‘Of course there’s the Antarctic, and then there’s the real Antarctic. Some parts of it are far too noisy for my liking these days.’ And with that remark, Rodney Russ’ head is buried again in the giant maps of the ‘real’ Antarctic that are spread lovingly across his desk. The wind howls outside his office as the skies take on an increasingly sombre hue. Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand, may not be considered one of the world’s great hubs for adventure today, but a century ago it was very different.
‘For early Antarctic adventurers, this place was the Cape Canaveral of the time,’ says Nigel Watson, head of the Antarctic Heritage Trust, as we talk later that day at the International Antarctic Centre, the base from which American, Italian and New Zealand scientists fly to their various bases in the Antarctic on sturdy Hercules LC-130s. While a century ago it was explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton who began their missions to the South Pole from Christchurch, today it is mostly scientists (and their support crews) leaving to join the élite Antarctic club. They head for a cluster of bases on the southern headland of volcanic Ross Island; Scott Base looks out to the Ross Ice Shelf and belongs to New Zealand, while nearby US McMurdo Station is closer to McMurdo Sound. At the height of summer the bases can accommodate nearly 1,500 people combined; McMurdo in particular has the amenities of a small American town, including bar, gym, cinema and bowling alley.
Conditions today are unimaginably palatial compared to what Shackleton and his 15-man team experienced. Despite Russ acknowledging the value of the work being undertaken by geologists, engineers, historians and geophysicists in exploring and preserving the region (including the impact this could have on the rest of the world), it is this anomaly of urbanisation that the director of heritage expeditions, buried in his maps, is keen to avoid.
‘About 30,000 people visit the Antarctic every year as tourists, but all of them, bar about 500, visit the Antarctic Peninsula located south of Chile. If you want to follow the footsteps of the first human beings that ever set foot on the place then you have to sail down via Christchurch,’ says Russ. ‘And to suddenly come across a bunch of coffee shops and bars is, for me, to take something away from trying to encapsulate what Shackleton and other men of the Heroic Age [of Arctic Exploration] had to go through.’
To discover the Antarctic from Russ’ preferred route, onboard his ship Spirit of Enderby, you will need around $16,000 for the 28-day trip, which is made twice a year. Wallet-emptying as it is, a voyage on Russ’ 48-passenger-capacity ship is now the only way to replicate the approach that Shackleton made when he left the tiny port of Lyttleton, 13km from Christchurch, aboard the Nimrod 100 years ago. The passage is proving increasingly popular with tourists who want to see the crumbling huts that Scott and Shackleton built at the edge of the Antarctic before plunging into its white, satanic heart.
Equipped with Manchurian ponies and an Arrol-Johnston car, the first, and spectacularly ineffective, vehicle ever to ride on Antarctica, Shackleton and his crew had an ostensibly simple objective: to be the first to reach the southern geographic pole. Leaving the relative comfort of their coal-fired expedition base on Cape Royds, a four-man team led by the ‘Boss’ (as they dubbed Shackleton) made it to within 156km of the South Pole before being forced to turn back due to food and fuel shortages.
‘The last day out we have shot our bolt,’ wrote Shackleton in his diary on 9 January 1909, ‘and the lati [sic] is 88 23 S… Homeward Bound. Whatever regrets may be we have done our best.’
They failed in their mission, but they had still gone further south than any man. Shackleton was knighted for his efforts but it is only when you see the primitive equipment he had to work with, on display at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, that you can possibly begin to imagine what cruel and gruelling exertion went into venturing into a region whose very existence was questioned only a century before.
The coldest temperature that was ever recorded in the Antarctic was a heart-ceasing -89.2°C at a Russian research station in 1983. ‘If you went out in those conditions in normal clothes you’d be dead within 45 seconds,’ says Richard Benton, head of the International Antarctic Centre visitor attractions. ‘Your lungs would collapse and your blood would turn to jelly almost instantly.’
Shackleton and his men almost certainly never experienced temperatures that low (the average temperature on the Antarctic in 1908 veered between 8°C and -42°C), but the difficulties they faced in their quest are manifested in a wheel (from the expedition car), now on display at the Canterbury Museum. Spindly, and looking like it would struggle to negotiate an unpaved canal towpath, the wooden wheel shows how ill-equipped the contraption was to deal with the constantly changing conditions. It could just about handle coasting along smooth ice but was found, to Shackleton’s chagrin, to be hopeless in snow. Eventually, the car was abandoned.
The museum also contains food tins from the expedition – an evocative larder of early 20th-century British tinned staples including lunch tongue, consolidated pea soup, boiled mutton and kippered herrings. This is the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the frugal hardships that the Nimrod team endured from within the confines of their hut on Cape Royds.
It is these huts that provide the most moving memorial to Shackleton’s adventure, and the other pioneers of this inhumanly cruel and hostile region. After decades of the elements taking their toll on the artefacts, Watson and his team at the Antarctic Heritage Trust now have $7m of the $9m needed in funding to preserve not only Shackleton’s hut but those of Scott and the lesser-known Norwegian explorer Carsten Borchgrevink.
‘Sir David Attenborough called them “timewarps without parallel”,’ says Watson. ‘The huts still look like the men stepped out of them into the snow only a moment ago. We couldn’t get any money from English Heritage as the location of the huts is outside of their territory. We ended up getting assistance from the UK government and from private sources. We got Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Lady Shackleton [the explorer’s grand-daughter] and [actor/director] Kenneth Branagh to campaign for us and we do now feel people are really beginning to realise the importance of these huts – even those who have never visited them. After all, this is the only place on earth where the dwellings of the first human beings to set foot [in the area] are still standing.’
As wind blowing straight up from the Antarctic whips around me, it is easy to imagine the fear Shackleton must have felt as he left Lyttleton for the frozen continent a century ago.
Modern scientists may have bowling alleys and coffee shops, but few of them are likely to get accolades such as this one, from the explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote admiringly of Shackleton’s place in the Antarctic pecking order in his book The Worst Journey in the World: ‘For a… piece of organisation give me Scott; for a winter journey, Wilson, for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen; and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.’
How to get there
Air New Zealand flies from London to Christchurch via Auckland and Hong Kong or Los Angeles.
www.airnewzealand.com
Where to stay
Hotel Off the Square
115 Worcester Street
Christchurch
Tel: (+643) 374 9980
www.offthesquare.co.nz
Find out more
Antarctic Heritage Centre
www.heritage-antarctica.org
Heritage Tours
Specialises in small-group travel.
www.heritage-travelgroup.com
Comments are closed.