Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fossil Bluff and the Ski Hi Nunataks
The Clowds near the horizon were of a perfect Snow Whiteness and were difficult to be dis-
tinguished from the Ice hills whose lofty summits reached the Clowds. The outer or Northern
edge of this immence Ice field was compose[d] of loose or broken ice so close packed together
that nothing could enter it; about a mile in began the field ice, in one compact solid boddy
and seemed to increase in height as you traced it to the South; In this field we counted Ninety
Seven Ice Hills or Mountains, many of them vastly large . . .
From Captain Cook's journal, January 1774
FOSSIL
B
LUFF
lies about 230 miles from Rothera on the east coast of Alexander Island. A group of
men from the British Graham Land Expedition were the first to set foot there; they surveyed it
roughly in 1936 and found Jurassic fossils, so they called it Fossil Camp. Lancelot Fleming, a mem-
ber of the expedition who later became Bishop of Norwich, made a cine film which, fifty years later,
was put on video with a narration by another member, the redoubtable Duncan Carse. Carse had
gone on to be a successful actor, playing Dick Barton in the 1940s BBC radio series. He has a melli-
fluous voice made for a piece of film which perfectly captures the lost innocence of a golden age.
After the expedition he spent some time alone in South Georgia. In a film about that he said, 'I en-
joyed a peace of mind there I've experienced nowhere else. It was an island where I belonged.' He
tried to retrace Shackleton's route over the mountains, and had what he described to me as 'an exper-
ience on the astral plane'. In his South Georgia diary he wrote of low cloud hanging in pearly
streamers 'like wraiths of the imagination. But through them and above, the unattainable heights of
the Allardyce Range fired the skyline with stupendous beacons of icy luminosity . . . no one had
ever seen them before: a thousand years might pass before they showed themselves again.'
The British Graham Land Expedition, led by John Rymill, was a private venture and, like all
the best expeditions since Columbus, it was chronically short of cash. They were even obliged to
straighten out packing-cases to retrieve nails. They had £3,000 with which to buy a ship and ended
up with the
Penola
, a 130-tonne three-masted Brittany fishing schooner which they were able to
equip with a de Havilland Fox Moth light aircraft.
Nobody knew much about Graham Land in those days. John Biscoe had named it after Sir James
Robert George Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Home Secretary, and it was annexed
in 1908 as part of the Falkland Islands Dependency. Fleming's film shows the
Penola
leaving Lon-
don's St Catherine's dock in 1934 to explore this
terra incognita
. She was away for three years.
They were dogged by bad luck at the beginning but, as Carse put it, 'It came good at the end.'
The expedition made numerous discoveries and surveyed great tracts of unknown territory. At the
conclusion of the film Carse declares triumphantly: 'Graham Land was the Antarctic Peninsula' (it
had been thought that it was part of an archipelago), much as Columbus must have declared that
there was land west of Iberia. Carse said, 'We were the expedition that links the Heroic Age - Scott,
