Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
about the possible location of the other half, which was, in fact, never found. I discovered a portion
of trifle in my left boot.
The Southern Ocean was very still as we sailed up the peninsula. When a penguin broke the
surface, the ripples spread into enormous concentric circles until they died far away in the silver-
blue water. On one side of the ship serrated mountain ranges sliced through the water, the sheerest
faces, ablated of snow, shading the landscape with patches of charcoal engraved with a fine white
lattice. The clouds massed into dark purply tornadoes that stormed through the fuzzy peach light
of the sky, or sometimes they remained expressionless for days, hanging down to the narrow band
of light on one side of the horizon. Icebergs came to seem as normal to us as trees on the side of a
road.
We had to pick up ten men from Faraday, a small BAS station on Galindez Island. They were at
the end of their tour of duty, and were going home. When we got there, on a Saturday afternoon,
most of us went ashore.
The bar at Faraday, a magnificent piece of polished woodwork, was famous in Antarctic history.
Two builders had been employed to construct a hardwood extension to the pier, but instead spent
the whole winter toiling over this fine bar. The wharf was never finished, and the men were dis-
missed, though they are remembered daily with pride and gratitude. The current incumbents had
alighted on the idea of brewing beer in fire extinguishers, and when we arrived they were busily
squirting it out of the syphons.
We remained at Faraday for twenty-four hours, and I was able to roam freely around the station
and its few outposts. In a small library tucked away off the famous bar I found a shoebox of replies
to a collective advertisement the base commander had placed in a dating magazine back in Eng-
land ('Dear boys, Hope you're not too cold down there . . .'). Photographs stuffed between the
topics revealed the recent Faraday Buddhist Night, when the residents shaved their heads, put on
their windies and sat crosslegged and barefoot. A blurred picture of Viking Night showed them
careering through the snow in horned helmets brandishing torches.
The station was opened as a geophysical observatory in 1954, and called Base F; it was renamed
in 1977 after Michael Faraday, the nineteenth-century English chemist and physicist who dis-
covered electro-magnetic induction and introduced the basic principle of the electric motor and
dynamo. Along the way he probably believed more wrong theories than any man alive then or
now, a gratifying testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Geophysics had remained the
main thrust of the science at Faraday, though it was an important meteorological station and col-
lected weather data from British, American and German bases. This information eventually found
its way into the World Meteorological Organisation database, and who knows what happened to it
then. There was no airstrip at Faraday. It was a very cosy base, and less institutional than Rothera;
but it was about to cease operating as a British station and be handed over to the Ukrainians, who
badly wanted a base of their own. They renamed it Vernadsky. It seemed like the end of an era.
The Faraday joiner, who had shown me a coffin he had made, unilaterally decided that I should
visit Winter Island and propelled me down the wharf and into a small and precarious boat with a
four-horsepower Seagull engine. The slipway at Faraday was positioned directly below the sewage
pipe, which meant that one was obliged to dodge flying turds while getting in one's boat. We
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