Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the Italian presence in Antarctica was shorter than a decade. They still referred to their presence as
una spedizione
- an expedition. Perhaps Terra Nova Bay recaptured the excitement and energy of
American and British bases operating thirty years before the Italians headed south.
∗
I had just divested myself of my cold-weather clothes after a bracing walk around the bay when
Gaetano's voice boomed over the tannoy announcing that an
elicottero
was waiting for me, his
tone indicating that each minute that elapsed precipitated the base further towards nuclear fission.
I rushed to pull on my cold-weather clothes again, jamming the zip of the vermilion parka.
Ben was resupplying a pair of biologists working on a penguin project at Edmondson Point on
the other side of Mount Melbourne. It was not a beautiful spot. Only partially snow-covered, it
was heavily invested with skuas on the lookout for penguin eggs. The huge Adélie colony dom-
inated the landscape, and as the Squirrel began its descent we could see individual birds waddling
about with stones in their beaks. When we opened the doors, a sulphurous gust of wind blew in a
blizzard of ice and rock particles. Edmondson Point reminded me of a curled old photograph I had
seen of an early British base on the Antarctic Peninsula with the words '
semper in excreta
' above
the door of the hut. A permanent low murmur hung on the air. Edward Wilson, Scott's confidant,
said that walking up to a penguin rookery was like approaching a football ground during a match.
The two women came to meet us. They had been living at this bleak spot with thousands of pen-
guins for three months, and later I watched them capturing nesting birds with what looked like a
large black butterfly net, stowing the egg lying under each one in a skua-proof box, tying the bird
up by its feet, weighing it on a weighbridge, opening its cloaca to determine its sex, measuring its
beak, passing an infrared wand over it and painting a number on its back. The penguins kept quite
still throughout this ordeal, and afterwards settled back on their stone nests with a quick wing-flap
as if little more than a minor inconvenience had occurred.
One of the women, Francesca, was about twenty-five, and she had never lived in the field be-
fore; when they weren't working she seldom strayed far from the tent. Raffaella, the other one,
probably wasn't older than thirty, but she had years of field experience behind her and seemed
much more at ease in the landscape. I imagined that the penguins felt safer with her.
'Don't you get bored?' I asked in my sketchy Italian.
'No,' she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. 'I bring a skipping rope. The penguins are good
company - though I like some better than others. Take that one over there - the one poking his
nose into someone else's nest. Miserable
diavolo
!'
'How do you tell which is which?'
'How you tell which man is which?'
'Er, well, they sort of look different.'
'Yes, so penguins look to me.'
And that, it seemed, was that.
Then we headed south along the coast to pick up a pair of scientists at Dunlop Island. Below us,
suffused in a primrose light, seal pups were slithering over the ice sheet, and in the distance the
last remnants of sea ice lay on the bright blue water like a membrane.
