Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
fore Greenpeace had entered the fray. Burning too had subsequently been outlawed, and waste was
retrograded to the United States to be burnt there, or used as landfill, or recycled. The reactor was
removed in 1972.
The American presence in Antarctica, financed and managed by the National Science Found-
ation, a government agency, and maintained by a private contractor based in Colorado, has out-
grown its naval origins. With a budget hovering just below $200 million, the Antarctic programme
represents six per cent of the NSF budget. As the U.S. Department of Defense has contracted, so
the Navy (more properly, a joint military force) has been withdrawing from Antarctic operations,
a process which looks set to continue.
At breakfast one day I sat next to a man with a chipped tooth and a ponytail who was fortifying
himself with boiled eggs before setting off to collect meteors from the polar plateau. He had
already discovered meteors from the moon, and he reckoned he had some from Mars too. He told
me this quietly over his yolky toast, explaining how he could identify whence the rocks came as
someone else might recount the story of a film they had watched on television the previous night.
'By the way,' he said when I got up to leave. 'Where do you live in the
real
world?'
∗
It happened that the elderly Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, the distinguished head of the Chilean
Antarctic Institute, was at the end of a short honorary visit to McMurdo. He had published widely
on Antarctica and, like any self-respecting Chilean, had written poetry about his experiences. I
sought him out, and we sat in a hut overlooking the frozen Sound, talking about Chile. He was an
enthusiastic character who seemed terribly grateful to speak Spanish. The more famous Pinochet
was his cousin, and he muttered uncomfortably 'we are not friends'. In the midst of my grand pas-
sion for Antarctica I occasionally looked over my shoulder at Chile, guiltily, as if at a lover I had
betrayed. Oscar facilitated a reconciliation, and as I got up to go he touched my arm, and with his
fingers resting in the crook of my elbow he said gently, 'Chile is Chile, my dear. But Antarctica is
about much more than ice.'
∗
Many images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration have burnt themselves into the imagin-
ation, but the wind-blasted huts constitute the most potent symbol, frozen set-pieces of old socks
and tins of Fry's cocoa. I was longing to see the huts. I wanted to pay homage, and I hoped it would
help me to understand the most highly charged chapter of the continent's history.
The Heroic Age began at the Sixth International Geographical Congress at London's Imperial
Institute in 1895. On 3 August those present passed a resolution 'that this Congress record its opin-
ion that the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration
still to be undertaken', and went on to urge scientific societies throughout the world to start plan-
ning. Six years later, on a balmy summer's day in 1901 in the middle of a glittering high society
yacht week off the south coast of England, a smiling King Edward VII stepped aboard
Discovery
and pinned the insignia of Member of the Victorian Order on the chest of her barely known young
captain, Robert Falcon Scott, wishing him Godspeed on his journey to the ice. The period drew to
