DEDICATION
Dedicated to
The women who journeyed to Antarctica in the 1930s
on the Christensen fleet:
Ingrid Christensen
Mathilde Wegger
Lillemor (Ingebjørg) Rachlew
Ingebjørg Dedichen
Caroline Mikkelsen
Augusta Sofie (‘Fie’) Christensen
Solveig Wideroe
My mother, Barbara Walsh (1941–1988),
whose journey ended too soon
And my partner, Andi, who came along on this
journey from beginning to end
CONTENTS
COVER
DEDICATION
AUTHOR’S NOTE
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE
NORWAY: Early 1930s
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOKS BY JESSE BLACKADDER
COPYRIGHT
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel has been inspired by events in Antarctic exploration that took place in the early 1930s and by the people involved in those events.
I have used real names for many characters, including those of the earliest women to reach Antarctica.
However, this is a work of the imagination, and many of the events and dates have been significantly changed, as have some of the names. The characters, though prompted by real people, are imaginary. In the afterword you can find a more factual recounting of their stories.
FOREWORD
by Diana Patterson, first female station leader in Antarctica
In early 1995 I had just commenced my year as leader of Davis, one of Australia’s three Antarctic research stations. I was pleasantly surprised when a member of our summer team suggested that we plan a celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the first landing by a woman in Antarctica. While I was aware that in the early 1930s much of this part of East Antarctica was discovered and mapped by Norwegian whaling fleets, it came as news to me that the first landing by a woman was made roughly thirty kilometres to the north of the station. That we should honour the occasion, acknowledging the history of women in Antarctica, was a far cry from prior experience of a hostile and negative attitude to the presence of women by some male expeditioners.
We duly celebrated the landing and throughout the polar winter our small team took a special interest in locating the site and learning more about the ‘first’ woman. Our curiosity was rewarded and by year’s end we had a name, face and location and, unexpectedly, belated recognition in Norway of the achievement. Local place names such as the Vestfold Hills and Four Ladies Bank in Prydz Bay acquired more meaning as we now knew their derivation came from the same voyage of discovery.
Despite this I was left wondering about the presence and experience of the Norwegian women on the whaling vessels. The few photos I saw could have placed them on an Atlantic cruise ship rather than an Antarctic whaler. I was therefore delighted to learn that Jesse Blackadder had been inspired to write an Antarctic novel based on these pioneering women. With so much focus on the stories of the Heroic Era of Antarctica, of the race to the South Pole and national scientific expeditions, the exploration of Antarctica in the 1930s is a story that has been overlooked.
Although I have now made numerous voyages to Antarctica myself, I found reading Chasing the Light an enthralling adventure story. To me it was like undertaking a new journey in a different era, my companions three women with very different personal circumstances, each with their own motivation for setting forth across the Southern Ocean. Motivation that I could well relate to with my own desire to venture south five decades later. While the race to the South Pole was well over, how would the race to be the first woman to step foot in Antarctica be resolved?
It is often said you cannot visit Antarctica and not be changed by the experience. The immense landscape, the fury of blizzards contrasting with the tranquility and silence of the pack ice on a still evening, all contribute to that change which occurs within. Less mentioned is the impact of the interpersonal encounters when you become part of a small community within the confines of a ship or a base on land. Just how the change is manifest is unpredictable, no less so in the 1930s as it is today.
In Chasing the Light Jesse Blackadder has made a superb contribution to Antarctic literature and adventure writing.
PROLOGUE
England, 1914.
Dr Marie Stopes held the chunk of raw coal in her hand, hefting its weight. She’d chiselled it from deep underground in the colliery tunnel, and kept it on her desk as a paperweight long after the other samples had been packed and stored in wooden drawers at the university. It contained an intricate leaf-fossil pattern, and fitted nicely in her fist.
She needed it today. The British Museum Natural History Report had arrived in the morning post.
It should have been a bag of Antarctic rocks sitting there on her desk, not a report. Marie gripped her piece of coal so hard that her knuckles turned white. It wasn’t done to think ill of the dead but she cursed Robert Falcon Scott. He and his four men had died to bring those rocks back from Antarctica, imbuing them with far more than their own physical weight. A decade ago she’d been the one to teach him what to look for – how dare he send them to someone else?
According to the eminent Dr Seward of Cambridge, Scott’s rocks were imprinted with the fossilised patterns of leaf veins, indicating that trees had once grown on Antarctica. But it should have been her to make the finding. Trained for precisely that purpose, her eye should have been the one to pick out the traces of ancient Glossopteris indica.
Marie had wanted to go with Scott. Wanted to chip the rocks from the seam near the Beardmore Glacier in the Queen Maud Mountains of Antarctica for herself. In the Manchester coal seam she’d known the thrill of levering out chunks of the earth to reveal its secrets. She’d found clues to the origins of the continents and saved them from being burned in factories and fireplaces across Britain. Without her, Scott wouldn’t have brought the rocks back at all. Wouldn’t have known what to look for.
Another woman, one more charming and persuasive, might have convinced Captain Scott to take her, but there was little place for charm in Antarctica and, it seemed, no place for a palaeobotanist either, if she happened to be female.
They had danced at their first meeting. Marie knew it wasn’t her strength, but
at the fundraising ball for the Terra Nova expedition it had been the easiest way for her to speak to him. She’d accepted his invitation and though he was short and slight, he was good on his feet and a firm leader, the kind you felt no hesitation in following.
But he tricked her. While they danced, he described the expedition and her fingers tightened on his arm. He was going to the place where the answers to her life’s work lay. Etched in Antarctica’s rocks, where no life now survived, might be the imprints of earlier life, evidence of how the continents had once embraced in a lover’s grip – the fabled Gondwanaland.
‘Take me,’ she’d said, with her usual bluntness and lack of forethought.
‘But, my dear, it’s impossible.’ His smile was all charm. ‘A woman cannot go to Antarctica.’
‘It was impossible for me to be Britain’s youngest Doctor of Science, but it was done,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘You’ve no idea of the hardships.’
‘I’ve been down Manchester collieries in winter looking for fossils,’ she replied. ‘Which was easier, on the whole, than convincing the University of Manchester to employ a female academic. You have no idea of my endurance.’
The music ended and he stepped back. There were many influential wives for him to dance with and husbands still to fete, for the expedition funds were far from raised, she could see.
‘I will give you an answer, but not till the night’s end,’ he said. He bowed his head and excused himself.
The sly fox had told her his decision only after she’d pledged a donation to the trip and in this she caught a glimpse of his ruthlessness.
‘But I’ll have my men collect your rocks,’ he said, by way of consolation.
‘Oh, really?’ she’d snapped. ‘And how will your men know what rocks are of use to me, Captain Scott?’
‘I will learn them myself,’ he said, his face serious. ‘I’ll come to the university and you can teach me. I can give you three days, Miss Stopes.’
‘Dr Stopes. It’s only taken me a decade to learn palaeobotany. I’m sure you’ll pick it up in three days.’
He was unperturbed. ‘I’m a fast learner.’
Scott had stuck to his word and come to Manchester. She’d been rude when he arrived but he was interested and diligent in learning and she sent him away with a rudimentary knowledge of what to look for. She’d not have guessed, from his cheerful demeanour, that he was a man who’d rather die than lighten his load by casting away those specimens.
For as it transpired, Robert Falcon Scott was on an inexorable path to his own death in a tent in Antarctica, on his bitter return from the South Pole, to which Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian, had beaten him by a month. Scott and his men had taken a day to gather the rocks on their way back. A precious day, as it turned out. They carried them all the way to their last camp, thirty-five pounds of specimens slowing their steps. Freed from their weight, might they have made the last eleven miles to One Ton Depot, and their salvation?
But though he was committed to her rocks, Scott had let her down in the end. By the time he died, eight years had passed since they’d met and he left no instructions to send the rocks to Marie. Instead, at the height of the public’s grieving over Scott’s death, the rocks went to Dr Seward of Cambridge.
The door to her study creaked open, startling her back into the present.
‘My dear?’ Reginald poked his head inside, his eyebrows raised.
In the years since meeting Scott, Marie had married, thinking it a simple enough transaction. She needed a man with a mind as sharp as her own, and Reginald at first seemed to fit the bill, being a Canadian geneticist. He had wooed her with wit and intelligence at a university dinner in Missouri while she was visiting America and she’d foolishly thought two days was enough to take her measure of the man, agreeing to his proposal at once, though stipulating that she would keep her own name.
But though they were both clever, neither Reginald nor Marie knew about love. Their marriage bed was as ice blown as Antarctica. She was ashamed to admit it but they hadn’t consummated their union. Reginald, seeming unaroused by her in any way, was impervious to hint, suggestion or seduction. Marie had no idea what to do about it. Their marriage was heading the way of Scott’s expedition, crawling towards a slow, frozen death.
It was a method of birth control, she supposed. She couldn’t afford to fall pregnant, not now, with the success of her work imminent.
‘Lunch is ready,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’
‘In a moment.’ Marie looked down at the rocks again. She waited until she heard the click of the door and exhaled heavily.
Ernest Shackleton was now planning an assault on Antarctica, in a ship called Endurance. The papers had reported the week before that he aimed to be the first man to sledge across the continent, a plan clearly formulated in a hurry once the South Pole was no longer a prize to be won. Another flurry of fundraising had begun.
Marie had composed a letter explaining the theory of Gondwana and asking to be included on his trip as a palaeobotanist. In a cruel twist, the reply had come just this morning, in the same post as the British Museum’s report.
Sir Ernest Shackleton begs to thank Dr Marie Stopes for her letter, but regrets there are no vacancies for the opposite sex on the expedition.
She pounded the chunk of coal on the table, ripping the page containing Seward’s words and smearing them with black. Damn them. Damn the lot of them.
NORWAY
Early 1930s
CHAPTER 1
It was a night so silent that every ski stroke rasped like a bow drawn across a cello string, sounding a rough and steady note, calling out their path to any trolls or wolves or errant gods that might watch from the dark of the trees. The white fur of Ingrid’s collar was warm against her cheek. Her breath billowed in clouds, the gasp of it in time with the scrape of the skis. The mountains rose steeply to the velvet black of the Norwegian winter sky.
Up ahead, Lars checked and held up his hand, arcing to a graceful stop. Ingrid glided to his side, pivoted and sliced to a halt. She pulled off her goggles and rested on her stocks, breathing hard.
‘There,’ Lars said, pointing.
Ingrid turned her head to look. Against the stars, a curtain of pale green light shimmered, almost winked out, surged again. The light spilled around them onto the snow, reflecting eerily as though each snowflake mirrored back the aurora. The land seemed to dance.
The lights spun and pulsated and died away. In their wake Ingrid felt the silence in her bones, as if the aurora had revealed the true size of the Arctic winter night. She inhaled slowly. In that moment she felt nothing but herself, nothing but a woman in the snow, a woman in the wild dark night without thought or responsibility. The unaccustomed pleasure of it burned in her chest like ice. She hadn’t felt this way since her honeymoon. Not since she’d become a mother.
‘I’m glad we came back,’ Lars said. ‘I suppose I can thank Unilever for something.’
His words jolted her from her absorption in the moonlit snow. To celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary, she and Lars had left their six children at home and travelled to Espedalen to repeat the adventure of their honeymoon – night skiing in the mountains to see the aurora borealis. It wasn’t only a romantic gesture. It gave Lars something to do while his fleet lay idle in Sandefjord Harbour instead of working the Southern Ocean whaling grounds as it had for the past three seasons. She’d hoped he might leave business behind him.
He reached out a mittened hand for her. ‘They’ve got us over a barrel, you know.’
Ingrid took his hand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Unilever’s big enough to put us all out of business.’
At the worry in his voice, Ingrid turned to look at him. In Sandefjord, in front of the children and around his business associates, Lars had made light of Unilever’s power to lay up Norway’s entire whaling fleet for the season and she’d believed his public assurances that he wasn’t concerne
d. Although Lars normally talked about his work with her, perhaps he hadn’t shared the extent of his private fear.
‘But isn’t the layover just for this year?’
‘I’m worried Unilever will build up its own fleet,’ Lars said. ‘I hear they’re trying to buy up ships from smaller companies that can’t outlast the layover. Then they’ll become my competitor as well as my customer.’
The cold air seemed suddenly menacing and Ingrid shivered. ‘What will we do?’
‘We’ve got to find southern whaling grounds for Norway so Unilever can’t run a fleet cheaper than we can. Paying concessions to the English to hunt in Antarctica is ruining us. Next year I’m going down there to confirm our own territories. I can’t keep sending other men – I’ve got to do this myself.’
The northern lights pulsed again, distracting her, and in spite of her worry, Ingrid felt a matching flare in her veins. This was the moment, after her twenty patient years, after her cheerful mothering, after her steadfast support, that he’d remember the adventurous woman he had married, and the promise he’d made her. She took a deep breath, drawing in air to the bottom of her lungs, and tried to imagine an even deeper cold.
‘I suppose we’ll go on Norvegia?’ she asked.
‘Hjalmar said Norvegia tossed like a tin toy in the storms last year,’ Lars said. ‘I don’t want to take any risks. I’ll go on Thorshavn.’
It took a moment for his use of the singular to sink in. ‘You couldn’t go without me,’ she said.
The aurora flickered once more and she strained to read his face. Half her lifetime ago, when they skied these runs as newlyweds, she’d felt they were a single person, moving in unison, united in body and mind. There was nothing they couldn’t do together. Nothing they didn’t know about each other.
‘Lars?’
He shook his head. ‘We can’t both go.’
‘But you promised.’
He tried to draw her closer. ‘Ingrid, my sweet. We weren’t parents then. Besides, think of those men on the ships. They don’t see women for months and then you come along. There’d be a riot.’
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