by Matt Vance
A couple of years earlier a massive iceberg calved off the Ross Ice Shelf. Measuring 292 kilometres by 37 kilometres, it was named B-15. With each high tide B-15 hopped its way along the coast of Ross Island, eventually breaking in two. As we approached the Ross Sea, I saw that B-15A had got wedged and was partly blocking the entry to McMurdo Sound. At roughly 160 kilometres long, it was big enough to hold back much of the sea ice that annually broke out of the sound. This was causing havoc with the penguin rookeries and scientific bases, all of which relied on a degree of open water over the summer months to obtain food and supplies.
Although B-15A was roughly half the size of its parent berg, it still took our ship the best part of twenty-four hours to steam along its length. It was in the first flush of youth, angular and monotonous in its geometry, and full of hard-edged arrogance. It demanded attention, like the tapping of a branch against a window in a gale. When, on each low tide, its southern end hit the sea floor it caused seismic tremors that registered at listening stations half a world away.
As it was at this point aground and stable we decided to sidle in for a closer look. It was a hard sell to get Glenys to join us. ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,’ I urged her as she put up excuses to stay on the ship. She relented but even as we approached the berg on a Zodiac she was busy looking everywhere else for birds.
The eighty metres of the berg that were visible above the waterline – a mere ten to twenty percent of its total bulk – comprised thin layers of ice glowing hospital white with glints of antiseptic blue. As we approached the air temperature dropped noticeably: icebergs are much cooler than the sea and sea ice around them. Binoculars and field guides were dropped on laps as the face of B-15A loomed above us.
Earlier in the voyage Glenys had asked me, ‘And what does an iceberg sound like?’ It was the only hint of interest in the berg business I had heard from her. B-15A was now answering her question with a slow tinkle of falling ice dust and the slop and gurgle of small waves licking at the waterline. In the background there was a fizzing as air bubbles of ancient atmospheres were released into the dark waters below. Occasionally this gentle sonata would be punctuated by a low groan or sharp crack as something shifted deep within the huge body of ice. Glenys swung around to look at me. She was grinning.
Like all recent converts, Glenys became zealous. Back on the ship her questions were relentless, and she and her fellow birders began to listen attentively to my answers. Some even took notes in their sacred notebooks. As I talked about the science of bergs, Glenys scanned the audience, ready to snuff out any sign of disbelief. Someone noticed B-15A was not behaving in accordance with Nansen’s observations about bergs drifting at forty-five degrees to the wind. ‘Is it because it’s aground?’ Glenys rejoindered. She was right. Like a ship on a reef, B-15A was behaving as if it were terrestrial.
After this every iceberg we saw came under Glenys’s keen gaze. She noticed that even small floating bergs did not always match what Nansen had observed. ‘That’s a queer one,’ she said, sweeping her hand towards a large berg that was stoically moving directly upwind. I explained that the deep keels of icebergs made them also subject to unseen currents deep beneath the surface.
When you look at icebergs, it is hard to imagine they will ever die. They seem immortal – ancient structures marking the boundaries of time. But this is an illusion. Many will suffer slow and steady decline until they are whittled to a stump. Others will collapse spectacularly, with Hollywood-style noise and drama. Not far from B-15A we encountered the remains of a berg that had disintegrated. There were bergy bits and growlers with a fresh blue tinge; some were revolving like rotisserie chickens. Among them lay a smattering of smaller pieces, forming an encompassing soup. Everyone fell silent. A live iceberg is a beautiful thing. A dead one spells desolation.
In August 1896 Nansen arrived back in Norway after his unsuccessful bids to, first, drift over the North Pole and later reach it by dog sled. While from then on he dedicated his time to the fledgling science of oceanography and advising expeditions on polar travel, he kept the Fram, one of the only iceproof vessels in the world, in immaculate condition and harboured a quiet desire to attempt again to reach the pole.
Early in 1909 a young Norwegian explorer by the name of Roald Amundsen asked Nansen’s permission to use the Fram to attempt to drift across the North Pole in sea ice as Nansen had tried to do. Nansen dithered, but after much thought he decided he was too old for the rigours of polar travel and agreed. He was certain that with the Fram in Amundsen’s capable hands, Norway’s flag would fly at the top of the world for the first time.
It was not to be. Before Amundsen set out, news reached him that two American explorers, Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, claimed to have reached the North Pole on April 6. Amundsen had no respect for Peary and only some for Cook, but their claim put him off attempting to reach the pole. While still publicly planning the trip, he informed Nansen he was instead going to sail south. The flames of anger and betrayal must have licked at Nansen’s toes: he had sunk his money, ship and reputation into Amundsen’s venture. Nevertheless, he sent a reply of support and set about defending his countryman’s unscrupulous and unscheduled attempt at the South Pole in the Norwegian press.
Stern of Russian icebreaker Professor Khromov in McMurdo Sound.
Breaking the ice
65°10′S
Copacabana Beach was the name the crew had given the low aft deck of the icebreaker. This was on account of the odd wave that sloshed across it, even in calm conditions. Although the deck was full of heavy gear, it was the sort of place where you could spend time alone, contemplating the long haul south from Bluff at the southern tip of New Zealand to the Ross Sea in Antarctica, or notice a light-mantled sooty albatross with a nick out of one wing hovering behind the ship.
The light-mantled sooty albatross is a small dark bird that looks as though it has had a nice spray job from a panel shop. Its colour ranges from dark brown on its head to a subtle grey-brown on its back. It has a sleek light look that some bigger albatrosses lack. New Zealand Birds Online warns us not to mistake it for the sooty albatross, which has a ‘burglar’s face mask’ and inhabits the distant South Atlantic. The light-mantled sooty, by contrast, has ‘a crescent of white feathers around the eye, giving the bird a slightly comical aspect’.
I am surprised to read this: comedy is not something I have associated with light-mantled sooties. If anything, the birds evince a hint of melancholy. They dislike being prodded by scientists and few satellite tracking studies have been done of them. However, observation has shown they stay away from the Southern Ocean’s convergence zones and high nutrient areas so favoured by other species. They are one of the few subantarctic birds that fly south over the Antarctic Convergence and are the most southerly foraging of all albatrosses, found as far as the ice edge of Antarctica.
New Zealand Birds Online tells me light-mantled sooty albatrosses ‘tend to be solitary at sea, and don’t follow vessels or scavenge on fisheries’ waste to the same extent as most other small albatrosses’. The one I spot with a nick out of its wing seems to have ignored the bit about not following ships.
It was not, of course, the only bird in our wake. A cast of hundreds were wheeling and swooping. All of them were petrels of some description. Some, like the royal albatrosses, were large, with mighty wingspans and Lancaster bomber heaviness. Others, like the prions, were tiny; they resembled potato chip wrappers blowing over the sea’s surface.
For some reason most seabirds have been conditioned into thinking every ship is a fishing boat replete with discarded fish. Hooks from longliners have been blamed for the demise of some albatross species. As the baited hooks roll out astern of the boat they take a little time to sink. The birds dive on what looks like a free feed of squid, get hooked, are dragged under and slowly drown. It is estimated that 10,000 albatrosses die each year just in New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone. The figure for the whole Southern Ocean will be infini
tely greater.
In the days of sail, to have an albatross follow your ship was considered good luck. The birds were said to be the souls of drowned sailors and were treated with the reverence of angels. To kill one meant you would be courting the devil. This happy state came to an end when industrial longlining was invented to satisfy the world’s burgeoning desire for protein. Since then the unfortunate victims have been desanctified as ‘bycatch’ and are smartly tossed over the side before anyone notices. On the high seas, this is easy to do.
Some clever designs have been put forward to prevent the accidental hooking of albatrosses. Some boats use streamers that keep the birds away from the bait before it sinks. Others use weights to make sure the lines quickly sink out of dive-bombing range. But no one doubts that the sad slaughter continues.
There were no longlines or fish guts rolling off our icebreaker. If you stood high on the bridge or at the bow of the ship, you felt a sense of triumph as the ship nosed south. On Copacabana Beach the view was more humbling. This was the functional end of the vessel, close to the water and smeared with rust, grease and sporadic waves. More to the point you saw only where you had been, with no hint of where you were going.
While I watched the hovering light-mantled sooty albatross, a rusty hatchway opened from the engine room. A waft of diesel fumes and hot steel was followed by the ship’s third engineer. Russian to the core, he was wearing a grease-stained boiler suit, a full set of gold teeth clamped on a cigarette, and tartan carpet slippers. We nodded greetings but the language barrier was too great to strike up a conversation. As he chain-smoked the engineer paced up and down Copacabana Beach, keeping his slippers dry by hoisting himself out of the way of the odd wave that sloshed through.
On the ship I would occasionally be invited into the world of the Russian crew. Sometimes the relationship would be a working one, as with Ivan the crane driver, whose job it was to lower me over the side of the ship in a Zodiac whenever we were near a landing site. Ivan sported the obligatory gold-toothed grin and wore a woollen pom-pom hat that sat wonkily on his head. Our entire shared vocabulary consisted of ‘do’ (up), ‘vinz’ (down) and ‘fineesh’, which was pidgin English for ‘Well done, Ivan, let’s knock off.’ Given that Ivan had to swing a large steel hook somewhere near my head, we said a lot more through body language and eye contact. Ivan also had a ready supply of Russian oaths, which he directed at other Russians who dared venture anywhere near his crane.
Other relationships with the Russian crew were based almost entirely around food. Natalia, the head stewardess, was the matriarch of the ship. She had a smattering of English and I learned she was from the Ukraine and had left behind a family and grandchildren to take up the job. Like many of the crew, she had qualifications far in excess of those required. She had trained as a meteorologist, but when glasnost came and many government departments were dismantled she had had to take any work she could get her hands on to survive. When we were in the New Zealand port of Bluff she would invite me to join the Russian crew for meals, believing, as Slavs did, that anyone not of a large size was unloved and in need of large intakes of borscht and ox tongue.
Natalia was rarely seen on deck; she preferred to spend her time in the galley and the dining room, keeping them both in tip-top order. She took life’s knocks with a shrug of the shoulders and a wry smile. She had long ago put aside any notion that the work of a stewardess was beneath her. Only occasionally would the meteorologist in her peek out, as when I caught her looking out of the dining-room portholes. She would pronounce the weather to be ‘Stormy same same’ or ‘No good, no good’. This pretty much covered the range of Southern Ocean weather.
When the ship was in Bluff at the beginning of the voyage, one of the engineers married a Russian woman who had settled in New Zealand and owned a string of fish and chip shops. As I walked past one of the crew cabins I happened to look in. Crammed into the tiny space was the whole bridal party, including Natalia, who gestured to me to join them. They were sipping Russian vodka from small tumblers and smoking furiously. The bride, in heavy make-up and white lace, gleamed while the groom, Grigori, smiled drunkenly and the guests raised toasts to his good fortune in finding a secure future away from the ship and the endless run of the ocean.
Back at sea, the ship forged south. Every evening the smoking third engineer and I sought refuge on the aft deck. We enjoyed Copacabana Beach without a word between us.
On the third day out the engineer gestured questioningly at the birds wheeling past the stern. ‘Black-browed, giant petrel, cape pigeon’ – I reeled off the names.
He mouthed the words and pointed with two fingers and a cigarette to the light-mantled sooty. ‘Horace,’ I said.
His lips peeled into a gold-toothed smile. ‘Da, Hooriss,’ he repeated. When his cigarette had been smoked to a stub he disappeared back down the hatch.
The engine room was one of the places on the ship rarely visited by anyone other than the engineers. Its cathedral-like architecture was designed to provide access to the ship’s two 1,560-horsepower Wärtsilä diesel engines. It was loud down there, and unbearably hot. The engineers, constantly covered in a mixture of sweat and grease, tended the engines like doting parents. When they retreated to the control room, which opened through a hatch near my cabin, alarms would occasionally go off to remind them to check levels and temperatures. These were invariably greeted with more good Russian oaths.
The alarms and gauges of the control room were maintained by the ship’s electrician, a big man called Viktor. ‘How are you today, Viktor?’ I would say as we passed in the hallway. ‘Fifty fifty,’ he would reply in his best English as he sloped off into the hatch.
The Russian crew considered engineering the most prestigious profession on the ship. When something broke down or the ship got into heavy ice and needed extra horsepower, the chief engineer was the one who took charge, even though his rank was below the captain’s. Fixing people came a distant second to fixing machinery: the ship’s doctor, also Russian, was relegated to dishwasher, the lowest job on the ship.
Storm brewing on the Southern Ocean.
In the sky there were signs of bad weather approaching, and on the bridge the barometer was taking a steep dive. This was confirmed by the faxed weather report, which displayed a low so low the isobars had only a sliver of white paper between them.
For the next day and a half we were ravaged by a storm. The wind rose until it blotted out all other sounds, and the swell rose to match it. All the ship’s doors and portholes had a double-door arrangement, which meant that in conditions like this we were sealed up as though in a submarine. Solid water, the sort sailors refer to as ‘green’, poured on to the deck. When it was cold enough, the spray that enveloped the ship formed into ice on any vertical surface with which it came into contact. If this ice were allowed to build up it would make the ship more and more top-heavy. The only way to remove it was to chip at it with a hammer. The Russian sailors were out with hammers in conditions no one else would have been brave enough to face.
Copacabana Beach was a fury of foam. I put my face to the porthole facing it, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of Horace. As the ship thrashed about wildly, I decamped to my bunk to read. I often do my best reading in such storms, tackling dense books that would not normally be on my list. This time it was William Faulkner, followed by a narcotic dose of James Joyce.
At two in the morning the ship hit something with a bang. There was a grinding shiver. James Joyce slithered on to the floor of the cabin as alarms went off in the control room. I heard loud Russian oaths, followed by an increase in engine revs.
In an instant I was awake and out of my bunk. I threw on sea boots and dashed for the aft deck. At the same time the third engineer burst out of the engine-room hatch.
The storm had gone, the sun was up and we were at the edge of the pack ice. With one last roll of the ship in the open ocean swell, a wave spilled over the deck. Both of us were gazing skyward and didn’t see i
t coming. It buried us up to our knees in icy water. The engineer’s slippers were soaked and my boots were full.
My Russian friend gestured at the sky with an oily hand. ‘Nyet Hooriss.’ It was true. Horace was gone but we had been safely delivered into the silence of the Ross Sea.
Mawson’s hut, Cape Denison.
Magnetic south
67°10′S
Before me was a slim chair, frozen to the floor and set in a shaft of light from a window frosted with ice. Around it lay the papers and trappings of a simple office, circa 1913. The chair was pushed back from the desk as if the occupant had just left. Outside the office a bag of potatoes lay spilt on the floor, maybe kicked over in the rush to the door to meet a relief ship and begin the long journey back to civilisation.
There is no hint of celebrity about Douglas Mawson’s hut at Cape Denison, just a feeling of quiet humanity. Outside, the hut is smothered in a drift of ice and snow; any exposed timber has been etched by the terrible wind until the grain of the wood stands proud. Inside, the scant wooden building remains the way the Antarctic explorer and his men left it a hundred years ago. It is a haven of peace, with the kind of intimacy only a hut in a vast wilderness can engender.
Around the walls are reminders of the long-departed company of men. Mawson’s quarters were one of the few private places of refuge. The room’s wood-panelled interior contains only the chair, the writing desk, a crude bunk, and the faintest hint of frustration. Douglas Mawson, the thirty-one-year-old Australian geologist who had been a member of Ernest Shackleton’s 1908-09 British Antarctic Expedition, had come back to Antarctica four years later to examine the place with the eyes of a scientist. In particular, he wanted to visit the south magnetic pole, which he believed he had come close to locating in 1909.