Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Paul Siple, Byrd's protege, took on the old man's mantle. He oversaw the construction of South
Pole station, was among the first to winter there, and invented the wind-chill factor. A biologist and
geologist, Siple wrote a topic, published in 1959, called
Ninety Degrees South
. The subtitle was
'The Story of the American South Pole Conquest', and in it he wrote, 'One striking characteristic
of my six Antarctic expeditions is that almost all the men were of the he-man type.' Siple regularly
worked himself into a fury on the subject of the fecklessness of young people. No alcohol was
permitted on his expeditions, and on one occasion, when chief scientist and second-in-command
Tom Poulter discovered thirty cases of liquor smuggled in by the doctor he poured it all on to the
snow. The doctor then declared himself sick (presumably from a broken heart). Shortly after this,
they ran out of tobacco, though Siple himself no longer smoked, of course, and spent much of their
time searching for discarded cigarette ends. One man held butts to his lips with long-nosed pliers.
Smoking is a leitmotif of polar expeditions. Shackleton understood the hardship of tobacco fam-
ine, and when he arrived at Elephant Island to rescue his men he threw bags of it ashore before
he landed. The stranded men had been smoking penguin feathers, and one of them, the proud pos-
sessor of two pipes, had tried to smoke the wood of one in the bowl of another. Viktor Ignatov, the
geophysicist in command of Vostok from 1959 to 1960, recorded that at the beginning of the year
four smokers signed the pledge and gave up. Not only did these men soon crumble under pressure
- the non-smokers took up the habit as well. During the bitter periods between resupplies they
smoked tea.
In the modern era the shortage of tobacco is rarely an issue. It is the restrictions on smoking that
annoy the nicotine addicts. All round the continent men and women huddle outside huts and tents
inhaling furiously like office workers on the streets of Manhattan. When finished, they can't throw
their butts on the ice. They have to put them in their pockets, if there isn't a receptacle to hand. We
were always finding butts in our pockets, and once, in the field, I saw a scientist's parka catch fire.
∗
Dave Grisez kicked six barrels of fuel out of a C-124 fifty feet over the Pole in 1956. He was a
construction worker in the Navy, and he spent fourteen months on the ice putting up what was to
become McMurdo. If the public has only a vague awareness of Antarctica now, in the fifties the
continent existed only in the realm of fantasy. Before leaving his small town in Indiana Dave wrote
in his black vinyl diary, 'Auntie Doris thinks it's hot at the South Pole.' On 26 October 1956, his
twenty-first birthday, Dave wrote in the same diary in a cold tent on Ross Island, 'A C-124 took
off to fly over the Pole this afternoon. They are afraid that Russia is at or near the Pole.' He had
been working all winter flattening ice for a runway. On 4 September he recorded, 'Sky was pink,
blue, green, turquoise, gold, yellow and lime. Would trade it all for a moonlit night with a farm girl
in Indiana.'
One day, forty years after this was written, I walked into the Heavy Shop at McMurdo to get a
litre of transmission fluid. Dave Grisez was standing in the corridor wiping oil from his hands. He
had just taken a job as a machinist in the Heavy Shop. He had got the girl in Indiana, but he had
come back. 'Call of the quiet land,' he said.
∗
