Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
on the veranda. The wind soon began whipping up small white horses on the lagoon, and Vasco lit
the paraffin heaters in the hut and went to sleep inside. I was so cold that I put my inflation suit
back on and walked up to a large area of shingle above the tide line. There were many of these
raised beaches on the island, formed when the glaciers retreated after the last ice age.
We were struck on the head by skuas dozens of times each day on Lagoon Island. They came
at us with open beaks and extended talons. The hut diary was bristling with anti-skua advice and
designs for combat gear, but nothing worked except holding a broom aloft and waving it vigor-
ously as you walked. The hut had been built several years previously, purely as a holiday cottage. It
was twenty feet square, on stilts, and the walls and ceiling had been painted canary yellow. Besides
an unplumbed sink, it had two primus stoves, four wooden bunk beds, three windows and, in the
middle, a formica table. The shelves around the sink were jumbled with rusty tins of peaches and
jars of separated mayonnaise. Two tilley lamps hung from the ceiling, as well as a coil of wire and
a collection of fraying teacloths. A single shelf was stacked with a dozen novels and a chess set.
The evenings were drawing in, and we were obliged to light the tilleys at eight o'clock. After
that, on the first night we drank rum and ate scones from a plastic bag shoved into our arms as we
left base by Al, the cook, who never forgot field-party care parcels. Nobody had anything particu-
lar to do. Steve was at the end of a two-and-a-half year tour of duty, and inside his head he hadn't
really been in Antarctica for some months. At the Bluff he had spent most of the time lying on
his bunk with his Walkman clamped to his ears, but at Lagoon, in a smaller group, he opened up.
He was far less concerned with being gnarly than most of the men at Rothera, and for that reason
he wasn't very popular. This alone would have been enough to endear him to me, but he had also
gone out of his way to be friendly. As he was unpacking the contents of his bag on to his bunk at
Lagoon, he held out a folded t-shirt.
'I thought you'd like this,' he said. 'I bought two when the consignment arrived from Cambridge
last year and, well, you'll appreciate it.' I unfolded the gift. It had been produced to commemorate
the departure of the huskies.
After the sun had finally struggled over the horizon on our first morning at Lagoon we sat on
the veranda for breakfast, an event made memorable by the fact that I had mistaken egg powder
for milk powder and put it in everyone's tea. There had been much discussion about climbing a
mountain, and we had brought plastic boots and a frightening array of harnesses. Like all field as-
sistants, Vasco was a passionate rock and mountain climber and raced up a peak at the drop of a
hat. I couldn't tell one end of a harness from another, and I had never worn plastic boots before,
but I hadn't dared to raise any objections. God smiled on me that day, as He sent a thick cloud
down over the mountains.
'We'll have to go for a walk instead,' said Vasco over breakfast as he scanned the horizon.
'What a shame,' I said.
We took the boats to Anchorage Island, another of the Leonies. It was reported by members of
the French 1908-10 Antarctic Expedition as possibly providing anchorage for a small ship, and
charted by the British Graham Land Expedition in February 1936. As we climbed, the lichens on
the shingle beaches got thicker. Above them we spied a vein of brassy yellow pyrite, fool's gold.
