by Barry Lopez
The Soviet Union collapsed shortly after ISW was established. The Soviet scientists at ISW were very suddenly back to being simply Russians. When I landed in the camp and began interviewing people, I gained the feeling that most of the Russian scientists were both confounded and depressed about the collapse. What were their futures to be now? Many of them were still flying the Soviet flag from the tops of their wall tents.
The scientists here—chemists, oceanographers, sea-ice experts, meteorologists, scuba divers—had been funded to come to the Weddell because, with global climate change, it was suddenly extremely important to learn more about this sea. The Weddell is sometimes referred to informally by researchers as Earth’s “main engine.” To oversimplify, cold water from its depths flows into the depths of the South Atlantic and is primarily responsible for driving that ocean’s circulation, the temperature gradients of which directly affect worldwide weather. The more the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere changes, with ongoing infusions of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, and with the buildup of manufactured chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons, the more important it has become to understand what is actually going on in the Weddell. (Prior to this, no scientific party had ever overwintered here.)
As I took tea with some of the Russians and chatted with Americans, all living a spartan life here in insulated shelters, I felt a growing respectful affection for them. Their work was physically demanding and was being conducted with a level of cooperation and courtesy between people from—back then—two superpowers, which was encouraging. With the demise of the Soviet Union, their project now had an extra-national dimension: they knew they were addressing together a challenge that no single nation alone could effectively manage.
ISW was the most isolated scientific camp I’d ever been in, and its occupants seemed to me to be even more cut off from the outside world than is usually the case. Global climate disturbance, at that time, was a contested issue. The work of scientists like these was being criticized and dismissed, even ridiculed, by religious leaders, industrialists, and politicians. The scientists knew it would take years for poorly informed people to accept and appreciate the nature of the emergency that had brought them here. At the time, and ever after, I thought of the researchers at ISW as heroic. Perhaps what made the helicopter pilot so irritable, so given to exasperation, was that he himself had doubts about the value of the research, but could find no one in the camp with whom to share his contempt. Or it could have been that as a (mere) helicopter pilot, he was not accorded the full respect he felt was due him at ISW.
The ongoing refusal of some governments and many politicians and business leaders to take global climate disruption seriously is part of a movement in some first-world countries to denounce any form of “politically inconvenient” science. The ongoing resilience of this obdurate denial, of course, is an indication of the deteriorating state of public education in these countries.
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A MORE ENGAGING, less autocratic, and less secretive British Antarctic explorer than Robert Falcon Scott was Ernest Shackleton, a person more working-class Brits identified with at the time than identified with the aristocratic Edwardian. When an opportunity arose to follow the track of Shackleton’s famous 830-mile open-boat journey from Elephant Island in Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands to the coast of South Georgia, I was delighted to accept an invitation from an ecotourism company to do so. They requested that I deliver several lectures aboard their chartered vessel, the Hanseatic. I asked my oldest stepdaughter, Amanda, twenty-two, to go with me.
In the austral summer of 1914, Ernest Shackleton sailed the Endurance into the Weddell Sea with the intention of landing an expedition party on what is now the Luitpold Coast. These men hoped to be the first to cross the continent from Coats Land to the pole and then from there to Ross Island. The Endurance was nipped in the ice short of the Luitpold Coast, in January 1915, and was subsequently carried farther and farther north until, so badly crushed it was no longer seaworthy, it was abandoned, in late October of that year. Twenty-seven days later, on November 21, the Endurance sank. Shackleton and his men had managed to transfer enough food and supplies onto the pack ice to be able to survive for five months, enough time, they hoped, for them to reach open water with the ship’s cutters. From there they could row for Elephant Island, which they did, putting ashore on April 14, 1916.
On April 24, Shackleton and five of his men launched one of the 22-foot cutters, refitted for ocean voyaging and christened the James Caird. They left twenty-two men behind, camped in a penguin colony on a small patch of rocky shoreline. The six of them sailed and rowed more than 800 miles north and east before reaching King Haakon Bay, on the southwest coast of South Georgia. The cutter was all but done in at that point, and two of the men were sick. Shackleton knew there were several whaling stations on the opposite, or northeast, side of the island. Leaving one man behind to tend to the sick, he and the other two set out to climb up and over the island’s crest, which was more than 9,000 feet high in several places. This singular feat of mountaineering brought them to the Norwegian whaling station at Stromness Harbour on May 20, 1916, ten days after they’d stepped ashore at King Haakon Bay.
Frank Worsley, the former captain of the Endurance and the navigator aboard the James Caird, boarded a whaler at Stromness to guide it to the rescue of the three men they’d left on the other side of the island. Shackleton then arranged for all six to sail for Elephant Island aboard a Norwegian whaler. Pack ice—it was now the middle of the southern winter—forced the whaler to retreat instead to the Falkland Islands, where Shackleton was offered the use of a fishing trawler. Once again the pack ice forced him to turn back, this time for Punta Arenas, the Chilean port on the Strait of Magellan. With the help of local residents who subscribed to a fund, Shackleton was able to hire a motor schooner, the Emma, and to set off for a third time for Elephant Island. When the Emma broke down, about a hundred miles from its goal, the Chilean government lent Shackleton a steamer, the Yelcho, with which he finally reached his crew’s encampment, on August 30, 1916, 129 days after he set sail from the same beach, hoping to reach South Georgia.
Famously, Shackleton—and importantly, Frank Wild, who had led the party Shackleton had had to leave behind on the beach—did not lose a single person on the expedition. All members of the party who had entered the Weddell’s pack ice aboard the Endurance twenty months before were now sailing for home aboard the Yelcho.
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THE PARTY ABOARD the Hanseatic intended to trace the reverse of Shackleton’s open-boat journey, starting at Stromness Harbour and ending at Elephant Island. On the first leg of the trip, from Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands to the northeast coast of South Georgia, the 403-foot ship ran into a Beaufort force 11 storm, one step shy of a hurricane on the Beaufort scale.
For more than an hour during the height of the storm, I stood on deck with Will Steger, the great polar explorer of my generation. Together we watched the gargantuan tumult of slow-motion seas before us, as the ship yawed sideways, its stern periodically coming clear of the water and sweeping across fifteen degrees of gray sky while the ship buried its bows again in a forty-foot wall of water and the stern fell. The ship plunged on. The surface of the ocean had no single point of stillness, no transparency. Veils of storm-ripped water ballooned in the air around us, and the high-pitched mewling of albatrosses, teetering impossibly forty feet away from us on the wind, cut through the sound of the storm rising and collapsing around the ship’s superstructure. Fifty-knot winds ripped the crests off waves in the cross seas and wailed without letup through passageways in the upper deck.
Shackleton, I knew, had faced weather like this crossing to South Georgia. I now had a more informed respect for what he and the others had accomplished.
High winds were still with us when we came around on the northeast coast of South Georgia, b
ut the seas had dropped and the following day the skies cleared. We sailed out of Grytviken, the abandoned whaling station on the shore of Cumberland Bay where we visited Shackleton’s grave and spent the morning exploring, cruising to the west and anchoring a few hours later in Stromness Harbour.
Once ashore, a group of us set off on foot, following the meltwater stream down which Shackleton and his two companions had come on that day in 1916. Our goal was the final obstacle on their trip, a thirty-foot-high waterfall. Shackleton’s party could see the whaling station off to their right from the top of the falls, but to reach it they would need to descend to the valley floor. The rock face around the waterfall was heavily encrusted with ice. The only way down was to lower themselves on ropes through the full force of the falling water.
Where my daughter and I stood at the base of the falls, we could see wildflowers blooming for hundreds of feet around us. Lush sea grasses were rolling like horses’ manes under the press of the wind. It must have been 50° F. We shed our windbreakers and sweaters. Some passengers, still woozy from crossing the Drake, stretched out on the sea grass to gather more of the sunshine and feel the brush of soft air across their faces.
I suggested to Amanda that we climb the rock face to the left of the waterfall, to get a view of the country inland. From up there we could also see the protected harbor where our ship was anchored and the now-collapsed and rusting whaling station. After we reached the top of the falls we continued on a ways, across a cushion of mosses and wild grasses, until we reached a level area. From here we could see clearly the intimidating ice wall farther inland that Shackleton and the others had had to inch their way down. The softness of the ground underfoot, the intensity of the sunshine, and the balmy air, however, overwhelmed us. We lay back on the carpet of moss. Amanda handed me a long stem of sea grass. I didn’t comprehend the gesture until I saw her rolling a similar stem from one side of her mouth to the other, imitating the casual air of a bucolic. It made sense, having passed through that storm in the Drake and to be sitting here in this idyllic setting in, historically, a harsh place. I did the same, flat on my back like her, and we said not much of anything until there was a shout from below.
It was time to head back to the ship.
We were in no mood to leave. As I reached down for my parka, folded up on the ground for a pillow, I caught sight of someone half a mile farther inland. He seemed to be scouting the icefall for a route up, some way to go even farther.
Will Steger. Nearly gone into the hinterland. Neither Amanda nor I wanted to be the one to shout to him that it was time to go.
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ONE AFTERNOON I accompanied some of the other passengers on a cruise through an ice-choked embayment in the Antarctic Peninsula. My mind was wandering in the moment, thinking of what I’d seen on previous trips to the continent. The landscape around us, I knew, was the great teacher here. You just had to step into it, with an open mind and an eager heart. Steger was off in one of the other boats and the photographer Galen Rowell, with his wife, Barbara, were in yet another boat, motoring through the loose pack ice. Will, Galen, and I had spoken together privately on several occasions about how strange this trip was feeling to us. We’d all brushed up against death here, had known bivouacs in Antarctic storms we hoped never to have to repeat. We also knew people who had died here after making a single simple mistake in a moment of inattention. And yet here we were, aboard a luxury ship, with comfortable beds, heat, five-star meals, and no reason to be anxious about a coming storm, even one as violent as the one we sailed into in the Drake. We had had the privilege of knowing, more intimately than most, what Shackleton and the others had managed to work through.
It was my sense of gratitude for the safety I’d experienced in Antarctica, and my appreciation for what I’d already been given, and not wanting to ask for more, I suppose, that kept me from saying anything about the meteorite when I spotted it. It was embedded in a piece of floating ice, like a stone mounted proud in a setting. This scrap of ice had surely been calved from the seaward face of a glacier or an ice shelf and had been in the water awhile. Eroded by waves, melting, the remnant looked like a miniature iceberg, with its underwater protuberances and asymmetric spires.
The dark cast of the meteorite, as large as a soccer ball, along with something else ineffable, suggested to me that it might be a chondrite (a type of stony, as opposed to iron or stony-iron, meteorite). I hesitated to point it out to anyone, however. I feared there might be an accident if five or six Zodiacs were suddenly to converge there, with people holding up cameras and jockeying for position. Better, I thought, to find another way to bring it to people’s attention. The unique shape of the piece of ice it was in, its nearness to the ship, and the fact that the sea was calm and the weather fine, meant I could return with a few of the ship’s staff and collect it, possibly.
Frankly, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. No one could say from where in Antarctica the ice had come, so we wouldn’t have that information. Technically, we’d be in violation of Antarctic treaty protocols if we collected it, which could get the tour company I was working with in trouble. And keeping the meteorite sterile would present a problem. The question of ownership would arise. Around and around I went. Ultimately, I told no one except Steger, Galen, Barbara, and my daughter, after finally deciding just to leave it be.
Maybe we should have quietly taken this heaven stone back to South Georgia and set it by Shackleton’s grave. Someone someday would probably walk away with it, but the theft wouldn’t compromise our gesture of respect.
One evening on the deck of the Hanseatic, bundled in our parkas and nursing our coffee, I told Amanda about the trip I’d made, years before, aboard the Palmer. Antarctica, I told her that night, was like a great island, separated in so many ways from the world of our everyday lives. I began to describe the anticipation I’d felt that day when the Palmer entered the west end of the Strait of Magellan and began to approach the town of Punta Arenas. This was to be our last stop before crossing the Drake Passage and pushing our way into the fringe of loose ice at the edge of the little-known Weddell. That particular crossing of the Scotia Sea, I told her, was very much calmer—just five-foot swells—than our experience in the same Drake Passage ten days before. Sometimes you get the weather you want.
Brunswick Peninsula and the Strait of Magellan
I decided not to tell her then about the encounter I’d had with a man on the road between Port Famine and Punta Arenas, the day before we set sail in the Palmer for the Weddell.
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IN HIS NOVEL Who Will Remember the People…, the French writer Jean Raspail dramatizes the plight of Kaweskar people in southern Chile in the middle of the nineteenth century. The lament in his novel is over the loss of yet another way of comprehending the unknowable world, as colonizers forced their way, literally and figuratively, into the homes and homelands of some of the last undisturbed inhabitants of what Europeans called the “new” world. The tone of the book is elegiac but not sentimental, aggrieved but not angry.
At the southern end of the system of Chilean channels, or “canals,” that offers ships a protected passage south to the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan from Puerto Montt, the Palmer had entered traditional Yámana land at Paso del Mar. Paso del Mar gives way to Paso Largo, Paso Largo gives way to Paso Tortuoso. At that point in the southern Andes, the mountainous spine of South America disappears beneath the sea, taking with it, among other things, ghosts from the mining tunnels of Potosí.
Raspail’s novel was one of twenty-five or so books I’d brought aboard the Palmer, for what would be a sixty-eight-day voyage, by the time we arrived back in Punta Arenas. I often read as I go books set in the places I’m traveling through, and for this trip had brought along Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Rockwell Kent’s Voyaging: Southward from
the Strait of Magellan, E. Lucas Bridges’s Uttermost Part of the Earth, and Thomas Bridges’s Yamana-English: A Dictionary of the Speech of Tierra del Fuego.
One of the advantages of reading about places like the Strait of Magellan during the time one is visiting them—Antonio Pigafetta’s firsthand account of Magellan’s famous voyage, say—is that what is not said or only implied or left unnuanced in the book can suddenly become important or more meaningful when one is looking at the actual place.
As we sailed through the eastern end of the strait—we were just northwest of Cape Horn here—I was able to comprehend, in just moments, how very easily a sixteenth-century ship of exploration, approaching from the east in heavy weather, could entirely miss the entrance to Paso Tortuoso. The mountains come down to the water so steeply here, they effectively close off the view to the northwest, forcing one to sail south into the dead end of Whiteside Canal, or into the constricted waters of Cockburn Canal.
Raspail calls the western end of the strait a “blind alley of the Stone Age.” Other authors have described the landscape as a “rain-sodden mass” and “a ruthless desolation of tundra.” Darwin wrote: “Death, instead of Life, seem[s] the predominant spirit” of the place. Nevertheless, this country worked well for the Kaweskar and the Yámana, and its maze of waterways and strong contrary winds make it a modern mecca for serious sailors. The day I saw the western entrance for the first time, from the bridge, I went out on the main deck of the Palmer to appreciate it more fully. The authority, the boldness of the land, draped in all its subtle dark hues and sylvan textures, was so strong, trying to take it in through windows on the bridge was like trying to see Paris from the windows of a taxicab.
