Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When I got back to McMurdo from the valley I set about making arrangements to travel overland
to Cape Royds to see Shackleton's hut before the sea ice melted out. Ann, the long-haired photo-
grapher, wanted to shoot the interior of the hut.
'You go and get all the survival gear and some food', she drawled, 'and I'll score us a vehicle
again.'
The food stores were run by a tall, straight-backed woman called Sarah with clear eyes, long
hair and a seraphic countenance. For five years she had been in charge of what people took to their
camps to eat and drink. She relied almost exclusively on dried, canned and frozen food, though
some fresh goods arrived on planes from New Zealand.
'I'm pushing dried figs quite hard right now,' she said, 'as I was sent 900 pounds, rather than
the 90 pounds I ordered.'
'Do people eat more down here because it's cold?' I asked as I walked up and down the aisles
picking up ziplock bags of trail-mix and cartons of juice.
'Sure - they need to. And I notice that in a warm season they eat a lot less than in a cold season,'
Sarah said. 'Which makes my job difficult as I have to place my order eighteen months in ad-
vance.'
Food assumes a role of abnormal importance in a place deficient in so many of life's pleasures.
In his topic
Life at the Bottom
, published in 1977, the American journalist John Langone mentions
a submarine commander who wintered over in Antarctica and reported a group obsession with
food, going on to say the men cared desperately if meals weren't up to scratch as food served as
a substitute for sex. In the early days culinary ingenuity occupied a good deal of time. One man
assured himself of lifelong popularity by producing minty peas, revealing later that he had squir-
ted toothpaste into the pot. Christmas and Midwinter Day menus were elaborately recorded and
printed up. During the hard times out sledging they played the game Shut-eye, or Whose Portion is
This? when food was doled out. Someone named the recipient of each plate with his eyes closed,
so the cook couldn't be accused of favouritism. It wasn't a game, really; it was a peace-keeping
mechanism. When rations dwindled they began having food dreams, and spoke bitterly to each
other about turning down a second helping of such-and-such ten years previously.
These days, the residents of Antarctic field camps deliberately hid the chocolate to stop them-
selves overindulging.
Packed, fuelled and ready to set off for Shackleton's hut, Ann checked out with the radio people
while I tested the level of the transmission fluid. On the journey we took it in turns to get out and
measure the thickness of the ice with a drill. By mid-December the sea ice in front of base was
beginning to melt.
'If it's thinner than thirty inches', said Ann, 'we turn back or find an alternative route.' But it
never was.
After about two-and-a-half hours, beyond the seals at Big Razorback, beyond Scott's hut at Cape
Evans and beyond the Barne Glacier, striped with its layer of ash, we left the Spryte by a large berg
and walked over the ice to the volcanic hillock of the cape itself, following the caustic odour of
penguins. Individual birds out walking never seemed to smell of anything, but tens of thousands of
them at home stank like an ammonia factory. Shackleton's neat buff-coloured hut appeared nest-
