Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Our hopes radically reduced, we lined up a day later for a Zodiac cruise around Scott Island, a seldom-visited outcropping of rock north of the thickest pack ice. Thrillingly, we saw a predatory leopard seal—they have been known to attack humans—sunning himself, looking like a cross between a sea slug and a dinosaur. At that afternoon’s briefing, Rodney said he thought ice might be clearing to the south and proposed that we wait near Scott Island a day or two, on the chance that we could still make it through. Even the atheists went to bed that night thick with prayers. We found a fragile camaraderie in staving off despair, as though going through this experience were forging soldiers’ bonds among us, though also with a creeping Huis Clos feeling that we could not escape one another.

At a time when the environment is under siege and ice shelves are famously dwindling, something about the dwarfing scale of the landscape was reassuring. All of us had come fearful of the greening of Antarctica, and what we found was relentless frozen serenity. Hoping that we would stay the course and break through to the continent, we were still awestruck and humbled by the majesty around us, and while we prayed the thick ice would vanish out of our ship’s course, we hoped it would not vanish from the earth.

The following day, we stayed close to Scott Island and waited some more. The terrible briefings were getting to be like consciousness-raising sessions of the mid-1970s at which each participant got to say his or her piece while the others gritted their teeth. Rodney now focused on how long it would take us to get out of the Ross Sea if we got in, but trouble returning seemed less alarming than not getting in at all. I began to understand those historic explorers who wanted to reach the poles so much that they trekked into uncharted territory not knowing if they would ever return, losing limbs to frostbite, disappearing into crevasses or whiteout storms. Dmitri now announced that getting through the ice would take several days, that we’d have to come back through the same ice, and that we no longer had sufficient time for the round-trip. Rodney said, unconvincingly, that the captain was right.

People were both shattered and outraged. Now the problem was time, after all these days had been expended on so much back-and-forth. Rodney had thought that we could get through. Dmitri had refused to go. We had been pawns in a contest of personalities. What nature does, one accepts with some degree of grace. What human cupidity has caused makes one furious. If the message had been conveyed to us that the problem was truly the ice, we would have accepted it, but the manner of bungling incompetence and personal conflict made it hard to swallow. That night, up on the bridge, Ian observed that we were going only nine knots, “as this boat was built more for comfort than for speed.” Mary said, “I’m not sure it was built for either, really.” That was about the size of it. A number of people on board were reading The Worst Journey in the World, the brilliant account of Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal expedition of 1910–13, and we began referring to the Nimrod Centennial as “the second-worst journey in the world.”

We still had two weeks left. We would go west to hunt icebergs, then head back to New Zealand via the subantarctic. So far, we had been on solid ground four times, and the intrepid adventurers on board were going stir-crazy. I have always hated being cold, but for those imprisoned days, shivering on deck was oddly thrilling, and I relished that touch of frozen numbness in my fingers and at the tip of my nose. The cold was antarctic even if we didn’t have the continent under our feet; it physicalized our brief kinship with the penguins and seals and whales. To reassure ourselves that we had gone somewhere, we tossed off new vocabulary: grease ice and pancake ice, frazil ice and hummocky ice, tabular bergs and bergy bits, first-year ice and multiyear ice, and brash ice and sastrugi. It’s not the Inuit who have a hundred words for snow; we do.