Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
people who had been talking for months about going home would say that they were going to miss
the ice.
∗
On Sunday 19 March at eight o'clock in the morning we were sprawled out in the dining room,
clutching mugs of coffee, when we heard the low elephant grief of a ship's horn. RRS
Bransfield
had appeared beyond the furthest berg. We all went down to the wharf, of course. Some of us were
boarding the ship for the day, as it was taking a clean-up team to Horseshoe Island before Relief.
The base there had scarcely been touched since the fifties, and as a short-term measure it had been
decided to remove the rubbish and make the huts good against the depredations of time and weath-
er.
The captain sent over a boat with a scow lashed to its side, and we filled nets with rolls of roof-
ing felt and tossed them down into the scow. Then we climbed down from the wharf into the boat
and motored to the rope ladder dangling over the side of the ship.
We sailed on a calm, steely sea, past snowy petrels dancing in the bands of light on the horizon
and solitary penguins on tabular bergs. A chippie from the building team was standing next to me
on deck. He was a diminutive creature with powerful shoulders, a gallery of tattoos and a rasping
Glaswegian accent, and when he was drunk he always ended up in a fight (though not with me). A
rainbow had arched over Horseshoe. The chippie said it was amazing how the sunshine changed
everything.
'I'm a bit of an agnostic,' he said, 'a doubting Thomas. But this - it makes you think there is a
God.'
Horseshoe Island was shoe-horned between Bourgeois Fjord and Square Bay, off the Fallieres
Coast. A station was established there in 1955 and occupied continuously until it was evacuated
on 21 August 1960, since when it has been used occasionally by field parties. It was imaginatively
known as Base. Y. In his book
Of Ice and Men
, Sir Vivien Fuchs recounts a radio hoax at Horse-
shoe in 1955. They used to indulge in radio pranks every five minutes in those days, but this one
was particularly well orchestrated. Two of the men tuned the bunkroom receiver so that their col-
leagues thought they had picked up a Falklands radio station, whereas in fact they were listening
to material broadcast from the room next door. Naturally all the music played was drawn from the
meagre selection on base, so to allay suspicion one of the perpetrators performed on the bagpipes
and mouth organ (it was gratifying to learn that at the Bluff we had unwittingly been adhering to
tradition). Even after they had broadcast a news story announcing that Marilyn Monroe was to lead
an expedition up Everest, one man still hadn't tumbled to it. 'The final broadcast', Fuchs wrote,
'took place the day before everyone except this man was to leave on a sledging trip, he being left
behind as caretaker. The “news” received that evening reported a revolution in Argentina where
fighting had broken out between the Army and Navy. It included a warning that likely conflicts
which would follow at Argentine Antarctic stations could well lead to the losers seeking political
asylum at the nearest British bases, and called on everyone to keep calm and use their heads.'
Before I left England, Sir Vivien had invited me to his home in Cambridge to talk about his
Antarctic adventures. A pair of porcelain penguins were guarding the fireplace, and Sir Vivien was
