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1. the Last Unexploited Place on Earth

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1. the Last Unexploited Place on Earth 1. the last unexploited place on earth I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. —John Keats The ancient Greeks were convinced there was a continent on the southern end of the planet, theorising that something had to balance the continent in the North. But they were also convinced there was a Golden Fleece, hot-looking homicidal girls hanging out on rocks and a creature that was half man, half bull. The earliest record of there actually being anything at the southern end of the planet is from Polynesian explorer Ui-te-Rangiora, who de- scribed an ice-strewn ocean circa ad 650. His mates back at the luau put it down to an overindulgence of kava and ignored him. Fast-forward one thousand years. In 1772, French explorer Yves-Joseph de Kerguélen-Trémarec bumped into a large island at latitude 50º south. Assuming it was the rumoured southern continent, he named it after himself and went home for brandy and prostitutes. He was wrong; it was only a pile of guano-covered rocks situated halfway between Australia and South Africa and not the southern continent, which was just as well, as “de Kerguélen-Trémarecica” just doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “Antarctica” and besides, no one could have spelled it anyway. The Spanish, taking a break from burning heretics, were the next to turn up, sailing around Isla de San Pedro, 1,500 miles from the Antarctic land mass, and claiming it for Spain. Unfortunately, no sooner had they 9780470153802.indb 3 8/7/09 3:26:34 PM 4 the last unexploited place on earth left for home than Captain James Cook also discovered it, renamed it South Georgia Island and claimed it for England. British cartographers were convinced there was a large land mass in the Southern Hemisphere and James Cook had been dispatched by the Admiralty to locate it and annex it for Britain. Annex (adj.): To massacre the local inhabitants, cart away all their stuff and shoot anything that might look good mounted on the wall. Unlike his predecessors, who were just looking for economic oppor- tunities, Cook was a scholar as well as a brilliant navigator and carried on board his ships Resolution and Adventure a number of artists, naturalists and astronomers, along with Larcum Kendall’s chronometer, which greatly aided him in fixing longitude. Up to now, figuring out where you were on the ocean had been a rather hit-or-miss affair—usually leading to more misses than hits. Englishman John Harrison invented the original chron- ometer, which spawned numerous copies, Kendall’s being one. Cook also took along Joseph Priestley’s device for obtaining fresh water from sea water by impregnating sea water with fixed air (the pre- cursor to what we now know as soda water). 9780470153802.indb 4 8/7/09 3:26:34 PM return to antarctica 5 The revolutionary ideas dreamed up by Joseph Priestley (a distant relative of mine) were considered heretical and resulted in his being verbally attacked in the House of Commons, burned in effigy, brutalised by cartoonists (bastards) and denounced from pulpits, culminating in his house being burned to the ground by an angry mob during the anti- Catholic Gordon riots of 1780. He was snubbed by the Royal Society (a.k.a. science academy) and was forced to resign his membership. At age sixty-one, he chucked it all in and fled with his family to America, where he died after a failed experiment with Priestley Cola. Cook was the first European to actually sight the continent of Antarctica, during his 1772−75 voyage. Well, not exactly the continent, more like the pack ice that surrounded it. Skirting the edge of the pack ice, Cook wasn’t impressed: all he could see was ice and he never actually laid eyes on the continent. Not that it mattered; his report on the abundance of furry sea life lounging about on the ice was all the merchants waiting at home needed to hear, and the sealing rush was on. Cook returned to the Southern Ocean on his 1776−80 voyage, with orders to explore the Pacific Coast and find the rumoured Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific. He sailed from London at the same time as the American colonies declared their independence. However, his task was considered of such international importance that Benjamin Franklin thoughtfully issued Cook a letter of safe conduct in case he had the misfortune to run into any American privateers along the way. Once again, Cook didn’t set foot on shore, but the accurate charts he produced of the surrounding coastline proved most helpful to the sealing ship captains. So helpful were they that by 1830 almost all the fur seals had been wiped out and the sealers turned their attention to reducing the abundant local whale population. From the records of the Peterhead Whale and Seal Fishery Co.: No. of seals killed between 1790 and 1861: 1,628,760 No. of whales killed between 1790 and 1861: 4,259 9780470153802.indb 5 8/7/09 3:26:34 PM 6 the last unexploited place on earth At the other end of the planet, Arctic exploration was becoming passé. Nobody had yet reached the geographic North Pole, but anyone who owned a fur-lined parka and could lay their hands on a ship turned up on the ice floes to have a portrait-worthy encounter with an Inuit family, kill a polar bear (or vice versa) and sail home, along with enough seal skins to enable them to live the rest of their port-sodden lives in relative comfort. The Arctic was close, and to be there wasn’t much of a hardship to the English, the mean temperature in the Arctic being similar to the temperature in the drawing-rooms of most English country houses. In fact, the Arctic might have been slightly warmer. Early Arctic exploration wasn’t done entirely for scientific reasons, although there is a science in figuring out how many seal skins one can stuff into the hold of a ship, while leaving enough space for a few dozen barrels of whale oil without having to throw the drinks trolley (and the steward) overboard. But early Arctic exploration was mostly about being the first to be there and surviving to come back and tell about it—a successful polar explorer was the rock star of the period. The lecture circuit, girls, a bigger ship, bigger girls ... The Arctic made many careers, including that of English explorer Sir John Franklin, who became more famous in death than in life, and to this day is the Elvis of Arctic explorers—and just as dead. The trip from London to the Arctic was a relatively easy one, involv- ing a short hop across the North Atlantic. Antarctica was an altogether tougher proposition. Ten thousand miles from the London gentlemen’s clubs, the financial cost to mount your average pillaging expedition was generally prohibitive, and many voyages to the southern continent never left the dock. Those voyagers who actually did make it to Antarctica never set foot on land, as anything worth killing lived in the ocean. That changed in 1897 when a Belgian expedition under the command of Adrien-Victor-Joseph-de Gerlache de Gomery sailed south in Belgica, a ship that was not much longer than his name. Among the crew were Russian and Romanian scientists, along with a young Roald Amundsen and Dr. Frederick Cook, both of whom would go on to play future roles in the geographic unveiling of Antarctica. Unaware of the shortness of the Austral summer, they dawdled on their way south, arriving in the Bellingshausen Sea off the Antarctic Peninsula much too late in the season. Belgica and her crew spent eleven months trapped in the ice and are credited with being the first party to spend a winter on the Antarctic continent—although it was purely accidental. They had a miserable time of it, and had it not been for 9780470153802.indb 6 8/7/09 3:26:34 PM return to antarctica 7 the resourcefulness of Dr. Cook in adapting tents, diet and clothing, they’d be just another set of ice-scoured wooden crosses sticking out of the snow. Dr. Frederick Cook Born in Hortonville, New York, in 1865, Cook had an addiction to polar exploration and spent more than twenty years in either the Antarctic or the Arctic. Credited with saving the crew of Belgica, he claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1908, one year before Admiral Robert Peary, and was supposedly the first to reach the summit of Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. To pass the time while trapped in the ice, Belgica’s men conducted a series of experiments on skis vs. snowshoes—snowshoes being preferred for climbing glaciers or pulling sledges. Curiously, this was the last polar expedition to use snowshoes for many decades, which was something Silas Wright remarked upon, twelve years later, from the Beardmore Glacier, when he wrote: “Wish I had moccasins & snowshoes down here, as I would like to convince Capt. Scott of their superiority over ski. They could have been used with advantage for 2/3rds. of the distance.” Two people died during de Gomery’s expedition. There were a few cases of insanity, which were delicately ascribed to “polar ennui” and scurvy, which was cured by Dr. Cook’s prescription of fresh seal meat. Although the crew didn’t appreciate it at the time, the lessons learned during their eleven months trapped in the ice were to prove most useful to the explor- ers who followed.
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