Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson - with BAS of today. We lived and worked on the watershed
between too little regard for personal welfare and too great a reliance on impersonal technology.
We were the fortunate ones who practised Antarctic exploration at its all-time best.'
Though it achieved more knowledge per pound spent than any other Antarctic expedition, the
British Graham Land team never received the recognition it deserved. Colin Bertram, one of the
surviving members, told me: 'People realised that the war was imminent, and they didn't have time
to think about us.' Nobody died, which meant the media wasn't interested, and the expedition had
nothing to do with the South Pole, always the sexiest part of Antarctica.
After I returned from the ice I took a train through the New Forest in the south of England on the
hottest day of the year and looked through cracked albums of sharp black-and-white photographs
of the expedition with Alfred Stephenson (known as Steve) who said he remembered taking every
one - and he had gone south only twenty years after Scott. In the pre-departure pictures, the men
were lined up in baggy trousers, hair slicked-back from pasty morning-after faces. On the deck of
the
Penola
, they were taking tea and laughing into the camera as if they were on a college trip. I
pointed out a picture of men making dog harnesses, and Steve reeled off the names of the dogs.
Barring Amundsen's, it was the most dog-orientated expedition ever. They had to shoot the last
eighty of their working dogs because they were unable to feed them on the long voyage home. 'I
still mourn them,' Bertram said sixty years later.
Fleming filmed a man making a canoe out of a barrel and paddling it furiously through the
pack ice. He also recorded puppy training on the snowfields, all hands on a storm-washed deck,
and three fabulous skiers slaloming down pristine slopes. They were all tall and handsome and
looked as wholesome as Greek gods. They were making history, and having the times of their
lives. Above all, there was an innocence about them; something untainted. In John Rymill's book
Southern Lights
, they all seem to be indescribably happy all the time. When they were leaving
Antarctica, Rymill wrote of 'a feeling of loss as though a friend had died'. 'To think', the topic
ends, 'that when we return to England one of the first questions we shall be asked - probably by a
well-fed businessman whose God is his bank book - will be “Why did you go there?”'
Alexander Island was roughly mapped as far back as 1821 by members of Bellingshausen's
Russian Antarctic Expedition, who named it after Tsar Alexander I, their patron. A British team
surveyed the Fossil Camp site in 1948 and renamed it Fossil Bluff, and BAS scientists have been
working on Alexander Island ever since. The focus of their investigations was primarily the rela-
tionship between glacier climate and atmospheric climate. In the middle of February I asked if I
could hitch a ride to the small Bluff camp on a fuel flight. Nobody raised any objection, which
was a relief, as I was becoming increasingly desperate to get off base - for two weeks I had been
hanging around there without much to do. I had no idea how long I would be able to stay at the
Bluff, but I couldn't have cared less about that. Someone would presumably tell me when I had to
leave.
Alexander Island is separated from continental Palmer Land by George VI Sound, which, when
I flew over it, was streaked with blue melt pools. We landed on the edge of the island next to a line
of black drums. A couple of men hooded in fluorescent orange ventile were waiting to refuel the
aircraft, and after we had waved the pilot on his way south I rode the mile to the Bluff itself in a
