Terra Incognita Read Free

preparations too, though these were more difficult. In the Foreword to a seminal book about the opening up of the continent I read: ‘Some of the most prominent challenges of polar living fall into the provinces of mind and emotion, rather than muscle and matter.’ A man with many years experience on the ice wrote in the same book: ‘The Antarctic generally wields a profound effect on personality and character and few men are the same after a stay there.’ I wasn’t afraid of loneliness; I had learnt that it doesn’t arrive on the coat-tails of isolation. All the same, I was apprehensive about where Antarctica would take me, and about seeing my life sub specie . Robert Swan, who walked to both Poles, told me that going to either is like watching a child’s magic slate wipe away your life as you knew it.
    In an academic book on Antarctic psychology I read, ‘It is intuitive that life in a confined environment is an adverse experience and may lead to human dysfunction.’ A scientist who went south with both Scott and Shackleton coined the phrase ‘polar madness’, and Admiral Byrd packed two coffins and twelve straitjackets when he led one of the earliest U.S. Antarctic expeditions. Soon I was familiar with the folklore: the base commander who torched all the buildings in camp, the man who started talking with a lisp, the chef who set to with a meat-cleaver, the Soviet who killed a colleague with an ice axe during a game of chess (to ensure it didn’t happen again, the authorities banned chess). One of the earliest behavioural findings in Antarctica was Mullin’s discovery of spontaneous trance states, and papers had been written on alterations in consciousness induced by exposure to Antarctic isolation. At the same time it had melted frozen hearts. ‘At the bottom of this planet’, wrote Admiral Byrd, the first man to fly over the South Pole, ‘is an enchanted continent in the sky, pale like a sleeping princess. Sinister and beautiful, she lies in frozen slumber.’ ‘There, if anywhere,’ said another explorer, ‘is life worthwhile.’
    The people lighting my way had one thing in common. They were all men. It was male territory all right – it was like a gentleman’s club, an extension of boarding school and the army. Only the U.S. programme even approaches normality in its ratio of men to women. Alastair Fothergill, who produced the Life in the Freezer television series and wrote the accompanying book, told me that for British men, going south was still like going to the pub. I had tea with Sir Edmund Hillary in New Zealand. ‘My experience has been’, he said between mouthfuls of chocolate cake, ‘that the scientific community in the Antarctic regard it as their property and bitterly resent any outsiders venturing there.’ Men had been quarrelling over Antarctica since it emerged from the southern mists, perceiving it as another trophy, a particularly meaty beast to be clubbed to death outside the cave. Mike Stroud, who played a Boswellian role to Ranulph Fiennes’s Johnson when the pair of them attempted an ambitious trek across the continent, was more honest with me than most of the Frozen Beards. ‘Sometimes I think I didn’t have time to stop and appreciate it,’ he said. ‘I walked across, but most of the time I was miserable.’
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    The Antarctic continent is shaped roughly like a cross-section of the human brain, with a grossly misplaced finger tapering towards South America (this is usually shown coming out on the left at the top, depending which way round the map is drawn). More than ninety-nine per cent 1 of this landmass is permanently covered with ice formed by thousands of years of tightly compacted snowfalls. The other 0.4 per cent consists of exposed rock. Like glutinous white icing flowing off a wedding cake, the layer of ice on the surface of Antarctica is slowly but