Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
While it was light, Ben was always out on deck.
'Well,' he said, when I remarked on this, 'I'll never see all this again.' It was as if he wanted to
drink in the landscape and store it up, like water in a camel's hump, and live off it in the seasons
still to come, sitting out his retirement in Sheffield.
What thrilled us most were not birds but whales. We saw humpbacks and minkes and bottlen-
oses, and one morning a large pod of killers came fluking past our ship.
Whalers played an important part in the discovery of Antarctica, especially after they had bled
the Arctic dry. A group of Dundonians set out in 1892, their thoughts fixed on the riches waiting
for them in the Southern Ocean. They were sharp in turning their attention to southern waters: the
Falklands sector of the Antarctic is the richest whaling ground in the world. But in technique, the
Scots had already been beaten by their Norwegian rivals. Their equipment was outmoded and they
were looking for the wrong kind of whale: they wanted bone for umbrellas and corsets, but the
market wanted oil, not least for munitions.
Before setting out from home I had walked along a salty spit in Dundee to see W. G. Burn-Mur-
doch's paintings of this expedition in Broughty Castle, a deserted museum with a spiral staircase
curling between mildewed floors. The second floor featured a programme from the Royal Terror
Theatre on the
Discovery
, advertising the Dishcover Minstrel Troupe. Whaling died out in Dun-
dee before the Great War, and the
Terra Nova
was the last whaler ever built by Dundonians. But
in Antarctica the trade took off in the first two decades of the twentieth century after the Norwe-
gian Carl Larsen founded Grytviken on South Georgia and floating whale factories were deve-
loped. The industry reached its peak in southern waters in the 1930s. Despite the mystique - an
early participant called it 'the greatest chase which nature yieldeth' - to which a number of writers
succumbed, whaling was one of the hardest trades, and it employed the hardest drinkers. It was
not unknown for men to break the ship's compass to quaff its alcohol. In the twenties a crewman
wrote, 'There were two kinds of days, bad days and worse, and each lasted twenty-four hours.'
Business dropped off dramatically during the Second World War when synthetic glycerin was de-
veloped and most of the fleet sunk by German raiders. After a few dying spurts, the last whaling
station on South Georgia closed in 1965.
In the late nineteenth century deep-sea trawling took off in the north of Britain in the wake
of whaling. My grandfather knew a trawlerman from Grimsby whose eight sons had all become
trawler skippers. I remember hearing this man talk about 'the wondrous freedom of trawling, when
time didn't exist'. I was a child then, and he made it sound like the most magical occupation in the
world - I wrote in a schoolbook that when I grew up I wanted to be a trawlerman. Now it reminded
me of what the old Antarctic explorers wrote in their diaries. None of them could submit to the
nine-to-five.
Lying on my bunk as we ploughed up the side of the peninsula, I read the last of the topics I
had brought south. Fearful that I was going to finish it before the journey ended, I went through
it very slowly. It was a volume of Edward Wilson's diaries, and in it I discovered that Scotland
had another connection with Antarctica. Scott and Wilson had planned their last journey south on
the rose-covered veranda of a bungalow near the mouth of one of the lovely glens of the Angus.
Originally a shepherd's stone cottage, it was bought in 1902 by a London publisher called Regin-
