Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'The Scandinavians', Huntford told me when I met him at Wolfson College in Cambridge for
lunch in a dining hall smelling of boiled cauliflower, 'by and large set out from a country at ease
with itself. They have no need for an ego boost. They are not play-acting. The Norwegian will
always look for a glimpse of the sun, because he actually wants to be happy.' Self-delusion, he
said, was the besetting sin of the British. 'Scott and Amundsen inhabited totally different mental
words,' he added, leaning across the table conspiratorially. 'You mustn't be deluded by the fact
that they were contemporaries. The Scandinavians live in a landscape which has enormous natural
power, so that when they go to the polar regions it's sort of an extension of what they are.'
Huntford lived in Scandinavia for many years ('mainly because I like skiing'). He writes excep-
tionally well about polar scenery; so well that it is hard to imagine him not hankering to go south
himself. When I put this to him, he prevaricated.
'No,' he said eventually. 'These are landscapes of the mind, you see.'
He had referred obliquely to a note written by Bowers on the back of one of Wilson's last letters;
it apparently indicated that Bowers died last, but Huntford said the envelope had been suppressed
by the people at Scott Polar Research Institute in order to maintain Scott's preeminence. When I
asked them, they denied it. Who cares? I wanted to know about the power of the human spirit to
transcend mortality, and what one human heart can learn from another, not whose aorta packed up
first.
∗
At McMurdo the project leaders were giving a series of weekly science lectures. An eminent geo-
logist among them had developed theories on the prehistoric supercontinents in which Antarctica
was attached to South America. His name was Ian Dalziel, and I found him nursing a whiskey in
the Corner Bar.
'I used to be a respected geologist,' he said, 'but now I move continents around like armchairs.'
His wife called it playing God. He was Scottish, had defected, but still displayed the characteristic
dry wit of the Scots. He had an easy manner which was self-assured without being confident, and
he was a repository of stories. He could remember the geologist who used live baby penguins as
toilet paper and reported that it was important to keep the beaks out of the way.
As nature's satire on humanity, it was part of the penguin job description to provide mirth for
the colonising hordes. Stories from the days before anyone had heard of environmental awareness
were legion. Officers would paint bowties on penguin breasts and set the birds loose in the mess-
room, navy construction workers flung them down seal holes 'to watch them shoot up', and the
1956 Personnel Manual for Williams Field Air Operating Facility on Ross Island laid out proced-
ures for obtaining a stuffed penguin. Now, abusing a penguin carried a stiffer fine than molesting
a person.
∗
I found myself reading a good deal about deserts while I was in the south, and at that time I was
engrossed in Thesiger's
Arabian Sands
. Like Antarctica, the heart of the desert was a blank in
time, devoid of human history. Both places could be perceived as a gigantic reflection of all you
