by Sara Wheeler
Back in the body of the plane the lower orders of the air force larked around with redundant red webbing and blocks of polystyrene. When one of the blocks flew across the cabin and hit me on the shoulder a representative followed in pursuit, and he sat down next to me and introduced himself, speaking loudly right into my ear. He was from the desert north, and he said, ‘I’ll never get used to the cold, not if I live here till I’m a hundred and one’. It didn’t take us long to get onto the subject of the Falklands War and Chilean assistance to the British RAF. ‘We painted the crown off a plane at our base, and we gave your men our flying jackets. It was very funny seeing them with our name tags. You know, “Gonzalo” is thought of as a small, swarthy bloke. When I saw a tall, blond Englishman in a jacket labelled “Gonzalo” I really laughed a lot.’ The troops often spoke like this. The officers did not. I wheedled a fighter pilot round to the subject once, and he said, ‘I saw many things. I do not speak them.’
As we came down the sea reappeared, its surface pierced with icebergs. Everything was shining. It was like entering another universe; a surreal one, beyond us. Some of the icebergs were ice-blue. So that was where the locution ‘ice-blue’ came from.
We crossed Drake Passage and approached the South Shetlands, the Antarctic archipelago named by Scottish sealers at the end of a tapering tail of land flicked out from the amorphous white continent. The petrochemical engineer looked up from his Reader’s Digest and pointed out King George Island. As we got nearer I could see that it wasn’t all white; part of it was dark earth. It was summer in Antarctica. But most of it was white. There was so much white land, fluted like corduroy and plated with glaciated slopes, glittering and reflecting the sun. There were some ice cliffs, but mostly the land sloped down to the ocean, which crusted into ice in a wide band all around the island. A collection of brown pinpricks appeared, and it made me laugh out loud to see the Lilliputian base set down there on the snow.
We landed in a roar. When the door was opened a glacial blast swept into the Hercules, and as I set foot on Antarctica, my heart singing, a man dressed like a yeti approached me.
‘Mrs Sara Wheeler? Welcome to Antarctica. I am Commandante Leopaldo, and you are my responsibility on this icy continent.’
He looked as though this were an onerous task, so I tried to be friendly, to break the ice, as it were.
The base consisted of clusters of portacabin-type buildings, all raised several feet off the ground, with flat roofs and small, square windows. We entered the mess, one of the largest; the lobby was busy, as it took people ten minutes to divest themselves of their outer layers of clothing. The floor was splotched with puddles. The mess was as well-heated as my flat at home in the winter, and air force personnel sat around in T-shirts in a lounge area, chatting or reading mail. Leopaldo fetched me a coffee. After a quarter of an hour of small talk we got dressed up again, went outside and walked down to Fildes Bay. The circumpolar sea consisted, to some three hundred yards out, of millions of chunks of neon blue ice, and a sinister grey Armada vessel was anchored beyond them.
There was a bank a few hundred yards from the shore – a bank that dispenses money, like the ones you find in every high street. The manager, open-collared, leapt to his feet when Leopaldo ushered me in, and he kissed me before typing my name on a certificate indicating that I had been given one thousand dollars by an Antarctic bank (I had not). In the meteorological station nearby I was shown the studio of Radio Sovereign FM. On Friday evenings it broadcast a quiz show. All the questions were about Antarctica, and other bases took part, although they first had to find someone who could speak Spanish. The Chinese had recently won, and they arrived at Marsh that same night to collect their prize, which was a specially baked cake.
‘En Antártida,’ said Leopaldo, ‘no bay fronteras’–there are no borders.
I was shown the hospital, a larger metal box on stilts where two appendicectomies had been performed and several children had been born. They were very proud of this hospital, and it was frequently used by staff from neighbouring bases – even Argentinian staff. There really aren’t any borders in Antarctica, and Antarctic politics, which revolve around territorial claims, international no-mining legislation and environmental protection, and which are complex, tense and often hostile, are played out not in the icy continent but in government buildings of the First World’s capitals.
The Chileans behaved very confidently down there. Usually they were shy in international situations. But they were nearer home than anyone else on King George, better equipped, and there were more of them, so it was natural that they should feel confident. They were very conscious too that what they were doing was important for Chile.
Expatriates in Santiago often told me that they found Chilean nationalism an offensive characteristic. They complained about people being narrow-minded, and were frustrated by the general lack of interest in anything beyond Chilean borders. Such things are more noticeable to residents than travellers – though I did observe a limited field of vision, even among educated Chileans. As in the case of Argentina-hating, a sense of inferiority seemed to be lurking in the shadowy hinterland of the national consciousness, and I wondered if it didn’t breed a kind of insecure nationalism. Self-obsession and insecurity were apparent in the disproportionate and repetitive media coverage generated on the rare occasions when anything Chilean enjoyed international success. I grew tired of reading about the Chilean iceberg on the stand at the Seville Expo. The newspapers were excessively parochial – the front section of the leading quality broadsheet, Mercurio, was filled with vacuous shots of the aristocracy at cocktail parties. ‘Geophysical isolation,’ said one of my history books, ‘means that a nation is more than usually obsessed with itself.’
I was shown the furnace where combustible rubbish is burned and the welded tin drums in which non-disposable rubbish is flown back to the mainland. I was shown the post office, the state lottery office and Leopaldo’s house. His wife was baking a fruit cake. We could have been in a middle-class suburban semi almost anywhere in the developed world. Not only did its occupants enjoy the likes of powerful central heating and a microwave oven, but they had also decorated their home with lace doilies, flying ducks and framed family photographs.
Later we walked over shattered ice pools and climbed a rock; at the top we watched eight chinstrap penguins waddling placidly around the rookery. Below I could see the church, at that time resembling a blue bandstand, and next to it were the churchbuilders, who waved, their heads sticking up out of a giant container bearing the words ‘capilla antártica’ (Antarctic chapel) in a docker’s scrawl.
Leopaldo pointed at the sun. ‘We have a hole,’ he said, ‘in the ozone,’ as if this were some kind of Chilean achievement. The hole which opens annually in the ozone shield fifteen miles above the earth’s surface in Antarctica causes too much ultraviolet light to reach southern Chile. I heard many stories about animal blindness in Magallanes, and I read in a local paper that the incidence of melanoma in humans in Punta Arenas is above the global average. But this was too downbeat for Leopaldo, who didn’t want to discuss the matter, and he mentioned lunch and led the way back to the mess in silence.
Leopaldo disappeared once we were inside, and I never saw him again. A squadron commander called Carlos appeared to have taken over his heavy burden; perhaps I was considered too much for one person to cope with all day. Carlos looked like he had just been defrosted after twenty years in a medical school freezer. He was rather more approachable than his predecessor, however, and we got off to a good start over a steak lunch served by a man in a red dicky bow. I noticed how he and everyone else addressed me immediately in the familiar ‘tu’ form.
After lunch we had another coffee in the lounge, where small groups of men were playing cards and looking bored. Carlos showed me military maps of the zone. Antarctic territory claimed by Chile is perceived as an extension of the mainland. It is a segment measured in degrees, like a slice of a cake, and the Chileans take
care to ensure that it features on every map – even small badge maps of the kind that boy scouts sew on their parkas. It covers twice the area of mainland Chile, and they call it territorio chileno antártico; land earmarked by the other six claimants was referred to on Carlos’ map as pretensión británica or reclamación australiana. Antarctic territory is even incorporated within the administrative subdivision of the country: the Twelfth Region is called Región de Magallanes y de la Antártida Chilena.
Chile and Argentina base their Antarctic claims on medieval bulls and decrees inherited from Spain. Official Chilean documents dealing with Antarctica make a great deal of a note handwritten by Bernardo O’Higgins early in the nineteenth century referring to Chilean territory down to the South Pole; this note was discovered languishing in British Foreign Office vaults in 1918. Chile made formal declarations to the international community in 1940 in order to assert its territorial rights in Antarctica, and it was one of the original signatories of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, ratified by twelve nations in 1961. The Treaty, which recognizes that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, remains the core of international Antarctic politics. Besides legislating for environmental protection and the exchange of scientific data between contracting parties, it stipulates that no new territorial claims may be asserted, or existing claims enlarged.
Chilean policy towards Antarctica is probably the only area of national life that remained unchanged in 1970 and 1973. Similarly, one of the few things Chile has ever agreed with Argentina was to take a common line against Britain twice in the 1940s by reinforcing the concept of a South American Antarctic (although they even squabbled about that later). Pinochet flew down there in 1977 and declared that it was merely a continuation of mainland territory. Six families were sent to Teniente Marsh in 1984 to institute a ‘permanent’ settlement; like Argentina, Chile has been criticized for the ‘non-scientific emphasis’ of its Antarctic presence.
Carlos folded up the maps and told me we were going out. He took me off in a specially adapted landcruiser, and a few hundred yards from Marsh a large orange caterpillar tank appeared in front of us with six Chinese men in orange snowsuits perched on it. One of them got down and embraced Carlos. They had rumbled over from the Chinese base, which was called Great Wall. The embracer came round to my side and pumped my hand enthusiastically with his big furry glove.
We drove on to Great Wall, a cluster of rusty portacabins painted red. National Working Committees of Young Pioneers had been busy setting up monuments in honour of nothing in particular. In the porches (the front doors in Antarctica were like the doors of industrial freezers) small armies of plastic flipflops were lined up in neat rows.
We walked to a ridge, accompanied by a single skua, a brown goosey gull which was eyeing the fur cuffs of Carlos’ boots. The north side of King George Island is one of the few parts of Antarctica not permanently under snow, and patches of the exposed soil were covered in wiry lichen.
‘That,’ said Carlos, pointing to a pale green, heathery tuft, ‘takes a thousand years to mature.’
On the other side of Marsh, later, we stopped the land-cruiser at a small stream. A man joined us from the Russian base. It was called Bellingshausen after the first man who ever saw the continent. (It was in 1820, and he was looking for the Pole.) ‘We are very proud of this river between our bases,’ said the Russian in Spanish.
‘What’s it called?’ I asked.
‘The Volga,’ said the Russian immediately.
‘The Mapocho,’ said Carlos simultaneously, and they both laughed.
Each country transports its culture to the bottom of the world when it sets up in Antarctica – the good and the bad. In Bellingshausen the piles of rubbish, the acres of mud, the puffy faced men with silver teeth, the ghostly outlines of the metal letters CCCP which had been clumsily jemmied off doors, the abandoned machinery of failed scientific projects, the one minuscule and inadequate Lada – well, they were Russian all right. The base contained six ‘souvenir shops’. These were recognizable by the word SHOP painted in tar on doors leading to tiny rooms set aside for profiteering. The Russians had carried souvenirs thousands of miles to flog them – dollars only – to tourists from the luxury cruiseships which docked from time to time in the ice flow. In one of the shops a blonde woman with bright blue eyeshadow was selling fur caps and amber necklaces. ‘Russian amber can cure diseases,’ she said with a gleam in her eye.
In the snowfields beyond we saw a tiny orange figure kneeling against the white. He was a Chinese scientist working on a project involving ice and its microscopic air bubbles. The air was taken off and examined in laboratories in Washington (Beijing wasn’t up to it), and it revealed what the atmosphere consisted of thousands of years ago. ‘Air archaeology,’ said Carlos.
By the time we reached the Uruguayan base (half a dozen corrugated iron hangars) we had picked up two Brazilian lieutenant colonels, a Uruguayan vulcanologist and a French doctor. We got out of the landcruiser and began walking to a lake. A steep ice cliff on the far side was streaked green and grey by antediluvian volcanic ash and covered with a lid of dazzling snow six feet deep, and at one end of the lake an ice cave arced perfectly, its fringe of sharp icicles catching the sun. It was a tough walk, up and down snowhills, arms outstretched.
‘There’s a river beneath us,’ said Carlos cheerfully, ‘so keep your arms out to stop being sucked under if the ice breaks.’
These conditions were benign, of course, compared with the interior of the continent. Jean-Louis Etienne was co-leader of the 1990 International Trans-Antarctica team, which travelled 3741 miles on foot across the seventh continent. In the middle of the journey he said, ‘Sometimes it is like Antarctica has no soul … it is not a place for man. But other times … I feel like I am in a big, wondrous temple.’
We had to cross another river, an open one about two feet deep which ran from the lake, and one of the Brazilians gave me his spare pair of dayglo snow goggles and a piggy-back. The cave turned out to be a tunnel patterned with perfect circular indentations like beaten white metal, each exactly the same size.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
Water and oversized icecubes flowed through the tunnel, but we walked along the edge, meeting a curtain of icicles at the other end. I went ahead with the vulcanologist, and Carlos and the rest went back to Artigas for a cup of tea. The soft snow again made walking hard work, but from the top of the hill beyond Antarctica appeared in all its glory, refulgent in the late afternoon sunlight. As their shadows lengthened on the rippling Southern Ocean the icebergs took on an incandescent quality, and I watched a single snow petrel fly among them, gliding through its private symphony. There was no sound at all except the occasional metallic tap-tap as the vulcanologist, a hundred yards away, scraped snow into a specimen tin. I did not need to take a photograph, and I could not: I knew that moment would always be with me, and I did not want to betray it with a picture.
On our way back to Marsh we left the landcruiser again and hiked over to a beach of volcanic basalt pebbles on Drake Passage, sliding down ice slopes on our bottoms. Little pieces of quartz glittered around the ice pools, and an Antarctic dove perched on a whalebone before floating off and hovering against the bright blue sky. At the edge of the water a harem of southern elephant seals dozed and flicked their tails, their skin and fur peeling off horridly like wallpaper, and then a bull almost twenty feet long inflated his snout and trumpeted at us, revealing a soft lipstick pink gullet. Out on a small headland Antarctic fur seals and their pups lay comatose in little groups, exuding indifference, their heads flat to their bodies and their eyelids drooping occasionally in a languorous blink.
The last thing we did was climb a hill with a clear view beyond the island. Another white landmass filled the horizon. I looked over the small buildings of the small base in the foreground, and I thought, That’s an ice-desert bigger than Australia. It
was the highest continent, as well as the driest, the coldest, and the windiest. But it wasn’t that. Nobody owned it – that was the thrilling thing. Seven countries might have ‘claimed’ a slice for themselves, and there might be pushing two hundred little ‘research’ camps, but the continent wasn’t really owned by anyone. It was like seeing the earth for the very first time, and I felt less homeless there than I had ever felt anywhere. All the sordid failures and degradations of humanity and the morass of personal anxieties we struggle to live within shrank to insignificant specks as I looked out over the Antarctic snowfields.
A Pole came to Marsh for tea. The Polish base, Arcktowski, is one of the smallest on the island, and rather poorly equipped; ‘but they’re used to roughing it, in Poland,’ Carlos said. This Pole was a lively man with masses of black hair, and when I first saw him he was laughing wildly with three or four Chilean officers. Although I had observed that all countries freight their cultures down there, the harsh conditions limit their application. Antarctica is a leveller; they’re all in it together. The Pole’s Spanish was ropey, and I asked him how he communicated with his colleagues at the other bases. He laughed and said in Spanish, ‘We speak antártico. It’s our own language – grown by us, like a plant in a cold greenhouse!’
Chapter Twelve
When God created the world he had a handful of everything left – mountains, deserts, lakes, glaciers – and he put it all in his pocket. But there was a hole in this pocket you see, and as God walked across heaven it all trickled out, and the long trail it made on earth was Chile.
Drunk, to author. Isla Navarino, March 1992
Back in Punta Arenas I applied myself to the task of renewing my visa, which was due to expire in three days. After being shunted from one municipal building to another I was signalled towards a table stacked with forms outside a men’s toilet. I sat down and started to fill one in, grudgingly determined to meet the exhaustive requirements of another Chilean bureaucrat. The visa renewal form demands two colour photographs in which you must be holding a sign bearing your full name and passport number. I had anticipated this event by having the said photos taken in Santiago; they came in fours, so I had mailed the other two to my mother, thinking at least she would be pleased to receive concrete evidence that I was still alive. She wrote to me shortly afterwards asking if I had been arrested. It was clear that she wouldn’t have been surprised either way: the paragraph concluded, ‘Aunty Gladys’ leg is no better’.