Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
another ship, and then he heard a bell clanging in reply. It was from Bellingshausen's ship, and the
Admiral quickly put on his regalia and formally invited Palmer aboard the Vostok .
James Clark Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle and penetrated the sea which now bears his name
during a Royal Navy voyage he led between 1839 and 1843. He discovered great swathes of the
ice edge. Ross joined up when he was eleven, went off to the Arctic with his uncle to look for
the Northwest Passage, the geographical grail of its day, became a scientist and located the North
Magnetic Pole. He was said to be the most handsome man in the Navy. When he reached home,
after more than four years in the south, he was knighted. He was also married, but only after his
father-in-law had extracted a contract from him that there would be no more polar voyages. He
settled in a small village near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, where he now lies in the churchyard.
In 1898 the Belgica expedition became the first to winter in the pack ice. Amundsen was on it,
so was Frederick Cook, the man who later claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole. Seven
nationalities were represented: as T. H. Baughman put it in his topic Before the Heroes Came ,
'The Belgica expedition was a fugue in seven voices.' The ship was not properly equipped for an
Antarctic winter. Many of the crew showed signs of scurvy, and each man made his own private
journey into despair during the long, dark months of the polar night. When a lieutenant died, it
almost broke their spirit.
Carsten Borchgrevinck went south aboard the Southern Cross at the turn of the century. Al-
though it was a British expedition, Borchgrevinck was a naturalised Australian whose father was
Norwegian, and to the British geographical establishment of the day this was tantamount to play-
ing football for a non-league side. He got along so badly with physicist Louis Bernacchi that the
latter refers to Borchgrevinck in his diary as l'enfant . Still, the dogs they had brought south proved
remarkably successful when harnessed to the sledges, with ground-breaking results for the exped-
ition. Another unsung hero, William Spiers Bruce, led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition
in 1902-4. The artist of the voyage, W. G. Burn Murdoch, wrote a book called From Edinburgh to
the Antarctic , and he ended it with an expression of malaise about the land they left unexplored.
'And so we returned from the mysteries of the Antarctic, with all its white-bound secrets still un-
read, as if we had stood before ancient volumes that told of the past and the beginning of all things,
and had not opened them to read. Now we go home to the world that is worn down with the feet of
many people, to gnaw in our discontent the memory of what we could have done, but did not do.'
We flew over the ice-locked Inexpressible Island, and the cockpit dials showed that 50-knot
katabatic 1 winds were flying down from the Reeves Névé 2 . It was the island where Victor Camp-
bell was stranded for eight months with five men in their summer clothes and two months' rations
during the Antarctic winter of 1912. They suffered from a painful condition they called 'igloo
back', their lives so troglodytic and their faces so caked with blubber that they were recognisable
only by their voices. Yet they enjoyed concerts on Saturday nights, and issued copies of a newspa-
per called The Adélie Mail .
Victor Campbell was an Old Etonian, a scientist and first officer on the Terra Nova on Scott's
second expedition. He went to Antarctica partly because his marriage was rocky. Having been
conveyed to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf by the Terra Nova in January 1911, the intention of
the Eastern Party, which consisted of Campbell, three seamen and two officers, was to carry out
Search WWH ::




Custom Search