January 2 - 15 2001 / Antarctica: Sky Water Ice Rock
Seeing the Nacre of the World, as well as the Falkland Islands, a Gateway to the Ice
Part 2 - Across The Drake Passage To The East Side Of The Antarctic Penninsula
I got up very early this morning--5:00--because I went to bed early, and besides, we have now crossed the Antarctic Convergence, where the Atlantic meets the Southern Ocean, and we have begun our journey to Antarctica across the Drake Passage. That is, Sir Francis Drake, who sailed this water in 1578…
We attached our behind-the-ear patches last night, to guard against seasickness. The ship is indeed rolling a good deal this morning, although not as much as I thought it was before I went on deck but was still lying there in my cozy bed and listening to waves sloshing outside our now-covered porthole.
It is gray outside, and cold. Yesterday at the Falklands it was actually hot, under a clear blue. For our long hike we shed nearly all of our outer clothing.
So we all wait for the ice, now. Just as they waited in those rickety wooden ships.
People lurch from railing to railing; a few ropes have been strung across some of the larger open space. They grab at stuff and at each other. But it is not bad thus far. John and I have slept a good bit today. I lay in the dark in my little bed. They have closed off the tiny porthole with its heavy metal cover, against the waves. So it is pitch dark in our cabin. But I lay there this afternoon and felt the deep troughs and high peaks.
All night we marched through the Southern Ocean, rolling from side to side and plowing through troughs and valleys. We could hear the water mash against our bolted porthole. I did not sleep as well as I might have, for I was thinking about the seas around and ahead.
In the morning it all looks the same, gray skies, jade water, swells but nothing really dramatic. Fog. Large and small sea birds behind and to the side of the ship--albatross, pintado petrels dotted with white.
Just at lunch, the first iceberg appears. Everyone rushes to look. Oh, they ARE blue, cerulean blue, cornflower blue! Then I see them all around, and then we arrive off Elephant Island, the miserably majestic scrap of rock and ice where in 1916 Ernest Shackleton and his crew finally came to rest after their ship was taken by the ice.
A line of fog obscures the tips of the mountains, and renders everything soft. But it is not soft, it is harsh and dangerous, very very dangerous.
Ten at a time, we are loaded into the zodiacs for a tour of this bit of the coastline, Point Wild, named for the heroic member of Shackleton’s crew left in charge of the twenty-two who waited here for a doubtful rescue. We come close to a huge glacier that fills a harsh valley. There is a floating field of brash ice (chunks not more than six feet across) in front of the glacier. There are penguins, Chinstrap pengies, porpoising [just what it sounds like: leaping in and out like porpoises] in the water around our boat. We go over to the neighborhood of a large blue and white iceberg on which sits a line of penguins. They are really just dots and they show how very big this thing is. I am not exactly frightened, but I am sobered, alert. We see the small monument to the Chilean captain who with his ship and Shackleton aboard rescued the twenty-two men who spent four months alone with their hopes on this monumentally unwelcoming scrap of rock and ice. A leopard seal takes a penguin and shakes it to death, then dives beneath the water with it.
Back aboard, we are called urgently to the bow to see a pod of at least six orcas. They undulate heavily in a group, their swordlike dorsal fins slicing cleanly, like thick black sails, through the water. As they sink there appears a lime green smear just under the surface.
So we have come to this dangerous, forbidding place of such beauty and allure. I am not sure why any of these people have come here. I know why I have. I have because I wanted to see this landscape. For myself. Not in somebody else's pictures. The water is full of living things. The rocks are thick with penguins. No one has ever lived here, it has no indigenous peoples. It is aloof. I will come very respectfully and carefully.
We are at anchor just off Brown Bluff, truly on the continent now. This morning, John and I got up at 3 am to go out on the deck to watch the sun rise. We were surrounded by icebergs of many forms and colors, subtle but varied. Penguins rode on many of the icebergs. Someone from the bridge tells us that there were minke whales playing about the ship just a short time earlier. The morning is clear, gently colored, the sea is deep prussian blue, we see a few penguins loping through the water.
At 8 o'clock we are first in the zodiac for shore. Looming above the tiny black beach is a chocolate brown and orange cliff. The black beach is dotted with white and blue icebergs. There is deep snow. There is some fog along the top of the bluff. There are Adelie and Gentoo penguin rookeries, and we can smell them. We can hear them, thousands of them. We clamber up to some rocks to see, under a large boulder, a nesting snow petrel, pure white. It looks back at us, as we peer under its roof, with perfect trust.
This is remarkable. Here is a continent, just its very edges sticking out, covered by a suffocating blanket of ice and snow, a blue-white mantle, heavy beyond measure, that hides the continent.
I am back on the ship now, and out the window I see the brown bluff, the pale blue ice field at the edge--I cannot tell how high it is. The dark blue water is dotted with bergy bits.
Coming over in the zodiac, the boat driver asked the eight of us, how many of you are about to set foot on your seventh continent?
And I did.
It is scary down here. Terrible, terrifying, horrible, horrifying. Great God, said Scott, This is a dreadful place! And he was right. We are only here by the skins of our teeth. We have come to a place that regularly deals out death, still. And we are here in our warm luxury cocoon. It's like slipping in between the legs of the tiger.
So our intrepid Captain Skog took us, after lunch, through a narrow narrow passage with big, big ice on either side, under a blinding sun and sky. The tabular ice bergs--what a lacklustre name for such a thing, a thing that was once a part of a continent and now wanders incessantly, until it dies a slow death, particle by particle, slab by slab. Each piece is wildly unique, some with striations, some of pale blue incised with that magical cerulean blue. Cerulean blue, that's a blue of heaven, but this is not heaven. This is a hellish place, a monstrous wonderful place. The men continued entranced through the bitterest times. You would take your last breath in the face of terrible beauty, and might even see it.
It is impossible to take pictures, for the visual image is so intimately connected to one’s understanding and emotions that any picture would be two-thirds empty. I mean, what I actually see, through the viewfinder, can’t possibly convey what I feel and understand.
So we pick our way through this channel, on the east side of the Antarctic peninsula.
The captain, somewhat of a daredevil perhaps, takes the ship to within a seeming few yards of shore, this time the shore of Paulet Island, site of another amazing survival story. But mainly this is a place of penguins, Adelie penguins.
John and I have signed up to participate in a kind of survey, of nesting birds, so we count blue-eyed cormorants--shags, they call them--and we do our best.
But it is the penguins that prevail here. Hundreds of thousands of them.
About penguins. I did not know, or had forgotten, that their fronts are not only so pure a white, but also that they glisten. There is a neat white ring around their eyes, the Adelies, and when they pause in front of you and cock their heads inquisitively, trying to sort out what you might be, their little ringed eyes have an intelligent look. When they walk, or waddle, or hop, over the black basalt cobbles that compose this beach, their little pink webbed coarse feet, with claws, make a satisfying plopping sound, a slapping sound. When they are in the rookery, sometimes a pair of them face each other, tilt their heads back, and squawk or bray shrilly at each other. The sound from so many many birds is overwhelming.
They smell pretty awful (all of our outer clothing is beginning to smell of penguin). But it's kind of a fishy smell, not really foul, just concentrated. When the wind shifts a bit it comes and goes in intensity.
Penguins mostly eat krill [very tiny shrimp-like crustaceans] which is pink or red, and so their area is all pale pink with excreta. Their nests are mere scrapes lined with pebbles. I see them carrying pebbles in their beaks, and tidying up their nests. The chicks are fluffy dark brown, and because the day is so warm in this bright sunshine, many of them lie prostrate. The cliffs tower above all this life, and it's covered with pengies too. We can see their spiky silhouettes against the blue.
We hobble over the cobbles up a bit to the remains of the hut that sheltered some Swedes who were beset in 1902 I believe, and had to spend a winter. No matter how much I hear these stories I can't believe them. There is NOTHING here, except penguins and other birds, and seals, to eat. There is a lake a bit inland here, a dead caldera, and it is partially thawed, but in the center is ice covered with parties of penguins. They drank this water, those beset Swedes, but it was guano flavored. Now their little stone hut is filled with nesting penguins.
I'm not sure anybody's feeling this horror and terror except me. I think they are seeing it as a beautiful, interesting place, but I don't think they really know where they are on the map, or in the imagination or in history.
Now we have set out again, and the sky is pale blue and white, and the ice is all around us, and we are nothing in the midst of it.
In the night, the pale night, the brash ice [less than about 6 feet across] and small bergs brushed against our ship, only a few inches from my head as I lay in my snug little bunk. It makes a rustling sound, and there are thunks below us that we can hear and feel. Early this morning when we got up we went out immediately, to see that we were floating slowly in an endless white wonderland. There is no place that is habitable, or that offers even a tiny place to land. The captain peers attentively at the ice through his binoculars, and his officers move purposefully around the bridge. The radar screen is a forest of green splotches. Now and then the captain comes out on deck to the flying bridge, and gently guides the ship here around a large chunk, there through a narrow passing. In a few places the ship pushes her way noisily through a solid layer of pack ice, not thick, but solid, and blue below. The ice moves aside, large flat pieces upturning and floating away. Here and there is a seal hauled out, or the odd penguin. There is a lot of fog. We pass between enormous ragged brown islands, some lined with snow and others completely bare.
I have a brief conversation with a young officer from the bridge, and try to talk with him about my overwhelming impression of pure terror, horror. Yes, he agrees, we are not meant to be here.
The captain approaches several possible landing places, but is turned back from them by ice and currents. Finally it's decided that we shall land on a place called Bald Head, on the continent proper. Captain Skog brings the ship in very close within the ice, soft but totally surrounding the ship.
A group of us hikes up to a small summit (with a cairn, a jarring sight, we are not the first here! but I would not add a stone to this somehow inappropriate object). Underfoot are folios of shale, thin as paper, and an assortment of granite cobbles, and some wonderful lichen--black fruticose (Usnea lichen) like tiny forests, and some black kind like tiny flattened buttercups, and a very small bit of Caloplaca lichen, which is lime green or mustard yellow. Otherwise, all is black and white and pale blue, and here and there, cerulean blue within the ice.
At the edge of the icy water, on the elegant black beach, we find wonderful things. Red-orange sea urchins, some with tiny rock hats. A red-orange jelly. Two comb jellies that, disturbed, are fluorescing blue-green. Some very odd affairs like massively spiny slugs. Swimming in the shallow water are half-inch long red-orange other creatures. I do not think they are krill but I do not know what they are. I am wondering why a number of living things we have seen are this color. The ice fishes it seems are pale pale, because they do not have hemoglobin, since they do utilize oxygen via hemoglobin. Why are these things this brilliant color?
The color is important, that warm color. If you were here, you would need to see this color. Blue is plentiful--though a horribly unreal blue--and black, and white, and a bit of green in the base of the black fruity lichen and some of the ice, and some orange in lichen but not much. Well, and a bit of yellow lichen too.
Well, it is all here after all I guess--the colors and even the forms, tree-like, rounded, plump, linear--all these forms are here. So why is it so forbidding? Is it that we know there are no settlements just past these mountains? That we know there is no one here but us? That we know there is nothing here to eat, to use to keep warm, or to clothe us?
Last evening they gave us a bit of a show of some of the underwater scene, from an underwater self-propelling vehicle they have got on board. Three hundred fifty feet down were sea stars of various forms, urchins, sponges, a fish or two, beautiful formations of many colors. Detritus drifting and sifting slowly in the column of water. These creatures work out their life times in an unthinkable distance from humans.
And yet we all ride on this same blue planet, the captain, John and I, the hundred thousand penguins, and the red-orange creatures. All of us pretty much transparent to each other. Unaware of each other!
In the afternoon we went to a place called Cape Well-Met (referring to another astonishing story of exploration by the Nordenskjold expedition of a hundred years ago). Here there are some Adelie penguins, and a cobbly beach, and best of all, there are many large grounded icebergs on the shore. I walk about taking artistic pictures of them. This is not difficult, since there are crenellations and apertures and serrations and ripples and ruffles and hillocks and hummocks and no end of them from which to choose. I frame other icebergs, the ship, the black shore, I try to frame a penguin but he goes around the corner before I can catch him in my camera's eye.
The ice is blue, that ethereal unreal blue, and grass green in places, and rather yellow in other places. At times we see towering structures of blue ice arrayed against a flat dove gray sky, like a hallucination, said one of the passengers. That is good--I think dreamlike, nightmarelike. In any case, completely Other. With nothing to welcome one.
The pengies are welcome in the water though. We see them as we go kayaking--in the Antarctic! The boats are pretty klunky, being yellow inflatable sit-ons, and the paddles seem awkward, but a good system has been set up for launching us at sea, off a platform suspended between two zodiaks, and off we go, happy. We paddle slowly among bergy bits [about the size of a house], a very respectful distance from the floating icebergs, having been emphatically warned how they can upturn without warning at any time, thus swamping something as insignificant as a kayak. We stand still to allow a line of pengies to porpoise across in front of us and shoot themselves onto the beach.
We paddle well together, as always, but this time it is in Antarctica.