the con-
tinent was supposedly to a waitress aboard a Russian whaler in 1948, and she called the poor in-
fant Antarctic. The Argentinians began bringing spouses south in 1977 to reinforce their territorial
claim, and in 1978 one of them obligingly gave birth - though she was flown south seven months
pregnant. By 1984 the Chileans were at it too, and they even established a school.
Private expeditions have been even more of a male preserve. The abiding characteristic of many
of them seems to be hostility between members - you only have to read what Reinhold Mess-
ner wrote about Arved Fuchs, what Will Steger wrote about Geoff Somers, and what Fiennes and
Stroud wrote about one another. The American Women's Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole
in 1992-3 was refreshingly different. One member wrote afterwards, 'We each had our hard times
and received the caring support of the other three . . . We found that although we got annoyed by
some idiosyncrasies, we still valued and needed each individual and the qualities she had to offer
the group.'
I am not, of course, suggesting that men are incapable of this kind of loving support (God for-
bid). It's exactly what Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes in
The Worst Journey in the World
. But
