by Matt Vance
The birders aren’t satisfied. They shuffle with restrained agitation and look like prolonging the discussion until suddenly a redpoll finch is spotted over by Hasselborough Beach. The redpoll is common in New Zealand hill country but rare on subantarctic islands. The birders charge out the door and over to the beach, leaving Ted and me to finish our scone in peace.
‘This is my kind of place,’ Ted says, as he uses one of his sweeping hand gestures to encompass the penguins and the delightfully rabbit-free hills framed by the window.
‘You don’t mind the harsh climate?’ I say.
‘Nah, the place is more alive than anywhere I have ever lived.’ He pauses and spreads his arms wide. ‘Every man has his island and I… I guess this is mine.’
He introduces me to some of the staff. It’s apparent most are escaping from something. For some it’s a big thing such as ‘society’. For others it’s more specific, an overbearing boyfriend or an unhealthy interest in games of chance. As it turns out, Ted is escaping a marriage gone sour and a dreaded nine-to-five job in the city.
As I hop on board a Zodiac full of birders and we begin to bash our way back to the waiting ship, I catch a glimpse of Ted between the waves. He is standing on the beach surrounded by king penguins. I can’t quite see his face but his arms give me the impression he is smiling.
As the ship begins to weigh anchor a swarm of kings encircles us, a ring of shining liquid silk quietly rotating clockwise. Occasionally a curious head pops up to the surface.
The Russian crewmen lean over the rail of the ship, flashing gold-toothed grins, and pointing.
‘Pingvin,’ one says.
A couple of his fellow sailors rub their stomachs in mock hunger.
‘Pingvin dinnar,’ they repeat and laugh loudly as Russians often do.
Macquarie Island and Ted dissolve into the Southern Ocean.
Within a day we reach the Antarctic Convergence zone, where cold waters from the south meet warmer waters from the north. The zone, anywhere between thirty-two and forty-eight kilometres wide, forms an undulating ring around the Antarctic continent, its northern limit a natural boundary that separates two distinct marine habitats. The nearest equivalent on land is the Arctic treeline.
There is no doubting when you cross the zone going south. The temperature of both water and air take a dive, and more often than not there is thick fog. The invisible line is a formidable barrier for Antarctic dwellers such as icebergs and emperor penguins. Most who head north across it are doomed to die by melting or starvation.
The convergence zone is literally a moving feast: the large-scale mixing and upwelling as the waters meet brings rich nutrients to the surface. Ted had referred to it as ‘the wobbly wall of food’. At Macquarie, which is just north of the zone, copious quantities of lantern fish, squid and krill allow the king penguins to maintain a well-fed breeding population of 70,000 pairs. South of the zone, life takes on a more desperate complexion. The cold temperature and low productivity of both the ocean and the Antarctic continent mean that for most creatures life is a frantic struggle to avoid winter and death.
The chance of seeing a penguin from the ship seems to excite both birders and non-birders more than the chance of seeing any other creature. Perhaps it is because penguins stand upright, or nest in a pattern that reminds us of our own sprawling suburbia. Or perhaps, when we see them from six feet above, we glimpse our own fragile Earth-bound existence. As Ted put it, ‘With kings I feel like a god among the gods.’
I return to my land life reluctantly. My head swims with deadlines, appointments and commitments. One busy Thursday I catch sight of a king penguin on a poster advertising the local aquarium. It is a warm summer’s day, much as ancient penguins would have liked. The king looks out of place, staring at me across the divide of latitude. The poster grabs my attention. I am intrigued and appalled at the same time. I loathe the idea of a king penguin in captivity but decide against my better judgement to pay a visit.
The enclosure of the ‘penguin experience’ does not look like Macquarie Island. There is fake snow on the floor and an Antarctic diorama complete with an artificial aurora, but no sign of a grim beach, howling wind and horizontal rain. No sign of a convergence zone either. The creators of the ‘experience’ have decided Antarctica is the place for penguins. The setting sells tickets and most of the patrons don’t know any better, nor do they care. They just want to see penguins.
I visit the birds on a rolling cart, much like a ghost train. Its flimsy aluminium construction rattles and lurches along the narrow tracks, the wheels squealing on every corner. Among the pseudo snow and diorama waddle the king penguins. To my surprise they are vigorous with good health. Their coats glow like metal. Their eyes are roughly on the same level as mine and they stare with the familiar curiosity, silently shuffling their feet and dipping their heads. They have become immune to the intrusion of people into their strange little world.
Their keeper Sue is said to be an expert at wrangling the penguins and breeding them in captivity. I am invited to go backstage and observe the gritty detail of keeping the birds alive in an artificial environment. Sue hands me a cup of tea; I have to stop myself asking for a scone. She has looked after the kings for more than six years but has never seen one in the wild. Until now I have never seen one in captivity.
We regale each other with what we know of the kings’ traits, a verbal game of ping-pong, until she stops me in my tracks. ‘They are a neurotic lot really,’ she says, ‘not unlike deer in that they get spooked easily. Something as offhand as a feed bucket left in the enclosure can set them off into a sort of walking stutter.’
The kings I know are not neurotic. It seems if you eliminate predators and provide an unlimited supply of food and a carefully monitored environment, king penguins manufacture their own demons.
Long after leaving the aquarium this revelation hovered on the edge of my thoughts. When I received an email from Ted it rose to the surface with a rush. Ted was back on the mainland and working for an acronym, which meant he spent most of his time avoiding politics as opposed to writing up research on his beloved kings. He was in town for a conference. We agreed to catch up.
Reconnecting with people you have known only on wild faraway places can be a tricky business. The stuff that bonded you together can evaporate, leaving only an uncomfortably loose association. Ted and I share a table in a café full of squabbling executives. We shuffle around a conversation. He talks of his new partner and their plans for the future, and the inner workings of the outfit he works for.
Ted looks different. He is wearing a tailored suit. Its metallic sheen shimmers every time he waves his arms. He has put on weight and carries a nice cell phone, into which he talks with an unfamiliar stutter. I am bursting to talk about my captive king penguin revelation but the moment never comes.
Vito Dumas aboard Lehg II.
Alone
55°02′S
Soon after he set the staysail somewhere in the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Chile, solo sailor Vito Dumas turned to find a woman’s slipper floating on the sea. It was pink silk with a pom-pom in a darker shade, and the only evidence he had seen of humanity in 2,500 nautical miles. It had been two months since Dumas’ last landfall and he built a romance around the slipper. ‘From its appearance it must have belonged to an elegant lady, a little foot, barely size 4,’ he wrote. ‘However did she lose it? Headlong flight? Shipwreck? Lovers’ tiff? A scene – or a moment’s hesitation? Like the assorted litter of a battlefield, this small object had been swept away in the vast ocean. It was strangely touching…’
Dumas, through a combination of hardiness and stargazing sensitivity, would become the first solo sailor to circumnavigate the globe via the Southern Ocean and pass south of the three great capes, Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn, along the way. Even before he departed on his voyage from Buenos Aires in 1942, fear had crowded in on him; the floating slipper afforded him a brief mental escape from the horrors of the oc
ean.
If there is one emotion that typifies the sailor’s experience of this ocean, with its endless numbers of enormous waves stretching to the horizon like so many mountain ranges, it is dry-mouthed fear. This is the baseline for sailors of every nation. It looms behind the entries in logbooks of clipper ships that used the ocean as a highway from the new world to the old in the nineteenth century. In between the concise sentences and dry descriptions of latitude, longitude and weather are chilling descriptions: ‘the cook house swept away with cook and boy’; ‘large seas sweeping the ship;’ ‘aft hatch staved in and foremasts gone’.
Many of the ships that ran the Southern Ocean were never seen again, most likely having collided with icebergs or been overwhelmed by towering seas. The polite term used in Lloyd’s List was first ‘overdue’, followed later by ‘missing’. In the dead of night ‘missing’ might be scratched from the record, replaced by a status that bore no name.
While the stories of the clipper ships are harrowing, it was the later breed of solo sailors who left the most vivid descriptions – gut-churning fear, horrendous storms, and elation at the sight of something as simple as a slipper. Dumas’ route was largely dictated by the world being at war: any other would have led him into waters threatened or bloodied by naval battles. He left a record of his voyage in a wonderful book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties. Via its 171 pages and seven black-and-white photographs he describes confronting the ocean with a thirty-one-foot double-ended ketch called Lehg II and not much else. His toolkit consisted of a screwdriver, which he dropped overboard. He had no self-steering gear – it had yet to be invented – and no radio: in wartime being found with a radio could place you under suspicion as a spy.
He appeared not to have a chip on his shoulder nor an urge to avoid society. In fact, his sociability is what makes his record of the voyage stand out. On the day of his departure from Buenos Aires, for example, he indulged in a manicure and broke down in tears in front of his well-wishers. A month later he showed the grittier side of his personality. Somewhere between South America and South Africa, he came to the conclusion he would have to amputate his monstrously swollen and infected arm with an axe. Fortunately, before he could lift the axe he passed out on his bunk. Hours later he awoke with a three-inch hole in his arm and a pool of pus and blood. The limb had begun to heal itself. He recorded his relief in true sailor understatement: ‘As I moved my arm it felt lighter. Thank God!’
Dumas’ congeniality was irrepressible. He held conversations with voices in the rigging, had a short intense affair with a woman of means in Cape Town, and out on the water developed a touching friendship. ‘I made a surprising discovery,’ he writes. ‘There was a fly aboard. Where could it have come from? Was it hatched aboard? As a good host I offered it some sugar; it buzzed around then perched on my hand.’
From time to time Dumas would let the fly out of the cabin for some exercise. It would do a circuit of the sails and decks before retiring to the cabin again. ‘It was my travelling companion; a good friend who kept me entertained and thus repaid my trouble. Alas! Circumstances were too strong for it: it vanished in the course of a storm.’
At his second port – Wellington – Dumas was adopted as an honorary son by a family called the Meadows. At night, after they had fed and watered him, he would retreat to his boat. Before he groped his way from the front door to the street in the dark Mrs Meadows would remind him, ‘Don’t forget there are nine steps.’ The warning was heeded. ‘I always counted the steps,’ Dumas writes. ‘I came to think of that refuge as the house of nine steps.’ When he set sail again and headed into the depths of the Southern Ocean it was with copies of the local newspaper The Evening Post stuffed into his clothes to insulate him from the cold.
Immediately below the Indian Ocean, Dumas got the hiding of his life. ‘Lehg II was sailing in a roaring, majestic inferno. The waves exceeded 40 to 50 feet, stood up like walls and rushed along at great speed. When I was in the trough I could hardly believe that the boat would rise again instead of going to the bottom in 1,500 fathoms.’ He responded with the only help at hand: rum and brandy, which he ‘took down like water’.
He knelt beside the bunk every night to say his prayers, and in the direst circumstances called upon the services of Saint Teresa, who seems to have protected him from the violent capsizes and dismastings considered the norm by later solo sailors who went this way.
One of these was David Lewis, who in 1972 attempted to circumnavigate Antarctica in his thirty-two-foot steel yacht Ice Bird. Thirty years on from Dumas, this was still considered a feat far beyond the normal sphere of human endeavour. At two in the morning in a Southern Ocean storm to end all storms, Ice Bird was pitch-poled down an enormous wave, slammed into the bottom and rolled 360 degrees. Her mast was torn off like a stick and her quarter-inch steel cabin crushed and torn open.
As Lewis stood on the ceiling of the small cabin, thinking it was all over, Ice Bird paused, rolled upright and staggered on full of water. Lewis was 2,600 nautical miles from the nearest land, with hands rendered useless by frostbite. The next seven weeks were an ordeal of deprivation and horror. He survived to tell the tale and retained his fingers and toes, but the prolonged and unrelenting fear had chipped his confidence. When he arrived at Cape Town he decided he could not go on.
Some of the solo sailors who followed in Dumas’ wake failed to heed his fundamental rule of engagement: do not dilly-dally in the Southern Ocean. Bernard Moitessier was one of these. The Frenchman became famous in 1968 when he entered the first solo non-stop yacht race around the world. At a critical point in the race, somewhere off the Falkland Islands, having faced the horrors of the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn and with only the balmy Atlantic to cross and a sluggish Englishman to pass to claim the prize of the golden globe, he had an epiphany. He fired a message on to a passing ship by slingshot: ‘The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea and perhaps also to save my soul.’
Bernard Moitessier on his boat Joshua, Tahiti, 1971.
By the time he ended his voyage Moitessier had sailed one and a half times around the world, mostly in the Southern Ocean. His long journey led him into reverie. ‘This is the first time that I feel such a peace,’ he recounted in his 1973 book The Long Way, ‘a peace that has become a certainty, something that cannot be explained, like faith… The entire sea is singing in a way I have never known before…’
He spent hours on deck, perhaps too long, meditating on the immensity of the Southern Ocean. ‘I listen, I feel, I sift the invisible. A delicious warmth runs down my leg. … It saved me the complexities of zippers and trouser buttons, which might have prevented my perceiving something essential.’
By the time Moitessier was south of New Zealand again winter was on its way. His boat capsized four times before he made landfall in Tahiti.
Vito Dumas was under no such illusion that the Southern Ocean could offer spiritual enlightenment. He scurried into the port of Valparaiso on Chile’s Pacific coast and awaited his chance to round the Horn. Bizarrely, he chose the depths of the southern hemisphere winter to attempt this final hurdle, something eschewed even by modern sailors. In Valparaiso some old salts had told him that midwinter could sometimes be the calmest time; in taking their advice he ignored other voices of doom on the wharves and in the drinking houses. The harbour master even asked him to leave his logbooks behind so his story could be told after the Horn had claimed him. He refused and headed south.
He rounded the cape in typically rough weather, well aware many sailors had been lost there. As if to remind him of the dangers, the roiling sea launched him clear across the cabin of Lehg II and broke his nose. He was too far south to sight the cape and too far gone to care. Amazingly, though, he managed to go round relatively unscathed and spent the next month sailing north to Buenos Aires. Along the way he mistakenly put Lehg II ashore 200 nautical miles from home, but with the help of some
local fishermen managed to get the boat off the beach and carry on.
Stamp issue featuring Vito Dumas, Argentina, 1968.
Dumas’ reception in Buenos Aires was spectacular. With the world at war and Argentina in the depths of economic depression, his voyage was a welcome fillip. He was acclaimed as an Argentinian hero, had a tango named after him, and became poster boy for the ascendancy of Juan Perón, who became the country’s nationalist-socialist dictator.
In a world gone mad, Dumas was a good man who had circumnavigated a lonely ocean. He now re-immersed himself in the land, where, he observed, ‘after so many struggles, human problems take on another aspect. I am interested in what others are doing, in the thread of lives entirely conditioned by an unchanging environment. … the effort to understand their problems made me forget my own.’
Icebreaker Professor Khromov in Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica.
First aid
56°47′S
The poet T.S. Eliot loathed what he called the ‘provincialism of time’ in the post-war world – focusing on the present and near future at the expense of the past, seeing the world as ‘solely the property of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares’. We should not, he said, become removed from our histories and the people who inhabit them. Eliot did not venture into the Southern Ocean but if he had he would have found both the living and the dead holding equal shares in an ocean redolent with history.
Among the former he would have discovered people such as Phil. I first met Phil on our icebreaker bound for Antarctica. He had come aboard as the ship’s doctor. It was a volunteer position that always attracted many applicants; payment was getting to see some of the wildest and most beautiful places on Earth.