‘I don’t think there’s going to be whaling for my sons to take over,’ he’d said when her monthly time came. ‘I’m going to train Lars Junior in shipping instead. So never mind, my dear.’
Ingrid had made the decision on the voyage back not to ask him about Ole and Gerd unless trouble arose when Mathilde arrived home. But Mathilde was living with her children and Ingrid was inclined to think she’d exaggerated the possibility of losing them. At any rate, it was a relief to let it go.
She and Lars were tender with each other after their return. They’d become again like an old married couple, Ingrid thought. They were affectionate, as they’d always been, but there was a deeper side to it; what they’d seen of each other on the journey. That they still loved each other seemed a small miracle. She didn’t mind that the passion evident on their voyage had faded. It was something from that place, not from this one.
Hjalmar had been right; she’d go to Antarctica again in a heartbeat. But it wouldn’t be the same. Before going south, the dream of Antarctica had been the promise of a place so different, so transporting and transforming, that nothing would ever be the same again. She’d find her essential self there.
It was true, she had found something essential. But in finding it, she’d lost something else. The Antarctica of her imagination, that mystical, wondrous place, was gone. In its stead was the real Antarctica, at once smaller and larger than she’d imagined, at once more wondrous and more ordinary. It was a place indifferent to humans. It was itself, no more and no less.
The dinner bell clanged across the lawn, and she heard the children’s voices in the distance. They’d be gathering up their baskets, stuffing the last few berries into their mouths, grabbing shoes and hats and running to the house. They’d be hardly able to eat dinner, she knew, and she smiled. It was time she started to work on Lars about Sofie. Her youngest daughter would be as capable as Lars Junior of running a shipping empire, and she was old enough to learn something about it.
Ingrid stood up and looked out one last time over the water, blinking against the light. She put her hand to her chest and felt the hard knot of the small green stone tucked into her bodice. Since she’d got home, there had been no further appearances of her mother, or of any child floating in her mind.
The only thing she could see was the baby whale, lying in its glass womb, its flippers tucked close to its body, its eyes closed, dreaming of the south.
AFTERWORD
About the novel
Chasing the Light is a work of fiction, inspired by the travels of Ingrid and Lars Christensen and Ingrid’s female companions, Mathilde Wegger and Lillemor Rachlew.
I have taken the liberty of using many real names, but the characters in the novel are works of speculation. The voyage described in Chasing the Light is loosely based on events that took place during Ingrid’s four real-life trips to Antarctica in the 1930s with her husband Lars on board Thorshavn.
There is no evidence that Ingrid, Lillemor, Mathilde and Caroline were competing to be the first woman to land on Antarctica and, in fact, discussions with Ingrid’s descendants suggest the matter was of little interest to them. Neither is there any contemporary suggestion that Lars wanted another child.
I chose to make this an exploration story not only as a tribute to Ingrid and her companions, but in memory of the thousands of women who longed to travel to Antarctica and were largely prevented, a state of affairs that continued from the start of the twentieth century through to at least the 1970s.
Dozens of women applied to join Antarctic expeditions during the Heroic Era – including those of Shackleton, Scott and Mawson. Marie Carmichael Stopes met Robert Falcon Scott in circumstances similar to those in the prologue and was refused a place on his expedition, in spite of her impressive scientific credentials. When Mawson was preparing for the 1911–14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, he received a letter that asked:
Will you take me as your cabin boy, a servant, on your antarctic expedition? I am a girl in the twenties, strong, healthy and fearless, & could make up as a boy perfectly. You will find the nimbleness of youth combined with the knowledge of a woman, a very useful factor. Yours truly Marjory Collier Alias Jack Sëall
Eighteen years later he proved no more amenable, refusing the twenty-five submissions from women who applied to join his British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) in 1929, though acknowledging some of them had the required expertise. In 1937, the extraordinary number of 1300 women applied to join the proposed British Antarctic Expedition.
But of all the aspiring female explorers who attempted to join Antarctic expeditions between 1904 and 1937, none were successful. The only women who managed to reach the Antarctic mainland before the mid 1940s were those Norwegians who went in association with Ingrid and Lars Christensen as part of the Norwegian whaling fleet.
One possible exception is ‘Olga’, whose adventure was recounted in the 1932 book Harpoon by Henry Ferguson. But I have found no evidence to show that her tale is true.
Ingrid Christensen’s voyages
It was a photograph that first sparked my interest in Ingrid Christensen. I was looking through a book on the subject in the reading room of Sydney’s Mitchell Library and came across a black and white image of Ingrid and Mathilde sitting on the deck of a ship, bound for Antarctica in early 1931. Mathilde was looking down, but Ingrid gazed out at me across continents and decades.
Ingrid Christensen and Mathilde Wegger on board Thorshavn, 1931. (Image provided courtesy of Sandefjord Whaling Museum)
When I went looking for more information about this enigmatic woman, there was little to be found. I discovered that Ingrid went to Antarctica four times during the 1930s, travelling with her husband Lars on Thorshavn, the resupply ship for Lars’s whaling fleet. This was in the heyday of Antarctic deep-sea whaling, when up to 40,000 whales were killed each season in the Southern Ocean, mostly for margarine and soap, and leading eventually to the collapse of those populations. The Norwegian historian Bjarne Aagaard was campaigning against the pelagic whaling activities of Norway and other whaling nations on the basis that such rapid expansion would bring about the extinction of the larger whale species and wipe out an industry that had operated sustainably for hundreds of years.
In January 1931, the time of her first voyage, Ingrid was thirty-eight, and the mother of six children. She left them all at home. This was surely unusual, even in progressive Norway and even in the relatively liberated 1930s. For Ingrid, like Louise Arner Boyd, it was wealth that gave her freedom. Lars personally funded much of Norway’s Antarctic exploration and his nickname in Cape Town was ‘the Whaling King’. Ingrid, and her companion on that trip, the widow Mathilde Wegger, travelled in relative comfort. They carried Captain Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Captain Nils Larsen, and the planes Qarrtsiluni and F18, to rendezvous with the exploration ship Norvegia.
After refuelling the whaling factories and offloading their whale oil, Thorshavn went looking for the Antarctic mainland. On 5 February 1931, they found a headland and named it Bjerkö Head. The surrounding area had already been named Lars Christensen Coast by one of Christensen’s whaling captains earlier in the season. On that date, Ingrid and Mathilde became the first identifiable women to see the Antarctic mainland (an unnamed female shipwreck victim possibly saw it in 1839). But travelling through unknown territory, in a large ship loaded with whale oil, meant landing on the continent was a tricky endeavour and a suitable site wasn’t found.
It’s likely Sir Douglas Mawson saw Ingrid and Mathilde on the first voyage, as he was sailing the area in Discovery on the second year of his BANZARE expedition and there are no other women known to have been in Antarctic waters at that time. In quoting part of the article he wired back to The Sydney Morning Herald in the closing chapters of Chasing the Light, I took the liberty of adjusting the number of women he reported seeing from two to three.
In 1932, the entire whaling fleet was laid up in Sandefjord due to
negotiations with Unilever, and none of Lars’s ships went south.
In early 1933, Ingrid and Lars travelled to Antarctica for the second time, again leaving their children at home. This time Ingrid’s companion was Lillemor (Ingebjørg) Rachlew, a Norwegian who’d been doing charity work in the London slums in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. She had recently become the wife of Cato Rachlew, the Norwegian naval attaché in London, who left his wife and three children to marry Lillemor just a few months later.
Lillemor Rachlew on Thorshavn’s 1936–37 voyage to Antarctica with the captain’s dog Bello. (Image provided courtesy of Sandefjord Whaling Museum)
Lillemor kept a lively diary of their trip, took photographs (some of which were later published in the French journal L’Illustration), hunted seals with a rifle, and by her own account, participated energetically in the voyage. Lars quotes extensively from her diaries in his own book about their travels and I have used one of these quotes in the novel, in the scene where Lillemor reads from her diary. These quotations from Lillemor’s diaries are possibly the only surviving female descriptions of visiting Antarctica prior to 1947, when Edith Ronne and Jennie Darlington spent the winter on the continent with their husbands. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to find any remaining trace of Lillemor’s original diaries.
Thorshavn also carried a large team of huskies for Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, ready to offload for sledging exploration. Due to the heavy ice conditions, they instead transferred Hjalmar to the whaling factory Thorshammer, to look for a suitable landing site once the resupply ship was ready to leave the Antarctic. His expedition came to grief when the sudden break-up of the ice barrier sent it floating out to sea on a small ice floe. He lost all fifty dogs and much of his equipment before being rescued by one of Lars’s factory ships.
Ingrid went to Antarctica for the third time in 1933–34 on the refuelling vessel Thorshavn, accompanied by Ingebjørg Dedichen. Once again they didn’t manage a landing, though they circumnavigated the entire Antarctic continent. A wealthy heiress in her own right, Dedichen became known for being the long-term lover of Aristotle Onassis, who she met on the luxury liner Augustus while returning home with Lars and Ingrid from Buenos Aires, after their Antarctic voyage.
By 1934 Ingrid had made three trips to Antarctica, but not managed a landing. Lars set about writing his book on their travels, Such is the Antarctic, and the following season, the 1934–35 austral summer, Ingrid and Lars stayed at home.
Another woman headed south that year. Danish-born Caroline Mikkelsen had recently married one of Lars’s whaling captains, Klarius Mikkelsen (the man who’d discovered and named Lars Christensen Coast in 1931). She was around twenty-eight years old, much younger than her new husband, and was considered a beauty – too beautiful, perhaps, to be left at home unattended. So she joined Klarius, who was that year the captain of the resupply vessel Thorshavn. After completing transfers of oil and cargo with the whaling ships, Thorshavn followed the Antarctic coastline until it was approximately five nautical miles off a snow-free coast that ran to the southwest.
According to the expedition report, ‘The weather was splendid, with light winds from the east’. Caroline was in luck – conditions were ideal for landing. Her husband launched and manned a lifeboat with his wife and seven crewmembers, and set out for shore. They landed in a small bay with a freshwater lake and a steep rocky hill, on the slopes of which were young Adelie penguins in an extensive colony. Caroline raised the Norwegian flag and a depot was laid under a stone cairn. Klarius named the area Ingrid Christensen Land and the party had a meal of sandwiches and coffee, took photographs and collected rock samples.
Caroline Mikkelsen’s was the first female footstep on Antarctica. But there was little fanfare. Her landing wasn’t mentioned in the English translations of her husband’s reports in the geographic journals of the day, nor in the report of the landing in the New York Times. Lars Christensen doesn’t mention it in any of his writing. The Norwegian historian Hans Bogen reported it years later in Main Events in the History of Antarctic Exploration, but Caroline herself remained silent about her adventure. Two years after the landing her husband died. Caroline remarried and, with a new name, made a decision not to talk about her Antarctic experiences ‘to spare his feelings’. She stuck with that decision for decades, only going public again in 1995 when Australian Antarctic researcher Diana Patterson tracked her down in Norway.
What Ingrid thought about being pipped at the post – if she thought anything – was never recorded. But she did return to Antarctica one last time, in 1936. Lillemor Rachlew went again as her companion and this time Ingrid took her youngest daughter, Augusta Sofie (‘Fie’), who was then eighteen. Another woman, Solveig Wideroe, wife of the aviator on the ship, also joined them, making the ‘four ladies’ for whom an underwater bank near the continent was named. Hans Bogen, who later described Ingrid as ‘spreading the Sunday sun over the working week’ and has having an ‘incredibly bold, fearless personality’, travelled with them. The aim of the trip was for Lars to carry out full aerial mapping of the Antarctic coastline to ‘lay the foundation of the coastal lands discovered by Norwegians in the East Antarctic’.
Ingrid had the chance to fly as a passenger over the land that had been named for her two years earlier, and she dropped the Norwegian flag out of the window. She sent a wireless from the plane back to her husband on the ship that said, ‘Greetings to the Consul from his wife … I bless my land and baptise it with my own hand’. With that flight, she became the first woman to see Antarctica from the air, including previously undiscovered areas. Lars and Lillemor Rachlew went up in the plane immediately afterwards.
After the flight, the weather was fine and sunny and Lars thought it time to try for a landing at last. But it was not to be:
We got into a motorboat we had brought for the purpose, but before we had rounded the bow of the Thorshavn the sea turned rough and waves broke on the boat, drenching us to the skin. So quickly does it change in the Antarctic from idyllic calm and sunshine to storm. We thought better of it, and turned back to Thorshavn, where we had not a little trouble getting on board again, on account of the heavy seas.
Caroline Mikkelsen’s landing
It seems like Ingrid’s efforts to land were jinxed and according to most recorded history her Antarctic story ends at that point. Even later writers who attempted to flesh out the record of women who travelled to Antarctica failed to follow Ingrid any further. Caroline Mikkelsen became known as the first woman to land on Antarctica and Ingrid was more or less forgotten.
It wasn’t until 1998 that an Australian polar researcher, Ian Norman, and some colleagues went back to the original records and sketches of Klarius and Caroline Mikkelsen’s 1935 landing site to examine Norwegian explorations in relation to contemporary Antarctic investigations and politics. They referred back to the original ship logbooks, sketch maps and historic accounts, including those in Norwegian, as well as later Davis Station logbooks and field reports of travels to the site.
After combing through the evidence in these documents they looked again at the map sketched by Caroline’s husband showing their landing site as being on the continent. Contrary to the sketch, the flagpole marking the landing spot is on the largest island of the Tryne group, a few kilometres from the shore. Although some have disputed this conclusion, no firm evidence has been found to prove Caroline Mikkelsen ever landed on the mainland.
Ingrid Christensen’s landing
Initially it was difficult to find out if Ingrid Christensen had actually landed on Antarctica. None of the scholars I’d been reading mentioned her doing so. In his 1937 address to the Norwegian Geographical Society, Lars described his own landing, but didn’t mention if Ingrid or the other women on board were with him:
On the 30th of January 1937, at two in the morning, I experienced the unique pleasure of setting foot on the Antarctic mainland, where we made a depot. Klarius Mikkelsen Mountain was a remarkable one, with precipitous
, crevassed sides. The stillness was almost uncanny: only the rhythmic beat of the waves and the unceasing, soft chatter of the penguins broke the solemn silence.
Norman’s article refers briefly to a landing made by Ingrid and her friends, as does the work of Hans Bogen. However, the sketchy information about the women’s landing remained buried. No later writers correctly picked up on the story and no history books had been adjusted.
The Sandefjord Whaling Museum holds Lars Christensen’s personal ‘logbook’ diaries from his second and fourth voyages. It appears he didn’t keep a diary of his first voyage (or it has been lost) and the diary of the third voyage is in the keeping of one of his grandchildren, who only discovered it three years ago in a box when her own mother died. The diaries are handwritten in Norwegian and their existence isn’t widely known.
So it was with a sense of discovery that I had the relevant section translated. And there, in Lars’s personal description of what it felt like to finally land on Antarctica, lay the answer to which woman landed first on Antarctica:
Firern came at around midnight. There was considerable rumbling (hollow echo sounds) and booming, a dim dusky twilight, a little layer of snow and a two-and-a-half-hour trip. So it was in fact uninviting, but ashore I wanted to go. Captain Mikkelsen was feeling uneasy. He had telegraphed advising that only I attempt to go ashore, that it was bad over there – and we came, six of us who all dreamed of going ashore.
We had coffee, daylight started to break, it stopped snowing and the wind settled a bit. So our spirits started to rise gradually. We come high up on the mountainside and pass first two reefs which signals uncharted waters. The walls of the mountain jut straight up approximately 500 feet with a small plateau down towards the water. Here sit dozens of penguins watching us. Firern is stopped quite close to land and the lifeboat is lowered onto the water.
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