Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
motored past a wooden signpost saying 'Crown Land' against which a crabeater seal was mani-
festing signs of disrespect. The hut on Winter Island was opened in 1947 as a wintering station
for three meteorologists and a general assistant. Called Wordie House, it was maintained for seven
years until Coronation House, now Faraday, was opened, and has been closed ever since, except
for the year when a team making for Adelaide Island got caught out by bad ice and bivouacked in
Wordie House.
Inside, it was like a set for a fifties film, dotted with blocks of Marmite and tiny tins of gramo-
phone needles 'each good for eight records'. The shelf of topic included
Instructions on How
to Play the Bagpipes
, novels by John Buchan, girlie annuals displaying women in swimsuits
which looked as if they had been designed for army combat - and, harking back to the old days,
Tennyson. One room was dominated by a massive typewriter of the kind that would be presided
over in the film by a straight-backed woman wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and ropes of fake
pearls. The thick cotton trousers folded over the back of a chair were exactly the same as those
sported by the
Bransfield
's third engineer, a Geordie who had come with us.
'You know you're getting old,' he said, slurping tea out of a blue-rimmed tin mug, 'when your
keks are in a museum.'
That night, in eighty-knot winds and horizontal rain, two bergs converged on the
Bransfield
.
When the golden rods of our searchlight beams tunnelled through the darkness and alighted on the
bergs, we saw that the ice was scratched with the red ship's paint. The
Bransfield
dragged her an-
chor, and at one point - black smoke pouring from the funnel and soaked crewmen wrestling with
ropes in pools of light on the foredeck - we were only twenty yards off the rocks.
∗
The sun shone during our passage through the Lemaire Channel, and most of us spent the day on
the monkey deck. Unclimbed mountains wobbled in the polished surface of the water, and pods
of whales fluked among the bergs. We passed the deserted red buildings of an Argentinian base
and its Chilean neighbour, the latter sporting a particularly large flag. I thought of my first visit to
Antarctica, when I saw it through South American eyes. The Chileans at Marsh were wonderful
hosts; they wanted to share it. Everyone addressed me immediately in the familiar '
tu
' form, which
they hadn't done in real Chile until the ice was broken. Antarctica didn't seem a problem to them.
It wasn't so much that they had made their little bit of King George Island home, but that it was
home. 'The water in the bay', they would say, 'has lapped on our shore.' They had a school, a hos-
pital and a bank on base, they brought their wives and children down with them, and they broad-
cast Radio Sovereign FM from the weather station. On Friday evenings Radio Sovereign ran a
quiz show. The questions were about Antarctica, and all the bases on the island took part, although
first they had to find someone who could speak Spanish. While I was there a Chinese contingent
arrived to collect their prize, which - I suspected to their chagrin - was a specially baked cake.
Because it was only a three-hour flight from the tip of South America and not permanently ice-
covered, King George Island, squatting in the archipelago named the South Shetlands by Scottish
sealers, was a popular site for bases. The Russians were there, as were the Poles, the Uruguayans,
the Brazilians and the Argentinians as well as the Chileans and the Chinese. I had eaten syrupy
