Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
miles along the Sound from McMurdo. In the background the faces of the Transantarctic moun-
tains zigzagged downwards in gradations of creamy blue. The sky was mottled with cirro-stratus
like fishscales, and shafts of sunlight fell on the creased surface of an ice tongue, a massive pro-
jection fed by two glaciers. Beyond it ink-dark seals lay around their holes. On one side mountains
sank into glacier snouts, and on the other the sea ice had melted into a berg-studded occean which
rippled lightly, like a wheatfield touched by the wind.
'Look,' said Ben, disengaging the fuel pump and pointing at a field of crevasses on the side of
a mountain. Each rift was miles long, and no doubt miles deep. So often it is the landscapes most
inimical to life that are the most seductive. In this respect they are like boyfriends. It doesn't seem
fair.
Before the
Resolution
sailed out of Sheerness on 21 June 1772 under Captain Cook, more than
half the crew deserted. Cook was under Admiralty instructions to find the great southern land. He
had always suspected that there was no such thing, despite the fact that the weight of the scientific
establishment at home pressed upon its existence. Joseph Banks, the brilliant naturalist who sailed
with Cook, recounts in his logbook that on the
Endeavour
, Cook's other ship on the 1772 voyage,
the men were divided into two camps according to their opinion on the existence of Antarctica.
They called themselves 'we Continents' and 'no Continents'. In 1770 the 'no's thought they had
sailed around what constituted definitive proof - but they were still footling about off New Zeal-
and.
Cook was a Yorkshireman without formal education, and he worked on the Whitby coal-carriers
before signing up with the Navy and applying himself to the cutting edge of eighteenth-century
science. He was measured and, like Shackleton, always had his finger on the pulse of his men, who
were frequently drunk. Cook took care to learn from those who had gone before him, and unlike
the crews battling around Antarctica over a century later, Cook's men never got scurvy.
In the end the pack ice stopped him. He wrote that the sea was so 'pestered' with ice that land
was inaccessible. In the
Resolution
he crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first man to do so, and
discovered the circumpolarity of the Southern Ocean. In January 1775 he claimed South Georgia,
though he wasn't impressed with the island, writing in his journal that the land he had seen was 'a
country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun's rays, but to lie buried under
everlasting snow and ice, whose horrible and savage aspect I have not words to describe'. As he
sailed away he concluded, 'There is not the least room for the possibility of there being a contin-
ent, unless near the Pole and out of reach of navigation.' Four years later this great man, only fifty
years old, was stabbed to death with an iron dagger by natives in the clear blue waters of Keal-
akekua Bay in Hawaii.
After Captain Cook, sealers and whalers ushered in the next phase of discovery as they eddied
around southern waters in the 1820s. The continent probably wasn't sighted before 1820, and it
was almost certainly the Estonian Fabien Bellingshausen who saw it first. Born the year Cook died,
and despatched south by Tsar Alexander I, Bellingshausen turned out to be a great explorer, and
took up Cook's baton. The British Edward Bransfield and the American sealer Nathaniel Palmer
also made early sightings. Palmer was twenty-one when, in 1820, he rang the bell of the
Hero
in
thick fog off the coast of the South Shetland Islands. He thought he was hundreds of miles from
